jwmerrill

7 ms·

1.
by jwmerrill 11mo ago
“Passive voice” is a grammatical term. “Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses,” is not an example of the passive voice. “14,000 workers were fired by Amazon,” is an example of the passive voice. There is not a 1:1 relationship between being vag
2.
by jwmerrill 1y ago
The article is a four part series.
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by jwmerrill 1y ago
This is also the inverse Gudermannian function [1]. That Wikipedia page has some nice geometrical insights. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gudermannian_function
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by jwmerrill 1y ago
My mistake! It seems clear in hindsight…
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by jwmerrill 1y ago
The next pointer doesn’t have to go first in the structure here. It can go anywhere, and you can use @fieldParentPtr to go back from a reference to the embedded node to a reference to the structure.
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Personal Calculator Has Key to Solve Any Equation (1979) [pdf](people.eecs.berkeley.edu)
3 points by jwmerrill 2y ago|1 comments
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by jwmerrill 2y ago
For problems in the plane, it's natural to pick two coordinate functions and treat other quantities as functions of these. For example, you might pick x and y, or r and θ, or the distances from two different points, or... In thermodyna
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by jwmerrill 2y ago
`<!DOCTYPE html>` is not an html opening tag. It is a preamble. https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/syntax.html#writing
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by jwmerrill 2y ago
Instead of differentiating c^(-xn) w.r.t. x to pull down factors of n (and inconvenient logarithms of c), you can use (z d/dz) z^n = n z^n to pull down factors of n with no inconvenient logarithms. Then you can set z=1/2 at the en
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by jwmerrill 2y ago
From later in [1] > Mind that all of this does not impose how we actually scale temperature. > How we scale temperature comes from practical applications such as thermal expansion being linear with temperature on small scales. An abso
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by jwmerrill 2y ago
KaTeX supports server side rendering to an html string. If you do this, the client only needs to load the css component of katex, and not the js component. I believe MathJax has a similar capability.
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by jwmerrill 3y ago
Entropy in Statistical Mechanics is a quantity associated with a probability distribution over states of the system. In classical mechanics, this is a probability distribution over the phase space of the system. Two probability distribution
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‘the Zeen’: Steadicam inventor creates wheelchair-walker hybrid(whyy.org)
2 points by jwmerrill 3y ago|0 comments
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by jwmerrill 4y ago
Raku interprets decimal literals (like 0.1) as limited-precision rational numbers (Rats) [0-1]. I think this is a pretty user-friendly compromise. [0] https://docs.raku.org/syntax/Number%20literals [1] https:/&#x
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by jwmerrill 4y ago
That paper discusses ways of computing a matrix exponential, rather than ways of computing polynomial zeros.
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by jwmerrill 4y ago
I’d recommend a language with automatic memory management for the AST walking interpreter in the first half of the book so you don’t have to worry about how everything gets allocated. Either Zig or Rust would be great for the bytecode compi
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by jwmerrill 4y ago
O’Neil has responded to those criticisms here: https://www.pcg-random.org/posts/on-vignas-pcg-critique.html
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by jwmerrill 4y ago
Pratt parsing and precedence climbing are the same or very similar, but they are not the same as recursive descent (and the linked article does not claim this).
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Reflections on a decade of coding, part 7: Coding(scattered-thoughts.net)
1 points by jwmerrill 5y ago|0 comments
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by jwmerrill 5y ago
> All you need to do is ensure that your calculations are in no danger of blowing past the max significant digits If you have a lot of control of the scale of the numbers you’re computing with, you could use fixed point instead of floati
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by jwmerrill 5y ago
Decimal floating point still doesn’t have associative addition or multiplication.
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by jwmerrill 5y ago
> Interesting that the author assumes that US equity dominance will continue. The author does not assume this—rather this is held up as an assumption that might be wrong. The article is structured as a list of 5 assumptions that would be
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by jwmerrill 5y ago
Here’s a conversation about tree shaking in Lisp from 1994 [1] (from the posted Wikipedia page). [1] https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/pspFr1XByZk
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by jwmerrill 5y ago
> what actually happens if you mix sulfuric acid with lye This reaction produces sodium sulfate (a salt) plus water and heat [1]. No idea if this is practical, though. Maybe it’s difficult to source sufficient quantities of some base to
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by jwmerrill 5y ago
I don’t think they’re actually intending to refer to physics here—they could have said “as fast as theoretically possible” instead. A square matrix with n rows and columns has n^2 entries, so if you need to look at all the entries in two ma
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by jwmerrill 6y ago
> Shouldn't 0-grade objects all have the same units? No, and this is a really important point. Scalars can have any units. For example, you can have a scalar with units of time, or mass, and you can take the dot product of a force v
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by jwmerrill 6y ago
I bet it was “Eigenvectors from Eigenvalues” * https://www.quantamagazine.org/neutrinos-lead-to-unexpected-... * https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2019/08/13/eigenvectors-from-... * https:&#x2F
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by jwmerrill 6y ago
Everyone should consider making their own blog! Kind of like everyone should consider baking their own bread, at least once. Having a blog that I built that is truly “mine,” with a domain name that I own, is one of the most rewarding things
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by jwmerrill 6y ago
I have to admit that this sounded apocryphal to me because it’s an almost-too-convenient illustration of a general point, but a quick search at least turned up the original study: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2
30.
by jwmerrill 6y ago
I sometimes wish there was a way to demand the same level of proof for claims of readability and productivity that we demand for claims about performance. Measuring before optimizing is of course a good idea, but it's also time consumi

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