lkozma

7 ms·

1.
by lkozma 4y ago
My favorite artistic illustration is probably Jorge Stolfi's drawing inspired by the self-adjusting splay tree data structure of Sleator and Tarjan: https://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/splay/tree5.jpg
2.
by lkozma 4y ago
Yes, this efficiency-aspect is not captured in the illustration -- while splitting perfectly _by index_ comes for free, splitting perfectly _by value_ needs nontrivial work (median-finding).
3.
by lkozma 4y ago
May I add one that I made? Illustration of QuickSort and MergeSort as two sides of the same coin: http://lkozma.net/images/sort/duality.pdf I find this somehow both obvious and counter-intuitive, and usually the t
4.
by lkozma 4y ago
Socrates supposedly loved going to the market. When his students asked him about this, Socrates replied, "I love to go and see all the things I am happy without." :)
5.
by lkozma 4y ago
This is a very nice and deep question. Are you aware of the published research on the problem? The growth rate is indeed around 4 and now known to be strictly above 4: https://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/rote/Papers/pdf&#
6.
by lkozma 4y ago
"Seeing an astronomer using a telescope to observe a galaxy, no-one will confuse the telescope with the galaxy. Mathematics differs from science in that there is no clear distinction between the tools and the objects of study." -
7.
by lkozma 4y ago
You are right in general, but when the quote is from someone on whose research the result builds in an important way (as it is the case here), I would say it is fair.
8.
by lkozma 4y ago
Your first point is correct, but just to clarify your second point, these two definitions are not quite equivalent, as there is a world of functions growing more quickly than log^k(n) no matter how large constant k, but still within n^o(1).
9.
by lkozma 5y ago
Who is pushing/lobbying for that type of legislation? Isn't it a case of regulation helping the incumbents?
10.
by lkozma 5y ago
For those coming from a CS background a possible (crude) intuition sometimes given is that frequentist :: Bayesian ~ worst-case analysis :: average-case analysis There are a good reasons why we don't usually do average-case analysis of
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by lkozma 5y ago
Honest question: who does it harm? These aspects that you mention may not be to your (or to my) taste, but if they are relatively harmless and the other stuff is overwhelmingly good, why not let it go?
12.
Finnish man blows up his Tesla Model S with 30kg dynamite(youtube.com)
10 points by lkozma 5y ago|0 comments
13.
by lkozma 5y ago
was posted here sometime ago: The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please." He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. "I'll pay you tomorrow," he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it re
14.
by lkozma 5y ago
> The Soviets royally sucked in the computation department To add more nuance, there is an essay [1] telling the history of early maximum flow algorithms and includes this small anecdote: [An] American asked: ".. how were you able t
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by lkozma 5y ago
Tolstoy along similar lines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Much_Land_Does_a_Man_Need%...
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by lkozma 5y ago
> However, you're being "too smart for your own good" if you go down this route. A perfectly unbiased input would still have 50% of its inputs rejected, and already you've dropped the speed of the RNG by 50%. To impro
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by lkozma 5y ago
That's true, but "high school algebra" in some countries also includes some group/ring theory basics (or it used to).
18.
The Afghan minister who became a bicycle courier in Germany(reuters.com)
3 points by lkozma 5y ago|0 comments
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by lkozma 5y ago
One small thing in the latest redesign: if you have two tabs, one active, one not, the visual cues suggest exactly the opposite. The active one seems like a clickable button, the inactive one seems pushed down and not clickable. After misc
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by lkozma 5y ago
I recognize the symptoms you describe, but I find the picture you painted a bit too pessimistic, given that in the field that I'm familiar with (theoretical CS), groups in Poland have been among the strongest and most visible in Europe
21.
Artist Posed as Billionaire Buyer to Get into New York Penthouses(curbed.com)
1 points by lkozma 5y ago|0 comments
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by lkozma 6y ago
This seems like a very accurate description, especially the observation about temporal continuity, which we take for granted, but on occasions it can feel like a fragile illusion.
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by lkozma 6y ago
Relatedly, there was an unintentionally funny translation of Gmail in Hungarian, where it was supposed to say "You have no conversations in Trash", or something like that. The translation was technically correct, but it sounded ve
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by lkozma 6y ago
By that logic, take all the paint away from Van Gogh and give it all to Jeff Koons.
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by lkozma 6y ago
There could be more courses that teach the necessary programming techniques but also case studies of problems that have been solved this way. For example, the course "Experimental Mathematics" given by Doron Zeilberger.
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Useful Inequalities Cheat Sheet(lkozma.net)
21 points by lkozma 6y ago|2 comments
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A dual view of sorting algorithms(lkozma.net)
2 points by lkozma 7y ago|0 comments
28.
by lkozma 7y ago
A long time ago I had taught a class on data visualization, and used this photo as example of creative use of pie charts: https://www.answerminer.com/static/489716080133492e99fdcb9c8... Here was another list: http:&#x
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by lkozma 7y ago
Yes, "competible" would be good for the opposite situation.
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by lkozma 8y ago
The step from tracking zero things to tracking one thing may be larger then the step from tracking one thing to tracking (almost) everything.

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