neel_k

7 ms·

1.
by neel_k 5mo ago
I do software verification. In my experience, Z3 is consistently but noticeably better than CVC5 at the kinds of problems we generate, though the two tools are close enough that you definitely want to architect your verification tool to be
2.
by neel_k 10mo ago
If you have a bound on the size of the largest type in your program, then HM type inference is linear in the size of the program text. The intuition is that you never need to backtrack, so boolean formulae (ie, SAT) offer no help in express
3.
by neel_k 1y ago
Richard Rorty, whose humanism and love of democracy MacIntyre despised. Over the course of his career, MacIntyre went from an extreme left Marxist to an extreme right Thomist, and the only constant was his hatred of liberalism. He really co
4.
by neel_k 3y ago
Let's translate your comment from scientific research to driving: > If driving on the road suddenly makes car trips possible, then I'd say that the road is indeed designed to make things more difficult for those not driving on
5.
by neel_k 3y ago
You are reacting to the title, not the actual article. 1. The author is a CS professor who wanted to make a "CS for non-majors" course that non-majors would find actually useful/interesting. So he asked a historian colleague
6.
by neel_k 3y ago
"On Inequality" is one of the very worst pieces of serious analytic philosophy I have ever read. The best part of Franfurt's intellectual tradition -- analytic philosophy -- is taking ideas seriously, and so to honor his life
7.
by neel_k 3y ago
Actually, there are very similar situations in Chinese culture! My understanding is that when someone gives you a gift, in Chinese culture there is a social obligation to give them a gift of similar value at some point in the future. So giv
8.
by neel_k 3y ago
Surprisingly, FRP doesn't have anything to do with dataflow constraints at all. In FRP, a program is fundamentally a function of type Stream Input → Stream Output. That is, a program transforms a stream of inputs into a stream of outpu
9.
by neel_k 3y ago
Luckily, lawyers in the 1970s already figured this out, by anticipating the research on causality that computer scientists and mathematicians like Judea Pearl and Peter Spirtes did in the 1990s. Really! In the first instance, you just can&#
10.
by neel_k 4y ago
This is really easy to explain: all of the colonial empires were horrifying engines of atrocity, oppression and death. Since imperial apologists hated socialism, that made it a very attractive ideology -- if the worst people alive hate som
11.
by neel_k 4y ago
The short answer is: reference counting walks the dead part of the heap, and tracing gc walks the live part of the heap. When a reference count of an object goes to zero, you recursively decrement the reference counts of everything the obje
12.
by neel_k 4y ago
It's worth understanding the context Bourbaki arose in. An entire generation of French mathematicians was turned to bits of blood and gristle in the trenches of World War I, and so French mathematicians in the 1920s and early 1930s fac
13.
by neel_k 5y ago
When I went to one of these things, it was pretty much entirely about how to scope the work and how to write the proposal. Eg, for a big ERC grant, you need to propose something big and exciting enough to be worth 2 million euros, but small
14.
by neel_k 5y ago
Same way that I (who left industry to pursue an academic career because I wasn't happy) cope with the feeling I am missing out on a giant FAANG salary: mostly, I just don't think about it. Like, I have enough money to afford a hou
15.
by neel_k 5y ago
It sort of depends upon the course. This particular syllabus looks like a really standard linear algebra course (I have no idea what is robotics-specific about it), and so of course Gauss-Jordan would show up there. More generally, though,
16.
by neel_k 5y ago
Of course Eliot was a great poet, but the impulse to hagiography is one that should be resisted, and despite a gesture at that fact this article mostly fails to do so. Here's what Eliot had to say about Judaism in After Strange Gods :
17.
by neel_k 5y ago
Self-modifying code was useful for optimisation back in the 80s, but these days it's usually awful for performance (with JIT compilation as the main exception to this rule). Your CPU has an instruction cache and a data cache, and on AR
18.
by neel_k 5y ago
Sure it can. Actual competitive markets are made of competing firms, and firms can't (in general) optimise. 1. Holmstrom's theorem tells us that no payment system for a team of agents can have a budget in balance, be in Nash equil
19.
by neel_k 5y ago
For behavioural correctness of terminating functional programs, you can by and large treat your programs as plain mathematical functions. Then reasoning about them is as easy (or more likely, as hard) as ordinary math. If you want to reason
20.
by neel_k 6y ago
Pratt parsing (aka top-down operator precedence) is a special case of LR parsing. Since Laurie Tratt (the author of the article) is advocating LR parsing, he has no need to talk about Pratt parsing since it is a special case of the approac
21.
by neel_k 6y ago
Do you mean topology, or geometry? For topology, there are two main constructive approaches. The first, better-developed one, can be found in the theory of locales. An easy intro is Vickers' Topology via Logic , from which you can lev
22.
by neel_k 6y ago
In the conclusion, raph writes: > I am even more convinced than before that efficient parsing is possible on GPU. IMO, the place to start looking for GPU-friendly parsing algorithms is Valiant's algorithm, which is asymptotically th
23.
by neel_k 6y ago
Basically, it doesn't. TLA+ is first-order temporal logic, where you can write formulas describing how the state of a system evolves over time. If you have a concurrent process, you can describe it as a state machine, and then write TL
24.
by neel_k 6y ago
Nowadays anti-vaccinantion is substantially a marker for being on the right, since Donald Trump ran for president while making anti-vaccination claims. This tremendously increased the popularity of antivax ideas on the right. See "Dona
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by neel_k 6y ago
Willie Wong wrote a nice blog post about this a while ago: https://williewong.wordpress.com/2010/03/18/compactness-part...
26.
by neel_k 6y ago
This note represents a rare misstep by Dijkstra: the pigeonhole principle actually is a special and important principle worthy of a special name of its own. For example: 1. When you formulate the pigeonhole principle in propositional logic,
27.
by neel_k 6y ago
See Ken Ishii's music video "Space Invaders 2003": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p--dHQIeagE It's super cute, and also hits like a truck. Detroit techno is a really inspired musical choice for this kin
28.
by neel_k 6y ago
Vector spaces and linear maps between them form a model of the linearly-typed lambda calculus. That is, each type can be interpreted as a vector space, with each well-typed term representing a linear map between vector spaces. 1. The linea
29.
by neel_k 6y ago
Gap buffers are zippers, which makes this particular case really easy: they arise as derivatives of the list functor, and so for generic categorical reasons they are isomorphic to a list plus a position in it. This means you can prove thing
30.
by neel_k 6y ago
Well, this was an utterly nonsensical waste of time. A much wiser and more humane attitude towards continental philosophy was expressed by the great analytic philosopher Michael Dummett, who remarked that the division of philosophy into two

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