DonbunEf7

Since nobody's spelled it out directly: Let an approximant be a rational number p/q which is near the desired irrational x. Then, let p/q be a best approximant iff no other rational with denominator smaller than q is closer to x.

It's a delightfully beautiful result that the best approximants for x are given by x's continued fraction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continued_fraction#Best_ration...

And they will be forced to learn, the hard way, that this is a bad way to approach algorithms design. The same argument applies to quicksort, and we know how that turned out: http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/mdmspe.pdf

The best tool for solving these problems is a whiteboard; writing code should be seen as a last resort, and brute-force solutions should be shunned, as they provide no insight.

They're gnomes. Tell them the truth: they'll be helping to care for the planet. Throw in some vacation and pay and they'll love it.

Ramanujan may have been aware of 1728 == 12² because of 12's recurrence within number theory. (Well, really, 24's recurrence. [1]) He wrote down several equations [2] which feature 12 and 24, and given the time in which he lived, he may have been acquainted with the work of Felix Klein and others [3] as well.

The other sum is 1000 + 729, much easier for a decimal-preferring mentat like Ramanujan to pull from thin air.

[1] http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/numbers/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mock_modular_form

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J-invariant

"Oregon Ripped-off, America's Cup, Larry Ellison."

Hi, here are some modern resources.

First, what's the problem? http://www.cap-lore.com/CapTheory/ConfusedDeputy.html

What are capabilities? http://habitatchronicles.com/2017/05/what-are-capabilities/

Is there someplace with a massive pile of links? https://github.com/dckc/awesome-ocap

Yes, capabilities are abstract and simple. Don't worry if you don't get it at first.

"So it’s pretty clear by now that “don’t make mistakes” is not a viable strategy."

This is more generally known as Constant Flawless Vigilance: https://capability.party/memes/2017/09/11/constant-flawless-...

Are there any countries with slavery which are outperforming similarly-situated countries without slavery? AFAIK slavery is only useful in Civilization 4 (whip it! whip it good!) and IRL it is no substitute for citizenship.

Not if it's in the Hadean Eon; we have serious difficulty finding well-preserved direct evidence from that time. It could be that we settled on DNA and cells before the geologic record was capable of faithfully preserving evidence of either.

Nobody? http://www.oregonvoices.org/

How do the schemes laid out here compare with zfec (https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/zfec)?

This site's JS made me very sad.

A lot of points in this post are about appeasing toxic behavior and working with difficult bosses. Why? Appeasing toxicity only increases toxicity.

Reminds me of ologs: https://arxiv.org/abs/1102.1889v2

The category on top of a given graph just adds path equivalences. While that might not seem like a big addition, it's crucial for restricting the structure's internal state.

Talks about Hillary Clinton being "cold" and promotes Amy Cuddy's "power pose" pseudoscience. I find this to be an interesting, disappointing worldview.

He designed CPUs from scratch using a bare-bones minimal Forth (ColorForth) as his preferred way of writing code. The resulting chipset is utterly fascinating: http://www.greenarraychips.com/

Núñez is not a mathematician and claims an anti-Platonic view of maths which is totally inconsistent with the reality of practicing mathematicians over the past century. In particular, I doubt that they grok the extent to which maths and physics have collaborated, and all of the predictions in particle colliders which started out as quirks of equations on blackboards.

I have a book that is along these same lines, and it says, "Quality is what you like." Quality is between an observer and an object.

I was tempted to explain, in excruciating detail, exactly what will happen if thermonuclear weaponry is used on North Korea. But you were glib, so I'll be glib too: Many North Koreans, South Koreans, Japanese, Russians, and Chinese will all die. Some will die instantly, some will die over the next 15min, some will die over the next week, and some will die over the next 20yrs. We will poison the Pacific. China and Russia may respond, and if so, it will not be a gentle response.

If you think that nukes are "good news" then you probably do not understand what "good" is.

Quantum mechanics has several facets which correspond to path integrals, infinite-dimensional operators, and infinite series, sums, and products.

Here's Woodin talking about his work in this area on a more technical level: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVF4N1Ix5WI

These levels are known to SREs as Initial, Repeatable, Defined, Managed, and Optimizing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Maturity_Model#Leve...

These levels are known to Discordians as Chaos, Discord, Confusion, Bureaucracy, and The Aftermath: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Discordia

Sounds like Named Data Networking, which cannot come soon enough. Is anybody doing commercial NDN yet?

To clarify, for those wondering, the separatist leader Puigdemont has not (yet?) been assassinated.

Languages where switch-statements or switch-expressions don't fallthrough by default include Ada, C#, E, Go, Monte, Perl, Swift, and I think basically every flavor of Pascal.

"Pretty much every language," right? C++ is right in there with C, JavaScript, and PHP.

I'm ashamed to be a postmodernist because of these assholes.

Postmodernists supposedly say "there is no truth." But that sounds an awful lot like a truth! Anybody who thinks only Sith deal in absolutes is going to have a bad time.

Postmodernism still works once logic and critical thought are applied, but it stops being an excuse for bullshit.

Maths is zero-based. I'm not sure why you think that numbers start with one; every formulation of the integers in modern maths starts with zero.

Rabbits suck. I'm trying to find a good source, but it's well-known to outdoorsmen that a diet of rabbit alone is not sufficiently nutritious to sustain humans when compared to other meats.

Also, it's Australia. Rabbits got out of control because people had this hubris about managing them; they won't permit that mistake again.

Indeed, I learned in school that it was short for "cat URL", since it functions like the standard `cat` command but takes a URL instead of a file or pipe.

Just goes to show that we are very good at coming up with incorrect justifications for things.

Imagine that; cities don't want to end up like Seattle, with entire neighborhoods of Amazonians.