JadeNB

> I'm currently reading a book on a local mafia boss, and the best the church could do, when he was finally popped, was refuse to host his funeral.

Not to defend the church, but what else should they have done?

> > A black box oracle that just tells you whether statements are true or false is not the goal of mathematics and would not be particularly interesting to the field

> This is a crude distortion. The recent breakthroughs have come with proofs, reasoning and verification, and there is no proposal that I'm aware of that would do away with these foundations.

I believe that we are still at the point where these proofs serve as verifiable certificates of correctness, so that it's not a "trust me bro" situation, but where humans mostly still don't find them understandable, so that they are still just a highly reliable black box.

> We would probably no longer care about code, engineering or even physics and mathematics among other things. We would probably mainly care about

… about what?

> - Verily I say unto thee today, shalt thou be with Me in Paradise.

Shouldn't this one be "Verily I say unto thee today, thou shalt be with Me in Paradise?"

> It was a different time. Everything from movies to stories at the bus stop were longer, more relaxed, less rushed. www probably didn't seem like a big deal at the time.

Hmm, and yet, though of a different era, we got `cp`, `ls, `mv`, `rm` ....

I agree, it is used in place of meat, but I think that it is not usually intended to mimic meat. For example, I think that few people would claim you could use tofu as a drop-in recipe replacement without affecting flavor, whereas meat replacers like Impossible are intended to be able to do exactly that.

> * Ultra-processed plant-based meat replacement

There, fixed that for you.

I think that it's also literally all plant-based meat replacers (meaning products intended to mimic meat, rather than just replacing meat with plants).

In case you missed the intentional misspelling, rather than are just going along with the joke: the word used was 'udder' (a cow's teats) rather than 'utter'.

> Every time I've tried to use it (as recently as half a year ago) it's still a shitshow and never displays or updates apps correctly. Half the time an app showed up on the website that didn't show up on the phone app.

Sounds like an accurate recreation of the Play Store experience to me.

I believe that, (possibly only) in the early days, it offered to add any imported music to your library, which I think it indeed did by converting to AAC and putting in a directory structure of its choosing.

Presumably there's not much logical obstruction to all human-understandable math eventually being formalized, although the willingness and ability to commit the requisite enormous amount of time will probably be insurmountable. But definitely that hasn't happened already!

What does "fully riced with cats" mean?

Boy, I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder.

I'd call P = NP computer science rather than math, but perhaps it's reasonable to call it sufficiently on the theoretical side of CS that it really is math.

For what it's worth, it's not a problem with multiple kinds of multiplication (multiplication by a scalar can be viewed as multiplication by a specific kind of matrix), but with the idea that one can cancel in a multiplication. Since you can't cancel in matrix multiplication, you run into unexpected trouble when you try to do so, even if that's the only multiplication in sight. (In fact, you can't cancel in scalar multiplication either unless you've checked that you aren't multiplying by 0 …. Also, I'll note that surely no young mathematician has encountered the P = NP problem without thinking for a sophomoric moment that the solution is N = 1.)

I'd way rather read a translation in which the author themselves has played a part, and at least nominally signed off on it, than one done on the fly with even less than usual guarantee of its correctness.

(I agree that authors should be able to publish in their first language, but I also note that the historical practicality has been that publication in non-dominant languages has resulted more in silos than in broadening access.)

It seems to me like we're saying the same thing. I'm saying that there is a practical bias, as in, it's there in the real world whether we like it or not, that can prevent some papers from appearing just because of limitations on English-language fluency, not because of any lack of scientific content. One solution is to get rid of it, but that's a long-term project. If we have an immediate remedy that works, if the authors still take responsibility for the scientific content, and if the use of the tool that provides that remedy is responsibly disclosed, then it seems like a win all around, except perhaps that it makes the need for the longer-term solution less obvious.

Which part is a sin? Using LLMs to deal with a lack of English-language fluency? I am a scientist (actually a mathematician, if it matters), and, if that's the way to deal with the practical hegemony of English in the scientific literature, then I have no problem with it. Rather that than people with important ideas can't get them before the scientific community. As long as the authors personally check and stand behind the scientific content of their papers, what do I care how the exposition was produced, especially if the role of LLMs is properly disclosed?

Depending on your mathematical background, it may be easier to get a grasp on Tannaka duality, of which I assume, but don't know, this may usefully be viewed as a (possibly too) vast generalization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tannaka%E2%80%93Krein_duality

The article mentions one reason for small numbers predominating:

> The first is listicles. “3 ways to do X”, “5 things I wish I’d known”, “10 tools I actually use”. The listicle is practically the native unit of the link post, and its count is almost always small and round. Nobody writes “17 things I wish I’d known” unless they genuinely have 17 things, which is rare, whereas “5 things” is a decision made in a title editor.

But doesn't the title mangler specifically try to strip out numbers that look like they're part of listicle titles?

That's only for individual usage, which, I assume, is small potatoes compared to institutional usage. No major research institution is going to use piracy as an institutional policy, and neither is it going to boycott Springer, since at least some researchers would put up a fuss—because you don't just need access to lots of papers, sometimes you need access to that specific paper.

I don't mean to pick on an irrelevant detail, but I genuinely don't know how to parse ">10x fewer deaths per capita." Does it mean "fewer than 1/10 as many deaths per capita," i.e., the ratio (heat related deaths in Nevada per capita)/(heat related deaths in Greece per capita) is less than 1/10?

> > Parquet is unfortunately very good just by virtue of being first, and so widely supported

> IMO that is not how technology works. It is great that Parquet is so good at a lot of things, but that does not mean just because it came first that it deserves to be the only analytic file format forever.

I think you and vouwfietsman (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48649412) are actually saying the same thing in different words—I think their "unfortunately" means "it is unfortunate that, by virtue of coming first, this now has a support lead that will make it difficult for anyone else to catch up."

A classic joke about computers (far before this blog post, just the source that came up when I Googled):

https://therefinedgeek.com.au/index.php/2010/09/22/dont-anth...

> In what sense? Emacs is a Lisp interpreter with a text editor embedded in it - one can fully emulate Neovim features in it, the opposite is hardly possible - you can bolt Lisp interpreter on top of Neovim, but it won't be the same.

Unless this is specifically what you want to do with Neovim, in which case you'll probably just use Emacs anyway, Neovim's inability to do this is probably not a strike against it. As royal__ says (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48537120), they are just interested in a good text editor, not in raw computational power.

Gold, but not new gold: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/heisenbug.html

Certainly! I was intentionally hedging my bets with 'most' in "for most values of 'every other editor out there.'" I'd still argue that, for very large values of 'most,' most editors in widespread use today came after vi.

> I wouldn't dislike vim's modes so much if it just had one combination insert/append mode that worked like every other editor out there (including a couple other modal editors I've used), but even after adding various hacks to my vimrc to help unify the two modes, I still stumble over the behavior differences in other places.

To be fair, for most values of "every other editor out there," they came after vi (if not after vim), so it's not like vi was discarding existing wisdom.

Yes, I intentionally left out the next part of the quote about graduate school, since that seems more accurate. I was disputing only the part that I took to be pertaining to undergraduate education. The full quote is:

> This starts to break down in college when the professors often at best only slightly ahead. (they have more knowledge and experience - but in a slightly different area and so it isn't relevant to the depth of whatever is under consideration) Grad school is about advancing the state of the art - if you don't know more than your professor you are doing it wrong.

> This starts to break down in college when the professors often at best only slightly ahead. (they have more knowledge and experience - but in a slightly different area and so it isn't relevant to the depth of whatever is under consideration)

I can't speak to the humanities, but this estimation is just not true at most universities in the sciences. (EDIT: As cycomanic emphasizes below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48477683), the part of the original comment pertaining to graduate education is more reasonable. I am speaking here only of undergraduate education.)