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asdftemp

64 karma · joined November 26, 2014

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asdftemp··on New type of dice guarantees no tie when deciding who goes first
Came here also to point this out, because there is an easy to find solution that lacks only this property. I find this restriction somewhat unsatisfying though, because the easy solution does have the property that, for any smaller number of players, there is a subset that is fair for them (so you could manufacture these dice and resolve any number of players up to the number you have).

Requiring same size doesn't make it harder; you can take any solution and inflate the dice (take the lcm of all the sizes, duplicate the face numbers).

edit: oops i just double checked my construction and while they give equal go-first probabilities they don't give equal permutation probabilities...

asdftemp··on Gauguin, Descartes, Bayes: A Diurnal Golem's Brain
cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49279638, "How art invented humanity"
asdftemp··on The quiet art of attention
after meditating regularly for a while, doing a noting practice produced a distinct shift for me on this point. I realized that most of the time, when I hear a sound there is also a momentary "shred" of visual/muscular thought that accompanies it. for example, when I hear a crow, there is a bit of black/feathery/tree-branch/etc. if this is interesting, you can find instructions from Shinzen Young online.

typing this up, I realize I'm not totally sure to what extent this is something that was happening before the practice vs something that developed from it [i.e. less habitual energy spent blocking things out], but either way I recommend it :)

asdftemp··on The quiet art of attention
attempt to interpret the parent comment more charitably: when different people who've shared a common experience try to put it into words, there is some consistency between what they write. the harder the experience is to verbalize, the harder it is to come up with meaningfully different precise descriptions of it, and the more aware you are of the limitations of language
asdftemp··on If Your World Is Not Enchanted, You're Not Paying Attention
personally, the post resonates strongly. focusing on this way of seeing has improved my life tremendously. based on the very little I know of you (your two posts) it sounds possible that the point isn’t landing. you seem to be living near the “control = safety/happiness” realm, where the high order bit of life is controllability.

try reading it again, and notice how little specific advice is given towards how to cultivate the sort of attention he’s pointing at (maybe his most concrete advice is in the form of a painting of an owl). are you convinced that by trying hard enough the future can belong to you, or that life owes you something? you can create an arbitrary amount of suffering for yourself by living that delusion (or the opposite one, that you can’t influence anything).

the notion expressed in the post is really worth trying, and simple, but hard to explain. one idea: the next time you see something you personally find beautiful (a flower, the sky? the fact that the earth supports you effortlessly?) you could investigate whether you did anything to “deserve” that.

asdftemp··on A linear algebra trick for computing Fibonacci numbers fast
I really like this analysis, which also discusses the “fast doubling” method: https://extratricky.com/blog/fibonacci-complexity

it points out that the bit complexity of the traditional algorithm is actually quadratic. and apparently, restricted to fixed width integers, there is a constant time method.

asdftemp··on Motto: Unsafe languages allow mostly-safe implementations
sorry about the misleading title choice; it’s quoted from the author’s homepage in reference to this work: https://www.humprog.org/~stephen/

also, could be marked [2017]

asdftemp··on The Art of Abduction
if hoofprints in snow were legible as a book cover, an allusion to the Name of the Rose would be even better :)
asdftemp··on Formalising Mathematics: An Introduction
that is a neat demo with a lot of useful links! In fact, it seems that the Lean developers/community are very interested in new methods of achieving readability, and providing users with tools to build interfaces that scale up to the complexity of real workflows.

For example, Lean in vscode supports interactive html "widgets": https://youtu.be/8NUBQEZYuis?t=453

(at that timestamp, there's a quick introduction to their typical use at the moment).

lean4 is committed to all sorts of extensibility; here's a demonstration of the new macros: https://twitter.com/derKha/status/1354082976456441861. There have also been several instances of users implementing old lean3 features (for example, the `calc` tactic mode, which has unique syntax for proving (in)equalities) by simply defining new type classes and short macros.

asdftemp··on Developers spend most of their time figuring the system out
https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/...
asdftemp··on Ask HN: Any logic based software dev tool which helps building code gradually?
> My main idea is that as a programmer what I do is constantly reducing the set of all programs to a particular program which satisfies the specification.

An alternate point of view is to start with the specification, interpreted as a generally nondeterministic program, and then refine it using logically sound optimizations to render it executable. This is roughly the approach of Fiat: http://adam.chlipala.net/papers/FiatSNAPL17/

They’ve used it to generate crypto primitives that are in use: http://adam.chlipala.net/papers/FiatCryptoSP19/

asdftemp··on Ask HN: What's your favorite elegant/beautiful algorithm?
this is a neat way to avoid moving those pointers around: https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/pubs/2010/2970/content.pdf
asdftemp··on Show HN: Sleeping Beauty, a 7-day roguelike game
"swap sword" is a pretty neat recent ios game where the character/enemies inhabit a match-3 grid
asdftemp··on Categories for Programmers: The Yoneda Lemma
a simpler introduction http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/11/yoneda-lemma.html
asdftemp··on Ask HN: Understanding inter-universal Teichmüller theory?
hi there, you might start with this mathoverflow thread: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/106560/philosophy-behind-m...
asdftemp··on You're in a space of twisty little mazes, all alike
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirchhoff%27s_theorem ?