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del_operator

110 karma · joined September 1, 2017

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del_operator··on Dark Alley Mathematics
Galois pistols loaded like hold my coffee
del_operator··on Dark Alley Mathematics
We are not so differential
del_operator··on Dark Alley Mathematics
Aye
del_operator··on Dark Alley Mathematics
Ah, 24, reminds me of ole days the lattice of those math alleys had a monstrous moonshine leeching into reality stranger than we’d care to code…
del_operator··on Do the simplest thing that could possibly work
Get it out. Make it work. Love your work.
del_operator··on The language brain matters more for learning programming than the math brain
This is largely true, but also, the dynamic shifts depending on how learners engage with peers as they move from understanding to synthesis.

In small peer groups (“pods”) that debug and learn together, communication becomes a core skill—and that can actually change how math skills are applied and developed. Language doesn’t just support learning; it reshapes the process.

del_operator··on The language brain matters more for learning programming than the math brain
Left as an exercise for the reader.
del_operator··on [dead]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38627114
del_operator··on Calculus Made Easy by Silvanus P. Thompson (1910)
I picked this book up when I was learning Algebra to see what the hype was about as a kid. It was dull. I went back to the library stacks after some weeks and found Calculus and Pizza to be even easier to swallow.

Calculus Made Easy is a good book. It made me appreciate even easier books when you need them and have enthusiasm for learning a topic.

del_operator··on The Matasano crypto challenges (2014)
Still think about ETAOIN SHLDRU when making wordle guesses because of this
del_operator··on HP 15C Collector’s Edition (preorder)
That’s crunching numbers for sure
del_operator··on HP 15C Collector’s Edition (preorder)
I still appreciate my hp 50g
del_operator··on Egypt builds worlds largest man-made river
> Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi recently hailed the New Delta project as the largest initiative ever undertaken in the country.

Wait a minute, how are we scoping and measuring initiatives when there’s at least one Great Pyramid plus a few others that may rank fairly high.

del_operator··on The great Covid and smoking cover-up?
Wondering also the chances you get induced social distancing for smelling like smoke.
del_operator··on Show HN: A central bank simulator game with a realistic economic model
441877

Mostly left it at 0% except for two inflation events where it went over 7%.

del_operator··on What happened to proper tail calls in JavaScript? (2021)
Stack frames iirc
del_operator··on Crabs evolved at least five times from separate groups of crustaceans (2021)
To pun this out — such shellfish animals end up so crabby in the end.
del_operator··on Europe's now-drowned 'lost world' and the 25m-high tsunami that finished it off
Didn’t Time Team cover these topics and more?
del_operator··on Guess the daily Wordle in one try using the tweet distribution
Two or three guesses with Wordle using the ETAOIN SHRDLU I learned doing cryptopals has been very effective at reaching a solution.

I usually have a first guess like SAINT then something like SCARE, CORED, etc eliminating vowels and frequent constants while also considering the most likely sequencing of matched characters or remaining characters.

Also eliminating S, T, C really reveals there’s no TH, SH, SP, CK, etc and is one factor that gets me suspicious of repeated chars or rarer k, g and x combos.

del_operator··on Mathematicians Transcend Geometric Theory of Motion
Also, yet another article that makes me rethink my choice to take Homological Algebra with no real algebraic topology coursework. Merkurjev was teaching so at least I have all his notes. It kind of forced me to give up any concrete basis and just handle abstract tools.
del_operator··on Mathematicians Transcend Geometric Theory of Motion
Well, this is how I learned Manolescu left UCLA and is now at Stanford
del_operator··on To Breed or Not to Breed?
I thought this was going to address the burden of finding affordable childcare, rigors of child development, family insurance, and maybe even a stark anecdote about a toddler or teenager. Then I hear a story about climate change and feel super frustrated that’s where this conversation is starting.

I see the anxiety, but I just didn’t anticipate this from the title.

del_operator··on The human tendency to over-water plants
I was thinking about this as I cleaned up and managed all my backyard river rock landscaping.

I over water the front yard and porch plants, but almost forget about all the backyard plants because of the landscaping. They get watered still — it’s just they definitely look they need before I go out there.

del_operator··on US housing price higher than housing bubble 2008
We bought in December at a price that felt too high, but now with all the sales on the block there’s enough comps this month to suggest we could re-appraise with 20% or 22% of more of debt-to-equity.

Having said that I also know more friends/family trying to have kids and move into a home. I also see friends with parent’s in retirement living alone in large homes too afraid to downsize in this market.

I went remote in 2018 living in a Brooklyn studio. My wife and I utilized remote work to move to a smaller city in late 2019, living off a substantially smaller portion of wages, seriously snowballing debt payments and increasing savings. Had we just bought in Jan 2020 we would have saved a bunch. The market was wild then too and already not cooling down here through that winter as it usually would. Little did we know 2020 would bring a pandemic into the mix.

del_operator··on The universe has already made almost all the stars it will ever make
Assuming no quirks in physics that the universe just left out for yet another pathological counter example to our understanding of everything — it could just be the star stuff hanging out and social distancing after a star blazing first act.
del_operator··on Man can change his pupil size on command
I came expecting satire, reading up to the video games eye training amused, but stopped mid way confused by the level of effort going into confirming its novelty.

O’ fortuna, the things we learned in the 21st century.

del_operator··on Having SARS-CoV-2 once confers much greater immunity than a vaccine
Tasteless/careless, IMO, especially living (in Texas) where “covid parties” have happened and people lost their lives right around the block last year. Although, it may be of relevance to my younger unvaccinated nephew that survived a rough case last December and is worried about being in school over in Tennessee without masks.
del_operator··on Chronically lonely flies overeat and lose sleep
Not sure how I read “files overeat and lose sleep” but I was intrigued.
del_operator··on Why is learning functional programming so damned hard? (2019)
Teaching someone to abstract out a name for something they want to do takes lots of practice, but then when they are pushed to have to abstract can lead to decision paralysis around when to do it. Having folks practice this together and feel out the nuances helps a lot. Control flow is also a tricky early concept for any new programming setting, but also, learning to compose is too. For some students tackling control flow and composition early by explicitly composing abstracted funcs feels great. However, I’ve oft seen many of my students want to get granular with control flow for a long while before they abstract or utilize many abstractions, probably because their mental model of what they want to do is stepping through each detail of an example they have in mind. Another component for andragogical learning is to just sell the WHYs of functional patterns: why care, why remember, why it’s helping, why they should just give it 5, why it’s ok to forget, et cetera. Learning and jumping straight into synthesizing, evaluating and analyzing code for a potential production setting has been difficult with a loose understanding. You need good scaffolding in your backlog, lots of time, patience, context sharing, and resourceful experts to turn to check your understanding and promote good tooling/solutions in the ecosystem. I saw this when my team switched to elixir. I saw this when my team stitched to K8s. Lots of delays I’m happy we worked through. Pairing a lot helped through it
del_operator··on Shocked to find smart thermostats raised remotely by “Smart Savers Texas” progrm
Yikes, though this is why I appreciate my own sensor dashboard for home temp, pressure and humidity monitored by my Pi + enviro+. It’s pretty good about alerting me to temp changes. I now feel pretty sensitive to degree changes over 70, especially as relative humidity goes up over 45%. Dry air up to 74 I can handle with a decent ceiling fan. Houston at 78 would be higher on my discomfort index.
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