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generationPon Standard Ebooks: liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover

You're probably in some country that has longer copyright duration than the US (life+70a, which is atrocious enough). Use Tor or a proxy.

generationPon Animals Made from 13 Circles (2016)

Nope, but this post is such a neat illustration of the richness of "life" that fits into 39 real parameters (each circle can be coordinatized as 3 real numbers: one for its radius and two for its center) that my first thought on seeing it was also "no surprise then that a matrix with a million entries can talk like an erudite person".

generationPon FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado

His old website: https://web.archive.org/web/20240415075438/https://homes.lud...

An app he wrote: https://web.archive.org/web/20240304061200/https://sit.luddy... or https://web.archive.org/web/20240727022112/https://homes.lud...

A news (probably PR) article about it: https://web.archive.org/web/20220622001223/https://www.compu...

None of these sites is available any more. This looks suspicious, even given the regular bit rot of American college servers. The app is supposedly downloadable at https://apkcombo.com/app-guardian/edu.iub.seclab.appguardian... . Anyone around with a disassembler and too much time?

generationPon California Attorney General issues consumer alert for 23andMe customers

What if someone in your family has done a crime, and the result of your DNA being online is (1) you are the first suspect and (2) the criminal might well learn/suspect that they have been compromised through you?

generationPon A Post Mortem on the Gino Case

Oh my, the titles in those proceedings are hilarious.

> Retracted on February 24, 2022: Innovation Research on College Student Affairs Management Based on Big Data Environment

> Retracted on February 24, 2022: University Students in the Greater Bay Area Conduct Research on the Construction of Big Data Teams for Cross-border E-commerce Startups in the Middle East

> Retracted on February 24, 2022: Discussion on International Trade Governance under the Background of Big Data

> Retracted on February 24, 2022: Application of Incoterms in International Engineering Based on Information Platform

> Retracted on February 24, 2022: The Fixed-point Tracking Model of Volunteer Service for College Students of Traditional Chinese Medicine Based on Information Technology

> Retracted on February 24, 2022: Sichuan Consumers' Mining of Agricultural Product Brand Value Based on Big Data

> Retracted on February 24, 2022: Sports Consumer Behavior Based on Integrated Data in the Context of Big Data

> Retracted on February 24, 2022: Talent Heights Construction from the Perspective of Talent Concentration

generationPon My Time at MIT

There are two kinds of MIT students: those who spend their time at MIT feeling they're not working enough, and those who spend their time after MIT feeling they haven't worked enough back at MIT.

The intellectual atmosphere is really something -- I don't know any other place in the world where so many interesting ideas will be whooshing past you, vying for your time. If you get too used to it, wherever you go next will feel like a backwater.

generationPon What does it mean that MP3 is free?

mp3 doesn't exactly fly off the tongue either. But maybe you've found the reason why bz2 never took off..

generationPon What does it mean that MP3 is free?

The reason why no one noticed is that everyone has been trivially circumnavigating the patents for decades (the usual model being a converter that doesn't come with its own lame.dll but asks you to put one into its folder) and Frauenhofer hasn't been caring much when it was private users as opposed to hardware manufacturers. If not for this, something like Ogg Vorbis would have taken its place.

As to files, I'm sure they start mattering to you when your train goes through a tunnel or your wifi is down. The fileless world is the leakiest abstraction of them all.

generationPon The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

Resolved? By whom?

generationPon ArXiv LaTeX Cleaner: Clean the LaTeX code of your paper to submit to ArXiv

What is the point of concealing tikz source code? It increases the size of the source archive and undermines accessibility.

generationPon 'Never seen anything like this' – NIH meetings and travel halted abruptly

https://www.science.org/do/10.1126/science.z7pm10i/full/acti...

This is the order. Good luck finding "literally stop everything" in it.

generationPon Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History

Ah, so Raft is what everyone uses, and Paxos is used by the very big providers nowadays. Good to know!

I can't find the study any more, though I'm pretty sure I saw it on HN...

generationPon Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History

I remember trying to read the paper and giving up somewhere early in the proof. I certainly don't think it gives a great intuition why the algorithm holds, so "approachability" is a matter of definition (does it tell a fun story? sure yeah).

generationPon Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History

That's easier explained using fixed-point theory: The damping factor makes the mapping x↦Sx into an actual contraction (on the space of probability distributions). Not to mention that it has a simple common-sense justification (you don't want to get stuck in a subnetwork that only links to itself, or drown out a subnetwork that has more outlinks than inlinks).

There is probably some gain from understanding the algorithm specifically as a Markov chain iteration (if nothing else, it provides a great example for Markov chain iteration), but I think it's perfectly possible -- and easier -- to understand it as a fixed-point iteration on a compact space. And I am someone who does algebra for a living and normally explains everything algebraically if ever possible...

generationPon Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History

For pratical purposes, perhaps this:

Andrew Tridgell and Paul Mackerras, The rsync algorithm, June 1996, https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/course/15-749/READINGS/required/c...

generationPon Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History

Does anyone actually use Paxos in real life? And let me ask the same question for all other academic distributed algorithms right away. I recall seeing a study some 10 years ago checking the major cloud providers for Byzantine fault tolerance and finding none of them to exhibit the qualities that the known algorithms would guarantee; apparently they would just rely on timing and hoping things don't get too twisted.

generationPon Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History

Where does the Brin-and-Page paper require linear algebra? It mentions "eigenvector" once, in a tangential remark. The "simple iterative algorithm" is how you find the fixed point of any contraction mapping, linear or not. Knowing that it is also an eigenvector is just a distraction -- you aren't going to use Gaussian elimination, not if you know what is good for you.

generationPon One of my papers got declined today

To be the devil's advocate: Breaking a result up into little pieces to increase your paper count ("salami-slicing") is frowned upon.

Of course this is not what Terry Tao tried to do, but it was functionally indistinguishable from it to the reviewers/editors.

generationPon Machine-Assisted Proof [pdf]

Right, and the paper you didn't read contains a lot more than that.

generationPon Feed readers which don't take "no" for an answer

Rejecting every unconditional GET after the first? That sounds a bit excessive. What if the reader crashed after the first and lost the data?

generationPon A binary tree of all Pythagorean triples

Both conventions are valid. You call it binary when you view it as a rooted tree, or ternary if you view it just as a graph.

generationPon Everyone is capable of, and can benefit from, mathematical thinking

If the article is in any way representative of the book, then I'm not sure what there is to be learned from the book. That mathematical skills can be honed through practice? That it happens at an intuitive, pre-rigorous level before it is ready to be written down on paper? How surprising. And I doubt he can disprove the genetical component of intelligence, only show that there are other components to mathematical productivity as well.

At least I know that David Bessis's mathematical work is not as shallow as this. His twitter thread on the process https://x.com/davidbessis/status/1849442592519286899 is actually quite insightful. I would guess this also made it into the book in some longform version, but I don't know whether I would buy the book just for that.

generationPon Math from Three to Seven

That and even better: it opened the doors towards a lot of the better jobs, both in terms of working conditions and offering some amount of breathing room.

Education was a more significant social elevator in the East than in the West, first and foremost because the ground level was much lower.

generationPon Math from Three to Seven

Also a huge drinking problem that is not entirely but mostly concentrated in men.

generationPon Math from Three to Seven

And I thought it was a pun on p-zombies...

generationPon Graph Coloring Methods

I'm seeing some influence of [Diestel](https://diestel-graph-theory.com/) at least on the layout of the text.

generationPon Graph Coloring Methods

Lots of academic authors have decided color is a gimmick (color printing is expensive and not clear how long-lived; grayscale printing kills yellow and light-green lines; then there is colorblindness). Certainly I agree that load-bearing color is to be avoided, and I do so in my own writing.

generationPon alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

I think development on the TeX-to-HTML compiler has slowed down at some point, and it's far from perfect yet. Some of the issues are probably HTML5 limitations, unlikely to be fixed any time soon (unless one wants formulas to become graphics).

But there is another problem: It takes too long to load on mobile and doesn't reflow. I thought mobile was one of the reasons people wanted HTML in the first place!

generationPon Poor Foundations in Geometric Algebra

It fixes the worst problem, which is the well-definedness of the interior product, since it defines the product explicitly on the standard basis rather than through a bunch of not-obviously-consistent axioms. It is too basis-dependent for my tastes (it should depend on the symmetric bilinear form, not on the basis). As for the sign conventions, I think they're ultimately matters of taste, and while I agree with you about the inner/scalar product, I disagree about the derivation-ness of a contraction (I like it to satisfy the Koszul sign rule, which allows signs to be inserted only when some factors move past each other).

My ideal approach is along the lines of Chevalley's "The Algebraic Theory of Spinors and Clifford Algebras", Chapter III, but he doesn't get to much geometric algebra.

generationPon Poor Foundations in Geometric Algebra

The subject doesn't lack rigor, but all of the popular and quite a few of the mathematically minded introductions to it do. Bourbaki and Chevalley did a good job introducing Clifford algebras properly some 80 years ago, but even this has been forgotten by the modern bloggy expositors.

This here seems to be one of the few good modern texts that are elementary yet rigorous: https://www.mathematik.uni-muenchen.de/~lundholm/clifford.pd...