polyphonicist | 6 years ago | on: From Tower of Hanoi to Counting Bits (2011)
polyphonicist's comments
polyphonicist | 6 years ago | on: From Perl to Pi
> Randal L. Schwartz said:
> 27 Apr 2008 02:30 AM GMT (#1 of 1 comment)
> Glad you enjoyed that bit. That was Tom's humor on that one. I could never have been that clever. :)
It is heartwarming to see the author of a popular Perl book providing credit for a joke to his co-author in the comments of an early 2000 blog post by an independent blogger.
polyphonicist | 6 years ago | on: Mathematics for the Adventurous Self-Learner
I like Anki but I have never been able to figure out how to capture complex and often long business related information in tiny cards.
polyphonicist | 6 years ago | on: Mathematics for the Adventurous Self-Learner
Can you share the names of the textbooks?
polyphonicist | 6 years ago | on: Mathematics for the Adventurous Self-Learner
Yes, it is really important to learn math with study-mates. Just like in code, we do reviews, in math too, we need someone else who can review our proofs. It is even easier to make an error in a proof and believe that something is proven when it isn't. A study-mate helps to prevent us from fooling ourselves.
polyphonicist | 6 years ago | on: Mathematics for the Adventurous Self-Learner
polyphonicist | 6 years ago | on: Mathematics for the Adventurous Self-Learner
Do not do it alone. I mean, it is okay to self-learn mathematics as much as possible but don't let that be the only way to learn. Find a self-study group where you can discuss what you are learning with others.
I think the social-effect can be profound in learning. I realized this when I used to learn calculus on my own. My progress was slow. But when I found a few other people who were also studying calculus, my knowledge and retention grew remarkably. I think the constant discussion and feedback-loop helps.
With round the clock internet connectivity, it is easier to find a self-study group now than ever.
polyphonicist | 6 years ago | on: Show HN: Search code in GitHub repos using regular expressions
Details like this would help the OP to track down the exact cause of why it has indexed the forks but not the original repo.
polyphonicist | 6 years ago | on: Fiber – Express inspired web framework written in Go
polyphonicist | 6 years ago | on: Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me
The domain name analogy scares me rather than reassures me. Sure, DNS was created in good faith to be as distributed as possible, but is it? There are recent stories that show that individuals do not have as much control on domain names as one would ideally like. See these stories -
- Sinkholed: https://susam.in/blog/sinkholed/ (domain name hijack by German authority by accident)
- The duck tape holding the internet together: https://medium.com/thisiscala/the-duct-tape-holding-the-inte... (loss of control on domain name due to registrar error)
While the idea behind Solid sounds solid but the moment they talk about outsourcing pod hosting to third-party pod hosting providers, I get worried. Would it lead to walled gardens of pods? (Example GMail for emails) Would they add non-standard convenience features to create vendor lock-ins (Example GitHub for Git)? Would they abuse their power due to vendor lock-in (Example Sourceforge for SVN)?
polyphonicist | 6 years ago | on: Should you self-host Google Fonts?
polyphonicist | 6 years ago | on: Should you self-host Google Fonts?
Why isn't relying on default fonts provided by the user's system good enough for that?
polyphonicist | 6 years ago | on: More bosses give four-day workweek a try
Where can I find such four-day workweek jobs?
polyphonicist | 6 years ago | on: Of Modes and Men (2005)
> Modeless: Computer scientists when writing code typically worked in different modes; you might have an insert mode, a delete mode, or a replace mode. You would first select the mode, then select the point on the screen at which the action was to occur, then perform the action. Tesler, in user experiments, proved that modes were confusing for nonscientific users and championed the “modeless” interface.
For non-technical users, sure modeless editing may be better. But for computer scientists, modeful editing may be better. The article mentions modeless editing to be better for no scientific users only, not necessarily for everyone.
polyphonicist | 6 years ago | on: Of Modes and Men (2005)
polyphonicist | 6 years ago | on: Let's Encrypt has turned on stricter validation requirements
I run a simple static website served with Nginx. I would like to know if this change has any impact on me.
polyphonicist | 6 years ago | on: How to write the perfect pull request (2015)
Your parent comment is suggesting rebase only for pulling latest changes in master into your pull request.
For merging someone's pull request to the team's master, sure use a merge commit.
But if you are working on a pull request and while you are working on it, the team's master gets updated and now you want to base your work on the recent master, by all means, use git rebase. That is what it is meant for, to rebase your work on another work. It's in the name itself.
Right tool for the right job.
polyphonicist | 6 years ago | on: Rust Ghost, Signing Off
polyphonicist | 6 years ago | on: Learning from Turing’s silver hoard (2016)
polyphonicist | 6 years ago | on: Benford's Law
> We will be dealing with arbitrary precision integers (bignums) in the problem, so let us also make a few assumptions:
> Addition or subtraction of an m-bit integer and an n-bit integer (m <= n) takes O(n) time.
> Counting the number of 1-bits in an n-bit integer takes O(n) time.