Viewing profile — JonathanMerklin

Straight Outta Lynwood was a great album. One of the CDs that I took out of my case the most often as a struggling nerdling who was still a year or two away from having scrounged u…

I'll bite. What's your argument, or at least the comment-sized gist of it?

I agree with almost all of what you have stated, save for a minor nitpick: I frankly don't think most functional adults think about the Fields Medal, similar annual prizes, or the …

The cyclic group generated by e.g. RU has order 105 (so 210 total turns or 105 of each side, alternated). If you have some math know-how, check out [1]. If you don't, take my word …

I think it's possible that that may be an additional benefit (for Google), but to me it seems overwhelmingly more likely that the main explanation here is Conway's Law.

You've identified a potential strategy by which a computer can play like a 1300-rated player, but not one where it will "play like a 1300-rated human". Patzers can still find and m…

I want to note for the HN crowd that the book is in the "just technical enough to inform yet not scare off the layman, but not technical enough for the practitioner" nonfiction sub…

Perhaps not the hyphenated form, but I'd had a chat with a friend a couple days ago where we meandered around some surface level philosophy and I paraphrased a section or two from …

Genuinely asking: is that huge in terms of their install base or revenue, or is that huge in terms of PR ramifications (like, "vocal minority" type of deal)? In my younger days I'd…

I get what you're saying, but "rule 34 also applies to scientific research" is a bizarre way to word it; the way I'd interpret that phrase out of context is just that it logically …

I don't claim to be in SBF's head, but the gist of the rationale for this type of thought is a hypercritical focus on effective usage of the limiting resource of time. Learning fac…

Worth noting for the interested reader that's disappointed upon reading your comment that there's also a Princeton Companion to Applied Mathematics (ISBN-13: 978-0691150390, ISBN-1…

A math history book about one specific area of study written more in a popsci style that I liked: one of my favorite authors (David Foster Wallace) wrote "Everything & More: A Comp…

I was going to correct you by saying "if you didn't intend the pun, you should have used 'aether' (or 'æther' if you're cool)" but in going to the Wikipedia article to copypaste th…

I haven't heard the "square root of employees are critical" rule of thumb. I have previously heard of Price's Law - paraphrasing: "half of the output is created by a square root of…

What fight do you recommend I take? The way I see it, if I balk at additional fees, taxes, and tips, there is a relatively high risk that I don't even receive the product or servic…

The system is bad, no doubt, but I personally have spent almost a decade living and interacting with reality with a hard fast personal rule that every numeric value I see fronted b…

FWIW, I read it that way. It's not a sequence of "finish the game of social success" coming after "finishing the game of financial success", it's a complete replacement of which ga…

Yeah, I've used it in Haskell for ignored variables, holes, type wildcards, etc. Another interesting little rabbit hole that this little conversation led me to: In the Chrome (and …

I just checked and this is true for the Node.js REPL (Tried in v12, v14, v16, and v18) as well, which I'm also just learning for the first time (and I had the same workflow as you …