Viewing profile — Syzygies

I also use Arq and Time Machine. How Pixar’s Toy Story 2 was deleted twice, once by technology and again for its own good https://thenextweb.com/news/how-pixars-toy-story-2-was-del…

Backup is way too important to trust to Time Machine. One should evaluate SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner side by side, and make a choice. Buy them both, or use both trials. The…

I thought this was how Nobel Prizes sickened fields. Mathematicians believe we're lucky to have been spared the Nobel Prize. While some repeat a discredited story this was because …

"In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not." I tried this, long ago. I just wasn't getting Haskell, so I'd retype my programs from memory and reconstruc…

It is mathematical folklore that one should attempt to prove a conjecture by day, disprove it by night. Jordan Ellenberg recently popularized this in his 2014 book. He and I both h…

https://github.com/Syzygies/Compare I spent far too long comparing dozens of languages, only some of which are part of the above project, before switching from Haskell to Lean for …

I loved the appearance of Bill Thurston. He proved enough of what he saw to be considered one of our greatest mathematicians, but his brilliance was what he saw. The obvious questi…

The sum from 1 to n is easy various ways, a matter of personal preference. One can "make rainbows", pairing 1 with n, 2 with n-1, ending up with n/2 copies of n+1. I prefer to tear…

> Rich Hickey has a joke about semi-colons in language design I didn't see semicolons, but I saw plenty of {} braces, and I can't explain why they're needed. https://github.com/Syz…

> I think most of the substantive criticism of Zuckerberg has been about burning funds. The 2017 Rohingya massacre in Myanmar? They handed him the death toll. He filed it under gro…

I can't believe I'm the first to Rick roll this thread with the most famous XKCD comic of all time: https://xkcd.com/327/

I've spoken before a thousand several times saying with a straight face "Every audience is an audience of one." My first example, I was asked to give one more talk on how one needs…

I came close to adopting Scala, many parallels to Ruby with vastly better performance. I'm Ruby or Lean 4.

I nearly adopted OCaml for my current math research, in no small part because of Jane Street contributions. I instead chose Lean 4, as LLMs became able to help code in Lean. I give…

As a mathematician, this reads to me as the most informed comment. Various priors inoculate me from feeling some of the rejection expressed in other comments. I knew Sammy Eilenber…

Thanks for saving me the time. I have email locally dating to the dawn of the internet; it's one form of external mind-mapping for me. I'm completely baffled that a decent mail pro…

There's the finished knot, and there's his way of tying it, which is easy to grasp. That strikes a chord for me. In grade school my teachers could not distinguish between these per…

Continental Airlines had an active frequent flyer community. A student emerged as a legendary figure (think "Hunger Games") after she noticed that Continental announcement URLs wer…

There is a meaningful design axis here, how one views one's role. In Bordeaux, winemakers consider themselves geniuses manipulating a many variety blend. In Alsace, winemakers view…

We have not yet converged on a best (or even adequate) way to present a structured mountain of information to AI, not already in its training corpus. AI agents fielded by major AI …

Not everyone expects to appear on HN, but chasing links this is a par two golf course: UFBT: Unofficial Flipper Build Tool (installation guide) uFBT is a cross-platform tool for bu…

Yes, I was going to guess semantic embedding from playing around and seeing the search responses. Thank you for "About this project". I'd love to extract just the foreign language …

I was hoping for Lean 4.

J is unclear on the concept, it's a hack to port APL to ASCII. I'm typing on a ZMK keyboard now where an APL unicode layer would be trivial. There are modern APLs. One can code a i…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cia_v4vxfE