Viewing profile — jwmerrill

“Passive voice” is a grammatical term. “Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses,” is not an example of the passive voice. “14,000 workers were fired by Amazon,” is an example of the pass…

The article is a four part series.

This is also the inverse Gudermannian function [1]. That Wikipedia page has some nice geometrical insights. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gudermannian_function

My mistake! It seems clear in hindsight…

The next pointer doesn’t have to go first in the structure here. It can go anywhere, and you can use @fieldParentPtr to go back from a reference to the embedded node to a reference…

For problems in the plane, it's natural to pick two coordinate functions and treat other quantities as functions of these. For example, you might pick x and y, or r and θ, or the d…

` ` is not an html opening tag. It is a preamble. https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/syntax.html#writing

Instead of differentiating c^(-xn) w.r.t. x to pull down factors of n (and inconvenient logarithms of c), you can use (z d/dz) z^n = n z^n to pull down factors of n with no inconve…

From later in [1] > Mind that all of this does not impose how we actually scale temperature. > How we scale temperature comes from practical applications such as thermal expansion …

KaTeX supports server side rendering to an html string. If you do this, the client only needs to load the css component of katex, and not the js component. I believe MathJax has a …

Entropy in Statistical Mechanics is a quantity associated with a probability distribution over states of the system. In classical mechanics, this is a probability distribution over…

Raku interprets decimal literals (like 0.1) as limited-precision rational numbers (Rats) [0-1]. I think this is a pretty user-friendly compromise. [0] https://docs.raku.org/syntax/…

That paper discusses ways of computing a matrix exponential, rather than ways of computing polynomial zeros.

I’d recommend a language with automatic memory management for the AST walking interpreter in the first half of the book so you don’t have to worry about how everything gets allocat…

O’Neil has responded to those criticisms here: https://www.pcg-random.org/posts/on-vignas-pcg-critique.html

Pratt parsing and precedence climbing are the same or very similar, but they are not the same as recursive descent (and the linked article does not claim this).

> All you need to do is ensure that your calculations are in no danger of blowing past the max significant digits If you have a lot of control of the scale of the numbers you’re co…

Decimal floating point still doesn’t have associative addition or multiplication.

> Interesting that the author assumes that US equity dominance will continue. The author does not assume this—rather this is held up as an assumption that might be wrong. The artic…

Here’s a conversation about tree shaking in Lisp from 1994 [1] (from the posted Wikipedia page). [1] https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/pspFr1XByZk

> what actually happens if you mix sulfuric acid with lye This reaction produces sodium sulfate (a salt) plus water and heat [1]. No idea if this is practical, though. Maybe it’s d…

I don’t think they’re actually intending to refer to physics here—they could have said “as fast as theoretically possible” instead. A square matrix with n rows and columns has n^2 …