Viewing profile — m31415

What I meant is that I'm not being pedantic for the sake of being pedantic.

That's like saying a well-written C program is a good reference for C++. In any case, writing POSIX-only shell scripts is much harder than writing Bash scripts, which can often be …

Not being pedantic, but OP's script isn't Bash, it's POSIX sh. POSIX sh can be executed in Bash, but there are several differences. The only non-POSIX command I can spot in that sc…

This is based on one person's (DHH's wife's) experience with an algorithm. Hyperbole much?

> Why in the fuck do I have to pay a publisher to submit homework to my professor? The argument is that it makes it easier for the professors/teachers to grade homework when they'r…

Indeed, I would say most "modern" introductory physics textbooks (including newer editions of old texts like Halliday and Resnick or Sears and Zemansky) are terrible. Of course, th…

This is an excellent article. Much of the discussion about digital vs. dead-tree books is similar to Stallman's "Right to Read" essay [1], which was published 22 years ago in 1997.…

But not all American whiskys are spelt "whiskey", e.g., Maker's Mark: https://www.makersmark.com/

Not that I know of, but many of the problems have been discussed online, e.g, calculating the average of the 100th power of sin in under 5 minutes [1], which according to Arnold, i…

Some problem collections by Arnold: * Problems for Children from 5 to 15: http://jnsilva.ludicum.org/HMR13_14/Arnold_en.pdf * A mathematical trivium pt. 1: http://www.physics.monta…

Yes, and quite a few Mir books are available freely [1] [1] https://mirtitles.org

For mathematics, I would recommend: 1. "What Is Mathematics? An Elementary Approach to Ideas and Methods" by Courant and Robbins -- a general book on mathematics in the spirit of F…

This is nuts. Mozilla should at least allow the user to set a custom search engine using an about:config option, like the old keyword.URL [1] option, which was removed after Firefo…

From the conclusion > the FSF needs to focus on the algorithms that change people behavior Is this satire or does the author really want the FSF to engage in mind control? This is …

Don't you notice a slowdown in your connection on using a 20MB hosts file?

From the article: > I also loved Louisa Gilder’s The Age of Entanglement and Kip Thorne’s Black Holes and Time Warps. That one was slow for me, but it was like being in the kind of…

In Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312, Venus is terraformed by inserting a large sunshade in the L1 Lagrange point of the Venus-Sun system. This makes Venus significantly cooler and atmos…

> I can see definitely a lot of added value to the scientific document there. You fail to see that nonprofit publishers (IEEE, AIP, APS, AMS, etc.) also typeset and copyedit articl…

Even if they don't read HN, I'm sure Elsevier execs know about the general discontent against costly journals. There have been numerous campaigns [1] to boycott journals published …

Chromatic aberrations cannot be removed using a material of just one refractive index. And as the video shows this lens has chromatic aberrations.

Why is this surprising at all? Any transparent material having a refractive index larger than air can be made to work as a lens. Pinhole cameras are much more interesting than this…