Top all-time · #3206
Good Math/Bad Math
Personal blog · goodmath.orgmathprogramming
Good Math/Bad Math is a personal blog at goodmath.org about math and programming. Since 2014, 24 different Hacker News readers have linked it 36 times, most often “Technical Interviews: More Than a Brain Teaser?”. The last post was in 2022, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (13) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog to explain mathematics and debunk crank claims, such as constructivism and infinite sets. Several commenters recommend specific posts on vaccination maths, slide rules and Knuth.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 13 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Technical Interviews: More Than a Brain Teaser?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-11-20
- Paxos, a beautiful protocol for distributed consensus2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-01-30
- Arabic numerals have nothing to do with angle counting2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-04-19
What Hacker News says?
>my assumption is that you want to read my article, and not to be distracted by whatever performance is happening in the comment section Pfft. Half of the fun on the Internet is arguing with people about what other people said. I like to link to this blog post with over 500 replies about a constructivist who doesn't believe in the well-definedness of real numbers and shows up in the comments to respond to people: ht…
Comment linking /blog/2011/02/10/e-e-escultura-and-the-field-axioms/
on “I’ve removed Disqus. It was making my blog worse”Submitted Abusing linear regression to make a point as a story · 82 points
HN discussion> I have been told I write better code than my CS grad peers but I have no clue about these algorithms and data structures. For a programer in the industry, the ability to write simple "legible" code is very important. An ideal interview process should spend some time evaluating those skills of a candidate - but this is very very hard to measure. But good familiarity with the basics of CS is also important to be abl…
Comment linking /blog/2015/11/19/technical-interviews-more-than-a-brain-teaser/
on “Top algorithms in interview questions”Submitted Combinator Parsing as a story · 69 points
HN discussionUnfortunately, it's not that simple. Maybe 95% of the people who get vaccinated are subsequently immune, the rest (and people who have depressed immune systems) are dependent on herd immunity. So the small number who choose not to vaccinate can make life much more dangerous for the few who can't or for whom the vaccination was ineffective. For a good look at the maths, see this blog post: http://www.goodmath.org/blo…
Comment linking /blog/2015/02/05/quick-vaccine-math/
on “I’m an Anti-Braker”Submitted Zippers: Making Functional "Updates" Efficient (2010) as a story · 63 points
HN discussionThank you for the clarification. Following up on this, I found a blog post [0] that explains why you don't get bizarre consequences like the Banach-Tarski paradox this way: > [The constructivist method] avoids the basic problem with the axiomatic problem. You can’t have something ridiculous like the set of all sets that don’t include themselves, because the only way to show that a set exists is to show a process to…
Comment linking /blog/2014/08/18/the-constructivist-roots-of-type-theory/
on “Constructive mathematics and computer programming (1979) [pdf]”Submitted Category Theory Lesson 2: Basics of Categorical Abstraction as a story · 22 points
HN discussion> I used a tool to extract the data You mean you have a tool for extracting tabula data from a scatter plot like http://www.goodmath.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/EcCq... ? That's very cool and I would love to hear more about it.
Comment linking /blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/EcCqXojUMAEBFnp.jpg
on “Abusing linear regression to make a point”Submitted Paxos, a beautiful protocol for distributed consensus as a story · 15 points
HN discussionWildberger has always been this way. Way back in 2007, Marc Chu-Carroll's "Good Math Bad Math" highlighted Wildberger: "This isn’t the typical wankish crackpottery, but rather a deep and interesting bit of crackpottery." In brief, Wildberger is clearly educated, but also clearly rejects axioms that mathematicians accepted a long time ago (infinite sets in this case): "Dirty Rotten Infinite Sets and the Foundations o…
Comment linking /blog/2007/10/15/dirty-rotten-infinite-sets-and-the-foundations-of-math/
on “Mathematician solves algebra's oldest problem using intriguing number sequences”Submitted Technical Interviews: More Than a Brain Teaser? as a story · 8 points
HN discussionIf you ever want to try using it, I recommend this page: http://www.goodmath.org/blog/2006/09/12/manual-calculation-u...
Comment linking /blog/2006/09/12/manual-calculation-using-a-slide-rule-part-1/
on “Ask HN: Is there anyone here who still uses slide rules?”Submitted Functional Programming Comes to the Macintosh – Introducing Swift as a story · 8 points
HN discussionAnother post I stumbled accross when looking for part one http://www.goodmath.org/blog/category/bad-math/cantor-cranke... A highlight I'd like HN to read, because it comes up every so often. > There’s a common belief among crackpots of various sorts that scientists and mathematicians use symbols and formalisms just because we like them, or because we want to obscure things and make simple things seem complicated, so…
Comment linking /blog/category/bad-math/cantor-crankery/
on “Category Theory Lesson 2: Basics of Categorical Abstraction”Submitted Arabic numerals have nothing to do with angle counting as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIt's kinda fascinating how dominant LaTeX is, how nice its output is, how respected Knuth is as a computer scientist, and at the same time how totally awful it feels to use it. Hard to figure out how it can be so good and so bad at once. Posts/discussion I found interesting: - http://www.goodmath.org/blog/2008/01/10/the-genius-of-donald... - https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/24671 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?i…
Comment linking /blog/2008/01/10/the-genius-of-donald-knuth-typesetting-with-boxes-and-glue/
on “RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust”Submitted The Futility of Pi Denialism as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThat's just a myth, by the way: http://www.goodmath.org/blog/2015/07/21/arabic-numerals-have...
Comment linking /blog/2015/07/21/arabic-numerals-have-nothing-to-do-with-angle-counting/
on “Gonon: Building a Clock with No Numerals”Submitted Another Stab at Category Theory: Starting with Monoids (2018) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionFrom his Bad Physics series http://www.goodmath.org/blog/category/bad-math/bad-physics/ -- http://www.goodmath.org/blog/category/bad-math/
Comment linking /blog/category/bad-math/
on “Another Crank Comes to Visit: The Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe”Submitted Paxos, a really beautiful protocol for distributed consensus as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> if the underlying buffer needs to reallocate after some edits the entire process slows to a crawl as you need to allocate a larger buffer and copy each byte into the new buffer and destroy the old one. It can turn an O(n) operation into O(n^2) randomly. This would still only be a O(n) operation. The constant value might be higher, but the complexity is the same. I don’t buy the argument that gap buffers “are bad f…
Comment linking /blog/2009/02/18/gap-buffers-or-dont-get-tied-up-with-ropes/
on “Text Editor Data Structures”Submitted Run, Hide your children from math with letters as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHe's probably one of those constructivists who don't believe in non-computable numbers. I recommend this post (and its comment section) to anyone interested in the subject: http://www.goodmath.org/blog/2011/02/10/e-e-escultura-and-th...
Comment linking /blog/2011/02/10/e-e-escultura-and-the-field-axioms/
on “Plimpton 322 is Babylonian exact sexagesimal trigonometry”Submitted Election Fraud? Nope, just bad math (2020) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Another Crank Comes to Visit: The Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted How Do Computers Work? Part 1: Basics as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Math of Vaccinations, Infection Rates, and Herd Immunity as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Time in distributed systems: Lamport Timestamps as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
