Top all-time · #20968
Kevin Houston
Personal blog · kevinhouston.net/blogmathculture
Kevin Houston's personal blog at kevinhouston.net covers math and culture. Since 2014, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 3 times. The last post was in 2021, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
The linked post, 'The Harry Potter fallacy', covers a mathematical point about limits: whether a quantity that approaches zero can be treated as exactly zero. Only one commenter discusses it.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
What Hacker News says?
> The second comment touches on how just because the limit of something approaches 0, you can't treat it as 0. I think this one is a little more subtle. You can definitely treat the limit of something as an exact value. If you split a segment of unit length into n segments, then each segment has length 1/n. As n goes to infinity, 1/n goes to zero. But at the limit, 1/n = 0, exactly. Not approximately, really exactly…
Comment linking /blog/2011/03/pi-is-4-video/
on “The Harry Potter fallacy”Submitted Mathematical Analysis of The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Chord as a story · 97 points
HN discussionSubmitted How to Think Like a Mathematician [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussion