Top all-time · #3761
The Lumber Room
Personal blog · shreevatsa.wordpress.commathprogramming
The Lumber Room is a personal blog at shreevatsa.wordpress.com about math and programming. Since 2008, 21 different Hacker News readers have linked it 38 times, most often “How does Tupper’s self-referential formula work?”. The last post was in 2016, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (12) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog as a source for historical and technical attributions, such as the Knuth/Hoare premature optimization quote, Pi rational approximations, shell startup files, and boolean blindness.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 12 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
"Consign them to dust and damp by way of preserving them"
Most-linked posts?
- /2008/05/16/premature-optimization-is-the-root-of-all-evil/4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-10-25
- How does Tupper’s self-referential formula work?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-07-31
- /2014/03/13/big-o-notation-a-couple-of-sources/2 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2018-01-23
- /2008/03/30/zshbash-startup-files-loading-order-bashrc-zshrc-etc/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-05-16
- /2011/01/10/not-all-best-rational-approximations-are-the-convergents-of-the-continued-fraction/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-03-12
- Boolean Blindness2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-05-09
What Hacker News says?
Looks like no one complained about the long comment, so some further trivia I omitted mentioning: • The problem that one cannot copy text from a PDF created via dvips and using METAFONT-generated bitmap fonts has recently been fixed — the original author of dvips, Tomas Rokicki ([1], [2]) has “come out of retirement” (as far as this program is concerned anyway) to fix this and is giving a talk about it next week at…
Comment linking /2015/06/16/bhavabhuti-on-finding-a-reader/
on “Knuth on Huang's Sensitivity Proof: “I've got the proof down to one page” [pdf]”Submitted On “trivial” in mathematics as a story · 5 points
HN discussionRelated to your comment, not the original post/book: - On Knuth’s idea (which seems good to me), see http://quomodocumque.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/knuth-big-o-ca... but also the last two comments by David Speyer. - And see also http://cornellmath.wordpress.com/2007/08/28/non-nonstandard-... and http://texnicalstuff.blogspot.in/2011/05/big-o-notation-for-... that seem to have tried teaching along somewhat similar (bu…
Comment linking /2014/03/13/big-o-notation-a-couple-of-sources/
on “Calculus for Mathematicians, Computer Scientists, and Physicists [pdf]”Submitted Tweeter Extream Image Compression Challenge as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI've TeXed it a while ago; scroll down here: https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2014/03/13/big-o-notation-a...
Comment linking /2014/03/13/big-o-notation-a-couple-of-sources/
on “Why Discrete Math Is Important”Submitted Multi-tty Emacs as a story · 3 points
HN discussion(Thanks for the correction, and the polite response.) The purpose of notation is to communicate effectively, and ideally notation should match the thoughts that the writer has and wishes the reader to have. That is, notation should match thought, rather than humans change their thinking to match notation. When a mathematician (who works often with asymptotics, say in analytic number theory) writes something like O(n…
Comment linking /2016/03/26/multiple-ways-of-understanding/
on “For mathematicians, = does not mean equality”Submitted How does Tupper’s self-referential formula work? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWow, so disagreeing with the point of this article immediately provokes a typed-out condescending sigh from you? That's worth a sigh more than anything. Furthermore, I was a mathematics person first, and got into computer science later, so I'm not a "CS person" insisting on calling it an abuse of notation. I have two points: Firstly, although the article does a good job making the point that there's no reason to get…
Comment linking /2014/03/13/big-o-notation-a-couple-of-sources/
on “For mathematicians, = does not mean equality”Submitted Zsh/Bash startup files loading order as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSigh; it seems it's only programmers who think CS has a monopoly on big-O notation, or keep calling it abuse of notation and trying to use ∈, when it's really = that's the standard notation in mathematics (and for good reason). Before Knuth popularized Big O notation in CS and started the field of analysis of algorithms, already in 1958 N. G. de Bruijn wrote an entire book on Asymptotic Methods in Analysis (not CS):…
Comment linking /2014/03/13/big-o-notation-a-couple-of-sources/
on “For mathematicians, = does not mean equality”Submitted Boolean Blindness as a story · 1 points
HN discussionNot uncommon even on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071722 On my own (long abandoned) blog, about 20% of (public) posts seem to contain an em dash: https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/?s=%E2%80%94 (going by 4 pages of search results for the em dash vs 21 pages in total).
Comment linking /?s=%E2%80%94
on “The Programmer Identity Crisis”Submitted Don’t Mess with a Genius as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI haven't read Siddhartha, and expect I won't like it, but perhaps the Sanskrit idioms translate better into German? ( https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2014/07/01/sanskrit-and-ger... ) Did you read the book in German? Or if not, which translation (Wikipedia lists at least six: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Siddhartha_(novel... )?
Comment linking /2014/07/01/sanskrit-and-german/
on “Ask HN: What was the one book that you read and it actually changed your life?”Submitted How does Tupper’s self-referential formula work? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionYes! To both. Calling Tupper's formula "self-referential" (which he did not) is essentially cheating: https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2011/04/12/how-does-tuppers... But someone has made one where the output contains everything: http://jtra.cz/stuff/essays/math-self-reference/ A little discussion on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/i75t1/tuppers_formula_...
Comment linking /2011/04/12/how-does-tuppers-self-referential-formula-work/
on “The Batman Equation”Submitted How does Tupper’s self-referential formula work? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI took this article as a starting point to discuss Sanskrit: https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/2953/87 (also at https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2014/07/ ) — roughly speaking, w.r.t. deviance from English, Sanskrit is German++.
Comment linking /2014/07/
on “The Awful German Language (1880)”I'm reminded of a post called Music and Lyrics in Math Talks ( https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/Opinion78.html ) by the mathematician Doron Zeilberger: > Human beings have bodies and souls. Computers have hardware and software, and math talks have lyrics and music. Most math talks have very hard-to-follow lyrics, […] > But like a good song, and a good opera, you can still enjoy it if the music is good. The “…
Comment linking /2009/03/20/music-and-lyrics/
on “That’s not why I did it”You missed 13/4 = 3.25, 16/5 = 3.2, 19/6 = 3.16667, 179/57 = 3.14035, 201/64, 223/71, 245/78, 267/85, 289/92, 333/106, 52163/16604 https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2011/01/10/not-all-best-rat...
Comment linking /2011/01/10/not-all-best-rational-approximations-are-the-convergents-of-the-continued-fraction/
on “The Mystery of 355/113 (2010)”I kind of understand why you'd think it's a massively complicated query. You are probably thinking the types of joins on two tables on random columns with weird conditions which go into full table scan. I am talking about queries/joins between tables that have foreign keys between them, like client/project/task/comment. I bet 90% of graphql schemas expose those kinds of relations between types. For those type of rel…
Comment linking /2008/05/16/premature-optimization-is-the-root-of-all-evil/
on “React, Relay and GraphQL: Under the Hood of the Times Website Redesign”Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll quote Jamie Zawinski.” Now they have two problems. Attributed to Mark Pilgrim in a comment at http://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2009/06/23/who-said-that/
Comment linking /2009/06/23/who-said-that/
on “Source of the famous “Now you have two problems” quote (2006)”This is a lovely and gentle (you hardly realize it) to a lot of very deep mathematics... great post, thanks to the author! There's a lot I learned and would love to look up and continue to explore. --- As an aside, one thing I like to point out though is that the definition of “good approximation” seems to some extent determined by what has the cleanest theory, than what one may naively desire, as in this paragraph…
Comment linking /2011/01/10/not-all-best-rational-approximations-are-the-convergents-of-the-continued-fraction/
on “Going beyond the Golden Ratio”I found this link when I got curious about that [1]. [1] https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2008/03/30/zshbash-startup-...
Comment linking /2008/03/30/zshbash-startup-files-loading-order-bashrc-zshrc-etc/
on “Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin, usr/sbin Split [pdf]”Sounds reasonable, source: http://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2008/05/16/premature-optimiz... Let me fix it.
Comment linking /2008/05/16/premature-optimization-is-the-root-of-all-evil/
on “Why enterprise software is bloated”> I would of course explain that the equality sign is not symmetric with respect to such notations; we have 3=A(5) and 4=A(5) but not 3=4, nor can we say that A(5)=4. We can, however, say that A(0)=0. As de Bruijn points out in [1, 1.2], mathematicians customarily use the = sign as they use the word “is” in English: Aristotle is a man, but a man isn’t necessarily Aristotle. — Donald Knuth, Teach Calculus via O Notat…
Comment linking /2014/03/13/big-o-notation-a-couple-of-sources/
on “Cure Dolly's Japanese Grammar Lessons”That’s because Knuth at some time thought he had it from Hoare. See https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2008/05/16/premature-optimi... I guess we’ll never know whether he was right, but all we know is that he used it at least twice in print, while we don’t know any time Hoare used it.
Comment linking /2008/05/16/premature-optimization-is-the-root-of-all-evil/
on “Computer Programming as an Art (1974) [pdf]”Just a guess, but you may have in mind certain PS files generated by TeX/LaTeX from the 80s and 90s, back in the day when both PS-based workflows and raster (bitmap) fonts were more common than they are today. So, although it's not really a limitation of PostScript, for purely historical reasons there may be a correlation among academic documents between PS files and raster fonts, which (because of a lack of hinting…
Comment linking /2011/05/05/converting-old-ps-files
on “PostScript Language Reference (1999) [pdf]”> Interestingly, the results of this optimization are well-described by Hoare's Dictum, often mistakenly attributed to Donald Knuth, which states More interestingly, it is not clear at all that it's Hoares. [0] has a nice overview, and they conclude that it is indeed Knuths. [0]: https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2008/05/16/premature-optimi...
Comment linking /2008/05/16/premature-optimization-is-the-root-of-all-evil/
on “The Art of Lisp and Writing”
