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Re:The Future of Computer Science (2018) on Tuesday March 26, 2024 @05:29PM (#39833092)
It might be Paul Halmos. In his "automathobiography", titled I Want to Be a Mathematician (Springer 1985), page 156: "In the late 1940's I began to act on one of my beliefs: to stay young, you have to change fields every five years". He goes on saying "I didn't first discover it and then act on it, but instead, noting that I did in fact seem to change directions every so often, I made a virtue out of a fact and formulated it as a piece of wisdom".
I wasn't familiar with this painting, for the very good reason that it doesn't exist

Are you sure? The wikipedia page on Flaubert's novel says: "In 1845, at age 24, Flaubert visited the Balbi Palace in Genoa, and was inspired by a painting of the same title, then attributed to Bruegel the Elder (now thought to be by one of his followers)." And the National Gallery seems to think they have it in the West Building (https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.41602.html).

Re:Before Machine Learning Vol 2 – Calculus on Wednesday March 13, 2024 @03:26AM (#39688859)
This is the second volume in a three-volume series. The first one, on linear algebra, was mentioned here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37935616). There is a repository with code and exercises on GitHub (https://github.com/mldepot/beforeMachineLearning).
Re:Emacs Docs The modern documentation website Emacs deserves on Tuesday November 30, 2021 @12:15PM (#29394562)
But somebody has to write those Stackoverflow answers. Perhaps for those who do the distinction between man pages and info is important. Or do you think that the source of Stackoverflow answers is just more Stackoverflow answers? Now that would be hilarious.
Re:Bringing GNU Emacs to native code [video] on Tuesday May 05, 2020 @09:45AM (#23079939)
It's not pointless, but the outline only shows up if the generated tex file is compiled twice. The default org to latex export will only compile it once.

Alternatively, it is easy to suppress the outline slide altogether (add "toc:nil" to "#+OPTIONS:").

Re:Perennial philosophy on Monday March 02, 2020 @09:17AM (#22464607)
I don't understand the reference to Gödel. Do you mean the theorem that in every formal system capable of representing arithmetic there exist sentences "P" such that neither "P" nor "not P" are derivable in the system?

It doesn't seem to me that from this it follows that "the point of philosophy is better living". It might be obvious, but I just don't see it.

Re:Reasons Why Job Seekers Are Not Given Feedback on Friday December 20, 2019 @07:46AM (#21843736)
Oh, sorry, didn't realize that. It still doesn't work, though, as the example of 2 * 3 * 5 * 7 * 11 * 13 + 1 = 59 * 509 shows.
Re:Reasons Why Job Seekers Are Not Given Feedback on Friday December 20, 2019 @07:04AM (#21843509)
You don't always get a prime. For example, 4! = 2 * 3 * 4 = 24, 24 + 1 = 25, 25 is not prime. The point is that N! + 1 is not divisible by any number from 2 to N (always leaves a remainder of 1), so either it is prime, or it is divisible by something larger than N!, therefore larger than N. In the case of 25, it is divisible by 5 (> 4).