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cpp_frog

cpp_frog on Hacker News

Re:Wacky Fun Physics Ideas on Tuesday December 02, 2025 @09:53AM (#46121789)
One of the most fascinating characters out there for sure, without fail his posts make me consider a new perspective.

He left HN unfortunately, he might be too brash for this site (or this place is too wimpy for him).

Re:150 years of Hans Christian Andersen on Thursday July 31, 2025 @08:22AM (#44744902)
I read The Steadfast Tin Soldier for the first time when I was a kid but it didn't have a special meaning for me until my late teens, when I first fell in love.
Re:PlasticList – Plastic Levels in Foods on Tuesday June 24, 2025 @12:11PM (#44367735)
It's easier to walk up to the woman that's been eyeing you at the party, speaking from experience.
Re:Gwern Branwen – How an Anonymous Researcher Predicted AI's Trajectory on Thursday November 14, 2024 @06:48AM (#42135298)
There is a comment on the r/slatestarcodex subreddit with supposedly true information about him (which I found googling 'who is gwern'), but it left me with even more questions.

EDIT: grammar

Re:A simple proof that pi is irrational [pdf] on Sunday August 11, 2024 @06:33PM (#41219767)
For anyone interested who could not follow the reasoning in the paper, it is explained extensively in this video [0] by Michael Penn.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFKbVTHK4tU

Re:SymPy: Symbolic Mathematics in Python on Wednesday February 28, 2024 @10:06AM (#39538870)
Symbolic mathematics is severely underexplored in undergraduate studies, and the little exposure I had was generally tied to proprietary software such as Mathematica and MATLAB. I learned to use it as an imperfect extension of pen-and-paper thinking, and source code for more advanced stuff gets shaky the deeper into abstraction one goes. For example, I work in a field of mathematics/engineering that requires heavy use of tensor calculations. My go-to tool for that is Maxima, however, it has limited and cumbersome packages for it (see [0]). Now for more sophisticated calculations I resort to SymPy, not necessarily because of better handling of symbolics but because of the abstractions that Python already has. Maybe someday I'll get to read the Principles by Norvig and fix Maxima to suit my needs (if anyone has better references to read Maxima's source code/implementation of tensor computations/symbolic (tensor, geometric) algebra I would be grateful to know).

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0503073.pdf

Re:Ten years of remembering every day that passes on Saturday February 24, 2024 @07:10AM (#39490939)
The moments captured in my images are fresh, but my perspective on them changes.

I am doing an experiment in memory and trying to memorize the name of every U.S. county, with the aid of a map. Several months in I can say that the brain inexorably will tie names together (wether by geographical proximity or etymology, e.g. Imperial-Riverside-San Diego or Redwood-Greenwood), and the addition of new names affects the perception of the ones before, or the perception of words which happen to be county names. I could write an entire essay on the limits of memory, but it would hardly be better than Jorge Luis Borges's story Funes, the memorius.

For anyone curious I can name 80% of U.S. counties with the aid of a blank map, and my geographic intuition has improved greatly. Every county (and county name) has a history attached to it, and sometimes when someone tells me where they grew up, I can guess their ancestry more or less, especially if they come from rural areas. It surprises them, sometimes even more when they know I'm not american.

Re:What is going on in Argentina? on Wednesday February 21, 2024 @07:54AM (#39453177)
In order to have a mature discussion about this topic, it's necessary for people to know about the economic and political history of Argentina. It's impossible to understand their current situation without going back to the 1940s. Bad faith arguments look over the fact that Argentina has had decades of incredible economic distortions as a consequence of political rot, and that undoing those distortions is not achieved in the time Milei has been president (I personally don't believe they could be undone in less than a presidential term).
Re:Thomas Cochrane on Tuesday January 02, 2024 @02:10PM (#38845640)
He is known by all members of the Chilean Navy [1], he is not obscure in this part of the world. By the way, I am chilean and lived most of my childhood just a block away from Lord Cochrane street [0], in downtown Santiago, which is one the busiest places in the whole country (and those adjacent blocks have seen some history).

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Lord+Cochrane+1-99,+Santia...

[1] https://www.memoriachilena.gob.cl/602/w3-article-726.html (documents, images and more)

Re:GNU/Linux Aviation How To on Saturday September 23, 2023 @06:35PM (#37628194)
As an occasional general aviation pilot (I found this HOWTO after trying to find tools to aid in flight plan calculations), I think it would be great if we took it a step further and make a full-fledged Linux avionics system, but it seems unlikely [0]. And Garmin will likely not be replaced in a dozen years.

[0] https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/36853/do-safety...

Re:Exposition of a New Theory on the Measurement of Risk (1738) [pdf] on Friday September 15, 2023 @08:15AM (#37521822)
I read the two first or so papers of the book and understood them, but I coulnd't get past because I lack the sufficient probability theory (I'm a functional analyst). Now it's been in my queue for some time but I hope to get to it after finishing the references I'm reading now.
Re:How Japan is tackling a syndrome that creates recluses on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @11:37AM (#36972366)
Didn't the german chancellor say recently that Germany would have to take in 1.5 million immigrants a year so that its pension system wouln't collapse? I personally don't think that is the solution but Spain is going through a similar phenomenon (pensions-low TFR).
Re:Stem Formulas on Sunday July 23, 2023 @11:24AM (#36836213)
Cool! I've just contributed several examples. If anyone is interested in the sheer amount of identities that have been discovered, good books are (many of them gigantic references spanning thousands of pages). When bored, try proving some of those facts, examples build on top of each other. These are not the only examples, as there are many texts like these in other areas of mathematics and engineering, be it numerical analysis, optimization and variational analysis, statistics, abstract algebra, control theory, geometry and so on.

[0] Table of Integrals, Series, and Products, Gradshteyn & Ryzhik.

[1] Special Integrals of Gradshteyn and Ryzhik, Vols. I and II, Moll for some proofs of the above.

[2] Handbook of Integral Equations, Polyanin & Manzhirov.

[4] Scalar, Vector, and Matrix Mathematics, Bernstein.

[5] Handbook of Number Theory I and II, Sandor, Crstici & Mitrinovic.

Wikipedia also has a plethora of pages with mathematical identities. Some of them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_calculus_identities

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_algebra_relations

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exterior_calculus_identities

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Del_in_cylindrical_and_spheric...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_set_identities_and_rel...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_formulas_in_Riemannian...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_set_identities_and_rel...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_triangle_inequalities

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_trigonometric_identiti...

... and its several lists of integrals (including trigonometric, exponential, rational).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_integrals#Lists_of_in...

Re:PhD Simulator on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @09:04AM (#36599867)
I'm a chilean maths grad student and save for the qualifying exam, it's quite accurate. So much so that I think I made a mistake clicking on this because as it progressed I started feeling dizzy. Other commenters here also have their relatable experiences, which doesn't make me feel so bad.

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