Hacker News: asmeurer

New comment by asmeurer in "Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)"

asmeurer — Sun, 25 May 2025 18:08:51 +0000

It's amusing that he argues (correctly) that "there is no Great Chain of Being with humans at the top," but then claims that LLMs cannot tell us anything about language because they can learn "impossible languages" that infants cannot learn. Isn't that an anthropomorphic argument, saying that what a language is inherently defined by human cognition?

New comment by asmeurer in "Tech terms I was pronouncing wrong"

asmeurer — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 20:45:13 +0000

Are there people actually out there saying "S-Q-L-ite"?

New comment by asmeurer in "You can use C-Reduce for any language"

asmeurer — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 18:41:27 +0000

A paper by the authors John Regehr et al. from 2012 explaining how it works https://fsl.cs.illinois.edu/publications/regehr-chen-cuoq-ei....

New comment by asmeurer in "I prefer rST to Markdown"

asmeurer — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 19:12:32 +0000

The author claims that RST is nice because it's extensible, but as someone who's written some Sphinx extensions, I can tell you that extending RST is not as pleasant of a task as the author makes it out to be. I don't really know what it's like in Markdown world, but the underlying tools (Sphinx and docutils) are very difficult to work with, and make many implicit assumptions that make certain things difficult or impossible.

Guide to NumPy Indexing

asmeurer — Mon, 20 May 2024 07:42:22 +0000

Article URL: https://quansight-labs.github.io/ndindex/indexing-guide/index.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40413221

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Towards a new SymPy

asmeurer — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 07:50:49 +0000

Article URL: https://oscarbenjamin.github.io/blog/czi/post1.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37430759

Points: 141

# Comments: 67

Towards a new SymPy: part 2 – Polynomials

asmeurer — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 21:49:55 +0000

Article URL: https://oscarbenjamin.github.io/blog/czi/post2.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37426080

Points: 31

# Comments: 11

Towards a new SymPy

asmeurer — Wed, 16 Aug 2023 17:50:13 +0000

Article URL: https://oscarbenjamin.github.io/blog/czi/post1.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37150867

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

Don't use the mailing lists

asmeurer — Wed, 21 Jan 2015 03:47:38 +0000

Article URL: http://blog.ironholds.org/dont-use-the-mailing-lists-a-love-letter-to-the-r-community/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8921338

Points: 53

# Comments: 31

New comment by asmeurer in "Chrome/Firefox aren't checking CA revocation lists"

asmeurer — Wed, 09 Apr 2014 16:53:09 +0000

The Chromium team seems to have an all-or-nothing policy when it comes to security. c.f. https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=53

New comment by asmeurer in "Chrome/Firefox aren't checking CA revocation lists"

asmeurer — Wed, 09 Apr 2014 16:52:07 +0000

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=361230

New comment by asmeurer in "SymPy Gamma: an open-source, Python-based alternative to Wolfram Alpha"

asmeurer — Thu, 30 Jan 2014 01:02:06 +0000

(I am the lead developer of SymPy)

The important thing to note about SymPy Gamma is that it does only the mathematics part of WolframAlpha. It's also relatively new. There is no natural language input. There are no non-mathematical capabilities. The syntax should match Python syntax for the most part, though there are extensions to allow things like "sin x" or "x^2" or "2 x". All this will hopefully improve in the future (and pull requests are welcome!).

Most of the code was written by David Li (who is actually a high school student). You can watch a presentation about it here: http://conference.scipy.org/scipy2013/presentation_detail.ph.... It started out as a "because we can" toy, and it's gotten much better.

The real benefit of SymPy Gamma over WolframAlpha is that there are no barriers around it, since it's entirely (BSD) open source. For example, if you start computing something interesting and want to try more, you can move to SymPy Live (http://live.sympy.org/) and compute in a more session like environment. Or you can use SymPy locally on your own computer.

Regarding the comments that wolfram is mostly used for play, I'm not so sure about it. Wolfram is invaluable to students as a calculator. Sure Google can compute 100 * pi, but it falls apart when you try to compute integrate(sin(x) * x, x). When I was in college (which was last year), I saw people use it all the time. It's been very successful in making computer algebra accessible to virtually everyone.

By the way, probably the best feature of SymPy Gamma right now is the integration steps. See for instance the "integral steps" section of http://www.sympygamma.com/input/?i=integrate%28sin%28x%29*x%.... This is a feature that used to be free at WolframAlpha, and it's extremely useful if you are learning integration in calculus. It doesn't work for all integrals, because not all integrals are computed the way you would by hand.

New comment by asmeurer in "Python on Wheels"

asmeurer — Mon, 27 Jan 2014 17:21:36 +0000

"What the command is supposed to do is to collect all the dependencies and the convert them into wheels if necessary..."

How does it convert the non-wheel packages into wheels?

New comment by asmeurer in "What is new in IPython 1.0"

asmeurer — Mon, 29 Jul 2013 02:17:45 +0000

You can also make a whole cell be in bash with %%bash.