Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45902146

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45902122

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

The "1x3x1=1" part for the earlier example is a typo indeed, it should be 3.

What's the point of your rude post? OP already knows this. In fact, they learned it from Tom Lehrer.

Nevertheless, you can always properly edge-color a graph with Delta(G) + 1 colors. Finding such a coloring could in principle be slow, though: the original proof that Delta(G) + 1 colors is always doable amounted to a O(e(G) * v(G)) algorithm, where e(G) and v(G) denote the number of edges and vertices of G, respectively. This is polynomial, but nowhere near linear. What the paper in question shows is how, given any graph G, to find an edge coloring using Delta(G) + 1 colors in O(e(G) * log(Delta(G))) time, which is linear time if the maximum degree is a constant.

I definitely think there are upsides to not tweaking your text editor config endlessly, so I understand your point :) What I meant with "vim/emacs" is mostly that sometimes you really want to automate a text editing task, and then it's really convenient to have a programmable text editor. It's also very much a case of [0].

> I'm a bit curious, how well do these tools handle HTML email?

In my case, I use mu4e in emacs to read my mail. Very basic HTML works by default via emacs's native HTML renderer (see, e.g., [1] for old screenshots). That's my preferred solution because I like the keyboard consistency (it's just an emacs buffer) and because there is a command to view the email in an external browser if needed, but it is also possible to render HTML email accurately in emacs by embedding a webkit widget [2]. As for writing, you can write in Org mode format (emacs markdown, if you will) and it gets converted to HTML on send.

[0] https://www.xkcd.com/974/

[1] https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2015/02/10/eww-now-with-fonts/

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/l60p6a/howto_mu4e_an...

Git is distributed and allows you to work efficiently with poor connectivity, having full history available at any time, which is a big accessibility point for people with limited connectivity (and also helps people working while traveling, for example). If you do have any email client, you get all of this as well, plus arbitrarily powerful, low-latency filtering and searching. I recommend Greg KH's "Patches carved into stone tablets" talk [0].

Despite your "luser" strawman, people advocating for client-side MUAs mean well and have a point. Try replacing "webmail" by "Notepad" and "client-side MUA" by "emacs/vim" to see how your argument sounds. You probably spend a decent amount of time interacting with email, and the investment in setting up a fast, flexible and powerful environment (preferably reusing your text editor for composing messages) for doing so pays for itself soon.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8OOzaqS37s

Edit: For further context for Linus's reply, there's http://web.archive.org/web/20250206022420/https://social.tre...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42972354

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

(I am a big proponent of language interop as an alternative to big rewrites. But opinions differ, and my opinion is worth nothing because I'm not a maintainer of the relevant code.)

Ultimately, if you don't have a 100% formal version of a given statement, some people will find a interpretation different from the intended one (and this is independent of how clever the audience is!). I think 3Blue1Brown knows this and is experimenting with alternate formats; the video is also available as an interactive blog post (https://www.3blue1brown.com/lessons/inscribed-rect-v2) which explicitly defines the function as "f(A, B) = (x, y, z)" and explains what the variables are.

The fact that "given a large enough audience (even of very smart people), there will be different interpretations of any given informal explanation" is a key challenge in teaching mathematics, since it is very unpredictable. In interactive contexts it is possible to interrupt a lecture and ask questions, but it still provides an incentive to focus on formalism, which can leave less time for explaining visualizations and intuition.

[1] https://woerterbuchnetz.de/?sigle=DWB&lemid=S04549

[0] https://data.who.int/dashboards/covid19/deaths

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41578383

Points: 2

# Comments: 0