Here is the fun bit hidden away in the comments page of this post:
> Randal L. Schwartz said:
> 27 Apr 2008 02:30 AM GMT (#1 of 1 comment)
> Glad you enjoyed that bit. That was Tom's humor on that one. I could never have been that clever. :)
It is heartwarming to see the author of a popular Perl book providing credit for a joke to his co-author in the comments of an early 2000 blog post by an independent blogger.
The OU; the Open University. It's a British university founded sixty or so years ago with the intent of widening access to higher education. Their campus is centred in Milton Keynes, a bit north of London.
I took a Masters in Maths with them and it was brutal. Serious exams are a youngster's game. I got a glimpse into why so many Cambridge wranglers were also serious atheletes.
Search for "Open University MST124" or similar on www.ebay.co.uk or www.amazon.co.uk. There seem to be plenty of copies of 124 available on both at the time of writing.
Yes, it is really important to learn math with study-mates. Just like in code, we do reviews, in math too, we need someone else who can review our proofs. It is even easier to make an error in a proof and believe that something is proven when it isn't. A study-mate helps to prevent us from fooling ourselves.
The preview linked is a little outdated so it shows the old figures, but the latest version has all the figures done in TikZ (a vector drawing package using LaTeX syntax, see https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/TikZ_package for examples).
There is no "tooling" per se for the book production (just run pdflatex to get the PDF, then upload to lulu.com and amazon.com, and they take care of the printing). I do have some scripts to enforce naming and notation conventions though, and there is some advanced git-rebase kung fu going on that allows me to reuse the high school prerequisites from Chapter 1 of the MATH & PHYS book for the LINEAR ALGEBRA book as well (basically when I fix typo in the master branch, I have to rebase the LA branch).
I am going to suggest something that might go against this idea of self-studying math.
Do not do it alone. I mean, it is okay to self-learn mathematics as much as possible but don't let that be the only way to learn. Find a self-study group where you can discuss what you are learning with others.
I think the social-effect can be profound in learning. I realized this when I used to learn calculus on my own. My progress was slow. But when I found a few other people who were also studying calculus, my knowledge and retention grew remarkably. I think the constant discussion and feedback-loop helps.
With round the clock internet connectivity, it is easier to find a self-study group now than ever.
It's not super clear to me how this actually works in practice. I've seen there is one public math meetup in SF, but the topic is usually different from the one I want to study.
I'm glad to see there are online options for groups like Stack Exchange or tighter group's like the one integerclub mentions, but I still seem to run into the same problem. For example, I'm not sure how to get a group of people that are interested in reading book X when I want to start it. If anyone has advice on that, please share.
Yep, this has been the story of my learning experience. I've studied mathematics pretty much entirely on my own, but it's not because I wouldn't love to have company!
Having said that, I think it probably would be sufficient to find _just one_ other person who is at the same level of mathematical maturity and has the same degree of commitment to change the entire learning experience for the better. You don't need a big group.
Agree. And if one is a well paid software engineer, one can definitely afford to pay a maths grad student for an hour week, preferably a bit more than whatever pittance the local univeristy pays them for being a tutor. You will progress far quicker and with fewer wrong turns. It is also far cheaper than enrolling at a university. A personal trainer for the brain.
I actually did this as an undergrad, despite barely being able to afford school. I left school for a bit, so I could figure out how to actually pay for it. After getting that worked out, I came back and realized I'd forgotten way more math than I had anticipated. Between my CS courses and math I was getting overwhelmed with the sheer breadth of information I needed to be have mastered to comfortably follow along. I took a one semester long remedial class that served as a refresher to all high school level math.
After that I worked through my classes with a tutors help. Everything up to and including linear algebra and numerical analysis with the help of a extremely kind PhD student named Adnan. He had the patience of a saint and ended up becoming a very good friend.
The most valuable part of having someone like this available for an hour or two every week is that it increases your knowledge or understanding/minute rate dramatically. It's like having Google or Khan academy on steroids. Someone that did everything already and knows exactly what page of a text book to look lat to help you understand, but they don't even need the textbook, because they know how to explain the concept you're having trouble with.
To this day I work as one of many data lscientists on a team where we all have fairly diverse backgrounds. In fact I'm the only person that is only CS and does not have a graduate degree. I have a teammate that did her undergrad and Masters in mathematics and if I'm having a hard time with something math heavy after some googling, the first thing I do is ask her for a quick explainer. She does the same with me for CS or programming issues as well and I help her with informal code reviews.
I know this will seem like basic teamwork to a lot of folks, but far too often I see people in our industry exert huge amounts of effort to understand a difficult concept that likely someone they're sitting a few feet away from has a very good understanding of and would be happy to help them with, so they're not banging their head against the wall for hours. I had to have a similar conversation with my intern a couple years ago. She was spending hours doing pen on paper math to understand Kalman filters. Things went much more quickly after I talked to her about my process of working with my colleagues and asking for help when I didn't understand something.
TL;DR Ask for help sooner rather than later. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.
Ha - I actually suggested the exact same thing before seeing your post. It's definitely much better to have a group. Since I've found this group I'm currently in, I've also been much more motivated, but also able to get feedback from more advanced people, and pare the problem numbers down to only the ones that are useful and will help me build concepts, limiting how many "calculation" problems I have to repeat.
Can you provide detailed steps to reproduce? What strings did you search? Two examples of repos that appeared in the results? What is the link to your repo that did not appear in the results?
Details like this would help the OP to track down the exact cause of why it has indexed the forks but not the original repo.
The authors are quite explicit that this site only includes a fraction of all github repos. Thus, this is not a "bug" that needs to be corrected.
In my case, I am not talking about forks but about people who copied my files into their repositories (with proper attribution and respecting the license). I just searched for my surname and was happily surprised to see it in major projects like ffmpeg, pytorch, bytedeco, scikit and opencv.
> Even if you do hand your pod over to some company, it'll be like letting them host your domain name or manage your cell phone number. If you don't like what they're doing, you can always move your pod -- just like you can take your cell phone number and move to a different carrier. This will give users a lot more power.
The domain name analogy scares me rather than reassures me. Sure, DNS was created in good faith to be as distributed as possible, but is it? There are recent stories that show that individuals do not have as much control on domain names as one would ideally like. See these stories -
While the idea behind Solid sounds solid but the moment they talk about outsourcing pod hosting to third-party pod hosting providers, I get worried. Would it lead to walled gardens of pods? (Example GMail for emails) Would they add non-standard convenience features to create vendor lock-ins (Example GitHub for Git)? Would they abuse their power due to vendor lock-in (Example Sourceforge for SVN)?
I think the phrase "perfect is the enemy of good" applies here - expecting something to never go wrong just means you'll never ship anything. Pods will break in ways that no one can foresee. That's not good, but giving up and not trying would be worse, so users and businesses will have to deal with those problems as best they can.
Don't forget that millions of domain transfers happen every year without going wrong. There are cases like the ones you linked to, but those are the exceptions rather than the rule, thankfully.
On the domain name analogy, there are now decentralized DNS initiatives like handshake.org that are trying to make domain names truly distributed, which may make for a better analogy for solid. I agree that DNS in its current implementation is not well distributed as you've pointed out.
> We will be dealing with arbitrary precision integers (bignums) in the problem, so let us also make a few assumptions:
> Addition or subtraction of an m-bit integer and an n-bit integer (m <= n) takes O(n) time.
> Counting the number of 1-bits in an n-bit integer takes O(n) time.