MaxBorsch228

3 lata temudiscuss

People (and employers) who can truly appreciate calculus wouldn't be impressed with a taken calculus course (thousands of students take calculus every year) or even a math BSc, and those who can't, how would they assess how hard your calculus course really was? There is no competition in a typical calculus course. Better ways of signaling the ability of doing hard things, especially for kids, in my opinion, are math/programming/etc contests. That's where you have a real competition and can show what you are capable of relatively to other people who participate and want to win. Also, it's important to note that passing a calculus course includes not only watching lectures or reading a textbook but also extensive problem solving. Typically "hard" college math courses are about memorization of abstract concepts, and taking any of them doesn't really prove you can do hard things (I'm not talking about PhD where you need to make novel contributions, thats crazy hard if you want your research to be competitive). Thats my experience and perspective but I'm living in my bubble.

MaxBorsch228

3 lata temudiscuss

Nice list! Reminds me of this: http://imperium.lenin.ru/~verbit/MATH/programma.html

MaxBorsch228

4 lata temudiscuss

A snippet of pandas code in a notebook I saw when learning pandas, it looked like this:

  def to_minutes(df, col):
    df[col] = df[col].dt.minutes
    return df

  (
    pd
    .read_csv('data.csv')
    .assign(dur=df.finish-df.start)
    .pipe(to_minutes, col='dur')
    .query('dur < 30')
    .sort_values(by='dur')
    .pipe(
      seaborn.relplot,
      x='dur',
      y='distance',
      hue='city'
    )
  )

It's a simple snippet but the code structure is clever in many ways. The enclosure of the whole expression, starting with pd, into () makes it possible to split method chaining into multiple lines without backslashes and start each line with ".". Now we can treat DataFrame methods similarly to verbs from dplyr data grammar and "." similarly to %>% operator. Its now easy to rearrange, add and delete whole lines without thinking if we forgot to add "." to the line above or below. Everything is immutable, no side effects, it's safe to copy the code in a new notebook cell and tweak it a little without worrying about tens of temporary df2_copy1 variables. The .pipe method allows to avoid "df = df[...]" junk, to reuse code fragments and even to use plotting libraries in ggplot fashion. If the chain becomes huge, just put it in a function and apply in to df using pipe method, etc... I wonder if it's possible to add memorization to pipe method to avoid recalculating the whole construction every time when rerunning the cell during debugging.

MaxBorsch228

4 lata temudiscuss

Procedural landscapes are such a fun thing.

When I was in high school I read about perlin noise landscape generation technique in a random blog post. I shared the technique with a friend and he was very excited. A week later he presented a program which rendered Minecraft-style landscapes in ortho projection. A few more weeks passed and he added 3D perspective (using alien tech called "projection matrices"), water reflections, grass and day-night cycle animation with shadows from Sun and stars. All this using Pascal and some primitive bundled-in 2D graphics lib.

Another related high school memory is Audiosurf game, where the road and environment are generated using an algorithm based on music tempo. What if we replace this algo with a modern generative model? Probably literally a bad trip.

MaxBorsch228

4 lata temudiscuss

I guessed correctly by the title that the article is about coding a 3d image, but was waiting for the classic "two balls and a cylinder" scene, which college students naturally come up with in path tracing assignment in computer graphics courses.

MaxBorsch228

4 lata temudiscuss

This is a national meme in Russia. War and Peace is mandatory reading in schools, but it's always only 3-4 students in class who really read it. Most students just skim through ("read diagonally", as we say), use summary or watch the movie.

MaxBorsch228

4 lata temudiscuss

In Moscow metro they sometimes ask (but do not enforce) via speakers to stand on both sides of the escalator. I heard this practice was brought by McKinsey from London. In my experience this sometimes works on very short escalators, and on the longer ones people seem to ignore the suggestions. I wonder about the psychological reasons of this behavior.

MaxBorsch228

4 lata temudiscuss

There is a fun story of a guy who was making several thousand $ a month for a couple of years from a side project, a bunch of fan websites about reality TV show. Unfortunately in Russian, but Google translated version is tolerable:

https://vc.ru/life/189035-doooooom-2-s-shestyu-nulyami-kak-y...

MaxBorsch228

4 lata temudiscuss

What if give it the same promt but "with subtitles in French" for example?

MaxBorsch228

4 lata temudiscuss

I agree with you, but hackers sell exploits to others all the time? One can never be sure that hackers gonna send the actual exploit. You're right the scheme does not protect from that, my initial shower thought was more about the "release to the public" part, so the public can be certain about they will get something when the amount on the crypto wallet hits the threshold.

MaxBorsch228

4 lata temudiscuss

It guarantees that the group will receive the money and the exploit will be released if the fundraising is successful.

MaxBorsch228

4 lata temudiscuss

Suppose a hacker group get their hands on a valuable exploit. They are like LAPSUS$ and are going to make the exploit public access, but also want to make some $. I wonder if the following scheme is theoretically possible:

1. Put the encrypted exploit file into some kind of Blockchain 2. Create a crypto wallet and announce a fundraising 3. As soon as the sum on the wallet reaches, say, $5M, the exploit is automatically and consensually decrypted by the Blockchain system and released to the public.

MaxBorsch228

4 lata temudiscuss

In Russia we say "spherical horse" instead of "spherical cow". I suppose that's because the russian translation of "horse" ("конь") sounds somewhat similar to "cow", and the translated phrase has the same rhythm as the original one. With "cow" ("корова") the translated phrase turns out to be a little tongue-twistey.

MaxBorsch228

4 lata temudiscuss

I agree such meta-questions are annoying. However, I saw many times a situation when a new guy joins some Telegram chat and asks a question, only to get an avalanche of angry and overreacting "go read nometa.xyz a hundred times" replies. Of course the guy never writes to this hostile chat again: he did noting bad but was treated like a piece of shit. And it's always the same people complaining, most of chat members just don't care.

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