From Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends And Influence People, said to Benjamin Franklin.

Recursion is the root of computation since it trades description for time.

You know how companies tend to make rather self-serving charts to show how they’re number one in their field? (even though that can’t be true for everyone)

It’s not at all necessary, but it looks super cool to quote The Venture Bros.

Shougo Matsu is scary when it comes to GitHub issues. No one, and I really do mean no one, fixes them as fast as him. And he has a lot of popular, well-maintained projects. I don’t think he even does Haskell programming, and yet he does a lot of work on an autocomplete source for it.

I love emacs. The consistent interface, strong scripting language (even if elisp has dynamic scope), and easy extensibility make it a joy to use. Just off the top of my head, emacs has these applications to make it worth living in:

Back in high school, I was in a business club called DECA. We ended up in Louisville, Kentucky for one competition. I won, and that is still one of the better moments of my life.

I just watched this video about “leftover women” in China, and it was one of the saddest things I’ve seen all year.

Michael Spivak once said that the definitions in math should be hard and the theorems should be easy. This is because the definitions are benchmarks for different levels of abstraction. Theorems are essentially chaining definitions together to get new definitions.

It’s been a year since I started learning programming. In that time, I went from not knowing what HTML was to doing machine learning and learning type theory and burning too many hours getting my mail to work in the terminal.

I recently read this debate on StackExchange.

The reason that bijective functions between sets imply that those sets are of the same size is because of a generalized version of a counting argument. If a function is injective, its target must be at least as big as its source, or else there isn’t enough “room” for points to map uniquely (google “Pigeonhole Principle”). For surjectivity, the target must be smaller or equal to the source because otherwise the function can’t fully cover the target since the target is too big. Each point in the source can only cover one point in the target. So if a function is to meet both, the sets must be less than or equal to in size as well as greater than or equal to in size. this means that they’re of the same size.

It bugged me that vim’s autocomplete was giving me useless autocomplete while I was writing the draft to another blog post. So I decided to fix it, which turned out to be pretty trivial.

It comes from the Old English word for a meeting place, and the Icelandic Parliament is called the Althing (literally: ‘all-thing’), and it’s been around over a 1000 years, which is pretty incredible.

“As ever, if you want to find the weak point in an argument, look out for words and phrases such as”clearly”,”obviously”, or”it is easy to see that”. Often they indicate the place that the writer is not quite 100% sure about.”

This post only says things that are pretty well covered elsewhere, so I’ll just give my thoughts and let you look for evidence/justifications.