4 ms·
> You think of n/2 of them in the first 5 minutes. The word that leaps to mind here is "half". :)
by randallsquared 17y ago
> You think of n/2 of them in the first 5 minutes.
The word that leaps to mind here is "half". :)
- izaidi 17y agoWhy use four characters when you can use three?
- abstractbill 17y agoEvery equation included in an essay will halve its readership? ;-)
- kabuks 17y agoFinal readership = Original Readership / (2 * Equations)
- byrneseyeview 17y agoNo, 2^equations.
- Confusion 17y agoYes, more power to equations.
- aneesh 17y agoWhile we're picking nits here, n/2 is not an equation. It's an expression. An equation has an equal sign.
- kylec 17y agoTo generalize: why use n characters when you can use n-1?
- byrneseyeview 17y agobc it sux On a related note, here's how to abuse the concept of URL shorteners in order to produce messages in which embedding a URL costs zero additional characters: http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/steganographic-typo-based-url-shorteners-add-a-link-with-zero-new-characters/ http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/steganographic-typo-based-ur...
- jacquesm 17y agoeven easier, every 64 characters are 64 bits, simply strtolower all the characters then make the '0' bits lowercase... No typos needed, still plenty of space. Maybe use a magic pattern in the first few characters to indicate a url ID is present.
- caffeine 17y agoI think it's sort of a textual fist-bump to people who smile when they see n followed by n/2, because it means something's about to get logarithmic, and we like that.
- zackattack 17y agoHe also recently used "orthogonal" in an essay when it really wasn't the best word choice. When given the option to maximize eloquence, the author favors impressing the reader with his technical know-how, sacrificing being articulate for upping his nerd cred. Possibly a smart move for communicating with the HN community and securing his status as leader. A political thing. I often find myself talking more nerdy than I need to in #startups, for example.
- RyanMcGreal 17y agoMy personal favourite such use is here: "It was so clearly a choice of doing good work xor being an insider that I was forced to see the distinction." http://www.paulgraham.com/copy.html http://www.paulgraham.com/copy.html
- Tichy 17y agoIf your brain is in algorithm mode, n/2 might actually be easier to process.
- gizmo 17y agoBecause the moment I read n/2 I wondered which kind of distribution n has, for t. It could be (cumulative) exponential. Ideas would then be independent and random. That doesn't feel right, because ideas are very much related, but a better model doesn't immediately spring to mind. Had he said half, I would never consider the distribution of ideas over time. And I bet pg considered the distribution while writing the essay, and he probably also realized it wasn't really all that interesting, and consequently left it out.
- caffeine 17y agoYou can play the Zeno game with this. The first half of the items is actually an article of n/2 items - so you think of n/4 in the first 5 minutes. So you never actually think of an item.
- nitrogen 17y agoSci-fi quantum physics takes care of that. Eventually, two correlated ideas randomly pop into existence, and then it's just a race to see how many more ideas you can build on them within 5 minutes.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]