CurtMonash

11 ms·

61.
by CurtMonash 9y ago
I factor numbers up to 3 or 4000 as my form of "counting sheep" when I want to relax and sleep. It's not hard. Obviously, you only need to check primes up to the square root of the number in question. 2, 3, 5 and 11 are easy
62.
by CurtMonash 9y ago
Somewhat related: My periodic rants about the terrible database designs of games. http://www.dbms2.com/2014/04/16/the-worst-database-developer...
63.
by CurtMonash 9y ago
A subscription is like a gate that gives you admission to certain content. As a general rule, the gate that gives you admission to the MOST content wins. Illustrative examples include: -- Search engines clobbering "portals". -- Th
64.
by CurtMonash 9y ago
Why would anybody downvote me on THIS site for opposing Trump? Do you like the bitter Steve Bannon attacks on the tech industry? Do you think immigration is a bad idea? Do you find him to be an honest, decent, likeable man? Do you agree wit
65.
by CurtMonash 9y ago
Robert Kraft was in the headlines (e.g. atop CNN.com) for two days when that happened. How may CEOs get that sort of public attention and have it be FAVORABLE? It was an enormous PR win for him. And then the ass had to go support his buddy
66.
by CurtMonash 9y ago
Martin Shubik once claimed to me that he more or less invented Diplomacy. I forget whether this was based on his involvement in So Long Sucker, or whether he claimed a more direct connection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki&#x
67.
by CurtMonash 9y ago
I never knew this. And I heard plenty of stories about the Berlin air raids from my father.
68.
by CurtMonash 9y ago
The great teachers of math to kids in the US are of course the Ross Program folks. (When last I checked in I thought Boston University's Promys was actually livelier than the original Ross Program at Ohio State.) They basically take ve
69.
by CurtMonash 9y ago
Fascinating subject. But the article adds nothing to our knowledge about it. Vacuous.
70.
by CurtMonash 9y ago
I once posted on a message board plagued by an anti-evolution, anti-medicine idiot who bragged of his Mensa membership. So I looked at their website, and there's a test you can take to see if you're smart enough for them. I did th
71.
by CurtMonash 9y ago
Come to think of it -- calculus wasn't really rigorous until a LONG time after Newton introduced it. Isn't Riemann sometimes credited as the guy who finally straightened it out?
72.
by CurtMonash 9y ago
Dirac? My favorite example of bogus-but-effective mathematics in physics is the Dirac Delta "function".
73.
by CurtMonash 9y ago
Then perhaps there wouldn't be a different Number Two every week. /ThePrisoner
74.
by CurtMonash 9y ago
My big concern is add-ons. The whole reason I use Firefox is the availability of add-ons such as NoScript and Cookie Culler. I'm guessing NoScript will work with Quantum, but Cookie Culler hasn't been updated since last year. Room
75.
by CurtMonash 9y ago
Not easy to find. But from memory, the tl;dr is: Any argument purporting to prove that human beings do or don't have minds or souls separate from their bodies applies equally well to finite automata. So, in the trichotomy I love, eithe
76.
by CurtMonash 9y ago
Could that be summarized as "Women and children first"? :)
77.
by CurtMonash 9y ago
Today's NYT article on "feminist philosophy" could actually be quite relevant. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/opinion/feminist-philosop...
78.
by CurtMonash 9y ago
Most welcome! And by the way: -- He told the story of a student giving the obvious answer. -- For some reason he did NOT point out that that answer would actually only work as an infinite recursion.
79.
by CurtMonash 9y ago
When I went to Harvard as a math graduate student in 1976, the professors I was most looking forward to engaging with in some way weren't mathematicians. One was Ken Arrow, in large part because of his Impossibility Theorem, which I la
80.
by CurtMonash 9y ago
I was a reading prodigy (full ability to read adult material before age 3), with astronomical IQ scores to match (higher than what Marilyn vos Savant had in Guinness). Even so, I think I was/am mildly dyslexic. Clearly, if it's re
81.
by CurtMonash 9y ago
Oh crap -- not again! Holding the line against censorship is very, very nerve-wracking.
82.
by CurtMonash 9y ago
Looks lie a physicist's version of G. H. Hardy's "A Mathematician's Apology".
83.
by CurtMonash 9y ago
Correct.
84.
by CurtMonash 9y ago
Images of all sorts of criminal acts are deemed acceptable, as long as no harm is done to actual individuals during those images' creation. I've never seen why child porn should be a exception. That I would think poorly of somebod
85.
by CurtMonash 9y ago
I say again -- he claims that the Daily Stormer claimed that Cloudflare NOT cutting them off was some kind of endorsement. If true, that makes them a very special case. I generally oppose almost all cases of a company using their legal righ
86.
by CurtMonash 9y ago
I'm an anti-censorship extremist, but this doesn't feel to me like censorship. After all, the site is being discussed here on HN, and I'm sure it could also be found through many other search engines, portals, or whatever. Ev
87.
by CurtMonash 9y ago
Actually, Microsoft was pretty much self-funded. (Except perhaps for some help from the Bank of Dad.) They eventually took a bit of VC mainly to get the outside advice.
88.
by CurtMonash 9y ago
Bill Belichick didn't just exercise his First Amendment rights to nexpress an opinion I disagreed with. That alone is hardly a problem for me; for example, Danny Ainge's political views have no impact on my Celtics fandom). Belich
89.
by CurtMonash 9y ago
I abruptly stopped being a football fan last November. The immediate reason was Bill Belichick staking his own reputation on Donald Trump's assaults on the media, in a close state in a close election. But CTE was making it hard to rema
90.
by CurtMonash 9y ago
I Lobachevsky that comment!!!

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