mark-t

9 ms·

31.
by mark-t 18y ago
I think ideas like "Oh, that guy was a genius. Normal people could never do that." are fundamentally misguided. He worked tirelessly on mathematics, filling notebooks in his spare time for the pure joy of it. If you can find somebody else w
32.
by mark-t 18y ago
Mathematics can certainly be learned outside of a university. Look at Ramanujan. Or go find any math professor at a decent university and ask if the majority of his/her learning happened in the classroom. You'll get a resounding no, if not
33.
by mark-t 18y ago
Sometimes. Many parts of math are very difficult to tell whether you're wrong or not, except by reading through the proof extremely carefully. For example, about a hundred years ago there was a proposed proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, but i
34.
by mark-t 18y ago
> Most solar cells in use today are either photovoltaic, meaning they harness only visible light, or thermal. Hmmm. I'm pretty sure that's not the definition that I learned.
35.
by mark-t 18y ago
I went to Northwestern, and I must say that "(a Big Ten university outside Chicago)" is not how I would describe it. It's the only private school in the Big Ten, and it's dwarfed in size by the others as well. To call it a Big Ten universit
36.
by mark-t 18y ago
My sleep schedule drifts forward gradually. Right now, I go to bed around 6pm and wake up around 2am. Tomorrow, it'll probably be an hour later. A couple weeks from now, I'll be going to bed at 6am. I do find that I'm much more productive w
37.
by mark-t 18y ago
I think the bar for a non-programming, non-startup article to count as "interesting to hackers" is a lot higher. Really interesting science articles just aren't written as often as somebody blogs something useless about how great closures a
38.
by mark-t 18y ago
The logic is sound if you take the stance that phishing is the biggest threat to security. I don't know whether it is or not, but XSS and CSRF at least are under the website developer's control. Malware and phishing are the head-scratchers
39.
by mark-t 18y ago
The trouble with math is that the exceptional mathematicians (including theoretical physics/computer science) are the stereotype, and the regular mathematicians are actually quite different from that. So in fact it's the stereotype that's w
40.
by mark-t 18y ago
"Ask any independent software vendor what he hates most about developing for Linux and he'll tell you that it's having to develop for SUSE and for Red Hat and for Ubuntu and ... you get the idea." Nope. He lost me right off the bat. Maybe I
41.
by mark-t 18y ago
Either it's running too fast on my computer, or this game is nearly impossible. I have a feeling it's a little bit of both. For example, I have to save the game every time I'm about to approach an enemy, as it will invariably take half my l
42.
Parasites That Brainwash Their Host(scienceblogs.com)
33 points by mark-t 18y ago|20 comments
43.
by mark-t 18y ago
There's no question as to the feasibility. The desirability is another matter. I would sooner write TCP packets by hand than use that thing.
44.
by mark-t 18y ago
Actually, I do have trouble with Gimp, too. I have to google how to make a straight line every time. Choosing brushes and changing the color are a pain, too. But I don't use it often, and about half the time I'm using it where I would have
45.
by mark-t 18y ago
You know, I just don't see it. Maybe it's because I'm a developer, but I just don't see that many usability problems in open source projects, and these articles are going out of their way to avoid giving concrete examples. I'm marking this
46.
by mark-t 18y ago
Are you suggesting religions don't need to be defended?
47.
by mark-t 18y ago
I thought wasting time was the point.
48.
by mark-t 18y ago
Seeing as how the Python and Tcl interpreters are both written in C, this really just seems to imply that the C code wasn't written very well.
49.
by mark-t 18y ago
You need sed -nf.
50.
by mark-t 18y ago
And if you want to make it actually playable: while (sleep .5); do xvkbd -text "\r" 2>/dev/null; done & sed -nf sedtris.sed; pkill sleep (Note: I tried just using echo with a pipe but couldn't get it to work. That would naturally be
51.
by mark-t 18y ago
Ask around. 16 is quite late to start taking math seriously and end up at the very top. He wasn't doing math for fun. He wasn't asking himself mathematical questions. He wasn't doing math competitions. He had no knowledge outside of what wa
52.
by mark-t 18y ago
Math education is so bad right now that any genetic differences are drowned out almost entirely. Of all the mathematicians I've met (including IMO gold medalists, Fields medalists, etc.), there seems to be little correlation with siblings,
53.
by mark-t 18y ago
I've watched a lot of the ArsDigita lectures on archive.org, too: http://www.archive.org/details/arsdigita
54.
Sarcasm is a Survival Skill(livescience.com)
1 points by mark-t 18y ago|0 comments
55.
by mark-t 18y ago
Awww, I was really expecting something interesting to happen after I clicked on the "Please do not press this button again." button. Oh, and by the way: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaatu_barada_nikto
56.
by mark-t 18y ago
When I find that I visit a site that often, I subscribe to the rss feed. I use keywords for searches: / for google, m-w for merriam-webster, and so on.
57.
by mark-t 18y ago
To be fair, there is an obvious benefit to being able to search titles and bookmarks. I've been using the betas (and nightly builds) for quite some time, and it's stopped getting in my way. I do believe that the default behaviors were not t
58.
by mark-t 18y ago
Actually, it would result in one person giving a reason and a bunch of people upvoting that. Whether or not that's a good thing is still up for debate. I do think people should feel compelled to give a reason, though.
59.
by mark-t 18y ago
Journals are really picky. The whole process takes ages. I'd recommend just writing it up and posting it to the arXiv.
60.
by mark-t 18y ago
I wholly agree with the principle here, but I often find myself running up against firefox. For instance, there's this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=341067 . You'd think if that many people find a behavior unintuitive or u

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