yaakov34

22 ms·

151.
by yaakov34 13y ago
Would you like to explain how e.g. Excel is a clone of 123, but 123 is not a clone of Visicalc? I mean, everything ever done with digital computers is an extension of Charles Babbage's work on the difference engine, which was cloned fr
152.
by yaakov34 13y ago
I didn't downvote you (I am not much of a downvoter), but frankly, your comment (the first one) is exactly the sort of thing that can be legitimately downvoted as "not contributing to the discussion". You launched into a vehe
153.
by yaakov34 13y ago
Let's start estimating the technical challenge here (we're supposed to be techies, after all). Bandwidth: quick googling shows that a flight data recorder records between 64 and 256 12-bit words a second, i.e. 1-3 kbps. Browsing
154.
by yaakov34 13y ago
Some math here is fucked up. These people don't have an average of over a trillion in assets each (assuming that tn stands for trillion...) My guess is that they have something like two orders of magnitude less, and the world's po
155.
by yaakov34 13y ago
I tried running a Chromium session with no extensions for the stuff I want to be more secure (email/banking/etc.), while using Chrome for everything else, and this does work in a way. But I find that I tend to forget to switch to
156.
by yaakov34 13y ago
Can we start a petition for Google to let us disable extensions on specific sites? After reading the last few stories about this, I am quite sure I don't want any extensions whatsoever running in the same tab as my Gmail account. I thi
157.
by yaakov34 13y ago
Having read the post, I honestly do not see anything that remotely approaches a "scam". You need to be more careful with words, or maybe just to learn to take disagreements or disappointments more in stride, and to maybe try to se
158.
by yaakov34 13y ago
I tend to agree, given my small-l libertarian tendencies and my preference for letting people do whatever they want unless it hurts others. On the other hand, there are already scads of standards (including ones that essentially say you-mus
159.
by yaakov34 13y ago
The upcoming USB standard connector is apparently going to adapt and extend most of the nice features of Lightning. There is a nice article on appleinsider about it [1]. I'll bet that the new EU standard adapts that, rather than enshr
160.
by yaakov34 13y ago
I remember that too, but I don't think that's how it will go down in this case. A mandatory EU standard has such tremendous weight that it will force a huge share of the market to comply. If the standard is actually any good, ther
161.
by yaakov34 13y ago
The study is here: http://www.bmj.com/content/327/7429/1459 . One of the authors archived it here, http://elucidation.free.fr/parachuteBMJ.pdf , since the British Medical Journal website is res
162.
by yaakov34 13y ago
There isn't exact data and there will never be exact data, because many of the settlements extracted are confidential and there is no incentive for anyone to talk about them. If someone is ambushing people in the street, hitting them o
163.
by yaakov34 13y ago
Where for God's sake are you even getting "Mossad" and "poisoning"? There was apparently a radioactive leak at the Weizmann Institute in 1957. Professor Dror Sadeh, in whose laboratory it happened, died of cancer in
164.
by yaakov34 13y ago
I agree, and you don't even need China in this analogy. Suppose that 5 of the best blacksmiths leave the blacksmith cooperative and start producing custom-made nails for less than the old blacksmith coop, which by the way is now missin
165.
by yaakov34 13y ago
You're describing syndicalism; it's not true that it was never implemented by the communists. The Soviet Union had a very serious go at it, allowing the artel as an economic unit (essentially a kind of co-op), and allowing peopl
166.
by yaakov34 13y ago
The algorithm actually does make sense for positional systems (or compact notations in general). Think of long multiplication: it assumes you can multiply by a one-digit number, and lets you get from there to multiplying by a many-digit num
167.
by yaakov34 13y ago
If you used objects to represent 5, 10, 100 stones, etc., and were capable of e.g. saying that 7 and 7 stones equal one 10-stone and 4 stones, you would have a compact representation of your number, and that would be the proper use of this
168.
by yaakov34 13y ago
No, it absolutely does not help. In the algorithm you are citing, the numbers never leave their binary representation; there is no counting of the units that make up the number. The step of multiplying by 2 is done by shifting the binary re
169.
by yaakov34 13y ago
That's not a property of the number 1729, that's only a property of the decimal notation for the number; an important distinction. The property is also trivial. Ramanujan's property - that the number is expressible in two different ways as
170.
by yaakov34 13y ago
My problem is not with this sentence, but with this passage from the second paragraph: > ... number theory is the study of numbers [...] > Geometry, on the other hand, studies shapes [...] > But French mathematician André Weil h
171.
by yaakov34 13y ago
Study complex analysis. It is a very pretty field which certainly has connections both to algebra (in fact, complex analysis grew out of the study of roots of polynomials) and to geometry - there are a lot of fascinating geometrical results
172.
by yaakov34 13y ago
I think that in their desire to explain this popularly, which is legitimate, they made a rather confused version of both the history and the mathematics. First, neither Weil nor Deligne are unheralded - they are about as famous and acknowle
173.
by yaakov34 13y ago
They're all very convincing. Probably because there are thousands of people with backpacks at an event like this, and they tend to take them off and put them on when they stop or want to take something out. But hey, let's just get their pho
174.
by yaakov34 14y ago
Yeah, I have no problem with that if it's viewed as an NxN problem. I do have a slight tic about this since I've heard "NP-hard" misused so often, including by one guy at a former workplace whose program needed to test all 6 permutations of
175.
by yaakov34 14y ago
A small personal peeve: it doesn't make sense to say that Sudoku is NP-hard, as the linked post does (or NP-complete). First of all, this benchmark (as far as I can tell) uses only traditional 9x9 puzzles, of which there is a finite number.
176.
by yaakov34 14y ago
There is a fundamental difference between conventions of notation, and properties of the thing being notated, in this case arithmetic. I'm frankly surprised that someone with a mathematical background keeps mixing up the two. There are a do
177.
by yaakov34 14y ago
Again, I think that's a very bad comparison - resolving this difficulty is not "impossible". You can choose whatever convention you like, and all that changes is the notation. Of course it's a bad test question, but it is not "impossible" o
178.
by yaakov34 14y ago
I don't understand his idea of comparing the independence of the Continuum Hypothesis from the other axioms of set theory, which is a very deep and important result about (in essence) one of the limits of mathematical reasoning, with this l
179.
by yaakov34 14y ago
I understand your point about honesty being preferable if you're going to discriminate - although I'm not sure if I agree - but why do you think that what Soviet universities did was in any way honest or open? Soviet laws did not allow any
180.
by yaakov34 14y ago
Most simulations can actually be parallelized in such a way that most memory accesses are local - you can divide the object or system in such a way that various parts don't communicate with each other too much, and map that to a cluster com

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