Fantastic. An excellent of example of "doing with a dime what any fool can do with a dollar."
1,432 karma · joined November 16, 2007
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A Mersenne prime is a prime of the form 2^n - 1 for some n. The new biggest Mersenne prime is 2^(43,112,609) - 1. An interesting coincidence is that the power itself, 43,112,609, is also prime.
The definition given by the improper formatting of numbers in the article: (2 * 43,112,609) - 1 = 86225217 = 3 * 13 * 2210903 and so is not prime.
The only problem is that the marginal returns on such implementations diminish very quickly, so after you've got the big ones down--like breaking down big, intimidating tasks into smaller, doable ones and realizing that you don't need email to auto-update every 5 minutes at every hour of the day--there's not much to gain from reading productivity blogs.
The big problem is that is it easy to get caught up in the huge initial improvements and fail to realize that the time you gain from implementing these marginal improvements is less than the time you already spent on implementing the improvement itself. It's especially bad if you're the typical geek like me and enjoy fiddling with programs and plugins and constantly trying to solve "third order" problems, even when they don't actually do anything in practice. However, exploiting this weakness is exactly what most productivity blogs do to keep their traffic up, so I now have a lot more respect for Merlin, who's actually trying to do something about this problem.
'During the mid-morning break (with cookies), Richard Thaler shows videos from a 40-year-old study (Walter Mischel, 1973) of children offered one cookie now or two if they wait. The observed behavior correlates strongly, by almost any measure, with both the economic success of the parents and the child's future success. Hypothesis: small behavioral shifts might produce (or "nudge") large economic results.'
and
'Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate for his work in behavioral economics told us about priming—how a subtle influence radically shifts how people act. So, in one experiment people are asked to fill out a survey. In the corner of the room is a computer, with a screen saver running. That's it—nothing overt, just a background image in the room. If the screen saver shows pictures of money, the survey answers are radically different. Danny went through example after example like this where occurred. The first impulse one has in hearing this is no, this can't be the case. People can't be that easily and subconsciously influenced. You don't want to believe it. But Danny in his professorial way says, "Look, this is science. Belief isn't an option". Repeated randomized trials confirm the results. Get over it.'
'The second impression is perhaps even more surprising—the influences are quite predictable. Show people images of money, and they tend to be more selfish and less willing to help others. Make people plot points on graph paper that are far apart, and they act more distant in lots of way. Make them plot points that are close together, and damned if they don't act closer. Again, it seems absurd, but cheap metaphors capture our minds. Humans, it seems, are like drunken poets, who can't glimpse a screen saver in the corner, or plot some points on graph paper without swooning under the metaphorical load and going off on tangents these stray images inspire...'
My math professors told me that math majors tend to fall in love with the second upper-division math course that they take, because in the first one, you're still struggling with the details of moving from mostly computational to proof-based problems. Usually this first course is either real analysis or abstract algebra, and since all analysis and algebra classes tend to build on the fundamentals of these courses, this may show up in the subsequent classes that you take within these fields.
On a less technical note, Growing a Business by Paul Hawken is great book about letting a company grow naturally.
It's hard to go at it alone.
I say that if you don't have a solid cofounder who has your back, an idea and implementation that you're willing to bet your career on, or an extraordinary opportunity that won't be there when you graduate, you should get your degree first and hack in your spare time until then. If you don't have connections, a job with your name on it, significant coding experience, a compelling product, or funding, you're going to have a hard time finding work or even in convincing people to work with you.
That said, programming jobs and startups are much more forgiving in the education category than just about any other job. If you've got the skills and have something to back it up, then you've definitely got a shot.
It's not impossible to succeed, but if you don't have a way to support yourself, it's that much harder. Just know what you're getting yourself into. While you will learn a lot if you drop out and do a start up, know the opportunity costs of what you are going to do.
Otherwise, I check HN and a couple other news sites. Most of the good stuff tends to rise to the top, and Google Alerts catches the good articles that don't get on the front page.
Also, I wonder where he went to school, because at every school I've been to, there have always been many resources to go to for support. You could always talk shop with more seasoned graduate students for honest advice on classes, advisors, or places to work outside the office. If you want books, there are many books available devoted to advice on how to finish your dissertation, find a research topic, or manage your time. Even for magazines, the Chronicle of Higher Education has articles and advice for the burgeoning and established academic. Yes, you have to do most of the research and your dissertation won't write itself, but it doesn't have to be one man fighting the academic windmill alone.
e^(i)(pi/2) = i.
The simple assumption that sqrt(-1) = i is problematic because you can get something like
i^2 = (sqrt(-1))^2 = sqrt((-1)^2) = 1.
The wonder and surprise of complex numbers is that assuming seemingly arbitrary properties of a constant like i lead to a number of deep and beautiful results.
If you just want to play around with graphics or don't like to program in Java, there are programming environments made especially for programming graphics like Processing [http://processing.org] and Nodebox [http://nodebox.net/]. Both are free and have tutorials readily available.
SECURITY UPDATE: Randomize UDP query source ports to improve forgery resilience. References: [http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=2008-1447]
So there's some more information, although it's not saying anything that hasn't already been said. Looks like I'll be patching boxen for the next couple hours.
You can obsess about development process all you want, have fun trying to push bits until they sweat, and create code that is like executable art, but I still believe that even computer programming is ultimately centered around people.
One of the major reasons I switched to a Mac was because font rendering was a lot clearer for East Asian languages.
I'm pretty sure most popular browsers already account for this vulnerability. At the very least, Mozilla-forked browsers should still have a built-in defense against homograph attacks. [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=279099#c135]
However, if most the studies cited in this article are to be believed, then there's no conclusive evidence pointing to a specific font or style of font that is "better" for reading on a computer, only personal preference.
Apparently, the way the Japanese government works, the rural districts are overly represented in the Diet, with each rural district having the same clout as an urban district, like the U.S. Senate. In other words, for political parties, it is much more favorable to court the rural vote than the urban one. Thus, almost all political parties want the support of the farmers and so promise lots of subsidies and protection from foreign competition. The farmer's associations perpetuate this cycle, because they drop support for political parties if they are not getting their demands.
This results in some ridiculous prices for food staples. When I was in Japan three years ago, I remember that the cheapest 5kg bag of rice was about $20. The only plant that I could afford to eat regularly was cabbage, because fruits like peaches and plums were about $10 each and were usually given as gifts instead of regularly eaten as snacks or dessert.
Or, if you prefer a more modern subdiscipline, there's algebraic geometry. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebraic_geometry]
If you peruse the Number Theory papers on the arXiv, you'll see that there is a purported proof of the Riemann hypothesis every few weeks. So far, none of them have been vetted by a professional journal. I'd be very surprised (but happy) if this turned out to contain a correct proof.
A more interesting question would be "Why is this particular proof by this otherwise unknown author getting so much attention?"
"Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer?" [http://www.princeton.edu/~ceps/workingpapers/125krueger.pdf]
I remember about a decade ago when I first signed up for services like Hotmail or eBay, they would be down fairly often and for long periods of time, but it was understood and even accepted, since they were usually free services that did not have much direct competition. "Internet application" usually carried implications of slow, buggy, and unreliable service. However, in the last couple of years, it seems that we have to come to expect a near-constant uptime for the websites we use. It points to a general up trend in application quality and consumer expectation, which I think is healthy for both developers and consumers.
In the end, I think Twitter speaks to Ev Williams's brilliance in building an extremely sticky product, since people continue to Twitter despite the downtime and the deluge of blog posts from people criticizing them at every turn. It reminds me of how most people continued to blog on Blogspot even with its notorious bad pre-Google uptime.
"Well, here is my experiment: a very simple setup for fast design and art direction around content. I’m approaching this is much the same way one would approach the design of a magazine: a system for the way content gets handled, but every layout and story can take on a look of their own within that system. I’ve established a visual language for the site: a basic eight column grid, a few typefaces, and more static branded elements like the masthead and utility information. Beyond that, the system allows me to adapt the design to suit the content. Typefaces, colors, images, background, columns and layout, can all easily be manipulated to whatever the art direction calls for."
I've been a fan of Jason Santa Maria's work ever since I started looking for inspiration in web design. I think it'll be interesting to see what develops from this site as a result of this concept in the near future.