manny

This makes me want to learn Japanese /that/ much more.

No Perl fans here?

Shame. :(

I, then, humbly suggest Perl. You might like it, and with your Ruby background it shouldn't be hard to pick up.

This is hacker news, not script-kiddie news. Sorry.

man you all really hate this idea. why? I hope its not just because its a thought experiment you guys are afraid to think about.

I personally love this thought experiment and the consequences one can reach from it.

irssi and finch (terminal app that comes with pidgin)

Atlas Shrugged,

The Fountainhead,

Stranger in a Strange Land,

The Rules of Life,

Catch-22,

1984,

Brave New World, and

An Introduction to Mathematical Reasoning (by Peter Eccles)

my response: so what?

1st step towards von Neumann Probes! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_probe#Von_Neumann_p...)

Now /this/ is an area of science that I am extremely interested in. By the off-chance, does anyone know where a mathematician by trade (read: math major) could focus his efforts to get involved in this type of research?

One step closer to creating a Dyson Sphere (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere)!!

C, Perl, bash.

Currently on my way to buy SICP so I can learn Scheme LISP.

edit: it may interest you to know that I do absolutely no web development.

Is this Hacker News?

If you truely want a really great, small, book, purchase Peter J. Eccle's An Introduction to Mathematical Reasoning.

http://books.google.com/books?id=ImCSX_gm40oC&dq=an+intr...

Also, ZFS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS) might be worth looking into.

One way of defragging your files: moving all your content over to a fresh partition and moving it back equates to a completely unfragmented file system.

I stopped reading when she wrote about her math woes.

The obvious question to ask here is: how can I find one?

First time reading this. I found it completely amazing.

*Understand math

Thank you for also realizing this. It is just mind boggling to me how many IT people are so utterly inept when it comes to basic mathematics.

I truely believe that the fact that so many IT employees don't know math is leading to this superficial computer-geek culture.

The link doesn't seem to work. :|

bumping because I agree with this good list of calculus books.

Sounds like an interesting idea, but what is to stop someone from just upmodding every comment in a thread?

Banach-Tarski paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach–Tarski_paradox

This has always blown my mind. From Wikipedia: "The Banach–Tarski paradox is a theorem in set theoretic geometry which states that a solid ball in 3-dimensional space can be split into several non-overlapping pieces, which can then be put back together in a different way to yield two identical copies of the original ball."

Trippy.

This book is great. Cryptography. Pirates. Finux. Battle scenes. Fantastic wit.

What more can you ask for? Definitely a must read.

All I do is constantly think about the next project-euler challenge (www.projecteuler.net).

...Religiously.

Does anyone else here affiliate themselves with the cyberpunk movement? Is anyone here interested in cyberpunk ideas? Glossy fashion and role playing games allowed, I guess, but I'm more interested in people who actually code and have a little socio-political chip on their shoulder. ;p

Opera. Though once I get some free time and get a little better at C, my secret wish is to resurrect Dillo (http://www.dillo.org/).

If the coders for 37signals are arrogant then they are automatically on my good-list. For better or for worse, I have come to see that it is these arrogant, idealistic, committed people who are usually the visionaries.

That said, the best of luck to them.

Honestly I wasn't really impressed with this. Though I am glad that the code is open. Perhaps there'll be some interesting tidbits there.

As a mathematics major and having gone through some seriously crappy math courses in highschool (and even freshman college courses) including AP Calculus classes, I just want to say that I truely recommend reading this article.

It really cannot be stated any better than this, folks. Even as a math major, reading this reinspires me and refuels my passion for mathematics.

Simply lovely. :)