Why You Should Be Excited About the New Record for the Largest Prime Number | Hacker News Reader

Why You Should Be Excited About the New Record for the Largest Prime Number

mobile.slate.com

49 pointsColinWright16 comments

Can someone summarize? All I got out of it is "you should be excited because, even though it's nearly insignificant, it's one more data point in some statistical distribution we're trying to sample more of".

I'm not sure how "it's not very exciting, but we're doing it for a greater, also-not-very-exciting purpose" should excite me.

I think you're pretty close to it. The last line seems a reasonable summary though:

>"Just finding one large prime number is a fun puzzle to have solved, but it doesn't say anything basic about how the world works. The patterns behind the primes, however, both proven patterns and ones only suspected, are the lens through which humanity can apprehend deep and unfamiliar truths about how reality is structured." //

Right, that was where I got my summary from too, I just wanted to know if I missed something and am being too critical. Thanks for the clarification!

> Curtis Cooper of the University of Central Missouri moved one small step closer to Euclid’s infinity

Within the first paragraph, the author displays ignorance of math that every Korean high school student knows.

that's a figure of speech.

Non-mobile URL: http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/02/05/curtis_co...

The mobile version loads fast and is more readable on the PC. Why would anyone want to visit the "non-mobile" version?

I might agree if the text wasn't so wide (edit: on my screen, at least). Longer lines are less readable because you can't easily find the next line when your eye flicks back to the left after finishing a line.

I use a narrow window, then I can scan the page down the middle reading all of the text as I go. Much faster and more convenient.

I also turn off the image to avoid the disruption. For me, reading the mobile version is much to be preferred.

Indeed, that's a disadvantage. However, this is easily fixed by resizing the browser window (reducing the width). I often do that with "normal" sites, too, if their text lines are too wide.

Because often it's a crippled or broken experience, where half the images are missing, or you can't zoom, or the text is cut off, or the columns too narrow.

Edit: Ironically, most of the issues above impact me the most when I really am on a mobile device.

Picture overlaps text, in my version of Chromium.

> The new number has 17,425,170 digits—just writing them down makes for a 22.45-megabyte text file

Um, what?

Even if you include commas... um, what?

If you include commas that's 23,233,560 characters, which would be 22.15 megabytes (at one byte per char). Maybe 22.45 is just a typo?

There are line breaks at a fixed interval so that it wraps at 80 chars. I imagine that makes up the other ~300KB.

Edit: Line-breaks do indeed make up the bulk of the overhead, but it's also an HTML page so there's some boilerplate markup at the beginning and end of the file.

Maybe document container formatting overhead? Filesystem/disk block sizes?

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