drx

That's fast. I got the email two minutes earlier :)

I meant to say this in an email, but big props to Colin for being transparent about this and responding to the issue the way he did. I'm sure it wasn't an easy weekend.

Curious, did it offer to post to your wall and could you refuse and still get it working?

Or did the fact that it merely offered it put you off?

I'm not related to the app in any way, but I'm curious about your reasons.

My advice: if you don't understand it at first, read it again. And again. Follow the references and read them if you need to. Or google what you don't understand, read up on it on Wikipedia, or another source. People give up way too easily.

Some of you might remember the invisible wall in your mind between you and college-level (and higher) math/science books/papers that you had before you went to college. Breaking that barrier has been one of the most important things I got from college.

Nothing is too difficult to understand (someone had to understand it to write a book about it), so don't give up too early.

I was 11 or 12. I learned the really hard way. I was in Norway for a month and I only had an old 486 at my disposal, a hex editor and some Sega Megadrive games and an emulator (the Megadrive uses a Motorola 68000 processor)

I was curious how the games worked so I started hex editing them at random, seeing what would happen if I changed this and that, etc.

Long story short I learned to write programs in 68000 machine code (binary) and recognize patterns in ROMs (music, art, code). I still remember how to code simple things in machine code.

Imagine my joy when I discovered assemblers, and after that, compilers a while later :)

I've learned to manage my emotions, including those that accompany failure, pretty well over the years, but there's still that initial involunary feeling of despair that, however brief, I can't get rid of. It's really nasty.

If you can get past that, I think you can overcome anything -- I've never faced a bigger personal challenge.

Less fluff per character:

Nature article - http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/v2/n9/abs/nchem.724.html

Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon_difluoride

Perhaps he still has it in his mail archive, you should ask him.

> Instead of a search, you need to present me with a shotgun blast of examples of things to like; getting the initial data out of me that you need to be useful needs to be twitch-simple, and ideally game-mechanic (have some kind of scoring, level-up system, and leaderboard for how many and what kinds of things I've reviewed).

Yeah, this is something I probably need to do. Once you rate one or two things, rating anything else is a blaze, but I need to work on convincing people to rate that first thing.

> I assume others have recommended that you provide filters by media type?

What do you mean provide filters by media type? If you mean books or tv shows, that's already in place, though filters usually only show up when they make sense (i.e. you won't see 'filter by books, tv shows or anime' if your search only returned books.)

> However, even here on HN, you'd find that most people are consumers and not contributors

Yeah, I plan to add things like 'if you liked X, you'll like Y', etc. I fully support not making people sign up if they don't want to.

Yes, I noticed this issue with books in particular. I plan to make it so you can mark duplicates.

This is the first I've heard of GetGlue. Wow, talk about a sinking feeling. I've had Archfinch in my mind for about two years now, wish I launched earlier.

Well, my site is much simpler to use, as far as I can tell.

I plan to launch features which will differentiate Archfinch from GetGlue, I would have done them earlier if I knew about it.

Oh well, competing can be fun too. At least I'll have someone to kick my butt to deliver awesome features and service. GetGlue seems to have been around for about 1.5 months now, we'll see yet.

Edit: on a second look, it seems they only allow you to 'like' something. On Archfinch you can rate things from 1 to 5. The recommendation algorithm is much more accurate this way.

Clickables:

http://archfinch.com/

http://archfinch.com/user/drx - my profile

Why would you be afraid to ask about something? Unless it's a trivial question that can be easily googled, asking questions is nothing to be afraid of.

Worst case someone will downvote or ridicule you. But the expected value of asking good questions in high quality communities is positive.

Greg Baker blogged about it (and since it's a hot topic, it probably appeared in many other places) -- http://gregbaker.ca/blog/2010/08/07/p-n-np/

Also, from the blog post: "I see someone else has uploaded the paper. I should point out that in the email thread I got, Stephen Cook said “This appears to be a relatively serious claim to have solved P vs NP.". I would love to see that email thread.

A scribd link would be nice for the RSS (it's de facto a PDF warning)

The site is interesting. I like the meal swap approach -- normally I get cravings for a particular meal so I can just put that there and get a healthy substitute -- nifty.

Some things I've noticed so far:

* in signup, it would be nice to be able to specify meters vs feet. I had to google the conversion

* in signup, 'inactive' looks clicked, had to think for a sec before noticing it wasn't (and the signup form wouldn't let me sign up)

I invoke something similar to Greenspun's Tenth Rule (any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.)

This would be an inferior implementation of a concept of 'leave everyone the fuck alone' aka libertarianism/minarchism/what have you.

Have you ever learned something truly? That you didn't forget? If the answer is yes, try to think about the environment that helped you do it and emulate it. Unless it requires socializing with people or something that is uneasy to do on your own, it should be doable.

E.g. if you found that a particular type of class in college helped you a lot, say, a laboratory where you had to hand in code weekly, then you could "assign" yourself a task that you'd like to do, just in a laboratory fashion.

Sometimes you might think this is hard for a newbie to do, since you don't know what you don't know, etc. For some things you can look up a relevant course at a "good" university/program and see what its curriculum is, what the reading material is, what kind of tasks get assigned etc.

Good question. I would imagine not, especially from the point of view of someone who can exploit an illiquidity.

I didn't say it was good, I said that discarding something merely because you see a drawback and no benefits is foolish.

You are right about the feedback loops though.

Minute trading introduces very high levels of liquidity to the market.

Your thinking represents a common fallacy: "I cannot immediately see any benefit to X, therefore X is pointless / should be abolished".

This is an extreme example of why you don't screw people over, even if you lack empathy.

Nobody likes to be screwed over, but most people take it in exchange for other perks (job security, for one). But people have a screw threshold, and if you cross it, this is what happens.

Now, this is not the main reason not be a jackass -- on the other side of the spectrum, you usually get much in return for being nice (if only for just differentiating yourself from everyone else) -- but that's another story.

IE users are less savvy than Firefox/Opera/etc. users, so they would "need" a plugin like this more than Firefox et al users.

Also it's probably easier to get IE users to download something like this.

Or rather, the project head expects the stable ABI to be ready ASAP.

If you can find 20 questions so that each question roughly halves the sample size depending on the answer, you can halve a big set of people 20 times, thus yielding a set of size 2^20 = 1 048 576 times smaller than the original.

So if you take a set of people of size 1 million and ask the right 20 yes/no questions you can almost always figure out the right person. Of course, the more questions you ask, the finer the result (with 30 questions it's 1 billion). Also, these questions don't have to be binary, thus they can cut a set in e.g. 1/5, not half.

Of course with real world questions this is much harder to do, but with a clever question selecting algorithm it could be done this way, I suspect.

You could scribble using a pen with ink that doesn't dissolve in water but dissolves in e.g. alcohol. Might be a bother, but could be better than nothing. I'm gonna try this.

Ah, I missed that, my bad.

The article asks the question "what does this code do" but never reveals the answer. The first algorithm is fast exponentiation.

Great.

I'm pretty much an omnivore when it comes to music... I'll listen to anything I like; there's hip-hop, movie/game scores, pop, rock, etc. in my playlists.

Indeed. Can you list yours that I haven't listed already? One can never have enough.

Edit: also, yeah. I thought my combo was pretty rare.