jvkersch

The educational track in South Korea is extremely competitive, and everything hinges on how well you do on the Suneung (a kind of SAT on steroids). If you drop out, it is usually because you have intergenerational wealth, exceptional non-scholastic talents, or a route to study/work abroad.

Stranger Things exploited this to good effect, though, with descriptive captions like "tentacles wetly squelching" and the like. See https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/stranger-things-seaso....

I spent a few months in Songdo visiting my in-laws (and often return) and I generally concur. Specifically, I found that the area had much more of a community feel than these articles let on (local interest groups for expats and Koreans alike, libraries, a wide variety of restaurants, meeting places) and I found the quality of life higher than in some American inner cities where I've lived (LA specifically). I found the contrast between the high rises and the parks refreshing and uplifting, and it was heart-warming to see people take advantage of abandoned land to have makeshift vegetable gardens on the outskirts of town. Both the large and the small testified to the ingenuity of the people living there.

Things that I didn't like so much: it definitely felt like there had been a shift away from bringing in businesses to housing, so that you end up with blocks upon blocks of apartments, and with empty business districts. I worked in a high-rise that had an identical 30-story building next to it, completely empty. The Incheon government is trying to turn the tide by attracting biotech and more universities, but it will probably take years before the balance is properly restored.

I see the reverse engineering skillset as not essentially different from low level systems programming, and as such it's very valuable even outside of "pure" security research.

I work as a Python programmer building scientific apps (so not security-related or systems programming at all), but at work every so often we're confronted with legacy code in binary form, or particularly nasty segfaults, etc. The thing with abstractions is that every so often the lower levels bleed through. At times like these, if you know your way around gdb, the ELF format, linking conventions, and can reason in assembly, you'll find yourself highly sought-after.

It gets even more fun when things work nicely on Linux and go haywire on Windows. Often there are no docs on Windows, so you need something who is ready to crack their knuckles, fire up IDA pro, and descend into the 7 circles of hell.

A counterexample would be a dataset that forms a fractal in the ambient space. I don't know of a realistic example of this, but it seems plausible if you think of scale-invariant phenomena. Other ways of getting fractal-like structures, or at least "dust-like" structures with weird topologies, is by taking intersections of smooth structures. These things would be hard to separate...

Reminds me of another turbulent IMF intervention: South Korea's bailout in 1997. See https://www.koreaexpose.com/imf-economy-south-korea-asian-fi...

That's a good point, and probably what GP was hinting at. Thanks for pointing that out :)

It's worth checking out Peter Woit's homepage at http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/ and looking beyond the blog and his role as a string theory skeptic. He teaches a number of classes and has a book about quantum mechanics and representation theory that has gotten a lot of favorable reviews. Not sure I'd classify this guy as your average helpdesk guy ;)

Lemaitre was also a first-rate geometer. He wrote a paper on quaternions and elliptic geometry (geodesics on a sphere) that was published with a Latin abstract in a journal of the Pontifical Society of the Vatican. My library didn't have a copy, and so that was probably the only time in my life that I had to correspond with the Vatican to get a copy :-)

In the US/UK civil engineering is often taken to mean constructing buildings (very roughly, in a nutshell), whereas other countries (in particular continental Europe) use the meaning that you quote. So you can have a Belgian civil engineer who specializes in theoretical physics, and knows more about the Higgs boson than about "traditional" engineering topics.

Not quite -- the comment refers to the fact that R^d has the structure of a normed division algebra in dimensions 1, 2, 4, and 8. This means that you can multiply things together in a nice way when you're in one of those spaces. For R^1, this is just multiplying real numbers, for R^2 it's multiplying complex numbers, R^4 is quaternions, and R^8 is octonions. As you go up in dimensionality, you lose more and more nice properties: the quaternions are not commutative and the octonions are also not associative (which is why there's no mention of them in the blog post). The point is that in dimension 1, 2, and 4 all sorts of interesting things happen. John Baez has a paper about this: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/octonions/node1.html

Yoga. It's the only time in the day where my brain is not in overdrive. Also, as a 36-year old with a sedentary lifestyle it's surprising/horrifying how stiff I've become. I'm just following the beginner movies on youtube and I go to the occasional class, so it's not stressful.

Hence, a very poor approximation to pi is given by 365 × 5⁵ × 4⁴ × 3³ × 2² × 1¹ / 10^10.

My bread has increased in quality so much by (a) mixing the ingredients (without the yeast, or with only a little bit of the sourdough starter) the night before (i.e. making a poolish), and (b) taking a full day to prepare: you knead a little, let it rest for a couple of hours, give it a few turns, rest, etc. As a result, the bread is much more flavorful, and the flavor is more delicate: not too sour, not too sweet, and you can chew it and feel the flavors develop.

I agree but I do like the fact that it's written in Markdown and hosted on GitHub. I don't know many recipe books that allow for issues to be raised and that accept pull requests ;)

Related: there are zones off the coast of Belgium and France that have been used as ammunition dumps after the 1st world war. There's one such zone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paardenmarkt) that is close to a very busy shipping route and whose existence was forgotten until the 70s, when people realized that they had 10000 tons of unexploded chemical ammunition lying around just off the coast. In practice there's a thick mud layer on top of the dumped ammo which keeps things stable, but if e.g. a ship were to get stranded, this could cause extensive environmental damage...

My (admittedly extremely limited) experience is that this is a sound strategy _for established entrepreneurs_, not for tentative business owners who are just getting started.

My wife and I were thinking about opening a restaurant, and as has been illustrated elsewhere, the costs are staggering and the total profit (if anything) is rather low. We were looking at total revenue of around £200 000, with maybe a 5% profit margin. This did not take into account kinda-expected risks, like staff quitting, which would have sent costs through the roof. By contrast, a little later we talked to a guy who sets up pubs for a living (for a large chain). They have costs down to a minimum, can rotate staff easily, and essentially have a playbook for starting a reasonably succesful, risk-free business in a few months. On top of that, they have departments full of people whose job it is to drive around looking for succesful business to copy (paraphrasing the original quote). This was profoundly depressing to me, since it made me think that even if we'd overcome the odds, we'd probably end up getting cloned by one of these behemoths...

I'm not the original poster, and I'm about to write something gross, but I commute for long times too and I find the sweat less of an issue than I originally expected (I do live in a climate that is not overly hot and humid, though). I avoid using a backpack (in favor using panniers) so that my back isn't all sweaty, and for the rest I find that the sweat dries up quickly and doesn't leave a trace. In the worst case I take a spare t-shirt and a deodorant stick.

Interestingly, there is some push-back against treating H. pylori too aggressively. While it is linked to stomach cancer, there is also some evidence that losing H. pylori is linked with increases in other diseases like type-2 diabetes (but then again, increased rates of type-2 diabetes are linked to losing pretty much any kind of stomach/gut flora). The microbiome is a delicate thing...

Korean websites also suffer from the early adapter phenomenon. Many were build when ActiveX controls were the new hip thing and everybody was on the same version of Windows, and same with flash. Add to that that some websites require logging in with government-issued credentials (which is probably not something that you can easily rip out and replace by a nice form) and you can see that there's a lot of early 2000s cruft floating around... I'd be interested in knowing Japanese websites have similar baggage.

I had to look up the results of my Korean language test the other day. This should be as easy as entering your name + test registration number to get one number of info back (your test score). I had to install so many suspicious browser plugins that I ended up downloading a VM just for this.

Oooh, oooh, pick me!

  This job is open to…
  U.S. citizens and U.S. nationals

Oh :(

For algorithms (or things that aren't snippets of code, for that matter), I keep a notebook. Writing in a notebook with a pen forces me to make the learned item as simple as possible (e.g. by making a drawing), and the "aesthetics" of writing mean that I also feel compelled to keep my notebook tidy and interesting to look at, I feel it gives me a sense of personal accomplishment (I was never good at "arts" and making drawings e.g. of how a graph algorithm works is my way of creating "art" ;))

For things that involve code, e.g. an actual implementation or particular snippet, I use org-mode. It allows you to embed code as part of a regular document. I keep both thematic documents as well as a file per day for loose notes (the idea being that stuff that I collect will eventually be polished up and make it into thematic notes, but that never happens).

I agree with this and other suggestions to seek for deeper habits. In addition, I'd suggest keeping a journal of what deeper habits you develop: when I'm tempted to kill some time browsing or watching cat videos, I look at my notes (both in a journal and as Emacs org files), give myself a little pat on the back, check some things on the list, and write down a little more of what I've been doing. I find that doing some "gardening" on my notes is useful in the long and provides me with a small dopamine hit in the moment.