51–60 of 115 posts
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For producing something of no intrinsic monetary value?
How are these any different from say Bitcoin?
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Mm, if something is subtly funny, it's usually welcome. One of my favorite jokes of all time was pg's nickb april fools prank: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=151109#152361 Probably worth putting together a list of HN moments... There were so many.
Reading over that, I actually recognize I miss the older HN - where the conversations seemed fairly long and in depth. It's still often the case, but it does seem like the average length and depth is decreasing.
So that's what it's working on when it's starting up.
> Jonathan Pace is a 51-year old Electrical Engineer living in Germantown, Tennessee. Perseverance has finally paid off for Jon - he has been hunting for big primes with GIMPS for over 14 years. What a great story.
I know he's a volunteer but only $3000? Does that seem low to anyone else?
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RSA encryption keys uses the product of two large primes, where each prime is many digits long. So many new primes are "discovered" every day.
Interestingly, those primes' primality is normally proven statistically rather than deductively. This is not really a practical issue for people using RSA, but could be a philosophical issue for someone interested in the question of how many different numbers' primality has been proven by humanity.
[0]: https://wiki.openssl.org/index.php/Manual:BN_generate_prime(...
Prime numbers are amazing. I was watching a math documentary and one example was a Cicada in North Carolina that only emerges once every thirteen years millions of them at once. It's a defense mechanism the sheer number overwhelms predators. The Cicada does this also to avoid appearing when another species of Cicada appears to prevent cross breeding. The other species in the same region emerges every 7 years. The two…
Edit: I looked it up, its 13 and 17 years, giving a 221 year overall cycle. I guess it only really "matters" that the years are coprime.
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When philosophers study mankind's knowledge, it's more typical to study the things mankind would ideally know at the end of all time assuming mankind could continue forever. (Formally: the knowledge predicate is usually assumed to satisfy modus ponens: if mankind knows "A implies B" and mankind knows "A", then mankind knows "B") Under this abstraction, if mankind knows the axioms of logic and Peano arithmetic, then m…
It's a little funny that mankind gets to use a full-fledged infinite-tape Turing machine in order to compute arbitrarily large computations, since no such machine would fit in our universe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_of_computation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcomputational_problem
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Mm, if something is subtly funny, it's usually welcome. One of my favorite jokes of all time was pg's nickb april fools prank: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=151109#152361 Probably worth putting together a list of HN moments... There were so many.
Reading over that, I actually recognize I miss the older HN - where the conversations seemed fairly long and in depth. It's still often the case, but it does seem like the average length and depth is decreasing.
The current plan is to create a "mirror" of HN's front page, but with a smaller community. You'll be bale to keep your HN name, because you won't be allowed to use someone's existing HN name on the new site unless you claim it.
Then, we'll need content. This was the secret sauce in the early HN days. The sole reason for people to come to the new site would be good conversation, and I think recruiting a few of the writers from HN would be enough to bootstrap it. Part of HN's early success was that pg actually participated in HN. Whereas the current mod team just shows up to beat us over the head and little else.
If you want to help plan this out, contact me (email's in profile). I think we have a shot at this. Some past thoughts on the topic:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16064078
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16044466
Getting away from the heavy-handed moderation will be the best part. Comments will be free to flow into tangents, as long as they're substantive.
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> Mersennes are beautiful and have some surprising applications. Unfortunately that page doesn’t elaborate on what these surprising applications are, which is itself surprising on a page that purports to answer “why”.
It automatically results in the discovery of a new perfect number. :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid%E2%80%93Euler_theorem (combining two of history's greatest mathematicians with names that have confused generations of students by being pronounced very differently)