cion

Joined 9 years ago

Karma
206
Submissions
15
Member since
Aug 18
Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.
View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 2 years ago
It might be Paul Halmos. In his "automathobiography", titled I Want to Be a Mathematician (Springer 1985), page 156: "In the late 1940's I began to act on one of my beliefs: to stay young, you have to change fields every five years". He goes on saying "I didn't first discover it and then act on it, but instead, noting that I did in fact seem to change directions every so often, I made a virtue out of a fact and formulated it as a piece of wisdom".
Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
But somebody has to write those Stackoverflow answers. Perhaps for those who do the distinction between man pages and info is important. Or do you think that the source of Stackoverflow answers is just more Stackoverflow answers? Now that would be hilarious.
Comment · 6 years ago
It's not pointless, but the outline only shows up if the generated tex file is compiled twice. The default org to latex export will only compile it once.

Alternatively, it is easy to suppress the outline slide altogether (add "toc:nil" to "#+OPTIONS:").

Comment · 6 years ago
I don't understand the reference to Gödel. Do you mean the theorem that in every formal system capable of representing arithmetic there exist sentences "P" such that neither "P" nor "not P" are derivable in the system?

It doesn't seem to me that from this it follows that "the point of philosophy is better living". It might be obvious, but I just don't see it.

Comment · 6 years ago
Oh, sorry, didn't realize that. It still doesn't work, though, as the example of 2 * 3 * 5 * 7 * 11 * 13 + 1 = 59 * 509 shows.
Comment · 6 years ago
You don't always get a prime. For example, 4! = 2 * 3 * 4 = 24, 24 + 1 = 25, 25 is not prime. The point is that N! + 1 is not divisible by any number from 2 to N (always leaves a remainder of 1), so either it is prime, or it is divisible by something larger than N!, therefore larger than N. In the case of 25, it is divisible by 5 (> 4).

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton