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ColinWright
136,194karma·18,658submissions·December 14, 2009
about
If you want to contact me, find me on the web. I am
especially interested in math, juggling, programming,
and education, and since there are other people with
my name you'll probably need to include at least one
of those terms in any search.
I was once a prolific contributor and commenter, but no more. I go through bouts of submitting stuff, but then go and disappear for lengths of time. If there is something you'd like me to see or comment on, you can email me. Don't ask me to upvote things. If it is interesting (to me) then I will.
Submissions do not imply endorsement.
My spam filtering is pretty severe, but I've put the word "Dysprosium" on the allow-list - quote that and your email will get through.
I used to have an email here but it got harvested by spammers - I'm looking at you, mbientlab.com - so it has been removed. This is a temporary one:
HN_a7dab8S4@solipsys.co.uk
Email sent there and quoting the element name will pass my spam filters. After that we can use "proper" email addresses.
recent activity (18,658 total)
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http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=417368 <- This exact same video. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=594881 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=669042 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?i…
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Clickable: http://this.isby.us/
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I must have mis-understood you. The method you have outlined - as I understand it - definitely will not find all solutions, and I don't see how you can think it would. Perhaps you should explain it a…
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You can't be that weak at what I call math, although your experiences with math education might be unhappy ones. You have found more solutions than I first found - that can't be bad. Half my life is …
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Hmm. Don't think so.
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You've found two infinite families and one sporadic solution. There is another sporadic solution, and the 8 piece solution you've found is not, in fact a sporadic. And yes, the infinities are uncounta…
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In essence, take any line from the center to the edge, and take three copies (giving four in total) rotated by 90 degrees. Provided they don't cross, that's a solution. And that's one infinite family…
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Not having my emails in folders would make it impossible to skim an email "conversation" prior to picking up after 3 months. It would be impossible to archive a project and send it to people. Folderi…
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Much discussion from the submission yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2578706
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Clickables: http://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=100 http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments http://news.ycombinator.com/newest http://news.ycombinator.com/active http://news.ycombinator.…
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Some puzzles don't have "significance", they are simply puzzles. Some people find some (but not all) puzzles intriguing. Why do people do Sudoku? Or crosswords? This particular problem is also an e…
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Woah! Cool! Thanks ... I wonder how many people read the "Ask" page.
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A heart-felt "Thank You" to those of you who have contributed and up-voted. Alas, as I type, this item has now slipped to the third page of HN and is unlikely to be seen by "the masses." So it is onl…
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Again, clickable: http://shouldibeproud.com/ This is all going to seem very harsh ... Why didn't you do this yourself? Why have you again not put the URL in the URL box, and instead put it in the c…
1 pts
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That's one solution. There are more ...
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So you have two infinite families - the generality is what I originally missed. There are more ...
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Yes, but simply saying there are infinitely many solutions is not enough. There are infinitely many solutions, but there is more you can say. It's a shame this will sink without making it to the fron…
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Previous report, several comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2575065
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Wibble: Facebook have an army of "citizen journalists" numbering
500 million and Twitter 175 million and don't employ any
of them.
Clearly, they are going to have to introduce a del…
3 pts
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I promised a few people I'd post this when I wrote it up, so here it is. The same techniques can be used to analyse decisions in business, but I'm leaving that for another day.
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That's already there. Did you read the linked item?
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There is a URL check, but it only finds exact matches, and only if the URL tested against is in memory. If it's old enough and hasn't been accessed recently, it's not found. I thought this was in jac…