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ColinWright

136,193karma·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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Is there a reason you've lunk to a comment in the middle, rather than to the question itself?
15y ago·view thread
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An old friend. Previous discussions: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1822376 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=297683 Lots of comments on each. Before commenting here it might be worth rea…
15y ago·view thread
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A few comments on the submission from years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=787419
15y ago·view thread
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Same video posted yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2571158
15y ago·view thread
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That can't be right - it doesn't have the right behavior as R->oo. As R->oo you need to get an answer of 0.5, but this gives an answer of 0.25.
15y ago·view thread
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The question is ill defined - it depends. Define "The Sky" as an enclosing sphere. When it has the same size as the Earth, the percentage of it you can see is 0. As it gets larger, so the percentage…
15y ago·view thread
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If I have one friend, and our machines are never both on at the same time, how do our updates get synchronised?
15y ago·view thread
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The actual paper is here, but I didn't link to that in the submission because I don't want it auto-submitted to Scribd: http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~savage/papers/Oakland11.pdf …
15y ago·view thread
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This is the event that I ran last November. It was successful enough that people have insisted I run it again. So I am. There's nothing interesting about the technology in the web site, or anything e…
15y ago·view thread
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Clickable: https://www.location-engine.com You're supposed to put the link in the URL box - your ranking gets punished if you haven't actually lunk somewhere. I'm tempted to call this spam. Can you…
15y ago·view thread
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Being done to death over here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2568312
15y ago·view thread
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But then you mention "runway", which makes me wonder whether you're talking about me, or my company, or my other company, or my money earning side project, or my other money earning side project, or w…
15y ago·view thread
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From 5 and 13 months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1967554 <- Some comments http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1290367 <- No comments…
15y ago·view thread
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Then why didn't you ask for that? You asked about salary, mentioning nothing about expenses or other commitments. That's a different question entirely. What are you really asking?
15y ago·view thread
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Alternatively, what's your salary in liters of Coca-Cola? Or Mars bars?
15y ago·view thread
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Rendered meaningless by different countries.
15y ago·view thread
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Same story, many comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2516510
15y ago·view thread
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I think the argument is that what you do in public places is public knowledge. If random people legally positioned can see you, then there is no assumption of privacy. I speak from a position of no f…
15y ago·view thread