Maybe I'm paranoid, but isn't it obvious how the whole Home Speaker story ends? "We're not spying on you, we're learning your behaviors to offer a better experience!"

How many Foxconn man-hours does it take to produce an iPhone, and what is the average hourly wage?

My point is that this is very similar to how elliptic curves are being counted here.

Fix any odd positive integer x, and consider its "twists" x{d}, which for positive d I define to be x*2^d. Every integer is of the form x{d} for a unique choice of x and d. Now, for fixed N, if I consider all "twists" for which d ]]>Sat, 10 Nov 2018 21:02:30 +0000https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18423485throwaway080383https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18423485https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18423485It's not accurate. Looking at the arxiv link (https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.02325), the idea is you fix some elliptic curve E, and you look at its "twists" E^d, where the parameter d is a nonzero integer.

If you only look at twists where |d| < N, you can ask "What proportion of these are rank zero, rank one, rank two, ...?" The Theorem in the paper is that as you let N go off to infinity, these proportions tend to 1/2, 1/2, 0, 0, 0, ... respectively.

Here's the thing: this does not correspond to a measure on the set of rational elliptic curves, and indeed, there is no reasonable way to define a uniform probability measure on a countable set. Consequently, statements like "half of all elliptic curves..." are kind of misleading and meaningless.

I do have to admit, it did not occur to me that the work week would still effectively enforce an "ordering" on longitudes which somehow takes the beauty out of it.

That is, I like the idea in principle, but I know it'll never happen.

District Attorney Marc Bennett said the Wichita police officer who fired the shot that killed Andrew Finch after a swatting call will not face charges.

That sounds like a problem to me. I don't know your situation, but when this happens to me, I am blunt and assertive that I don't understand what they're saying, like "I did not follow any of what you just said. I have no idea what X and Y are, and my understanding of Z is... Is that correct?"

in the short term people may think less of you, but in the long-term you will actually learn this stuff assuming you have a helpful mentor. If the senior engineer's job is to break things down for junior folks, and you're not understanding their explanation, then they're not doing their job.