Category: Thoughts

Five year vision

I’m reading up on amateur radio licenses. I’ve always been curious about it, I’m planning to get a radio set – and talk to other people. Similar to the way it was done in the movie Contact. I’m fascinated by space, and radio is one of the things the space shuttle predominantly uses to communicate with earth. Also the thought of being able contact with aliens is nice – however unfeasible.
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Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

I’ve just completed a book, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age by Paul Graham.

I thought it was very articulate, it feels like he is giving a talk, so it was easy to follow and understand. It’s a relatively non-computer-science friendly, though some parts of the book were rather technical. The chapters didn’t necessarily follow one another, so each chapter felt like reading a separate essay. As a result, the book overall didn’t flow well. Individual chapters reads great, each with its introductions, arguments, and takeaways.

Several things in the book that caught my attention:
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Interesting Consequences of Undecidability

In the book Introduction to Automata Theory — Languages and Computation. The following paragraph is interesting:
av

What this means is that if we were given a source code of a program, we would be unable to decide what the program does. Only lexical or syntactical properties of the program may be decided. This is interesting because it’s really counter-intuitive! You’d think that given the source code and read through it we can systemically figure out what it does. Not true. This means is that another program, B, cannot figure out what program A does.

Interestingly enough, this implies that no anti-virus will ever be totally effective, or any other types code detection software, because it is undecidable what a program does. There will always exist programs which can’t be detected. I knew this when I was young, from the fact that AV programs always update their virus databases, so naturally that meant there was no systemic way to detect mischievous programs. I wondered if the updates would ever stop in the future. Now I know this will never happen because of this consequence of undecidability.

Negotiation Strategies

Negotiation Strategies

A summary of three types of strategies.

Flight Nibbling

Ask for a little bit more at a time, and keep nibbling away – at small things. Obviously small things accumulate. Airline example:

Airlines usually overbook their seating when possible; on a plane that seats 120, they can sell 122 tickets and just about get away with it, because there is a roughly 3% chance that people don’t show up. (Exactly why they oversell I shall explain below.)

Anyways, consider that you’re on the plane and they are at capacity. The attendant announces that they need a seat for someone that actually showed up and began offering a seat on the next flight… with compensation of course. So the deal is that you get on the next plane, which leaves tomorrow, and plus a bonus of $100 for your troubles. If you want the offer, you can take it by raising your arm. Nobody took it. Then they increased to $200. And still, nobody budged.  Slowly, with $100 at a time, it got to $800. Only then, since you calculate the price to be about fair for your troubles, would you take it.

Should you stop here? No. You should nibble. How?
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