Oscar Del Ben

The best way to do something

I often see people asking for the best way for doing something. Sometimes what they want to do is a sort of esoteric thing about computer programming where a standard yet exist or simply there are many options. So instead of asking for the very best way, ask for an acceptable way or advice and you are more likely to receive a response.

My ideal president

My ideal president would walk the first day in his new company and interview all his staff, from secretaries to executives and ask them what they most love about their work and what they think is wrong or they would not be doing if they could get a chance. Then he would come back the next day and reorganize all the staff members so that each of them would do what they said to like.

Do you think that company will succeed or instead it will have an hard time to get out results?

The truth is that we all have different talents and strengths, for example one can be a perfect sales man, but he/she might not like doing cold calls in the morning before the real meeting or followup. This does not mean that nobody else likes to do cold calls, on the contrary there are many people who actually do hate meetings with clients but likes more and are effective doing cold calls. In this situation if the first guy (the sales person) would do for the 80% of his time meetings and delegate cold calls to someone else who loves to do it, the company would increase sales almost instantly, you can do the math for yourself.

What about stuff that nobody wants to do?

Obviously the are still tasks that nobody wants to do, that is perfectly acceptable. In this situations you should consider outsourcing the entire task outside of your company, in the same way you are probably already outsourcing other stuff.

What to do next

If you are the boss, you want to first understand what your employees are very good at and then find how to get the most out of them. If you are self employed or you work for someone else you can still apply these principles to your life and work by identifying and delegating all those tasks that you don't like.

Try this for a few days, and measure the results, you may end up to be astonished with the results.

Epistemology

Epistemology is the study of the nature and limitations of knowledge. Its main goal is to answer questions like How do we learn new things? or How do we know that we know something?

The basic practical principle of epistemology is that if you want to know something, you must both prove it to be true, and also prove that the opposite is false. Think about this for a moment, how many times you've found something which seemed to work perfectly in certain conditions, but not in others?

For a practical example, say that you are a computer programmer and you are adding a new feature to your web site, how could epistemology improve your work? If you were adding a link only visible by registered users, you would not only test that registered users can see it, but also that not registered users can't see it.

My goal here is not to teach you epistemology but instead to feed your curiosity. If you want to learn more about epistemology, check out the following resources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/

Project Euler 3 in Ruby

This is problem number 3 of project Euler series.

Announcement:

The prime factors of 13195 are 5, 7, 13 and 29.

What is the largest prime factor of the number 600851475143 ?

Solution:

This program is straightforward, here's my solution with ruby:

class Integer

  def factors

    n = self

    result = []

    checker = 2

    while (checker**2 <= n) do

      if n % checker == 0

        result << checker

        n = n / checker

      else

        checker += 1

      end

    end

    if n != 1 # If n is not 1, then n is a prime!

      result << n

    end

  end

end

p 600851475143.factors.last

We start from a checker of 2 and we loop from 2 up to the square root of n, which initialy is 600851475143, and for every loop we can encounter two possibilities: if n modulo checker is not equal to zero, we add 1 to checker and continue with the next loop, else we add checker to the list of the prime factors and we divide n with checker and assign the result to n. This last sentence may sound a bit confusing, so let me explain it with an example. Suppose we want to find the list of prime factors of the integer 60:

1. First, we start with n = 60 and a checker of 2;
2. n modulo checker is  0 (60 % 2), so we add checker to the list of prime factors and assign n / checker to n; n is now 30 and checker is still 2;
3. n modulo checker is 0 (30 % 2), so we again add checker to the list of prime factors and assign n / checker to n; n is now 15 and checker is still 2; 
4. n modulo checker is not 0 (15 % 2), so we add 1 to checker and proceed with the next loop; n is still 15 and checker is 3;
5. n modulo checker is 0 (15 % 3) , so we add checker to the list of prime factors and assign n to 15 / 3; n is now 5 and checker is 3;
6. the loop condition fails, since the root of checker is bigger than n, so we move forward;
7. since n is not 1 (it is 5), we add n to the list of primes;
8. we are finished, our list is [2,2,3,5] , which should be read as 2^2 * 3 * 5