Hacker News: Arcorann

New comment by Arcorann in "Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better"

Arcorann — Sat, 16 May 2026 05:31:35 +0000

Don't forget Wikisource! https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page

New comment by Arcorann in "Show HN: Forty.News – Daily news, but on a 40-year delay"

Arcorann — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 03:40:20 +0000

The 500 edits required for access to TWL is actually for all of the sites under the Wikimedia banner. If you're having trouble finding things to edit on Wikipedia, you can try their other sites such as Wikisource or Wikibooks.

On Wikisource in particular, it's fairly easy to make useful edits through validating proofread pages or proofreading simple pages (both of which can be easily found in the Monthly Challenge).

New comment by Arcorann in "Time travel is self-suppressing"

Arcorann — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 23:53:56 +0000

The conclusion is basically (Larry) Niven's Law of Time Travel. From "The Theory and Practice of Time Travel" (1971):

> If the universe of discourse permits the possibility of time travel and of changing the past, then no time machine will be invented in that universe.

The entire essay is worth a read, of course. Meanwhile the paper in the OP goes for a more mathematical approach.

New comment by Arcorann in "Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with an 8-bit Home Computer [pdf]"

Arcorann — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 08:32:09 +0000

Somewhat related is the work done in "Falling with Style: Factoring up to 255 “with” a Quantum Computer" published in the proceedings of SIGBOVIK 2025 [1]. The author, Craig Gidney [2], successfully factored all odd composite numbers up to 255 using Shor's algorithm, even though the quantum circuits involved were such that any meaningful output would be overwhelmed by noise (and indeed, performance was maintained when the circuits were replaced by a random number generator).

> To my knowledge, no one has cheated at factoring in this way before. Given the shenanigans pulled by past factoring experiments, that’s remarkable.

[1] https://sigbovik.org/2025/; standalone paper is also available in the code repository https://github.com/strilanc/falling-with-style

[2] Who has previous experience in cheating at quantum factoring: see "Factoring the largest number ever with a quantum computer", posted April Fools' Day 2020 at https://algassert.com/post/2000

New comment by Arcorann in "Corrected UTF-8 (2022)"

Arcorann — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 01:09:45 +0000

A while back I came up with the idea to carve out 4096 code points in plane 14 (Supplementary Special-purpose Plane) for super-surrogates, and use three such surrogates (1 initial, 2 extension) for codepoints beginning from U+110000. If done properly you get unlimited range and self-synchronizing, at the expense of needing 12 bytes minimum per codepoint (more if you want it truly unlimited), but I figured the demand for UTF-16 would be low enough by the time it's needed that it's a workable tradeoff.

New comment by Arcorann in "Cure Dolly's Japanese Grammar Lessons"

Arcorann — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 14:04:28 +0000

Having come across the connection from somewhere else entirely, I found it a very curious rabbit hole. I saw recently a website that attempts to summarise the whole thing (not quite complete) [1], with a section on St. Bride's.

Then there's the oral history someone posted on Something Awful some years ago [2] -- from someone who may have accidentally indirectly derailed the entire movement.

[1] https://aristasia.guide [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20230817170434/https://forums.so...

New comment by Arcorann in "When the sun dies, could life survive on the Jupiter ocean moon Europa?"

Arcorann — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 04:19:00 +0000

RFC 2550 to the rescue: handling the transition from A99999 to B100000, or even from Z999999999999999999999999999999 to ^A1000000000000000000000000000000 will be a piece of cake.

New comment by Arcorann in "Show HN: Lazy Tetris"

Arcorann — Tue, 27 May 2025 11:11:44 +0000

Neat. However, I noticed that the page description reads "No stress, memory-optimized 3D Tetris variant.", but I can't figure out what's supposed to be 3D about it.

New comment by Arcorann in "The Epochalypse Project"

Arcorann — Mon, 12 May 2025 07:18:57 +0000

MAX_SAFE_INTEGER = 2^53 - 1 = 9007199254740991. The next integer 2^53 is representable, while the following one 2^53 + 1 isn't.

2^53 + 1 milliseconds = 9007199254740993 milliseconds = 104249991 days 8 hours 59 minutes 0.993 seconds. Since the zero point is midnight 1970-01-01, we reach the first non-representable millisecond at 287396-10-12T8:59:00.993 (be careful to use the Gregorian leap rule if you want to calculate this manually).

New comment by Arcorann in "Quality-of-Life in Tetris Games"

Arcorann — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 14:21:46 +0000

Have you looked at TGM4, which released on Steam last week? [0] I'd be interested to see your thoughts on it.

Also would like to note that, at least for TGM1, 2 and 3, the PRNG used is a 32-bit LCG (the common C one, in fact).

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3328480/TETRIS_THE_GRAND_...

New comment by Arcorann in "Standard Ebooks: liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover"

Arcorann — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 03:11:17 +0000

In a similar vein, there is Wikisource.[0] Wikisource has the advantage of allowing for extensive formatting to closely match the source works due to its wiki-based format, but doesn't have quite as robust processes. Its flexibility is unparalleled though -- it covers virtually any form of scanned print work and even some old movies, and contributors can focus on whatever niches they're interested in if they want.

[0] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page

New comment by Arcorann in "Can humans say the largest prime number before we find the next one?"

Arcorann — Sat, 09 Nov 2024 06:11:56 +0000

If you check the section "Extensions of the standard dictionary numbers" on the page you linked, there's a system for naming arbitrarily large numbers as -illions. The prime here is approx. 8.82 * 10^41024319, and 10^41024319 is the 13674772nd -illion (short scale), so it would begin eight tredecilliquattuorseptuagintasescentilliduoseptuagintaseptingentillion.

New comment by Arcorann in "Generating Mazes"

Arcorann — Sun, 25 Aug 2024 02:14:51 +0000

> I also read that starting with Aldous Broder and then switching to Wilson's Algorithm (reasoning: Aldous Broder is slow at the end, Wilson's Algorithm is slow at the start) is faster than either. However, I haven't seen proof that this combination still results in a uniform spanning tree (where all possible mazes have equal probability).

I did some searching, and the paper at [1] (2022) studies the problem. Based on the paper, a naive combination of the two algorithms can generate uniform spanning trees on complete graphs, but more work is needed for arbitrary graphs. [2] apparently cites this when discussing their hybrid maze generating algorithm, but I haven't been able to find a copy to check.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.12378 [2] https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of...

New comment by Arcorann in "Untouchable number"

Arcorann — Sat, 26 Aug 2023 00:37:12 +0000

Funnily enough, there was a short story about the killion published in the New Yorker in 1982: "The killion, as every mathematician knows, is a number so big it can kill you." [1]

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1982/09/06/the-killion

New comment by Arcorann in "Had a call with Reddit to discuss pricing"

Arcorann — Wed, 31 May 2023 21:40:06 +0000

RIF dev just posted an official update on the changes: https://old.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/comments/13wxepd/rif_de...

As the URL suggests, at this pricing RIF will simply die.

New comment by Arcorann in "Sci-fi becomes real as renowned magazine closes submissions due to AI writers"

Arcorann — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 12:45:43 +0000

This reminds me of an old Roald Dahl story, "The Great Automatic Grammatizator". A man creates an electric computer that can write short stories in a few minutes (this being written in 1953, when electric computers were just becoming a thing), and starts churning out magazine submissions. Having made a name for himself as a writer (several names, in fact), he then upgrades it to write novels. Finally, he starts offering existing writers the chance to license their names to the machine's works. It's a good read.

Of course, the situation isn't quite the same, largely because unlike the story the magazine here can identify AI submissions, but the similarities are nevertheless interesting.

New comment by Arcorann in "How fateful?"

Arcorann — Wed, 05 Oct 2022 03:26:57 +0000

You might be thinking of "Cat Pictures Please" by Naomi Kritzer, which can be found online at Clarkesworld: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer_01_15/

New comment by Arcorann in "Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar"

Arcorann — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 14:52:15 +0000

I once read a story in which a human gave an extraterrestrial visitor a calendar to examine and they were confused as to all the inconsistency. I then wondered how they would react if we gave them a Malaysian wall calendar instead:

- Four calendars (Gregorian, Islamic, Chinese, Hindu)

- Three scripts (Latin, Chinese, Tamil)

- Two solar (Gregorian, Hindu), neither synced with the other, with varying month lengths (29-32 for the Hindu, but at least months follow solar longitudes properly; Gregorian doesn't really follow anything)

- Two lunar (Chinese, Islamic), also offsync (Chinese starts months on new moon, Islamic on first visible crescent) and Chinese has leap months while Islamic doesn't.

- Weekday names in four languages (English, Malay, Chinese, Tamil)

It'd certainly be a puzzle for our hypothetical alien.

New comment by Arcorann in "Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus"

Arcorann — Sat, 27 Aug 2022 01:55:16 +0000

There are other wiki farms that are good if one wants to avoid Wikia's crap. I usually recommend Miraheze [1], which is MediaWiki-based, not-for-profit and ad-free (they run on donations).

[1] https://miraheze.org/

New comment by Arcorann in "Slack’s free plan change is causing an exodus"

Arcorann — Sat, 27 Aug 2022 01:52:06 +0000

Wikia/Fandom has a history of refusing to delete wikis where the community has agreed to migrate (such as when many wikis left after the forced skin change in 2010), leaving a stale copy with better SEO. I don't know whether they still do this nowadays, but after that incident I swore never to contribute to Fandom ever again (for new wikis I try to recommend other wiki farms, usually Miraheze).