Hacker News: CaptainNegative

New comment by CaptainNegative in "True Rate of Unemployment"

CaptainNegative — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 07:49:48 +0000

> I guess I've been living outside of the US for way too long

If you're the kind of person to invent new definitions to fit statistics and then cry about the fabrication's implications then perhaps it's better for Americans if you keep living abroad.

> Food insecure—At times during the year, these households were uncertain of having or unable to acquire enough food to meet the needs of all their members because they had insufficient money or other resources for food. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...

New comment by CaptainNegative in "Mathematicians still don't know the fastest way to multiply numbers"

CaptainNegative — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 05:30:46 +0000

They don't count the additions or shifts because they're both linear time operations, and thus provably at least as fast as multiplication (both in an asymptotic and exact sense). In any case where multiplication is super-linear, this means that addition and shifting are are not the temporal bottleneck at any stage in the algorithm where you have a constant number of those operations surrounding at least one multiplicative recursive call (on numbers of similar magnitudes).

If additions were truly free, an even easier optimal algorithm would just be repeated addition involving zero multiplications.

New comment by CaptainNegative in "TikTok disproportionately served anti-Democratic videos during the 2024 election"

CaptainNegative — Sat, 23 May 2026 01:28:35 +0000

Does he also run a time machine? He bought TikTok only earlier this year.

New comment by CaptainNegative in "New arXiv policy: 1-year ban for hallucinated references"

CaptainNegative — Fri, 15 May 2026 11:55:04 +0000

why is the standard response when someone comes down with a serious illness to bring them into a facility where serious illnesses spread readily?

sometimes the presently available solutions are subpar. people go with what's available. it's not ideal, but it is practical.

New comment by CaptainNegative in "GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values"

CaptainNegative — Tue, 12 May 2026 00:49:30 +0000

I don't know why someone with a cousin named Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso is that much of a better hire than someone named Jón Bergþóruson, 王小明, Sukarno (with no surname), גִּדְעוֹן בֶּן־גּוּרְיוֹן , or Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Wilhelm Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg. None of whom would classically qualify as diversity hires.

Hiring someone in the off chance that their ethnicity gives them some unique critical unknown unknown that will pop up half a decade down the line resides in the same mental space as a programmer writing `if (5 == i)` in case a future programmer accidentally deletes an =. It's just speculative defensiveness whose efficacy is simply not well established by actual research. And, in my view, just works to confound actual signals that, evidently, gitlab and other employers feel get unfairly overshadowed when emphasizing explicitly pro-diversity hiring policies.

New comment by CaptainNegative in "Bets on US-Iran ceasefire show signs of insider knowledge, say experts"

CaptainNegative — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 20:53:55 +0000

There could also be some degree of "(5) bandwagon effect" players, who pump money into an outcome specifically to get people talking about its possibility, thereby increasing its probability of coming into fruition.

New comment by CaptainNegative in "Wikipedia was in read-only mode following mass admin account compromise"

CaptainNegative — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 18:13:08 +0000

> but at some point a state based cyber attack that just wipes wikipedia off the net is deeply damaging to our modern society’s ability to agree on common facts

Haven't we hit that point already with bad faith (and potentially government-run) coordinated editing and voting campaigns, as both Wales and Sanger have been pointing out for a while now?

See, for example,

* Sanger: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/Nine_Theses

* Wales: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide/Archive_22#...

* PirateWires: https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-wikipedia-is-becoming-a-ma...

New comment by CaptainNegative in "Faster Than Dijkstra?"

CaptainNegative — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 19:49:30 +0000

> You can generally reduce the problem to a finite alphabet by taking the finite subset that actually appears in the input.

You can generally sort any array in constant time by taking that constant to be the time it takes to sort the array using bubble sort.

New comment by CaptainNegative in "The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1961-1964)"

CaptainNegative — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 06:15:11 +0000

I feel like the section on primality testing with Fermat's test should at least make a shout out to Carmichael numbers and that for some inputs the probability you get a false positive result is 1.

New comment by CaptainNegative in "P vs. NP and the Difficulty of Computation: A ruliological approach"

CaptainNegative — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:07:14 +0000

This is so tangentially related to the P vs NP problem that the title is basically pure clickbait. Remove every sentence relating to polynomial anything and the information content of the write-up doesn't change at all.

New comment by CaptainNegative in "Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?"

CaptainNegative — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 01:20:28 +0000

What's a concrete threat model here? If you're sending data to an ssh server, you already need to trust that it's handling your input responsibly. What's the scenario where it's fine that the client doesn't know if the server is using pastebin for backing up session dumps, but it's problematic that the server tells the client that it's not accepting a certain timing obfuscation technique?

New comment by CaptainNegative in "State regulators vote to keep utility profits high angering customers across CA"

CaptainNegative — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 23:43:41 +0000

Capping margins at a percentage also directly breeds inefficiencies. If you could spend $10M to fix a problem that costs you $4M/yr, you're effectively paying $10M now to lose $400k in annual profit potential.

New comment by CaptainNegative in "Implications of AI to schools"

CaptainNegative — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 19:02:58 +0000

It depends on their test dataset. If the test set was written 80% by AI and 20% by humans, a tool that labels every essay as AI-written would have a reported accuracy of 80%. That's why other metrics such as specificity and sensitivity (among many others) are commonly reported as well.

Just speaking in general here -- I don't know what specific phrasing TurnItIn uses.

New comment by CaptainNegative in "Two billion email addresses were exposed"

CaptainNegative — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 00:28:05 +0000

TOTP inside a password manager doesn't make much sense to me. What's the point of two factor auth if both factors are stored together?

New comment by CaptainNegative in "Determination of the fifth Busy Beaver value"

CaptainNegative — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 13:04:31 +0000

Only finitely many values of BB can be mathematically determined. Once your Turing Machines become expressive enough to encode your (presumably consistent) proof system, they can begin encoding nonsense of the form "I will halt only after I manage to derive a proof that I won't ever halt", which means that their halting status (and the corresponding Busy Beaver value) fundamentally cannot be proven.

New comment by CaptainNegative in "Using information theory to solve Mastermind"

CaptainNegative — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 01:24:07 +0000

I don't understand the point of this article, as it doesn't define an objective function. It just states a strategy that is only practically implementable for small board sizes (given the cited NP-completeness result) and then calls it good sans theorem or even conjecture.

I believe it is provably not the optimal algorithm for solving the problem under the minimax objective, and I have a hunch that (due to rounding issues) it is also not optimal for minimizing the expected number of guesses under even a uniform prior. So what does this actually accomplish?

New comment by CaptainNegative in "First American pope elected and will be known as Pope Leo XIV"

CaptainNegative — Fri, 09 May 2025 00:40:50 +0000

Golda Meir was the Prime Minister (head of government) of Israel after having naturalized in the US when she was 19.

New comment by CaptainNegative in "What Is Entropy?"

CaptainNegative — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 02:02:50 +0000

The temperature of an object is a macroscopic property basically depending on the kinetic energy of the matter within it, which in a typical cup of water varies substantially from one molecule to the next. If before you could guess a little bit about the kinetic energy of a given water molecule based on whether it is part of the ice or not, after melting and sufficient time to equilibrate the location of a particular molecule gives you no additional information for estimating its velocity.

New comment by CaptainNegative in "Long division verified via Hoare logic"

CaptainNegative — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 21:03:13 +0000

Not specific to this article, but it's tragic that computer science curricula, and discussions of these algorithms, virtually never highlight the tight connection between binary search and long division. Long division done in binary is exactly binary search for the correct quotient, with the number written above the line (plus some implicit zeros) being the best lower bound proven thus far. Similarly, division done in decimal is just "ten-ary" search.

New comment by CaptainNegative in "How types make hard problems easy"

CaptainNegative — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 21:42:39 +0000

I think the problem is in going for a Computer Science degree when you really meant to study Software Engineering.