Hacker News: OscarCunningham

New comment by OscarCunningham in "Longest Straight Line Paths on Water or Land on the Earth (2018)"

OscarCunningham — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 15:39:35 +0000

The one they give also crosses numerous rivers and lakes. For the strict version of the challenge where you literally can't cross water it's likely that the best solution is across Antarctica. Guaranteed by temperature to contain no water whatsoever.

New comment by OscarCunningham in "Longest Straight Line Paths on Water or Land on the Earth (2018)"

OscarCunningham — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 10:02:10 +0000

There's a longer land path that starts in or near Senegal and ends in China. But they miss it because it goes near the Dead Sea, and they treat anything below sea level as water.

New comment by OscarCunningham in "Hilariously fast volume computation with the divergence theorem (2018)"

OscarCunningham — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 17:03:45 +0000

It's also robust to errors in the mesh. Like if the triangles don't quite join up it still gives a reasonable answer. https://mathstodon.xyz/@keenancrane/109388206643166726

New comment by OscarCunningham in "Dithered QR Codes"

OscarCunningham — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 12:19:36 +0000

You could maybe determine this using a SAT solver. You would have to encode the entire QR code specification. I was thinking of doing this to find a minimalist QR code that just had as few black cells as possible.

New comment by OscarCunningham in "Dithered QR Codes"

OscarCunningham — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 03:17:04 +0000

https://pony.social/@luna/115057532794342459

New comment by OscarCunningham in "Dithered QR Codes"

OscarCunningham — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 03:08:25 +0000

https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/ublxt...

New comment by OscarCunningham in "Dithered QR Codes"

OscarCunningham — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 02:52:15 +0000

By the same author: https://mathstodon.xyz/@andrewt/115056697540191327

New comment by OscarCunningham in "Human mathematicians are being outcounterexampled"

OscarCunningham — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 16:23:17 +0000

I think you're in the wrong thread. This one is about Claude producing counterexamples. The Go thread is next door.

New comment by OscarCunningham in "Human mathematicians are being outcounterexampled"

OscarCunningham — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 12:39:09 +0000

I wouldn't have expected that there was post training specifically on the issue of looking for proofs vs counter examples. But it might be that other post training has a side effect of making AIs better at looking for counter examples. I wonder if these agents are overall less biased and more rational than humans. Can you expand on what you mean by goal based training?

New comment by OscarCunningham in "Human mathematicians are being outcounterexampled"

OscarCunningham — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 06:56:42 +0000

They're trained on human data. I would expect them to emulate human biases as closely as possible.

New comment by OscarCunningham in "Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't"

OscarCunningham — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 05:22:16 +0000

The AI understands context so it's able to spot typos even when they coincidentally make reel words.

New comment by OscarCunningham in "What Ozempic does to the gut-brain axis"

OscarCunningham — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 02:22:23 +0000

One argument would be that Ozempic doesn't give your body any additional resources. It just triggers your body to behave in a different way. But if the changes it causes are universally good, why didn't evolution already make your body work that way?

I suppose the counterargument would be that modern life is different from the evolutionary environment, and so it's possible for a change to be beneficial now that wasn't beneficial then. But it would still be good to understand better the mechanism of the effect of Ozempic on things like addiction.

New comment by OscarCunningham in "The sigmoids won't save you"

OscarCunningham — Fri, 15 May 2026 17:21:11 +0000

John D Cook gives more technical details here: "Trying to fit a logistic curve" https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2025/12/20/fit-logistic-curve...

New comment by OscarCunningham in "How and why to take a logarithm of an image [video]"

OscarCunningham — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 14:47:48 +0000

I've been wondering if you could do a similar thing for a Droste effect image containing two copies of itself. Packs of Laughing Cow cheese show a cow with two earrings, each of which is a pack of the cheese.

New comment by OscarCunningham in "France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app"

OscarCunningham — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 18:53:27 +0000

Oh I get it, the onion is made of Swiss cheese.

New comment by OscarCunningham in "Building a Procedural Hex Map with Wave Function Collapse"

OscarCunningham — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 19:26:20 +0000

It seems like a lot of the difficulty is in finding arrangements that satisfy constraints. I wonder if an alternative approach would be to use a SAT solver. I suppose the problem with that approach would be that the solver might always find an 'easy' solution that doesn't look random. I know that some SAT solvers let you randomly assign the initial assignments of the variables, but that doesn't mean you get a random solution. Has anyone tried a similar approach?

New comment by OscarCunningham in "Pass-Through of Tariffs: Evidence from European Wine Imports"

OscarCunningham — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 17:52:38 +0000

This is a deliberate choice by Congress to give the Fed a mandate to target 2% inflation. In particular Congress hasn't given them any instruction to try to make up for mistakes. If inflation overshoots in one year then they don't try to undershoot in the next year. They just keep trying to hit 2% inflation.

So if retailers tried to lower prices to pre-COVID levels then they would fail. The Fed would see the falling prices and cut rates until 2% inflation was achieved.

New comment by OscarCunningham in "Data centers in space makes no sense"

OscarCunningham — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 14:44:22 +0000

Does this mean that if Earth stays a fixed distance from the sun then its equilibrium temperature is fixed? I remember people saying things like that the albedo of the ice caps affected the Earth's temperature.

New comment by OscarCunningham in "Maze Algorithms (2017)"

OscarCunningham — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 17:49:14 +0000

Is it known which algorithms produce 'difficult' mazes? I'm imagining you could run all the maze solving algorithms against all the maze generating algorithms many times, and then calculate what the Nash equilibrium would be if the solver is trying to minimise expected time and the generator is trying to maximise it.

New comment by OscarCunningham in "Why medieval city-builder video games are historically inaccurate (2020)"

OscarCunningham — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 17:51:04 +0000

Enclosing a settlement gets easier as it gets larger. The amount of work is proportional to the perimeter, while the number of people to do the work is proportional to the area. The area is proportional to the square of the perimeter, so the work per person is inversely proportional to the length of the wall.