Hacker News: OscarCunningham

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.

New comment by OscarCunningham in "The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform"

OscarCunningham — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 16:19:57 +0000

Another example: ears are excellent at breaking down the frequency of sounds, but are imprecise about where the sound is coming from; whereas eyes are excellent at telling you where light is coming from, but imprecise about how its frequencies break down.

New comment by OscarCunningham in "enclose.horse"

OscarCunningham — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 09:00:32 +0000

There's an old Flash game called 'Chat Noir' where you have to trap a cat on a hexagonal grid. Here's a copy of it: https://www.hoodamath.com/games/chatnoir.html

New comment by OscarCunningham in "Round and Round"

OscarCunningham — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 08:49:55 +0000

But is a geostationary satellite going around the Earth?

New comment by OscarCunningham in "1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long"

OscarCunningham — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 22:51:26 +0000

Right. Interesting small patterns can be found using clever search algorithms. There's also the approach of running trillions of random 'soups' and scanning the results for interesting patterns. These small patterns are then pieced together to build the larger structures.

New comment by OscarCunningham in "I mathematically proved the best "Guess Who?" strategy [video]"

OscarCunningham — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 19:11:21 +0000

The problem is when you bisect an odd sized group. You necessarily have to make one half larger than the other. So you're not trying to misdirect, you're trying to avoid creating a signal. But to do this you have to sometimes put your character in the smaller half, which trades off against your other goal of shrinking the pool as fast as possible.

New comment by OscarCunningham in "I mathematically proved the best "Guess Who?" strategy [video]"

OscarCunningham — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 06:53:52 +0000

One thing this doesn't take into account (and the paper acknowledges this) is that the characters are assigned by picking cards from a deck. So the two players cannot have the same character.

Taking this into account would make the game much more complicated, because it can introduce an element of bluff.

For a simple example, imagine that there are only 5 characters. On your first turn you know the opponent doesn't have the same card as you, so you've got 4 options remaining. You'd like to ask a question that splits them into 2+2, but if you do this then the card you're holding will make one of the groups into a 3. Your opponent will know that your card is one of the 3, so you've effectively given them a head start. Instead you might sometimes want to split the options 3+2 with your card in the 2, as a bluff.

How often you want to do this must be described by some Nash equilibrium probabilities. It would be interesting to set up a linear programming solver to find these exactly, but so far I haven't had time to set this up. I don't know if it would be practical to solve the full version of the game with 24 characters.

New comment by OscarCunningham in "Celtic Code: Drawing knots with Python"

OscarCunningham — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 16:36:57 +0000

Fans of Celtic knots might also like the daily game Celtix (https://www.andrewt.net/puzzles/celtix/) where the objective is to separate a Celtic knot into five coloured strands.

New comment by OscarCunningham in "SQL Anti-Patterns"

OscarCunningham — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 18:54:09 +0000

I've even seen the BigQuery formatter change the behaviour of a query, by mixing a keyword from a comment into the real code.

New comment by OscarCunningham in "Internal emails reveal Ticketmaster helped scalpers jack up prices, FTC says"

OscarCunningham — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 19:16:03 +0000

The issue that spawned scalping and Ticketmaster is that musicians want to sell tickets under their market value. There's no analogous issue with airline pricing.

New comment by OscarCunningham in "Want to piss off your IT department? Are the links not malicious looking enough?"

OscarCunningham — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 08:07:56 +0000

I had the opposite problem at my last company. When you hover over a link Apple's Mail app opens a preview of the page. So if you try to see the URL then you automatically visit the link and get sent for more training.

New comment by OscarCunningham in "KDE is now my favorite desktop"

OscarCunningham — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 14:14:28 +0000

Thanks for this work. I switched from xfce when I realised that KDE was nearly as lightweight.

New comment by OscarCunningham in "KDE is now my favorite desktop"

OscarCunningham — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 13:58:44 +0000

I've tried KDE in Debian and NixOS, and the experience is exactly the same. In many ways the choice of distro is much less impactful than the choice of desktop environment.