Hacker News: daveFNbuck

New comment by daveFNbuck in "GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers"

daveFNbuck — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 01:18:43 +0000

The complaint here is about this being an insufficient amount of effort because the bibtex entry from Google Scholar is wrong sometimes.

New comment by daveFNbuck in "GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers"

daveFNbuck — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 20:50:08 +0000

You want the content of the paper to be carefully crafted. Bibtex entries are the sort of thing you want people to copy and paste from a trusted source, as they can be difficult to do consistently correctly.

New comment by daveFNbuck in "Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes"

daveFNbuck — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 17:13:52 +0000

steel-man means trying to interpret someone's argument in the most favorable light rather than arguing against a weaker interpretation. It does not mean making up a different argument for them that you like better.

New comment by daveFNbuck in "Jerry Lewis's “The Day the Clown Cried” discovered in Sweden after 53 years"

daveFNbuck — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 22:56:30 +0000

Spending money to ensure something is released online for free is not the opposite of thinking it should be released online for free though.

If think the owner should give up its monetary value to satisfy your beliefs, you should be willing to do the same.

New comment by daveFNbuck in "Jerry Lewis's “The Day the Clown Cried” discovered in Sweden after 53 years"

daveFNbuck — Fri, 30 May 2025 21:10:07 +0000

If you think this is more important than the money it can be sold for, you should be the one to buy it.

New comment by daveFNbuck in "How to avoid P hacking"

daveFNbuck — Tue, 13 May 2025 04:28:03 +0000

That's not p hacking. That's just the nature of p values. P hacking is when you do things to make a particular experiment more likely to show as a success.

New comment by daveFNbuck in "AI Will Upend a Basic Assumption About How Companies Are Organized"

daveFNbuck — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 05:17:38 +0000

Why do you think senior managers would replace themselves if they could? Given the choice between saving a company and giving a senior manager slightly more money or power, the senior manager will always win.

New comment by daveFNbuck in "PEP 750: Tag Strings for Writing Domain-Specific Languages"

daveFNbuck — Sat, 10 Aug 2024 23:22:44 +0000

Can you explain the difference?

New comment by daveFNbuck in "How I write HTTP services in Go after 13 years"

daveFNbuck — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 22:42:19 +0000

If you do that, people outside the package can also do Username(x) conversions instead of calling NewUsername. Making value package private means that you can only set it from outside the package using provided functionality.

New comment by daveFNbuck in "Researchers claim first functioning graphene-based chip"

daveFNbuck — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 17:36:08 +0000

We're at single digit gigahertz for an entire chip, not a single transistor.

New comment by daveFNbuck in "Cratering motor fuel sales in Norway show the death spiral that can end oil"

daveFNbuck — Sat, 21 Oct 2023 15:52:40 +0000

I don't think most people make a special trip just to get gas. It's usually a quick added stop along the way of another trip, which is less of a nuisance than having to make two small walks to move and plug/unplug your car.

New comment by daveFNbuck in "Google changed ad auctions, raising prices 15%, witness says"

daveFNbuck — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 16:16:32 +0000

They happen more than once. You'd change your bid for the aggregate effect of paying for many wins, not for an individual auction.

New comment by daveFNbuck in "Calculate the difference and intersection of any two regexes"

daveFNbuck — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 15:31:09 +0000

They show the DFA for it on the site, it's 3 states. There's a starting state for the first . and then two states that transition back and forth between whether z was the last character or not.

I think what's actually happening here is that they're doing the intersection on the DFAs and then producing a regex from the resulting DFA. The construction of a regex from a DFA is where things get ugly and weird.

New comment by daveFNbuck in "Complexity theory’s 50-year journey to the limits of knowledge"

daveFNbuck — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 00:23:35 +0000

Having a constant runtime means there's a constant bound on the runtime, not that the runtime is an exact constant value. 100 + 1/n would still be constant, as it's bounded above and below by constants.

To have sub-constant time it would have to go to 0 as n increases, as otherwise we could bound the time below by a constant. This isn't possible, as a computer will take at least 1 time unit on every input. So the expected time will always be at least 1.

New comment by daveFNbuck in "Complexity theory’s 50-year journey to the limits of knowledge"

daveFNbuck — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 02:02:33 +0000

An algorithm can't have that property for its expected runtime, as it can only look at a sub-constant amount of the input of it runs in sub-constant time.

it's not possible for it to behave differently as n increases because it doesn't have enough time to distinguish between different values of n once it's large enough.

New comment by daveFNbuck in "Complexity theory’s 50-year journey to the limits of knowledge"

daveFNbuck — Sun, 20 Aug 2023 06:56:48 +0000

That's what I'm saying. The runtime will go down to a constant. It can't keep decreasing forever.

New comment by daveFNbuck in "Complexity theory’s 50-year journey to the limits of knowledge"

daveFNbuck — Sun, 20 Aug 2023 06:55:08 +0000

I'm not sure what your big-O expression is supposed to mean, but if a sequence is decreasing and bounded below (which runtime is) then it has a limit. Since the sequence is discrete, it can't get arbitrarily close to the limit without reaching it. So at some point the runtime will stop decreasing.

You can approximate the runtime with a function that decreases forever, but the actual runtime will be constant for large enough n.

New comment by daveFNbuck in "Complexity theory’s 50-year journey to the limits of knowledge"

daveFNbuck — Sat, 19 Aug 2023 18:19:26 +0000

> Running any (halting) algorithm on a human computer is constant time, because you're bound by the number of states you can fit into some terabytes, but nobody should actually try to use that as a final analysis.

That's the sort of thing I would usually say to explain why we do things like use asymptomatic analysis and ignore polynomial factors. If you have a different solution, that's great, but you're no longer taking about the kind of runtime the article is about.

New comment by daveFNbuck in "Complexity theory’s 50-year journey to the limits of knowledge"

daveFNbuck — Sat, 19 Aug 2023 16:09:42 +0000

"constant time" in complexity theory just means there's a constant bound on runtime. It doesn't have to actually have the exact same runtime down to the instruction for every input. Here, the bound would be a quadrillion.

Of course, showing a constant upper-bound doesn't tell us that it isn't even faster than constant as in the proposition I was responding to. That's why I focused on the constant lower-bound.

New comment by daveFNbuck in "Complexity theory’s 50-year journey to the limits of knowledge"

daveFNbuck — Sat, 19 Aug 2023 15:12:23 +0000

You can't have that because when N=K that's not a valid expression and when N>K you're putting a negative number in the big-O notation. You can't have negative runtime.

All algorithms have a lower-bound on runtime of 1. If a sequence is decreasing and bounded below, it converges to a value [1]. If the sequence is discrete, that means it reaches exactly that limit and never deviates from it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotone_convergence_theorem