Hacker News: randomizedalgs

New comment by randomizedalgs in "Containment and monitoring failures are to blame for AI hacking reports: experts"

randomizedalgs — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 19:14:18 +0000

Both can be true at once: (1) AI agents are going rogue (2) And labs are skipping security basics

New comment by randomizedalgs in "ArXiv's Updated Rate Limit Policy"

randomizedalgs — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 13:23:21 +0000

In theoretical computer science, at least, researchers plan their work to finish on three major deadlines a year (SODA, STOC, FOCS). STOC [1] is requiring all submissions to be uploaded to ArXiv before submission, and allows up to 5 submissions per author. I wonder if they'll change their policy or instead adopt an additional de-facto limit of two per submitter.

[1] STOC 2027 Call for Papers https://acm-stoc.org/stoc2027/stoc2027-cfp.html

30% on AR-AGI-1 at $0.0007 per task

randomizedalgs — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 13:35:49 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09888

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49489813

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by randomizedalgs in "Why Erdős Problems Are Falling to AI"

randomizedalgs — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 15:55:25 +0000

Even the experts on the problem being solved find the writeups nearly impossible to read.

Example: https://nitter.poast.org/henryquantum/status/208362369543662...

Seems like a disservice to the community that openai put so little effort into producing good writeups...

New comment by randomizedalgs in "Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science"

randomizedalgs — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 06:25:28 +0000

After skimming some of the writeups, I'm surprised that the frontier internal model still writes just as poorly as Sol.

Maybe good AI paper writing is further away than I thought...

New comment by randomizedalgs in "“Erdos problem #728 was solved more or less autonomously by AI”"

randomizedalgs — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 18:13:02 +0000

I'm an active researcher in TCS. For me, AI has not been very helpful on technical things (or even technical writing), but has been super helpful for (1) literature reviews; (2) editing papers (e.g., changing a convention everywhere in the paper); and (3) generating Tikz figures/animations.

New comment by randomizedalgs in "NIH limits scientists to six applications per year"

randomizedalgs — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 14:05:03 +0000

For perspective, the CS programs in the NSF already have a two-submission limit per year [1].

Besides reducing the incentive to spam, this rule has had another positive effect: As a researcher without funding, you don't have to spend your whole year writing grants. You can, instead, spend your time on actual research.

With that said, NIH grants tend to me much more narrow than CS ones, and I imagine that it takes a lot more grants to keep a lab going...

[1] https://www.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/computer-informati...

New comment by randomizedalgs in "H-1B program grew 81 percent from 2011 to 2022"

randomizedalgs — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 17:13:52 +0000

For perspective, in the same time period, The number of employees at Google multiplied by five. I wouldn't be surprised if the growth of the software industry, at least, actually outpaced the increase in H-1B visas.

New comment by randomizedalgs in "H-1B program grew 81 percent from 2011 to 2022"

randomizedalgs — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 17:12:57 +0000

For perspective, in the same time period, The number of employees at Google multiplied by five. It seems likely that the number of highly educated positions, in general, increased by quite a bit during that time.

New comment by randomizedalgs in "Geometric Search Trees"

randomizedalgs — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 13:13:49 +0000

Cool paper!

As a small comment, this seems closely related to another recent paper: History-Independent Dynamic Partitioning: Operation-Order Privacy in Ordered Data Structures (PODS 2024, Best Paper).

I'm not sure how they compare, since neither paper seems to know about the other. And I'm also not sure which paper came first, since the geometric search paper does not seem to post a publication date.

New comment by randomizedalgs in "Big O Insights"

randomizedalgs — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 17:12:16 +0000

I don't think the claim is true in quite as much generality as the author claims. Some deterministic data structures use much more space than time, for example, the deterministic implementation of a Van Emde Boas tree.

New comment by randomizedalgs in "A visual interactive guide to Bloom filters"

randomizedalgs — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 00:13:25 +0000

Maybe quotient filters?

New comment by randomizedalgs in "Scientists find optimal space-time balance for hash tables"

randomizedalgs — Sun, 11 Feb 2024 13:05:05 +0000

I think you may have a backwards. Libcuckoo, CLHT, and TBB are widely used high performance C/C++ DRAM hash tables. I think TBB is the hash table Intel maintains, if I remember right.

So the DRAM experiments are apples to apples. It's actually the PMEM experiments, I think, that are comparing a new hash table on a new technology to previous hash tables that weren't designed specifically for that technology.

New comment by randomizedalgs in "Scientists find optimal space-time balance for hash tables"

randomizedalgs — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 04:53:56 +0000

I think these are more-often called "cache oblivious" algorithms

New comment by randomizedalgs in "Scientists find optimal space-time balance for hash tables"

randomizedalgs — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 04:50:48 +0000

IcebergHT isn't just for persistent memory (although I can see why you might think it is based on the paper's title). The paper also gives experiments showing that the hash table performs very well in standard RAM, much better than other concurrent implementations.

New comment by randomizedalgs in "Efficient parallelization of an ubiquitous sequential computation"

randomizedalgs — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 17:32:44 +0000

As a super minor grammar point for the author, "ubiquitous" is a rare example of a word that starts with a vowel but should be proceeded by "a" instead of "an".

New comment by randomizedalgs in "The Dunning-Kruger effect is autocorrelation"

randomizedalgs — Sat, 25 Nov 2023 21:36:02 +0000

Consider the imaginary world that the author describes, in which people's estimate of their score is independent of their actual score. Wouldn't it be fair to say that, in this imaginary world, the DK effect is real?

The point of the effect is that people who score low tend to overestimate their score and people who score high tend to underestimate. Of course there are lots of rational reasons why this could occur (including the toy example the author gave, where nobody has any good sense of what their score will be), but the phenomenon appears to me to be correct.

New comment by randomizedalgs in "The Simplest Interesting Algorithm (2019)"

randomizedalgs — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 21:29:55 +0000

The randomized version of this algorithm is also fun: repeatedly find an edge that is not yet covered, select one of the two end points at random, and add it to S.

It's a nice exercise to show that the randomized algorithm is also a 2-approximate algorithm, i.e., the size of S is at most twice the size of S_{OPT}, in expectation.

The Simplest Interesting Algorithm (2019)

randomizedalgs — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 21:25:06 +0000

Article URL: https://algorithmsoup.wordpress.com/2019/10/25/the-worlds-simplest-interesting-algorithm/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29544858

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

New comment by randomizedalgs in "Toyota owners have to pay $8/month to keep using their key fob for remote start"

randomizedalgs — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 21:21:23 +0000

This is a classic example of price discrimination. Slowly but surely, companies such as Toyota will converge to a state where every consumer individually pays the maximum amount that the consumer is willing to pay for the product.

$8 a month may not seem like much compared to the cost of a car, but that's the point. Toyota will be able to get free extra money from a large population of people (many of whom will later barely even remember that they are incurring this regular cost).