Hacker News: supernewton

New comment by supernewton in "Solving a “Layton Puzzle” with Prolog"

supernewton — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 22:15:45 +0000

Dan and Lisa's answers agree on all but problems 6 and 9, and Dan got two more correct than Lisa. So Dan is correct on both 6 and 9. Therefore, Mary is incorrect on 6 and 9. So she got seven of the other eight correct, and Dan got three of the other eight correct. But on those eight problems, Mary and Dan disagree on only problems 2, 3, 5, and 10, therefore Mary got all four of those correct. Then Mary got three of problems 1, 4, 7, 8 correct, but everyone answered the same way on those, so Colin got three right on those problems as well. Then read off the deduced answer key for the other six problems to get Colin's final score.

New comment by supernewton in "Backyard Cyanide"

supernewton — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 19:23:08 +0000

Your body actually produces a small amount of cyanide endogenously, if it makes you feel any better. It has some role in cell signalling.

New comment by supernewton in "Terence Tao – Machine-Assisted Proofs [video]"

supernewton — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 13:55:39 +0000

Note that being able to do this would imply P=NP.

New comment by supernewton in "Show HN: Value likelihoods for OpenAI structured output"

supernewton — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 19:55:56 +0000

I feel like https://xkcd.com/221/ might be heavily influencing what the typical "random" die roll looks like on the internet ;)

New comment by supernewton in "Who Can Understand the Proof? A Window on Formalized Mathematics"

supernewton — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 16:06:09 +0000

The thing you're missing is that at no point is it assumed that there are exactly two elements in a boolean algebra. In fact you can have a boolean algebra with four elements (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_algebra_(structure)).

New comment by supernewton in "Show HN: Cardstock- Free TCG Proxy Manager for Magic, Yugioh, & Pokemon"

supernewton — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 19:34:09 +0000

Wizards of the Coast's in-house card database (Gatherer) is basically not maintained at all. I think they're very happy there is a third party willing to do that for free, and for a game with as much history as Magic, having a searchable card database is basically mandatory.

New comment by supernewton in "A visual proof that a^2 – b^2 = (a + b)(a – b)"

supernewton — Sun, 15 Dec 2024 14:48:02 +0000

It is not. a and b are not symmetric in this equation, you can't just swap them.

New comment by supernewton in "The case against Google's claims of "quantum supremacy""

supernewton — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 17:14:06 +0000

You know he's been responding directly on Scott Aaronson's blog, right?

New comment by supernewton in "Every board game rulebook is awful [pdf]"

supernewton — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 22:56:53 +0000

This is covered by the article. A board game might take 4 people and 2 hours to play. If your three friends didn't have fun with a board game the first time, they probably won't want to play again, and so you won't be able to play again either. Therefore there is a strong drive among boardgamers to play the "full" game the first time, because there might not be a second time.

It also adds extra difficulty to design a game that even has a simple version that is fun to play. Take your Texas Hold'em example, imagine it takes 2 hours to play one game. If you start with a version that has all cards face-up and no betting, people would conclude that Texas Hold'em is a supremely boring game, and wouldn't bother to try the full Texas Hold'em experience!

New comment by supernewton in "Boeing ends crippling strike as workers accept latest offer"

supernewton — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 19:06:45 +0000

An American's life expectancy when they're born is around 76. But the life expectancy among Americans that have already lived to the age of 65 is more like 83.

New comment by supernewton in "The bunkbed conjecture is false"

supernewton — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 22:18:07 +0000

The conjecture is true for all small graphs that they tried, so if it's "obviously" false to you then something went wrong with your intuition somewhere.

New comment by supernewton in "Judges rule Big Tech's free ride on Section 230 is over"

supernewton — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 18:13:44 +0000

The third sentence is "If the kid searched specifically for the video and found it, TikTok would have been safe."

New comment by supernewton in "Why Triplebyte Failed"

supernewton — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 20:40:05 +0000

For air transport in the U.S., it's not just one certificate, it's many. You get your private license, instrument rating, multi-engine rating, commercial certificate, instructor certificate, and finally the air transport certificate. And you're not allowed to even think about that last step until you've accumulated 1500 flight hours on the previous steps. Being allowed to write a Javascript login page is easy pickings compared to that.

New comment by supernewton in "P vs. NP and the Computational Complexity Zoo (2014) [video]"

supernewton — Wed, 01 May 2024 13:41:23 +0000

Sure, but in practice there don't really seem to exist "natural" problems that are both in P and are worse than O(n^3) or so.

By "natural" I mean a problem that one would actually want to solve, not some contrived problem specifically to make it O(n^100) since that's obviously easily possible.

New comment by supernewton in "P vs. NP and the Computational Complexity Zoo (2014) [video]"

supernewton — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 18:12:49 +0000

You don't get to have "hidden information". The code used to respond "yes" or "no" to the guess would be part of the problem input. But, we currently can't prove there doesn't exist some algorithm that can examine that code and figure out what the "yes" input is faster than brute forcing all inputs.

New comment by supernewton in "Parsing: The Solved Problem That Isn't (2011)"

supernewton — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 15:01:58 +0000

Ambiguous parses aren't even the worst of it -- the worst are the ones that require real world knowledge.

"I couldn't fit the trophy in my suitcase because it was too big."

"I couldn't fit the trophy in my suitcase because it was too small."

New comment by supernewton in "What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)"

supernewton — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 20:16:54 +0000

Similarly, Vatican City has slightly less than 6 popes per square mile.

New comment by supernewton in "What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)"

supernewton — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 20:09:27 +0000

Anecdotally, with practice, some people can flip a coin to a desired outcome like 65% of the time. And .65^20 is only around 1 in 10,000.

New comment by supernewton in "$10M AI Mathematical Olympiad Prize"

supernewton — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 18:48:49 +0000

They're the feeder contests in the U.S. that determine who gets to represent the U.S. in the IMO.

AMC = multiple choice test, open to all grade school students.

AIME = open response test, all answers are numerical, open to students who score high enough on AMC only.

USAMO = USA Math Olympiad. IMO-style proof problems. Open only to top N scorers on AMC and AIME.

New comment by supernewton in "The Bluffers Guide to the Mythical Man Month"

supernewton — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 18:31:27 +0000

Laypeople use "exponential" to mean "superlinear". It's fine, probably.