Hacker News: timjver

New comment by timjver in "Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem"

timjver — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 08:29:33 +0000

Verifying that every step in a (potentially long) proof is sound can of course be much, much harder than verifying that a definition is correct. That's kind of the whole point.

New comment by timjver in "Bybit loses $1.5B in hack but can cover loss, CEO confirms"

timjver — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 06:40:32 +0000

By "online wallet" they were likely referring to the Bybit website being the wallet of those customers that held their coins there rather than keeping them in their own private wallets, and not whether the hack involved a hot wallet or a cold wallet. Calling it a custodial wallet would have been more accurate.

New comment by timjver in "OK, I can partly explain the LLM chess weirdness now"

timjver — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 15:54:18 +0000

> It would be similar to if I claimed that an LLM is an expert doctor, but in my data I've filtered out all of the times it gave incorrect medical advice.

Computationally it's trivial to detect illegal moves, so it's nothing like filtering out incorrect medical advice.

New comment by timjver in "Earth has caught a 'second moon'"

timjver — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 19:11:40 +0000

> in the absence of other celestial bodies the satellite would be in a stable orbit

Presumably entering such an orbit is only possible due to forces from other celestial bodies in the first place, since otherwise if you reversed time it would spontaneously leave its orbit. In other words, the act of the earth "capturing" the object is ultimately performed by external forces?

Pulley system composition – a systematic approach (2020)

timjver — Wed, 08 May 2024 12:48:19 +0000

Article URL: https://www.kiipeilytuomas.fi/articles-in-english/pulley-system-composition-a-systematic-approach/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40297502

Points: 66

# Comments: 17

New comment by timjver in "Code Llama, a state-of-the-art large language model for coding"

timjver — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 08:23:16 +0000

They said nothing about not printing any non-primes.

New comment by timjver in "Cowboy rides to the rescue of VanMoof owners with app to unlock threatened bikes"

timjver — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 19:32:01 +0000

VanMoof bikes are known for breaking quickly. Calling them "so much better" than Cowboy based on a single bad experience doesn't seem totally reasonable.

New comment by timjver in "Can a Rubik's Cube be brute-forced?"

timjver — Sun, 09 Jul 2023 06:52:20 +0000

Simply twisting a single corner piece or flipping a single edge piece achieves that already, without having to mess with the stickers.

New comment by timjver in "Freeform: a new app designed for creative collaboration"

timjver — Wed, 21 Dec 2022 16:11:38 +0000

Whether or not it is a coincidence depends on whether Obsidian planned this. Apple isn't going to base their release schedule on something like this.

New comment by timjver in "Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)"

timjver — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 20:15:43 +0000

Give Copilot a try, it has been way more reliable for me in terms of giving good code suggestions than ChatGPT so far.

New comment by timjver in "Placing #1 in Advent of Code with GPT-3"

timjver — Sun, 04 Dec 2022 15:13:56 +0000

That's probably an impossible task. The best they can do is ask contestants nicely not to do this, but that opens the can of worms of whether tools like GitHub Copilot should not be allowed, either.

New comment by timjver in "In defense of linked lists"

timjver — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 21:50:16 +0000

Just in case performance matters, there is a more efficient way: have the tortoise stay in place and advance the hare only one node at a time, and assign the hare to the tortoise every time a power of 2 number of steps have been made. This is known as Brent's algorithm, and it requires fewer advancements than the original tortoise and hare algorithm by Floyd.

Another notable advantage of Brent's algorithm is that it automatically finds the cycle length, rather than (in Floyd's case) any multiple of the cycle length.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_detection#Brent's_algori...

New comment by timjver in "Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program"

timjver — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 12:13:01 +0000

Right, but will they be eligible the year after? If not, then this still means that not surpassing the threshold could increase their revenue in the long run.

New comment by timjver in "A Sad Day for Rust"

timjver — Sat, 18 Jan 2020 03:09:46 +0000

Not to mention that that was a comment on GitHub, not on Reddit, even though the "far, far, far over the line" statement was about "the now-usual Reddit uproar". I guess Klabnik just really dislikes Reddit.

New comment by timjver in "A Sad Day for Rust"

timjver — Sat, 18 Jan 2020 03:07:05 +0000

Yeah, that comment on the GitHub issue was definitely over the line, but it wasn't on Reddit. The comments in the subreddit were higher in volume, but way more reasonable.

New comment by timjver in "A Sad Day for Rust"

timjver — Fri, 17 Jan 2020 20:46:54 +0000

This could very well be thanks to the moderators, but I hardly saw any nasty comments on r/rust. People were critical of the actix maintainer, sure, but I didn't see anything that crossed the line. Some comments in the GitHub issues were indeed nasty, but those were actually called out on the subreddit.

There's no way for me to know for sure, but it seems as though Klabnik was exaggerating here.

New comment by timjver in "Seemingly Impossible Swift Programs"

timjver — Mon, 10 Dec 2018 20:33:09 +0000

You're not wrong, but the author's code does in no way rely on the fact that you could theoretically iterate over all the valid Int values in Swift, so it would have made no difference if the Int type was somehow truly infinite.

And the author clearly acknowledges this:

>it’s best to think of Int as modeling the infinite set of all integers

New comment by timjver in "Extending optionals in Swift"

timjver — Sun, 18 Nov 2018 20:07:57 +0000

I'm not a huge fan of Optional.matching (also commonly called Optional.filter) because you may want to "filter" non-optionals as well, i.e. T -> Optional given a predicate. Unfortunately Swift doesn't (yet?) allow writing extensions on any generic T and the alternatives are a free function and an Optional initialiser, neither of which allows you to easily chain them. (Another alternative is a custom operator, but let's not.)

So perhaps the best we can do is Optional.matching as defined in the post, combined with turning a non-optional into an optional using Optional(...) in case we want to "filter" non-optional values using a predicate.

New comment by timjver in "Amateur Mathematician Finds Smallest Universal Cover"

timjver — Fri, 16 Nov 2018 06:28:49 +0000

I think the lack of left-right symmetry was the surprising bit.

New comment by timjver in "EU to stop changing the clocks in 2019"

timjver — Tue, 18 Sep 2018 08:26:39 +0000

>but still we may introduce the problem to places that did not have it before.

And perhaps in some places this will cause the problem to disappear. I think it will be fine.