Hacker News: travisjungroth

New comment by travisjungroth in "You can beat the binary search"

travisjungroth — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 22:10:03 +0000

> If we would guess that there is a bias in the distribution based on recently seen elements, the guess is at least as likely to be wrong as it is to be right.

This is true for abstract and random data. I don't think it's true for real world data.

For example, python's sort function "knows nothing" about the data you're passing in. But, it does look for some shortcuts and these end up saving time, on average.

New comment by travisjungroth in "South Korea police arrest man for posting AI photo of runaway wolf"

travisjungroth — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 14:56:38 +0000

Or like $5. This is the kind of thing it was very easy to hire people for. Dropping the price to near zero exploded the usage, though.

New comment by travisjungroth in "I don't want your PRs anymore"

travisjungroth — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 21:37:43 +0000

Neither are bug reports or feature requests.

New comment by travisjungroth in "NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers"

travisjungroth — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 02:31:15 +0000

I want all the colors! Give me the full spectral power distribution!

New comment by travisjungroth in "NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers"

travisjungroth — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 02:25:28 +0000

The name for the color doesn’t exist before the name. But, you can distinguish all sorts of colors you don’t know the name for. Look at a smooth color wheel or a wall of paint swatches.

New comment by travisjungroth in "South Korea introduces universal basic mobile data access"

travisjungroth — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 17:03:27 +0000

The provided rights are called positive rights, and the not infringe rights are called negative rights. Freedom of speech is a negative right and a right to legal counsel is a positive right.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights

New comment by travisjungroth in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

travisjungroth — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 19:09:53 +0000

It keeps it shorter.

New comment by travisjungroth in "Show HN: I built a frontpage for personal blogs"

travisjungroth — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 14:46:24 +0000

That sounds like PageRank, Google’s original algorithm.

New comment by travisjungroth in "Combinators"

travisjungroth — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 22:12:21 +0000

Perfectly clearly, just for a different audience.

New comment by travisjungroth in "Combinators"

travisjungroth — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 17:09:04 +0000

No one who would ask that question would be able to understand your answer.

New comment by travisjungroth in "Combinators"

travisjungroth — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 17:07:14 +0000

More directly than the other comments: No you can’t solve for x and y here and yes your intuition is wrong.

These are functions. I don’t know your level of knowledge in math or programming and what that would mean to you. Here’s an example.

double(x) -> x*2

So, double(3) = 6. You can’t solve for x because x doesn't have a value. It’s a placeholder for whatever you put in.

These combinators are functions that take other functions and return them unmodified. “Unmodified” is a little misleading because it can do things like drop inputs.

New comment by travisjungroth in "A review of dice that came with the white castle"

travisjungroth — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 17:44:08 +0000

Yeah, I’m surprised this didn’t get a low impact. If just setting initial board state isn’t low, what is?

New comment by travisjungroth in "A Review of Dice that came with The White Castle (2025)"

travisjungroth — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 17:43:09 +0000

Wouldn’t that be hours and really really slowly? Could do seconds mod 12 (or any other factor of 60, which is a lot).

New comment by travisjungroth in "A Review of Dice that came with The White Castle (2025)"

travisjungroth — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 17:36:48 +0000

It’s pseudorandom. It’s predictable in theory because if you had another watch, or an amazing sense of time, you could predict it. Is that realistic? Not really.

Computers use their clock to generate pseudorandom numbers all the time (hehe). It’s great randomness for something like shuffling songs or a sorting algorithm. You don’t want to use it with some “adversarial”, like online poker.

New comment by travisjungroth in "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story"

travisjungroth — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 18:45:00 +0000

It's a bad idea to reward death threats like that. There would be more of them in the future.

New comment by travisjungroth in "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story"

travisjungroth — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:07:41 +0000

That would mean the people who did the death threats get their money back.

New comment by travisjungroth in "I beg you to follow Crocker's Rules, even if you will be rude to me"

travisjungroth — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 05:16:02 +0000

> “It looks like” concisely signals that you have a good faith belief in your diagnosis but are not certain.

A lot of people never get past this level of sureness, so the signal is lost (or at least compressed). You can ask them for a number from a digital display and they’ll say it “looks like 54”.

One way to rectify the idea that these messages have signal (which I agree with) and what the article says is that it’s declaring bankruptcy on additional context. The extra text has so little value it’s worth removing as a rule.

New comment by travisjungroth in "Games with loot boxes to get minimum 16 age rating across Europe"

travisjungroth — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 04:36:04 +0000

Woah, you can sell it back to them? That’s normally the line that isn’t crossed. You sell it at the store next door (pachinko) or on the open market (trading card games and digital items).

Prisoner's Dilemma in World Baseball Classic for Mexico and Italy Threatens USA

travisjungroth — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 07:37:44 +0000

With USA losing to Italy 8-6 in the group stage, tie breaking rules are at play.

Only two of these three teams can advance. Italy and Mexico are set to play each other at 7pm ET tomorrow.

Winner advances.

If Mexico wins with 4 or less runs, they both advance. (Maybe as many as 5 in an extra innings situation).

Italy advancing by winning would give them a better seed than by losing.

This creates a situation where Mexico winning with a low score lets them both advance. Going for this intentionally would be cooperation. Going straight for the win is defecting.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47332658

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by travisjungroth in "Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults"

travisjungroth — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 15:58:06 +0000

Birthday, zip code and gender is enough to uniquely identify most Americans.