Hacker News Reader

Hmmm... How about a one's complement system? For example if A owed B 24 dollars, A would wear the bands 1100111 = -24 and B would wear 0011000 = 24. This way, they would only need 7 bands between the two of them, yet each person would know how much they owed or were owed. Also, no matter the balance, each of the bands would be worn by one of them, so there would be no need to carry around extra bands.

View on HN

I found the redundancy of having the same number stored on both also unnecessary, and a scheme that just reorganized where the bracelets are seems better. The "friendship" component of having identical bracelets is lost, but information density is certainly improved. Instead of considering this as one's complement, just give the right bracelet sum to one person and all the rest of the bracelets to the other.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com