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Comment by plafl | Hacker News Reader

I find amusing the fractal nature of the universe: we say that some problems are complex (i.e NP-Hard) because no matter the algorithm you design I can devise a problem instance that will take exponential time for your algorithm (informal explanation). Clearly designing metrics for human is even worse: no matter the metric, people will find a way not only to make it hard to measure, but to make the metric fail. Which takes me to the following strengthening of the Turing test:

A true AI will not only pass the Turing test, it will do so by cheating.

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Ironically, cheating on exams gives the cheater a form of "artificial intelligence".

I know you stated that's it's informal explanation, but please don't conflate nondeterministic-polynomial with non-polynomial.

I have a proof that NP(Non Deterministic Polynomial)-Hard = Non Polynomial, but it's too long for a HN comment

A link is never too long for a HN comment

If you don't care about IE and Edge compatibility a link can be too long for an HN comment.

Well then I'd recommend using a URL shortener

That raises the question of how long a link the URL shorteners can handle.

The HTTP specs places no limit on URL length. All the specs say is that browsers have finite limits and recommend that everything that transmits or receives URLs allows at least 8000 characters.

A bit of Googling suggests that Chrome can handle URLs of up to 2 MB, Safari 80K, and Firefox somewhere above 64K.

I can't find anything on how long a URL that the popular shorteners can handle.

That gave me an interesting idea.

A URL shortener as a method of data exchange.

The data URI spec does not define a size limit but says applications may impose their own.

Chrome - 2MB for the current document. Otherwise the limit is the in-memory storage limit for arbitrary blobs: if x64 and NOT ChromeOS or Android, then 2GB; otherwise, total_physical_memory / 5 (source). Firefox - unlimited IE ≥ 9 & Edge - 4GB

You also could use blob URLs, which have a 500Mb limit.

An example: 1. Alice constructs a data url with the base64 encoding of a zipped and encrypted document, submits it to her favorite URL shortener and gets a short URL back. 2. Alice transmits the short URL to Bob, perhaps as metadata in an cryptocurrency transaction. 3. Bob receives the short URL, navigates to it in a modern browser and extracts the data.

This is not anonymous unless the shortener is guaranteed anonymous, which it won't be.

I already built a good bit of that: https://thoughts.willcipriano.com/podjeli-a-new-way-to-share...

I used to leave myself messages or short text snippets by requesting a nonexistent page on my website and adding the text as a GET query in the URL. I had my log autorotation set to email me logs after a day or two. So later in the week, when I wanted to retrieve the information, I could just search my email for the name of the nonexistent page, and the text would show up in the relevant access.log. It worked okay for what I needed and aside from the log setup (or grep'ing the apache logs) required no code.

then link it...

I am attaching a file that contains a detailed explanation.[1]

[1] thatsthejoke.jpg

I have been had it seems

(I enjoyed the pun) On the right is the margin that was too small to contain Fermat's alleged proof of his "last theorem".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_Last_Theorem

Something about dry humor and HN comments just hits different. Well-played :)

So many commenters who don't know Fermat.

Kirk cheats because he does not accept no-win scenarios :-) https://youtu.be/qs0J2F3ErMc

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