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devinj

687 karma · joined February 25, 2010

I'm a programmer who enjoys video games and long walks on the beach.
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devinj··on Android Game "Push Down" shown to be NP-Complete
No, NP Completeness states that you can go either way.

Specifically: A problem X is NP Complete if:

1: X is in NP.

2: Every problem in P can be reduced to X in polynomial time.

We have established the first condition by intuition-- pathfinding is easy. Immediately, we know, then, that there exists some way to reduce this to 3-SAT, in a way general for any level. Reducing 3-SAT to this, however, proves the second criterion (because 3-SAT is NP-complete, so by doing two reductions you can reduce any NP problem to this, in time at worst the cost of doing sum of the two polynomials describing the complexity of the reductions).

So we can also convert 3-SAT-- or any NP-complete problem, in fact, and even more generally, any NP problem-- to this in poly-time.

devinj··on The Hard Problem of Consciousness
Aha! This had been troubling me for some time, but I didn't have a name for it. Now I do. Thank you.
devinj··on On Geeks and Gays
+1. Yeah, I was only thinking of his work on computation (not even AI!). I should have been more clear.
devinj··on On Geeks and Gays
Other people did do it, and even at nearly the exact same time. Turing just did it more convincingly. (See: Alonzo Church and the Lambda calculus).
devinj··on US newspaper circulation drops 8.74% during last six months
What's new about this technology, or swift about this decline? The web has been around since I was a kid. I still don't even know what's changed.
devinj··on On Geeks and Gays
Magical quality? Well, 2 genders instead of one. I don't find the idea that children take their cues depending on the gender of the parent at all unreasonable. It's certainly entered the common mind as an idea of what happens. Is it true? No idea, haven't seen any research on it. But there's at least a possible basis for the "magical" quality of gender being important.
devinj··on Don’t talk to aliens, warns Stephen Hawking
There is no "human logic". Logic is logic. It encompasses thoughts both natural and foreign. Who, for example, really finds the Banach-Tarski paradox intuitive? And yet it's logical. In fact, it follows from somewhat intuitive logical rules. But, hell, we can throw those out, too. We can accept a logic that, for example, rejects the entire concept of implication and the principle of explosion. A logic which can have two contradictory things both be true, without causing the system itself to fail. The limits of logic have nothing to do with what is natural to humans.

Axioms are not things that exist just floating in space, but neither are they things that only exist to a human mind. Logical implications can be defined, and inferred, in a useful way that applies to systems that don't understand logic at all! Even if aliens thought in a way entirely, well, "alien" to us, they could still be described by logic, even if they themselves found the idea patently ridiculous, because even their formation followed physical laws, and their development followed biological laws.

Perhaps not laws that we are familiar with. Perhaps the life we hypothetically encounter is just one monolithic life-form that developed in solitude on a planet, and self-developed. Normal rules of evolution do not apply when there is only one creature. But, that's not to say that there were no rules. For to survive, it still must have done something right. And in a universe with some known laws, what is right to survive can be surmised quickly: it obviously didn't jump into its sun right away and perish. Suicide cannot coexist with life. So already we can figure out one thing: this singular life-form that "evolved" in such a strange manner does not commit suicide. Other aspects might be harder to find. Is it peaceful? There's no way of knowing. Whether it's peaceful or not has nothing to do with whether it survived and developed to get here, because it developed entirely in solitude. But, is it very sociable? Almost certainly not. A thing that has never before seen other life won't even comprehend what it is to be social. It's just like us examining quantum physics. What on earth is going on? We can't understand things totally outside of our experience except by analogy and coincidence, and here there is almost definitely no analogy, only a freak coincidence of mental structure.

So you see, we can reason about things logically, even if they are alien. We've reasoned about quantum mechanics, despite never seeing it, and despite never even understanding it. We've reasoned about single-celled organisms, things that are incapable of even thinking. We have reasoned about automata and machines, about chemical and nuclear reactions on a scale so far beyond the realm of our comprehension that we can never hope to appreciate it on anything more than a dumb, primitive level. We do it even if we don't understand, because the tools of logic are universal. Not by virtue of some belief or god, but simply because things have patterns. Even alien things.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach-Tarski_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraconsistent_logic

devinj··on Don’t talk to aliens, warns Stephen Hawking
Given the highly logical minds required to develop technology that could let them traverse the stars, assuming them to make a decent cost-benefit analysis is not unreasonable. If they raided Earth for resources, it would either be because we had something rare, or because they're malicious sons of bitches.

You make it sound as if there'd be no reason at all. There's always a reason, and it's generally comprehensible even to us. We can understand the motivations or behaviors of non-human life just fine so far, and we have examples of our continued understanding all around, ranging from simple single-celled life forms to complex plants, animals, etc. . Why should life be incomprehensibly different "out there"? It can be modeled, motivations examined. Basic evolution will most likely still apply. They want to survive, and this is a basic logical tenet that weaves the fabric of the psychology of any lifeform.

devinj··on Optical illusion of motion
Eh? It only has to move relative to the image behind it. Parallax should do the work here.
devinj··on Video Games Can Never Be Art
And what if I don't agree with your definition of "stupid"? Or, "hopeless"? Or "definition", for that matter!

All words are ambiguous. What we interpret them to mean is not some hard concept, but the sum of a range of lifetime experiences with that word, giving it subtle nuance between people that nominally agree, and often more significant differences that lead people to disagree. One of the easier examples are, for example, the words "geek", "nerd", and "dork". Another one is "hacker", which is part of the title of the very site we're talking on.

devinj··on Video Games Can Never Be Art
No artist has a free hand. Just as the architect cannot create something unsound, the sculptor cannot create something that moves or speaks. The musician cannot include visuals, and cannot use sounds that are outside the range of human hearing. The painter cannot use motion.

I would argue that limitations are part of what creates truly great art. Specifically, transcending the limitations to create something altogether other, evoking an unexpected reaction. For example, a painting that evokes the feeling of motion is far more impressive than a short clip of an object in motion. We want things that are more than the sum of their parts.

devinj··on HTML5 presentation
That's nice and all, but Firefox is still one of the biggest browsers out there. It's not obsolete, and you can't ignore it if you value users. In fairness, not everyone values users.
devinj··on Overall I was happy with the license conditions...
See, I don't know. I sort of understand the appeal of having a one-sentence license you can just give people, but at the same time I like attribution, and the WTFPL doesn't offer that. In fact, it explicitly gives it away. Are people allowed to take my work and pretend its theirs? I don't know. I'm guessing it depends on the legal system. I definitely don't like that.

It's not like BSD or MIT licenses are much longer (and the size of my LICENSE file doesn't keep me up at night). And "you can do WTF you want" is about as short as "it's MIT-licensed", and carries almost the same meaning.

devinj··on Nakatomi Space
Consumed and processed by you, perhaps. The film was released (somewhat shortly) before I was even born. I watched Die Hard for the first time last year. Before then, the only thing I knew about it was that it had Bruce Willis in it. I don't think I'm particularly special, I just don't watch that many old movies.

The point is, spoiling it adds nothing to the conversation: "I watched the movie and you got this plot element that, while important to the film, is completely unimportant to your point ... wrong!". On the other hand, not spoiling it lets anyone a bit too young to have seen it the first time around not have their experience of the film permanently altered for the worse. There is no contest. Don't spoil things, even if it's old as hell. It really, honestly ruins things for some people who are a bit behind the times and care about this sort of thing.

devinj··on Nakatomi Space
Also, it conveniently avoids spoilers.
devinj··on Ask YC Archive
There's no reason the sections can't be given constant names-- instead of #toc29 you could have #visas. This would avoid the explanation of how links can break, as well as avoid breaking links (and, as a bonus, you can stay backwards-compatible in the transition). Though of course, this does require you to update it, blah blah blah. Perhaps consider it in the future? :)

Very nice collection, of course.

devinj··on Ask HN: Is HN Ignoring The Long Tail?
I see plenty of posts with 10 points on the front page. This was one of them.
devinj··on Is Lisp just too hard?
Yeah, I agree, it's just about as easy to compute Lisp arithmetic as infix arithmetic.

The problem, for me, is that it's not as easy to understand, read, or write. By this, I mean that most of the time that I'm reading an arithmetical expression, I don't really care what it means. I am only reading it because it's easier to just read it than to look for where it ends and continue. It's fluff. Not being as comfortable with prefix, and probably never being as comfortable with infix, it's not as friendly to the eyes.

When I need to understand it, I'm basically converting to infix-- I think in infix, not prefix. The parentheses in the infix expression are mental and implicit, and I think my mental notation is more than adequate. Prefix form gets in the way here.

And obviously, it's more of a pain to write fully parenthesized arithmetic than not.

devinj··on We are like prisoners... We do not have a life, only work.
Actually, no, that's not how economics has always worked. Mercantilism was very popular before free market capitalism came along.
devinj··on Java drops to #2 in TIOBE index
Is it cause for concern, or just a statistically insignificant blip?

It seems obvious to me that it is neither. Even among java programmers, a miniscule fall that brought it a tiny bit below another language that isn't generally used for the same things as Java is totally unimportant. Not to mention other JVM languages are climbing up the rankings. And it's not very sound as a basis for what languages are important.

And it's definitely not a blip. Java's been going down for years in the TIOBE rankings.

devinj··on Eric Schmidt Is the Nicest Guy in Tech
No, no, the correct company to choose for that joke is Nokia! Argh you've ruined everything!
devinj··on Eric Schmidt Is the Nicest Guy in Tech
You're missing a word (my guess from context: "stop").
devinj··on How "elite" dating websites scam people
I think what is most apparent is that different people drink different ways. There is nothing unreasonable about the "hypothetical" case.
devinj··on Paul Graham's Infatuation with the Concept of Hacker
Everybody should program computers. Everybody can program them.

I was with you up until this point. I don't know that everyone can program computers, and it's quite possible that many people cannot.

Observe: some people cannot, as programming requires intelligence and some people are in fact no more intelligent than vegetables, usually due to brain damage. If we progress further we have people that are capable of simple thought, but cannot even recognize themselves in the mirror. Somewhere down the line of progression (since we cannot really rank intelligence, let's assume we are progressing in whatever "direction" of intelligence leads to the ability to program [if there is more than one, pick one arbitrarily]) we can choose a brain which gives people the ability to construct rudimentary programs. I admit the line here is extremely fuzzy, because programs can vary in complexity: the least you need is to be able to remember two words: "print 'hi'". At this point our knowledge goes to hell, it's not really clear what functions of our minds are necessary to construct and understand varying levels of program complexity, or whether anything special is required at all. Simple statements like "everybody can program", or "only some can program" gloss over extremely complicated neurological (possibly psychological, as well) issues that won't be resolved for some time, and have no known answer.

We may believe it to be true, but I would say such a belief is heavily influenced by our own experiences, as well as our own socialization with people that share that experience. We can program, why couldn't others? It's tempting to believe that because it was true for us it's true for everyone, but sadly (or not so sadly) this really isn't always true. Stating as fact that everyone can reeks of bias and optimism, because honestly it just isn't that simple.

devinj··on How "elite" dating websites scam people
Oops, I misremembered. I was thinking of Ein-Stein, not Molly's.
devinj··on Designing for iPad: Reality Check
It's one thing to calibrate, it's another to rely on context-sensitive data and pretend it is universal, when instead you can just rely on the context-specific data for any specific context and refine the estimates as you go. To my knowledge, web browsers do not "calibrate" like this.
devinj··on How "elite" dating websites scam people
I'd need more beers to get a buzz, of course, but honestly I have no idea how many it'd take. I was working under the assumption we were only having one.

As for what food costs $5, I'm eating pasta and instant noodles, at the moment. It's not healthy if it's all you eat, of course. At the bar you could spend the money on a burger or whatever.

devinj··on How "elite" dating websites scam people
I don't drink much. I was using Molly's as a bar benchmark ($10 for a pitcher), and the first price was just from an LCBO.
devinj··on Designing for iPad: Reality Check
Yeah, that's where I went from "this could be useful" to "that's stupid". It's like doing an internet speed test to determine how long it will take to download a file, ignoring how fast the file has actually been downloading.
devinj··on How "elite" dating websites scam people
Your town must be expensive. In Toronto, a beer costs about 2 CAD, which is also 2 USD (we have reached parity again). This is true even if you get it at a bar, provided you get it as a pitcher. The food then costs maybe $5 on top of that. So this is $7 per-night under the described rules ("a drink every week with some friends"), which allows just over 4 nights out with a budget of $30. And that's only if you're buying food there, too (bad idea, honestly, you can feed yourself for a week with $5 of food if you're smart. Rich people confound me.)

It's possible you go to more expensive pubs than I, but paying over $30 for a night out sounds ridiculous.

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