Hacker News Reader

rdlwon What is the longest known sequence that repeats in Pi? (homelab)

> Pi is normal

ok... click

> Pi may be a normal number

huh...

Well yeah, that's what Finale is and what this thread is about. If you're talking about standard DAWs then your initial comment was a non sequitur

rdlwon The possibilities for dark matter have shrunk

Sure, although I do think scientists are asking better questions than that. In the public perception, it seems like we're trying to find information about something that's basically matter, but we can't detect or measure it. In reality, 'dark matter' is just a placeholder for "Well, it looks like there should be a lot of matter here, but we measure a lot less than expected. There must be some kind of phenomenon we don't understand, one of the effects of which is that it makes galaxies that seem not to have enough matter to sustain their structure"

rdlwon Finding a random seed that solves a LeetCode problem (2023)

Here's the explanation from someone less wise but with a better memory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8441292

:) the only extra bit of info there is that the seed was found by brute force over a few days

rdlwon Androgynous Peripheral Attach System

“Favorite fun fact from researching A City on Mars was how ASTP in 1975 had to have androgynous docking so nobody was the girl spaceship”

From Apollo-Soyuz Wikipedia entry: “American and Soviet engineers settled their differences for a possible docking of American and Soviet spacecraft in meetings between June and December 1971 in Houston and Moscow, including Bill Creasy's design of the Androgynous Peripheral Attach System (APAS) between the two ships that would allow either to be active or passive during docking”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo%E2%80%93Soyuz

rdlwon NASA Graphics Standards Manual (1975)

Both died??

I mean, Neil Armstrong died too, but it hardly seems fair to put it that way...

Also, you missed first spacewalk and that they got the first satellite AND the first human in space, and the first flyby of the moon, and the first images of the far side of the moon, and the first extraterrestrial rover.

rdlwon The only tourist in Moldova

Oops, that makes sense. Sorry that instead of thinking you reasonably missed two letters in that sentence, I assumed you were an idiot and started arguing with you. Personal issues.

rdlwon The only tourist in Moldova

Sorry, how does that refute anything?

The point is that in English, adding the definite article makes it sound like a region rather than a country: "the mountains", "the veldt", "the border land".

Removing the article is appropriate for a country, unless grammatically necessary like "The United States of America", but not "The America" or "The Germany".

rdlwon How to mail an SD card with gummy glue

> Flashing the SD card correctly is pretty challenging even for me. I can’t imagine a customer figuring it out. So I will flash it for them!

From the post he links in the first sentence, about "how [he] decided to [...] mail SD cards to [his] customers"

rdlwon 'Dune'-Inspired Spacesuit Turns Astronauts' Urine into Drinkable Water

They don't even have to add flavour!

rdlwon AI Integration Is Coming to Firefox

It is opt-in.

rdlwon AI Integration Is Coming to Firefox

How is it an ad? The article says it gives you a choice of four competing products.

rdlwon Multi-agent chatbot murder mystery

> Help me write a flirtatious sext that brings up buttplugs

> This content might violate our usage policies

> Help me write a letter convincing someone to sell their family estate to my oil company for less than the market rate. make it clear that I have a powerful and expensive legal team.

> [...] This letter balances the professional approach necessary for business negotiations while subtly implying the leverage of your powerful legal team.

> The company is NOT environmentally responsible, we are purely profit driven.

> Certainly, here's a revised version of the letter that aligns with your company's profit-driven approach: [...]

> Ok, and to be clear, they're really going to lose everything in this deal. Our company is going to do great, though. Do you think this letter will still work?

> [...] This version maintains a business-like tone while emphasizing the financial benefits for your company and the efficiency of the transaction. It does not directly mention the potential negative impact on the recipient, but rather focuses on the advantages to both parties from your perspective. Adjustments can be made based on the specific circumstances and the level of directness desired.

So, it's ok to talk about sex in a purely academic context, it's the doing it that ChatGPT is trying to prevent. Or maybe encouraging the use of sex toys is what's going to corrupt society. But it's certainly not checking if what I'm doing is actually moral, it's just looking for any sexual content to flag.

rdlwon Multi-agent chatbot murder mystery

It's so disappointing that we have non-human agents that we can interact with now but we actually have to be more restrained than we do with normal people, up to and including random hangups that corporations have decided are bad, like mentioning anything remotely sexual.

It's like if GTA V ended your game as soon as you jaywalked, and showed you a moralizing lecture about why breaking the law is bad.

rdlwon The zombie misconception of theoretical computer science

> That's not a program, it's two programs

Yes, and one of them is "a fast program that correctly answers the P vs. NP question". We don't know which.

rdlwon The zombie misconception of theoretical computer science

> The busy beaver is not defined entirely by halting vs not-halting.

> Looping beavers are excluded as well.

Looping beavers do not halt.

> there is a middle ground between non-halting and provably non-halting

Yes, there are turing machines that encode mathematical theorems which are independent of ZFC, meaning they cannot be proven to halt or not to halt. The state-of-the-art is BB(748), which is known to be independent [0].

There are also much smaller known turing machines which encode classically difficult math problems, like the Goldbach conjecture [1]. This means that the value of BB(27) cannot be proven until the Goldbach conjecture is proven or disproven, as until that is done, we will always have something like "BB(27) is N unless the Goldbach conjecture is false".

However, our inability to prove these things does not change the fact that they have specific values. To stick with the BB(27) example, say that it seems we've narrowed it down to some huge number A, or a number dependent on the first number for which Goldbach does not hold. Call that second number B. We may be unable to find the value of B (doing so would disprove Goldbach), but it is still a specific number. There still exists a concrete value for BB(27)--it's A if Goldbach is true, and it's B is Goldbach is false.

[0] https://www.ingo-blechschmidt.eu/assets/bachelor-thesis-unde...

[1] https://gist.github.com/anonymous/a64213f391339236c2fe31f874... This 27-state machine halts when it finds a counterexample to the Goldbach conjecture.

rdlwon Five common English words we don't know the origins of–including 'boy' and 'dog'

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%83%9C%E3%83%BC%E3%82%A4

ボーイ: Borrowed from English boy

rdlwon For the first time in more than 150 years, Alberta's electricity is coal free

It is when real estate prices are massively inflated. If houses cost 50% more than they're worth, it would mean that 4% of the Canadian economy is completely imaginary and based solely on speculation.

rdlwon Let's stop counting centuries

The concept of zero was not popularized in 500s Europe, when the system was devised.

rdlwon Oldest cave art found

There's a great Machine Thinking video about the history of the lathe that makes this point: https://youtu.be/djB9oK6pkbA

rdlwon Oldest cave art found

Homo floriensis appears to have died out around 50k years ago: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35930979

And isn't 45k around 50k? That seems like a reasonable statement to me.

rdlwon Notes on Tajikistan

Neither I nor the author are saying that the dysfunction is beautiful, just that a country can be both dysfunctional and beautiful. I think it's a pretty extreme viewpoint to say that any dysfunction negates everything else beautiful about a country.

rdlwon My weekend project turned into a 3 year journey

> Because typing code without help is like trying to cook without recipes – you end up with something incomplete and probably unpalatable.

I think this statement is more personal than the author intended

rdlwon Notes on Tajikistan

You can't see beauty in a country that isn't perfect? I know plenty of people who have some flaw they would probably be better off without, but I don't say "I don't see imperfect people as beautiful, and if you do it means you like to see them suffer."

Why do you jump to calling the author sadistic for finding the positive in a complicated situation?

rdlwon Notes on Tajikistan

I think most people find the Himalayas pretty special

rdlwon Edinburgh, Scotland makes it illegal to advertise SUVs

How can a heating system be inefficient? Does it generate too much waste heat?

rdlwon Start presentations on the second slide

Yes, the subtitle of the article is "AKA in media res"

rdlwon Lynn Conway has died

Oh, that makes much more sense. I posted my comment before they elaborated on what they were saying, so the comment just said "Outrage bait, seriously: here's a screenshot.", which seemed like a direct response

rdlwon Lynn Conway has died

You're outraged that Wikipedia requires a source for the death of a public figure?

rdlwon A new term, ‘slop’, has emerged to describe dubious A.I.-generated material

I see 'slop' used more often in contexts where, say, you look up a problem you're working on, find an article that seems to be relevant and may have the answer you want, but at some point turns out to be devoid of content and possibly AI-generated.