Rainbow, Binary, Debt Friendship Bracelets | Hacker News Reader

Rainbow, Binary, Debt Friendship Bracelets

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54 pointszmanian16 comments

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.

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.

This is the cutest thing I've ever seen on HN.

Something about this feels off, but I had to think about it for a bit before I realized why.

The $63 dollar debt limit is acceptable because the random walk will (apparently) almost never go over this number. That is, the difference between this and nothing is at most $63 dollars worth of avoided inequality.

What kind of relationship would someone have to have in order to not want to give their significant other a gift of $63 dollars, total over the entire relationship?

... this isn't about gifts.

I'm not sure I follow your conclusion. Assuming random walk increments are 1 (or less), it would indeed take some time to reach 63 (although you will reach it with probability 1), but in case the increments are greater (e.g. a 30-50$ dinner), you'll quickly go over $63.

The point of "keeping score" is that you can bias the debt process and make it mean-reverting. You're always guaranteed to split costs less than $63 evenly, and can possibly even split a cost of up to $126 in a fair way.

The point was that the walk isn't random, and that if it were unguided, the participants believed it would be unbounded.

Presumably it's easy to stay within $63 when the decisions are guided.

But how so isn't it random? The article doesn't say, unless I misunderstood.

Isn't it painfully obvious? They're discussing joint events, like dinner. Whoever owes money in the relationship pays.

I guess I'm daft, but if they'd just flip a coin each time on who pays, in the long run they'd each pay the same, if each payment event were to be random (let's even say within an upper limit, to keep the 'in the long run' within the lifespan of their relationship). Why wouldn't the dollar amounts of these events be essentially random?

seems strange to me that trading off expenses wasn't enough for them

This struck me as surprising as well. I personally find not making a big deal out of shared expenses much more freeing to the mind than keeping track of it. I do this with friends as well as SOs; my philosophy is that it all evens out, somewhere. But... different strokes for different folks, I guess.

Regardless, this is just so adorably nerdy. Or nerdily adorable. Either way.

What kind of relationship would someone have to have in order to not want to give their significant other a gift of $63 dollars, total over the entire relationship?

It's not about gifts, it's about shared expenses, and quite a lot of people want their relationships to be egalitarian. Rather than have one partner 'supporting' the other.

> …just trade off paying and call it good? [...]

They could flip a coin every time. That would take care of their objection.

Rainbow binary debt friendship bracelets. The commas are unnecessary. In fact the title seems to indicate rainbow friendship bracelets, binary friendship bracelets and debt friendship bracelets are all things, which is not the author's intent.

I think it can be read either way, so let's leave the author her commas.

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