Hacker News Reader

Edit: whoa, they really buried the lede: the upper bound for the knowable values may be as low as BB(1919) as of May 15!

I'm confused by the winning TM given for BB(2). It has 3 non-halt states, but N==2 should be a TM with 2, shouldn't it?

Did they merely put the illustration for BB(3) in the wrong place?

Edit: yeah, looks like they just put the illustration for BB(3) in the wrong place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine#/media/File:Sta...

View on HN

The author has the first name "John Carlos". Why not take an educated guess and use (gasp) gendered pronouns?

Because the byline wasn't easy to find on the device I read it on, and the possibility that someone might be offended by gender neutrality seemed far-fetched at the time.

> The author has the first name "John Carlos". Why not take an educated guess and use (gasp) gendered pronouns?

Because the text of the article could have been generated by a Turing machine with the pseudonym "John Carlos". And on the internet, nobody knows if you're a man, woman, dog, or sufficiently complicated state machine.

tl;dr: Non-gendered pronouns are inclusive and never inappropriate on the internet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com