Ask HN: What tech paradox is analogous to 'dark night sky' paradox in physics? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What tech paradox is analogous to 'dark night sky' paradox in physics?

8 pointsjawns6 comments

Oblers' paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers%27_paradox notes that a (relatively) dark night sky seems inconsistent with the idea of an infinite and eternal universe, where one would expect that the sky would appear uniformly bright. This led to people questioning whether the universe really is infinite or eternal.

There are other similar paradoxes in other domains, and in each of them, the puzzling thing is that we expect a certain thing to be more prevalent than it actually is.

Can you think of an analog in the tech or startup world?

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The Halting Problem, maybe?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem

I think The Halting Problem is perhaps the greatest unsung hero and villain of computing/technology. It consequences are manifest in so many areas of computing (for instance, I believe The Mythical Man-Month is a relative/corollary to The Halting Problem, and other's point out that Godel's first incompleteness theorem is itself perhaps isomorphic with The Halting Problem), in so many tech problems the answer to "can we solve this and when?" isn't "yes" or "no" and some clear time interval, it's "I don't know, we haven't already solved it once."

As clean and "simple" as most algorithms seem at face value (when written in nice, simple code), the undeniable truth that we don't actually know much about how they "run" in the real world until we actually run them.

How does the world go on relatively okay considering the general level of security and correctness in software? Why aren’t we all completely owned, etc?

You could make the same observation about physical security. Pretty much every mainstream security system or setup in existence is apparently trivial to beat for a sufficiently determined adversary, and many real world things aren't well constructed in general.

The answer is probably a combination of:

A: Most people not drawing attention from said adversaries (rival states, etc)

B: Security in numbers, or so many potential 'targets' that the average site is likely unaffected by probability alone.

C: The majority of the population being decent people who wouldn't do anything dodgy anyway.

D: Most adversaries being opportunists or incompetent

I'd also add:

E: a strong criminalization deterrent

F: relative unprofitability - you see some big scams happening with bitcoin, but all stealing say user data does is allows you to more easily commit other crimes like identity theft

If you mean logical paradox there can’t really be any because computer programs are necessarily logically consistent. See Gödel's incompleteness theorems.

I think what they're looking for is more like a counterintuitive economic situation in the tech industry.

Something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus_paradox

In general see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Economics_paradoxes

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