Hacker News Reader

Comment by sneedenheimer | Hacker News Reader

>trolls

I hate their usage of 'troll' too. To me, 'troll' means a guy who argues about 0.9 bar not equaling 1 in a math forum. I have no idea what the hell these people mean when they say 'troll'.

View on HN

The modern definition of troll seems to be more closely related to one of the personalities that got its start at a particular notorious imageboard, who constantly posts flamebait and thrives off of pushing the limits of how much they can upset others. I haven’t seen the original more innocuous definition used in a long time.

Posting flamebait to troll precedes 4chan by many years. 4chan really isn't that old in the grand scheme of internet things, and isn't truly the originator of very much. Virtually any form of trolling you might find on 4chan was pioneered somewhere else many years before 4chan existed.

Trolling existed on Usenet long before 4chan.

https://gizmodo.com/the-first-internet-troll-1652485292

Right, even something awful predates 4chan.

Ugh. I was an antisocial jerk trolling IRC in the early 90s. I would use shell accounts to ping flood servers and cause netsplits just so I could take control of a channel and change the topic to something dumb.

Oh, I consider flamebaiting trolling. But flamebaiting isn't cyberbullying or harassment or whatever these people think trolling means.

Troll has come to mean "anyone who acts bad" to like 90% of the people who use it these days. It has no meaning anymore. "Trolling" just means "doing something I don't agree with".

i am afraid that what they mean by troll is code for anyone who disagrees with their narrative

But 0.9 bar isn't equal to 1. Oh! I see what you did there!

I think they are using it to mean something closer to "cyberbully", maybe.

> But 0.9 bar isn't equal to 1. Oh! I see what you did there!

This is a foundational problem in our anthropogenic decimal system of math (which we only use because of the evolutionary accident of a modal (n.b.: not average) human happening to have ten fingers); the whole issue doesn't even exist in the only correct representation of numbers, ternary (base-3).

For example, let's multiply 1 / 3 * 3:

In decimal `1.0 / 3.0 == 0.3 bar * 3 == 0.9 bar` and we've proven that 1 equals 0.9 bar, which is clearly nonsense and falsifies the whole concept of decimal representation of numbers.

In ternary, though, `1.0 / 10.0 == 0.1 * 10 == 1.0` -- see? no contradiction. Maths just work properly if you use the true numeric base.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk. I will not be taking any blasphemous questions from unbelievers about dividing and multiplying by two.

In a ternary system, wouldn't 1.222... equal 2?

The last paragraph indicates the whole comment is in jest.

Yes; the joke I was going for was that decimal one half would be written as 0.1 bar when converted to ternary. And then multiplying that value by 2 gives you 0.2 bar. Which is equal to ternary 1, in the same way that decimal 0.9 bar equals 1.

I find it really fascinating that different numeric bases all suffer from this same issue, but for different values. That the division by three which breaks decimal representation survives in ternary, but the division by two which is fine in decimal breaks ternary.

Of course, it seems to me that the real underlying problem is that we insist on writing these values out as an infinite series of fractional digits in the first place, instead of keeping the values in a precise fraction form. One third times three equals one; there’s no controversy there even in decimal. It’s only when someone insists on actually performing the division and representing that initial “one third” value as being a zero followed by an infinite number of fractional threes that the whole “omg 0.9 bar equals one??” paradox appears.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com