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Comment by bruce343434 | Hacker News Reader

Heap trees would be less efficient with trits. What do you mean "most efficient of all integer bases"?

Ternary minimizes both the length and number of different symbols used to express a range of numbers[1].

Heap trees were probably optimized for binary, since that's what we use. Perhaps there would be a ternary version of heap trees? Or a totally different ternary data structure that serves the same purpose?

[1]: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/446664/what-is-the-...

Slightly off topic, but I'm curious why some users start a comment with "* * *", then edit it later? Is this just a HN thing?

(Parent comment happened to start as one of these "* * *" comments.)

Do you mean my comment? I did not write nor remove "* * *".

Oh, interesting! According to HN Replies, that was the content of your comment (https://imgur.com/t5316Rx) (When I checked on HN, it was not "* * *")

I've seen these ephemeral "* * *" comments before, and even another comment asking about them.

That is interesting, perhaps a synchronisation error? As if the actual comment wasn't available yet but the email already got sent.

I don't think it's just an HN Replies email thing. I've seen "* * *" in actual HN comment threads, too.

And I've seen it in 100% of your replies to me, when I've never seen it for other replies. So I wonder if it's related to how you use HN

This is definitely solely an HN Replies thing.

This is the first time I've seen it in my HN Replies, but I have seen "* * *" before on https://news.ycombinator.com/. I even saw another comment asking about this type of comment.

Do you have any HN-related extensions installed?

Edit: I truly did not believe you, but it appears to maybe be the “delay” feature [0]. Users with a delay set might show the asterisks until the delay passes.

My apologies.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=231024

Reply on news.ycombinator.com