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Comment by commonlisper | Hacker News Reader

Cool project but... This is an egregious misrepresentation of the actual results both from significance perspective and accuracy perspective.

A. No validation is done on server side to confirm the workers are reporting correct results.

B. Increasing the limit by less than a thousandth of a percent does not make this a "world record"! If we go by that logic, I only have to validate one more example than you and claim a world record. And then you'd do the same. And then I'd do the same and we'll be playing "world record" ping pong all day!

But "B" isn't the big problem here because we have worse problems "A"! Nobody (not even the OP) can tell if the results are accurate!

No, I'm not simply dissing at a Show HN post. There are many comments here that explain these problems much better than I could.

This is egregrious clickbait!

View on HN

"Increasing the limit by less than a thousandth of a percent does not make this a "world record"!"

Why doesn't it?

"If we go by that logic, I only have to validate one more example than you and claim a world record."

Yes. You can argue that it's not difficult enough or interesting enough, but you can't argue that N+1 result is not a world record.

Yeah, I was confused, too. That’s how world records work.

That makes sense in sports. But in math? It's trivially easy to generate thousands of so-called "world records" every second.

Here's one:

4*10^18 + 7*10^13 + 1.

Boom! New world record. Now add 1 and you've got another. Try it. Keep going. World records like this will be surpassed by someone else in milliseconds.

Honestly, this is the first time I've heard "world record" used for NOT finding a counterexample. The whole thing feels absurd. You can keep checking numbers forever, calling each one a record? It's silly, to be honest. Never heard anyone calling these world records, before today.

OP has a nice project. But the wording is so deceptive and so silly that it harms the credibility of the project more than it helps.

> Never heard anyone calling these world records, before today.

You've never heard of the world record for calculating digits of pi?

https://www.livescience.com/physics-mathematics/mathematics/...

That's not comparable to finding Goldbach NON-counterexamples.

With Goldbach, claiming a "world record" just means checking one more number and seeing if it is still NOT a counterexample. It's easy. Contrast that with computing a new digit of pi - something you can't achieve by simply incrementing a value and running a check.

Finding each new digit of pi (the ones very far out) is not a trivial task. The computational effort increases by a lot as you go deeper. Something like O(n (log n)^k) for some k (usually k = 3).

Every second is easy. Let's aim for new world records at a 1MHz rate.

Since this is math, I feel pedantic. It may not be a notable world record, but it’s still a world record. There are infinitely many non-notable world record categories. I currently hold the one for saying the word “fbejsixbenebxhsh” the most number of times in a row. Nobody cares, but it’s still a world record.

Since it's not just math but also using English on a social website, we can be even more pedantic and observe that posting it implies notability. It is literally noting it.

Isn't it more a record about the state of computing than the state of conjecture?

This is more like if someone pulled a truck down 2,800 miles of road between NYC and LA in 2012, left it there, and then you grabbed the rope in 2025 to pull it less than another tenth of a mile to have "shatters world record" in your blog title.

I.e. not only is this an extremely small increment but the original work did not have to be repeated. Nothing about the state of computing in 2012 would have prevented going the extra amount here, they just decided to stop. The original record even states (on https://sweet.ua.pt/tos/goldbach.html):

> On a single core of a 3.3GHz core i3 processor, testing an interval of 10^12 integers near 10^18 takes close to 48 minutes

So the additional work here in 2025 was the equivalent of running a single core of a 2012 i3 for ~70 more hours.

All this is a shame as the project itself actually seems much more interesting than leading claims.

It’s not a notable world record, but it’s still a world record, if we’re being pedantic. And math is pedantic.

That is the literal definition of a world record here, my guy.

Take it up with the rules.

And yes, mathematically it's uninteresting. But that's not what is being showed off here.

> That is the literal definition of a world record here, my guy.

I don't dispute that. If you read my comment carefully, you'll find that I'm calling them "world records" too. My point is that nobody in the math community uses "world record" for finding trivial non-counterexamples like this. There are infinitely many such "world records" and each one is trivial to surpass in under a second.

Compare that to something like the finding a new Mersenne prime or calculating more digits of pi. Those records hold weight because they're difficult to achieve and stand for years.

This post could've been one of the infinite, uninteresting "world records" if the OP had applied more rigor in the implementation. But due to gaps in verification, this post is not a world record of any kind because the correctness of the results can't be confirmed. The OP has no way to confirm the correctness of their data. You'd get better context by reading the full thread. This has already been discussed at length.

I think they're saying that because it builds on the previous result having any one effort claim a record doesn't really make sense.

Like imagine there was a record for longest novel published, and what you did was take the previous longest novel and add the word "hello" to the end of it. Does the person who added "hello" get the record?

If you’d read the article... ;)

He slightly pushed the computation past the previous world record, and he’s continuing to push it forward with a clear goal. It’s well within the spirit of a world record.

Besides, a world record is still a world record — it’s up to you to decide how interesting it is. You are indeed just dissing on a Show HN post.

Server side validation is trivial. What makes you believe that is not happening? That code is not available.

> If you’d read the article... ;)

If you'd read the article carefully, he hasn't. For all we know one client (or worse, several) found counterexamples but didn't report them back to the server. Without verification on the server side, there's no way to claim the entire range has been reliably checked.

What he's shown is that many volunteers have checked a large portion of the numbers up to a certain bound and found no counterexamples. But he hasn't shown that all numbers within that range have actually been verified. It's entirely possible that some block results were falsely reported by bad clients. Meaning counterexamples could still be hiding in those falsely reported gaps, however improbable! This kind of lapse in rigor matters in math! This lapse in rigor invalidates the entire claim of the OP!

> Server side validation is trivial. What makes you believe that is not happening? That code is not available.

Please read the full thread. This has all already been discussed at length.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43735397

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43735498

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43735483

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43735555

From the OP himself, an admission that there's no mechanism to ensure clients aren't submitting false results:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43736281

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43736558

Don't get me wrong. I've said before. This is a good project. But the claims made in the post don't hold up to scrutiny.

> a world record is still a world record

This isn't particularly relevant at the moment, since OP can't confirm the correctness of the results!

Lol okay these comments do change things — I wish these were pointed out in the parent comment.

But I agree then. Good project; not a world record.

Edit: I’m not getting any of this for the article still, but I trust I’m misreading something

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