Hacker News Reader

For another perspective, 52! is roughly the number of atoms in a galaxy. Galaxies are really quite large!

davidncon OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

I was curious about this - if my Google results are accurate, it looks like the stock actually peaked in June 2007, the same month that the iphone was released.

It seems that Blackberry's market share of new phone sales peaked at 20% in 2009. So I'm not sure if it's coincidence, but it looks like the market actually did a pretty good job of pricing in the iphone/android risk well before it was strongly reflected in sales.

davidncon Prime Number Grid

This comment does a great job of clarifying the picture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17106193.

It's effectively a visualization of gcd(x,y), and has almost nothing to do with primes. Once you realize that, it's a lot easier to reason about a lot of the patterns, although it is still a pretty interesting visualization.

davidncon Two new books on John Calhoun and his rodent experiments

The page for the novel mentions it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Frisby_and_the_Rats_of_...

davidncon Mathematicians have found a new upper limit to the Ramsey number

There's still a red clique. And changing any of those 3 to blue crates a blue clique.

davidncon Computer memory prototype ditches 1s and 0s for denser data storage

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_economy

The idea is that if it costs $r to store a base-r digit, then base 3 (or e in a continuous scale) turns out to be the most efficient. Obviously, there's no a priori reason to think that a 3-level gate is exactly 1.5x more expensive than a 2-level gate, so this is mostly of theoretical interest.

davidncon Why should I always enable compiler warnings?

Note that the answer was written by the asker. Who then commented on the answer:

> I have posted this Q&A because I'm sick and tired of telling people to enable warnings. Now I can just point them here (or, if I'm in a particularly evil mood, close their question as a dupe). You are welcome to improve this answer or add your own.

davidncon Delaney Introduces Bill to End Gerrymandering, Reform Elections

Or, give each representative voting power proportional to the number of voters in their district. That way, no need for the added salary and chaos of 200+ more representatives, and you can get perfectly proportional representation.

davidncon Acing the technical interview

I thought I'd try writing a translation into Python. Not sure if it makes it any easier to follow, though...

http://pastebin.com/yK1HrZJQ

davidncon A Moneymaking Machine Like Few Others

I'm curious to know what the original statement was that got mangled into this. Maybe the author heard ASCII instead of C? Not sure where numbercentric would come in, though.

davidncon Judge blocks Obama overtime rule, putting it in jeopardy

The article does mention that in August Trump promised to roll back the regulation.

davidncon A bit of background for the unified C++ call proposal

The paper "Unified Call Concerns" (linked at the end of the post) describes the issue in a bit more detail: you might write f(X x, Y y), knowing that X doesn't have a member function f, and call it with x.f(y). If a new version of the library extends X's API to include the member f(Y y), your code will suddenly start calling the member instead of the original non-member function.

As he mentions in that paper, this isn't likely to be a common issue, so I'm with the general consensus that it seems unfortunate that the feature wasn't adopted.