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leifmetcalf

17 karma · joined August 13, 2018

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leifmetcalf··on Jean-Pierre Serre turns 100
I especially liked the proof in that book that looks at the action of a group on its Cayley graph to show a subgroup of a free group is free.
leifmetcalf··on Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term
This is a trade that is already done by trading businesses. It doesn’t even need to be this explicit; you could for instance dispose one side of a trade to reduce exposure to insiders.
leifmetcalf··on The Ski Rental Problem
Why do we have that E[max_k alg(k)/opt(k)] is equal to max_k E[alg(k)]/opt(k) ?
leifmetcalf··on Ask HN: Share your AI prompt that stumps every model
Gemini 2.5 at least replies that it seems unlikely to be false without hallucinating a proof. From its thoughts it gets very close to figuring out that A_4 exists as a subgroup.
leifmetcalf··on Ask HN: Share your AI prompt that stumps every model
My mistake, I said unique path when I should have said unique shortest path.

Also, there are trivial solutions with odd cycles and complete graphs which must be excluded. (So the answer to the prompt as originally stated is wrong too)

leifmetcalf··on Ask HN: Share your AI prompt that stumps every model
Let G be a group of order 3*2^n. Prove there exists a non-complete non-cyclic Cayley graph of G such that there is a unique shortest path between every pair of vertices, or otherwise prove no such graph exists.
leifmetcalf··on I don't believe DeepSeek crashed Nvidia's stock
This seems pretty convincing to me.

At the very least, the story that NVDA dropped because the Deepseek announcement reduced expected demand for cpus seems inconsistent with typical market behaviour. I wonder if we’ll see a correction of the narrative in mainstream outlets.

leifmetcalf··on Haskell: A Great Procedural Language
I was wrong about this. Case is a macro (a special-cased macro even, defined at https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/blob/4def31f8abea5fba4...), not a function. It works with pipes because in the AST it's a call, unlike in Haskell where case is its own thing.
leifmetcalf··on Haskell: A Great Procedural Language
Elixir doesn’t even need a special syntax — it gets Haskell’s LambdaCase as a natural consequence of case being just another function, and the pipe operator always chaining by the first argument.

Haskell’s >>= is doing something slightly different. ‘getThing >>= \case…’ means roughly ‘perform the action getThing, then match the result and perform the matched branch’

Whereas ‘getThing |> \case…’ means ‘pattern match on the action getThing, and return the matched action (without performing it).

The >>= operator can also be used for anything satisfying the Monad laws, e.g. your actions can be non-deterministic.

leifmetcalf··on Bitcoin is as costly to environment as beef production
This is according to ‘climate damages compared to market value’.
leifmetcalf··on Programming with Nothing
Haskell gets compiled to core (https://hackage.haskell.org/package/ghc-9.2.1/docs/GHC-Core....) which is pretty similar to lambda calculus, but it has some additions like literals, let expressions, and case expressions.
leifmetcalf··on Show HN: This website moves your mouse cursor
Huh. If I move my mouse fast enough I can escape the lock.
leifmetcalf··on YouTube Down
Back now in NZ
leifmetcalf··on Home servers are greener than cloud
Heat pumps are more than 100% efficient
leifmetcalf··on Sites with dumb password rules
Auckland Transport does the same thing
leifmetcalf··on Researchers develop a new houseplant that can clean home air (2018)
I'd be interested to see how effective algae and mosses are at cleaning air, too, since they are so easy to grow and propagate.
leifmetcalf··on New Pricing for G Suite Basic and Business Editions
I just switched from GSuite to https://www.pobox.com. For $20 a year they manage your email address and forward anything sent to it to another account. I have a gmail free account set up to send emails via smtp through pobox, which works great. It's the service a lot of open-source people use, like gitster.

EDIT: Looks like https://improvmx.com do the same thing, but for free.

leifmetcalf··on FizzBuzz in ten languages
With this? http://duriansoftware.com/joe/Optimizing-is-multiple-checks-...
leifmetcalf··on FizzBuzz in ten languages
I'm a bit confused, how did you implement let, if, else etc.? I don't really know much about the lambda calculus except for what I learned from a short youtube video.
leifmetcalf··on Show HN: Edabit – Like Duolingo for Learning to Code
Ah, that explains it. The link actually works, though.
leifmetcalf··on Show HN: Edabit – Like Duolingo for Learning to Code
How does the url http://redacted/ work? I've never seen a url without a tld on the end.

Could I register the domain http://foo ?