tgflynn

Hello, I'm the author of this project. Please let me know if you have any comments or questions.

I wonder if that characteristic correlates with greater math ability.

It's rather ironic that a discussion on what Christians believe would be based entirely on quotes from before the birth of Christ.

I think though that he did say something relevant to the question at hand: "The kingdom of God is inside you" (Luke 17:21) (ἡ βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ ἐντὸς ὑμῶν ἐστιν).

Now isn't God in his kingdom ?

Tat tvam asi.

Sorting has a simple local optimum implies global optimum property. If a list is sorted than any (not necessarily sequential) sublist is sorted, and the converse. No such property applies to TSP.

I think that the best way to think about why some combinatorial problems are hard and others easy isn't to ask what makes a problem hard, but rather what makes a problem easy. Combinatorial problems seem to be hard by default. It takes some special simplifying property to make them easy.

That still seems like a major issue, because I and probably quite a few other people rely on the security page to decide when to look into upgrading.

I hope there is some rationale for why the security fixes in later releases were not serious enough to warrant an advisory on the security page, rather than it just being an oversight.

That's concerning. Do you have a link/source for that ?

Out of curiosity, what would be the advantage of DTL over TTL, which I would think would be the default choice for building discrete logic circuits ?

Yeah, that might work with a default keyboard layout but it doesn't work with a polytonic Greek layout. How would you type a lowercase alpha with an acute accent and a macron that way ?

Yeah, I was hoping to find some general information on how the Compose key is (or was) supposed to work. It's easy to find info on how to assign the Compose key to a particular key but I haven't found anything on how to actually use it to input more or less complex character codes.

Part of the problem may also be the difference between precomposed and non precomposed glyphs in Unicode, which I don't really understand, but it seems that if a keyboard layout is designed to use precomposed glyphs it may not allow you to further compose those with other code points.

For example there is a character that is a lowercase alpha with both an acute accent and a macron on top. With the right font it displays correctly (it probably wouldn't if I tried to copy-paste it here) but I don't know how to enter it on the keyboard. I suspect that's because there's no precomposed Unicode codepoint for it and my keyboard layout only seems to work with those.

The correct encoding for it is "GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH MACRON" (Unicode name) composed with "'".

Has MRI actually been proven to work with similar carbonized scrolls ?

Does anyone know of a good resource explaining how the compose key is supposed to work in general beyond the simple cases like those discussed in this article ?

I have an interest in some less spoken languages like Ancient Greek and Sanskrit and though there are specific keyboard layouts that mostly work there are still some less common combinations of diacritics used in writing Ancient Greek, for example, that don't seem to be covered.

Is there some way to use the compose key for entering general Unicode sequences for example, that would work for different applications ?

I'm a Linux user but I'd be interested in seeing a solid exposition on this topic even if it was for a different OS.

I assume it's just old inventory. It's not supposed to be refurbished because I enabled the "New" filter.

Yes, and you can still buy those new on Amazon with no mention that they're unsupported, just like the chromebooks.

With the high level of self awareness that you've developed as evidenced by this post I would think you would be largely immune to falling into the kind of traps you're worried about. Maybe you should ask yourself why you don't trust your self enough to avoid such traps in the future ?

I think there is also a risk in becoming too skeptical or even cynical. I agree that there is much in most religions that is not useful and can sometimes by very harmful yet at the same time I think many religions contain elements of truth that are worth being open to.

My recommendation would be to approach all ideas with openness while maintaining a healthy amount of skepticism. Try to find the nuggets of gold without becoming burdened with tons of sand.

Not to diminish the achievements of these people but I suspect being in the right place and time has a lot to do with it. I suspect that for each of the names you cited there are a thousand others who were equally as technically skilled but who you've never heard of.

Wozniak, as I understand it, is best known for creating elegant and highly optimized designs for the Apple I and II circuitry. That may be a rare skill, but I don't think it's nearly as rare as the vast gulf in fame between him and the typical EE would lead one to believe. He became famous because he used those skills in the exact time and place where they mattered most, creating one of the first usable computers that was affordable for the middle class.

Torvalds didn't create Linux ex-nihilo. There was at the time an extensive literature on the design of Unix/Posix systems on which he could lean, as well as the example of Minix, which as I recall, is largely what inspired him to create his own clone of the Unix kernel. The reasons it became as successful as it did are numerous. Part of it has to do with that work being done at the time the Internet was enlarging the number of people who could access and contribute to open source projects. It also coincided with the GNU project being at a stage where it had already developed many of the user space tools for a fully open source Unix-like system but was having trouble getting a kernel off the ground. Note also that a key ingredient of his success beyond his technical competence was his ability to shepherd a world wide group of open source collaborators, keeping them all moving in the same general direction.

I don't know as much about Jeff Dean's history but I do know from experience that there's a lot more to being successful in a corporate context than just technical competence, or even, I suspect, genius. It's rare that one person can create an entire system on their own (though it does happen that one person's work can establish a framework for future contributions) and moving beyond the work of one individual requires a whole additional set of skills.

> there is no parallel track and parallel solvers are disqualified [1] from participating.

Maybe that's as much a cause as an effect. What's the incentive to create and improve parallel solvers if there's no place that evaluates and rewards your work ?

Upvoted because I'd like to see an answer to this question too.

I've heard a lot about IDA Pro but I've never used it. What are the most important functions it has that you can't do with, say, gdb ?

Ah, OK thanks, that definitely could have been more clearly explained.

I'm stuck in the III.A "Main Idea" section where he says:

> Doing this enables us to represent each Di as a variable sequence, but with all the negative literals being removed. See Table I for illustration.

What justification does he have for throwing out negated variables ? If you do that the problem likely becomes trivial, but has nothing to do with the original problem.

There's one thing I'd like to get some clarification on. You said in an earlier comment:

> I am reducing to 2XSAT, which is a name for instances that are intersections of 2-SAT and XORSAT instances.

It seems to me that 2-SAT and XORSAT are distinct problems. I mean there is no problem instance that is simultaneously a 2-SAT problem and an XORSAT problem instance. So how can there be instances that are intersections of both ?

Why don't you try testing your algorithm on some 1000 variable or so SAT instances ? There are thousands of such problems that have been created for the SAT competitions. If your code can solve all of them and is really P-time then I think there are many people who would be interested in looking at your algorithm, myself included.

A decision problem as used to define the classes NP and P is of the form: does there exist an x such that F(x) = 1, where F is a P-time computable function.

If you can solve that problem in P-time then you can also solve the functional version (find an x for which F(x) = 1) in P-time simply by setting each bit to a value for which the decision problem is satisfiable, one by one.

That's the kind of argument I've never put much credence in, otherwise I never would have even attempted to solve the problem.

I still think it's possible that there could be a relatively simple solution that has so far eluded humans. They are burdened by many individual, institutional and societal biases and I think they are far less intelligent than they generally believe.

I've spent a great deal of time over the last decade+ trying to find an efficient algorithm for NP hard problems and one thing I've learned is that this field is a graveyard for seemingly good ideas. Therefore I tend to be very skeptical of any paper that claims to solve such a problem but doesn't provide any empirical evidence that their solution works. I mean I've had hundreds of ideas and very few of them have survived without counterexamples appearing even for very small instance sizes.

I first saw this paper yesterday when it was posted on HN but didn't make it to the front page and I'm uncertain about how much energy to put into it (unfortunately my health gives me very little to spare). So far I've only read the introduction and it doesn't obviously involve any advanced mathematics that I'm unfamiliar with so I could perhaps attempt an implementation.

In addition to what I said above another factor arguing against investing much time in this is the fact that this was first published last year and nothing seems to have come of it in that time. Moreover it appears that the current paper is a revision from the one that was published last year. Does anyone know what the history of this was ? Were bugs found in the first version ?

There's a huge difference between recognizing that most software will have some bugs and creating a system that's so broken by design that you have to invent a fictitious island to work around it.

If you can handle an error and still return meaningful data that's fine, but returning the coordinates 0,0 to the user because GPS isn't working is far worse than giving them an error message. At that point you're essentially lying to them.

That's what NULL (or it's various equivalents) is for.

This makes no sense to me. Generally speaking an application should return an error message or code when something goes wrong, not a potentially valid piece of data. That an entire industry would adopt this kind of workaround for poor software engineering is astonishing.

Yeah, what I said isn't completely accurate, because I didn't take into account the tax rate. But the factor is still larger than 1, assuming you have any revenue at all, because in addition to what you payed them in salary you have to pay tax on the 4/5ths of their salary you couldn't deduct in the current year.

If in your example you hired the construction workers as employees and, for what ever reason, kept them on the payroll, wouldn't you still be able to deduct the salaries you pay them each year ?

If not it seems like a colassal disincentive to employment, which is the opposite of the result usually sought by government policies.