WCSTombs (u/WCSTombs)

WCSTombs commented on Polis: Open-source platform for large-scale civic deliberation pol.is/home2... · Posted by u/mefengl

amarant · 4 days ago

Man the name really threw me for a minute. Polis is the correct spelling for police in my native Swedish and I got through the first 2 paragraphs wondering what any of this has to do with law enforcement.

Then it dawned on me.

Edit to add: I think the white and blue theme helps. Those are police colours in Sweden...

WCSTombs · 4 days ago

The name must be taken from Greek.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polis

WCSTombs commented on Show HN: Purple Word – A new word puzzle game purpleword.com... · Posted by u/gentlyenvy

almara · 11 days ago

Some interesting math here.

You’ve got ~170k possible words and a pure higher/lower signal, so with perfect play it’s just binary search. Number the words 1 to 170k, guess the middle, then keep halving the range. In binary terms, each guess is basically telling you whether the next bit is 0 or 1.

Since log₂(170,000) ≈ 17.4, you need at most 18 guesses. On average it’s a bit less: about half the words take 18 guesses, a quarter take 17, an eighth take 16, etc. So the expected number of guesses works out to 17.

All of that assumes you know the exact ordering of the dictionary, of course. Once you don’t, it stops being optimal and starts being human. That’s where the difficulty actually comes from.

WCSTombs · 11 days ago

How are you getting the 170,000 number? I did a quick search and found this quote from merriam-webster.com [1]:

> Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, together with its 1993 Addenda Section, includes some 470,000 entries. The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, reports that it includes a similar number.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/help/faq-how-many-english-wo...

WCSTombs commented on 3 ways for achieving responsive code formatting on web mostlyobvio.us/2026/02/re... · Posted by u/calineczka

WCSTombs · 12 days ago

I do kind of like the idea of automatically reformatting the code based on the media size, but the devil seems to be in the details. In my experience, code formatters can sometimes backfire and make the code harder to read. There's usually an escape hatch via special comments in the code, but those would appear in the final rendering and add noise to the presentation, which is unacceptable. Thus, I didn't pursue that idea, and instead I ended up manually breaking my code samples at 64 columns or so. There can still be some horizontal scrolling on very small screens, but hopefully it's tolerable. I also made sure each individual code block gets its own scroll bar and not the whole page, so you wouldn't need to constantly scroll the whole page back and forth to check for overflowed content.

I have other thoughts on this, but I don't want to go too far afield. Anyway, I think it's an interesting problem and one that's worth solving.

WCSTombs commented on Cyclic Subgroup Sum m-slee.netlify.app/posts/... · Posted by u/richard_chase

richard_chase · 17 days ago

It was more to provide a hopefully new perspective on some existing problems in number theory.

WCSTombs · 16 days ago

Then nice try I guess, but there is nothing remotely new about any of this. You're not going to find a new perspective on something in math using a completely routine application of a well-known theorem. You'll need to either work really hard or come up with a genuinely new idea, and probably both.

WCSTombs commented on In praise of –dry-run henrikwarne.com/2026/01/3... · Posted by u/ingve

wging · 16 days ago

One nice way to do things, if you can get away with it, is to model the actions your application takes explicitly, and pass them to a central thing that actually handles them. Then there can be one place in your code that actually needs to understand whether it's doing a dry run or not. Ideally this would be just returning them from your core logic, "functional core, imperative shell" style.

WCSTombs · 16 days ago

I totally agree with both this and the comment you replied to. The common thread is that you can architect the application in such a way that dry vs. wet running can be handled transparently, and in general these are just good designs.

WCSTombs commented on In praise of –dry-run henrikwarne.com/2026/01/3... · Posted by u/ingve

cake-rusk · 16 days ago

Design patterns exist to paper over language deficiencies. Use a language which is not deficient.

WCSTombs · 16 days ago

There's some truth to this, since some design patterns can simply be implemented "for good" in a sufficiently powerful language, but I don't find it's true in general. Unfortunately, it has become something of a thought-terminating cliché. Some common design patterns are so flexible that if you really implemented them in full generality as, say, some library function, its interface would be so complex that it likely wouldn't be a net win.

WCSTombs commented on Film students who can no longer sit through films theatlantic.com/ideas/202... · Posted by u/haunter

prhn · 16 days ago

I don't dispute the shortening of attentions spans, which seems to be directly related to new forms of entertainment young people consume.

However. Films across the generations are very different in terms of how they lay out a narrative. Watch any film before 1980 and you'll start to see a pattern that the pacing and evolution of the narrative is generally very, very slow.

Art is highly contextualized by the period it's created in. I don't really think it's fair to expect people to appreciate art when it's taken completely out of its context.

Lawrence of Arabia, for example. What a brilliant, brilliant film. Beautiful, influential, impressively produced. And really, really boring and slow a lot of the time.

If I were a film professor today, hell even 20 years ago, I would not expect a modern film student to sit through that whole thing. I think it's my job as a professor to understand the context of the period, highlight the influential/important scenes, and get students to focus on those instead of having to watch 4 hours of slowly paced film making and possibly miss the important stuff.

WCSTombs · 16 days ago

> If I were a film professor today, hell even 20 years ago, I would not expect a modern film student to sit through that whole thing.

Sorry, but this to me sounds completely insane. We're not even talking about the general population here, but people who are ostensibly serious about the art and craft of film making. And the bar is being set at literally just watching the movie, and not even some obscure marathon of a film that takes a degree to be appreciated, but a major mass-released picture that has already been enjoyed by countless people.

WCSTombs commented on Ask HN: Blocked by YouTube? (Sign in to confirm you're not a bot) · Posted by u/dv35z

WCSTombs · 17 days ago

I briefly had that in the past, but it went away within a day or so. I may have also reset my YouTube/Google cookies. I think sometimes the site cookies get into a weird state, but I believe it can also be that your IP address was flagged for some reason. In the former case, switching browser profiles or deleting cookies should fix the problem, but in the latter case, you'd probably need a VPN or something, and unfortunately some VPNs could also just be blocked outright. You could try Tor as well, but it also won't reliably get you through without logging in, although sometimes just rerolling the dice with the Tor circuit can work.

There could also be other workarounds like VPSes, but TBH I don't know how reliably they can access the site, if at all.

WCSTombs commented on Cyclic Subgroup Sum m-slee.netlify.app/posts/... · Posted by u/richard_chase

WCSTombs · 21 days ago

This "classification" is pretty much a tautology and provides no information. The enumeration of all subgroups of a cyclic group and their orders is one of the most basic facts in all of group theory and known by pretty much everyone who has studied the subject at all. Thus, I'm completely failing to see the point in any of this.

WCSTombs commented on Ask HN: How many local logins do you have on your computer? · Posted by u/bahmboo

WCSTombs · a month ago

On my own computers I typically have the two logins you mentioned, the user and the root account, since there's only one of me and only I use the computers. On the computer I recently had for work there were many accounts, since the sysadmins sometimes needed to SSH in. I also selectively added accounts for some of my coworkers as needed.

If I lived with any family, making non-sudoer accounts for them on at least some of the machines would seem like a pretty normal thing.