I'm starting to wonder how many Canadians are on Hacker News. This after seeing the BC Time Zone story as well as this one. Just curious, really. I'm wondering what the country breakdown is for Hacker News users.
Canadian checking in!
Readit Newsgregdeon commented on Closure of the Weatheradio service in Canada rac.ca/rac-responds-to-th... · Posted by u/da768
gregdeon commented on British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time cbc.ca/news/canada/britis... · Posted by u/ireflect
That's what everyone says. But it turns out people hate spending their morning in darkness for more light at night. Which makes perfect sense:
https://washingtonian.com/2022/03/15/the-us-tried-permanent-...
> the inkling of light they get during their winter commute
It's not an inkling. Unless you roll out of bed and instantly onto your commute, you're getting natural sunlight through all your windows for hours every morning. That's exactly when you need it.
> Unless you roll out of bed and instantly onto your commute, you're getting natural sunlight through all your windows for hours every morning.
Sadly, not if you're a student living in a basement in Vancouver!
The article on the average pilot and aircraft cockpit design is fascinating.
Now I’m entirely invested, what was the problem causing the crashes? How did they solve it?
Same here. If you shouldn't design for the average dimensions, what _should_ you design for?
Small anecdote:
In the IEEEXTREME university programming competition there are ~10k participating teams.
Our university has a quite strong Competitive Programming program and the best teams usually rank in the top 100. Last year a team ranked 30 and it's wasn't even our strongest team (which didn't participate)
This year none of our teams was able to get in the top 1000. I would estimate close to 99% of the teams in the Top 1000 were using LLMs.
Last year they didn't seem to help much, but this year they rendered the competition pointless.
I've read blogs/seen videos of people who got in the AOC global leaderboard last year without using LLMs, but I think this year it wouldn't be possible at all.
Oof. I had a great time cracking the top 100 of Advent of Code back in 2020. Bittersweet to know that I got in while it was still a fun challenge for humans.
gregdeon commented on I mathematically proved the best "Guess Who?" strategy [video] youtube.com/watch?v=_3RNB... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
In addition to other answers, one way to think about it is that the options are symmetric around the midpoint: a guess that partitions the space into (1/4 of options, 3/4 of options) is the same as one that does (3/4, 1/4). So (1/2, 1/2) is special in some way – it has to be either a local minimum or local maximum. And if the function is convex (or close enough), then (1/2, 1/2) is a global minimum/maximum.
But (1/2, 1/2) is clearly a better choice than just guessing a specific individual. So it must be the best choice.
This is all right, but it just kicks the intuition into the assumption that the function is convex. As far as I can tell from the paper, this turns out to be exactly the argument they use to prove that (1/2, 1/2) is the optimal guess. But the majority of that proof is dedicated to showing that the function is indeed convex.
gregdeon commented on I mathematically proved the best "Guess Who?" strategy [video] youtube.com/watch?v=_3RNB... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
If you're behind and you're doing the same strategy as your opponent, you'll never catch up. If you're behind doing the risky bet strategy, most times you will never catch up either because your risky bets don't pay off, but a few times they will pay off.
Sure, I think it makes intuitive sense to me that you should play riskier when you're behind. The surprising part to me is that when you're ahead, even if you know that your opponent will play "sub-optimally", that doesn't change your own optimal move.
gregdeon commented on I mathematically proved the best "Guess Who?" strategy [video] youtube.com/watch?v=_3RNB... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
Binary search minimizes the number of expected moves until you find the target. If you are already ahead, this is a natural thing to want to do. The reason why this doesn't work when you're behind is that your opponent can also do that and probabilistically maintain their lead.
I know that it minimizes the expected number of moves. But, the goal is to maximize the probability that you win in fewer moves than your opponent, not minimize the expected number of moves. Given that your opponent is playing some riskier strategy, it's not intuitively obvious to me that your optimal moves for those two objectives are the same.
gregdeon commented on I mathematically proved the best "Guess Who?" strategy [video] youtube.com/watch?v=_3RNB... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
The idea is that if you're winning you can just do a binary search, but if you're losing, it's better to take some risks by making narrower guesses.
For example, let's say it's the last turn and your opponent is about to win. Say you may have 2 options but your opponent has 4 options. Instead of whittling it down to 2 options, it's better to guess one of the four. How outrageous should your guesses be is the content of the result and paper.
Paper is on archive (and linked from the video):
I find it somewhat surprising that the optimal play when you're ahead is still just binary search. Is there an intuitive reason why it's not productive to make riskier guesses? Why not use my lead to have some chance of sealing my victory immediately, while still maintaining my lead if I'm wrong?
I love running euler problems when trying to learn the basics of a new programming language. I have a small collection of programs in like 10 different languages that I keep around as a reference for things because I always try to use language-specific features to solve the problems, and then I reference them as examples.
Wow. You reminded me of a computer engineering class years ago where we wrote assemblers and emulators for a simple architecture. I tested mine by writing a solution for one of the first Project Euler questions!
I have an intense phobia of dentists; if I were wearing a constant monitor, I bet you could tell when I was at the dentist just by watching the blood pressure and heart rate spikes. (You'd have to find some way of differentiating them from me being in a car accident, or being attacked by a werewolf.)
I wonder if it would show up on the heart rate (or heart rate variability) tracking from an Apple Watch or similar. My Garmin picks up stressful events all the time.