rho4

That list ordering drives me nuts. What's up with 1024?!

And how come much larger numbers have already been solved? Based on that information one cannot strictly assume that the current solution required improvements to the strategy or hardware, no?

So are there no discontinuities for weekday calculation? Never 2 Sundays in a row or a maybe even a Monday skipped?

Was going to say the same but then decided to search first if someone beat me to it. Sigh.

> After the voting period there will be a record of all the votes without the name of the voter. It will instead contain a cryptographic hash. You will receive a secret after you have voted that can be used to calculate that hash. This allows you to verify that your vote is in the list. This secret is sent in an encrypted mail.

I've always wanted this for mail-in voting. E.g. print a random secret on the voting form I receive per mail. Afterwards publish the complete vote-count on the web, with the choice and a hash of the secret. So I can check that my vote was recorded, and only once, and correctly.

I understand there might be a lot of reasons for why it could fail in practice, but it would be a start.

3 next clicks in missing a back button

Thank you, I really needed to read a sane voice. The relentless hype-onslaught is not easy to cope with.

Haha thanks for that article (I microwave most of my meals). I wonder if this statement from the article will apply to AI:

> Second, microwave cooking fell victim to the same curse that threatens every new easy-to-use technology: it became low-status tech.

Absolutely, I was purely reacting to the "not". Every variable named not-something will lead to difficult-to-read code with double-negation like "if (!isNotSomething()) {...}".

I just wish the variable was called "has_been_viewed_much".

> I'm not sure people are reading comment chains deeply enough to be swayed by two strangers arguing online

HN comments sway me more than any other source nowadays. Reading comments not directed at myself probably makes it easier because my ego does not feel attacked.

I really liked the specific actionable steps in the TLDR.

You can only serve the 3 closest levels to a lobby with stairs or escalators.

I guess I wanted to say that no tool/technology can prevent people from creating chaos (or make up for bad/non-existant processes). People need to do that. Of course, systematic people use tools as well. But you can't expect to buy or mandate a tool/technology and expect your system to then automatically have these qualities.

Not sure if tools and technologies can solve accidental complexity.

In my opinion, a system that has been stable for years isn't 'mature' in a good sense. An exceptional system is one that can still change after many years in production.

I believe this is almost impossible to achieve for enterprise software, because nobody has incentive to make the (huge) investment into longterm maintainability and changeability.

For me, consistent systematic naming and prefixes/suffixes to make names unique are a hint that a person is thinking about this or has experience with maintaining old systems. This has a huge effect on how well you can search, analyze, find usages, understand, replace, change.

A few of my favorites:

- "Not-Boxes": Negatively formulated text (disable... / don't...)

- "Button-Checkboxes": Checkboxes with verbs that trigger actions

- "Radio-Checkboxes": Radios that are actually checkboxes (not mutually exclusive)

- "Toggle-Checkboxes": Checkboxes that are actually toggle buttons and can't decided wheter the text should show the current state or the state that will happen when you click.

Same for me. Add a 'paste text to clipboard'-button top center.

I meant it more as feedback, to be aware that some people might have this reaction. I do believe it is sincere in the beginning.

I developed an aversion to "with love"-marketing. I've seen too many products come full circle from idealistic "ad-free-forever" "will-never-sell-your-data" "open-source-forever" "customer-first" student-times to selling out everything.

The author makes beautiful concise statements that make me feel like he has a deep, big-picture kind of understanding of computing.

I think this person would be very satisfying to work with, because decisions would be based on a discussion of tradeoffs, and an awareness of similar technologies and approaches throughout computing history.

Ouch, so painful to read.

Or when you're too lazy to hunt down the sources, both for internal and external dependencies. Just Ctrl+click the method and have a quick look at the decompiled implementation, usually good enough.

And then there is the moderate position: Don't be the person refusing the use a calculator / PC / mobile phone / AI. Regularly give the new tool a chance and check if improvements are useful for specific tasks. And carry on with your life.

I like the AI-disclaimer :). This might become a thing for blog and news articles: (c) all words written by <editor> on <date> without AI. And then there will be a robots.txt directive that allows collection of this self-declared human material for AI training. And a google search option: "ai:no" :)

Well said. Sad how that reflex starts kicking in for HN comments as well (ps I'm not getting any signals from your comment).

Yes, I feel the same recently with Google results. But I think I would still like to see the immediate 10 results, along with a big button "Try harder - not feeling very lucky".

I understand your point, but I still prefer instantaneous responses.

Only when the immediate answers become completely useless will I want to look into slower alternatives.

But first "show me what you've got so far", and let me decide whether it's good enough or not.

This. Speed determines whether I (like to) use a piece of software.

Imagine waiting for a minute until Google spits out the first 10 results.

My prediction: All AI models of the future will give an immediate result, with more and more innovation in mechanisms and UX to drill down further on request.

Edit: After reading my reply I realize that this is also true for interactions with other people. I like interacting with people who give me a 1 sentence response to my question, and only start elaborating and going on tangents and down rabbit holes upon request.

I really hope hacker news does not also turn into a Bash-Elon-Club like electrek.co (used to love that blog). But this comment section does not bode well.