martinhath
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mht.wtf
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Comment · 5 days ago
ETH is false! This is one of the big long-standing hypotheses that I actually remember from university, and afaik, it was reasonable to assume it would be true; reasonable enough for a lot of papers and results to assume this for bounds or hardness proofs of common problems in parameterized complexity, anyways.
Also glad to see that one of the authors of the paper stating it is also in the loop here.
2026 is weird.
Comment · 2 months ago
> Jevons paradox occurs when a more efficient use of a resource leads to an increase in its use
I think these are the same, because efficiency is value over cost. In the original formulation of the paradox, a more efficient steam engine lead to a rise in coal consumption. You can look at this as a "money buys coal, coal drives locomotion" system, where the latter part was improved. Modulo practical issues with coal (transport, storage, etc), dropping the price of coal would (probably?) lead to the same effect, since the end result is that locomotion per money is increased. For an outside observer, it doesn't matter if you get more coal per money or more locomotion per coal.
> standard supply and demand
Standard supply and demand doesn't say anything about increase of spend. If food prices drop, I'm not going to buy more food. I might buy better food for the same budget, but there's no reason why my total food spend should increase.
Comment · 1 year ago
This is from C.A.R Hoare's "Prospects for a better programming language" (1972) [0]:
> It is on production runs that the security is most required, since it is the results of production runs that will actually be trusted as the basis of actions such as expenditure of money and perhaps even lives. The strategy now recommended to many programmers is equivalent to that of a sailor who wears a lifejacket during his training on dry land but takes it off when he is sailing his boat on the sea. It is small wonder that computers acquire a bad reputation when programmed in accordance with this common policy.
It is also quoted by Donald Knuth in "Structured programming with goto statements" (1974) [1] ( which incidentally is also the source of the quote about premature optimization):
> He [Tony Hoare] points out quite correctly that the current practice of compiling subscript range checks into the machine code while a program is being tested, then suppressing the check during production runs, is like a sailor who wears his life preserver while training on land but leaves it behind when he sails!
[0]: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:dff9483b-e72f-4599-bf90-76... p. 341
[1]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/356635.356640 p. 269