Can you enter an RSA key and have it produce two prime numbers?
Show HN: I made a spreadsheet where formulas also update backwards
31–40 of 122 posts
Re: Show HN: I made a spreadsheet where formulas also update backwards
#32Hm? I don't get it. What's the point of calculating backwards non-invertible operations such as addition? Isn't the result just arbitrary?
You could add hints as a feature to this. E.g. interest = rate × principle
The user hints principle is preferred fixed so they can see what rate is needed for a givem amount of interest.
Hints could have a precedence order (then prefer to fix earlier terms on an operation on a tie breaker.)
Re: Show HN: I made a spreadsheet where formulas also update backwards
#33Excellent (sorry accidental pun)
This is a nice exploration.
Re: Show HN: I made a spreadsheet where formulas also update backwards
#34LOL! Gemini suggested to implement this to me literally yesterday: bidirectional computations. The example was that given a temperature in Celsius and Fahrenheit, modifying either of them should update their counterpart. In angular that would be two linked signals for instance, but even that is a bit fringe. Gemini was going for something even more elaborated. I told Gemini that spreadsheets were actually not doing t…
That's weird, Gemini told me not to do this.
Re: Show HN: I made a spreadsheet where formulas also update backwards
#35Can you enter an RSA key and have it produce two prime numbers?
A random tool like this would be the most entertaining possible way for something like that to be unleashed on the world
Re: Show HN: I made a spreadsheet where formulas also update backwards
#36A 2d sketcher with constraints is kind of similar. For example the equation
A = B + C
Where A, B, C are the lengths of 3 parallel lines. Within the sketcher you can drag the length of any one of those lines and the other two will adjust to keep the constraints.
Re: Show HN: I made a spreadsheet where formulas also update backwards
#37The idea is very interesting. As a default strategy you could preserve the ratio of inputs by scaling them to match the scaling of the output, instead of making them equal (for addition). Similarly, for multiplication, you could preserve the ratio of inputs as well, by scaling them by nth root of the scaling factor of the output.
Re: Show HN: I made a spreadsheet where formulas also update backwards
#38Can you enter an RSA key and have it produce two prime numbers?
A random tool like this would be the most entertaining possible way for something like that to be unleashed on the world
My brother once suggested that there are probably bits of code/algorithms that would be world changing if they were released in academic journals, but instead were written by some unknowing programmer in an afternoon for their job coding embedded systems for refrigerators.
This particular example may be unlikely, but it's a very fun idea.
Re: Show HN: I made a spreadsheet where formulas also update backwards
#39“Formulas that update backwards” is the main idea behind neural networks such as LLMs: the computation network produces a value, the error in this value is computed, and then the error quantity is pushed backward through the network; this relies on the differentiability of the function computed at each node in the network.
Re: Show HN: I made a spreadsheet where formulas also update backwards
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
A random tool like this would be the most entertaining possible way for something like that to be unleashed on the world
My brother once suggested that there are probably bits of code/algorithms that would be world changing if they were released in academic journals, but instead were written by some unknowing programmer in an afternoon for their job coding embedded systems for refrigerators. This particular example may be unlikely, but it's a very fun idea.
Lots of people working in different fields end up reinventing things that have been known to math for centuries, often in clunky roundabout ways. I imagine some of them figure out things not known to math, but it's far more likely to go the other way.