Ask HN: What's the hardest problem you've ever solved?

Post by sonnyblarney » Mon, Nov 19, 2018, 8:02 PM UTC

effie wrote: post #394

sonnyblarney wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"And sometimes cheating the system is actually regarded highly by the fellow citizens, because the people do not believe in the imposed system. " If you live a totally corrupt system, maybe. But functional societies are based on the notion that cheating is bad, immoral, and nobody should do it. "Now, what is more ethical, doing what benefits the people or doing what benefits such system?" - ha ha ... this sounds like…

People who rob banks are not necessarily psychopaths. For a good (fictitious but convincing) example, see Toby Howard in the film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_or_High_Water_(film) Robbing a bank is universally illegal, but it is not regarded as unethical in general.

Post by quadcore » Mon, Nov 19, 2018, 8:57 PM UTC

yesenadam wrote: post #380

quadcore wrote: post #259

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My humble opinion. University is about learning (not, for example, status). Learning is something strictly personal. There is nothing fundamentally universally wrong to cheat at an exam beside the fact you may be harming yourself. Now since we need a little order for various secondary reasons, we promoted exam cheating to illegal and that's ok. We need order. But there is nothing someone should feel guilt for imho, a…

I wasn't talking about law, I was talking about ethics. "There is nothing fundamentally universally wrong to cheat at an exam beside the fact you may be harming yourself." I don't understand that, I have no idea where you got that. Or what those words "fundamentally" and "universally" add. I say it's wrong, you say "Oh, but it's not fundamentally, universally wrong".. As if it's clear what that means. For example: Yo…

Post by zerr » Mon, Nov 19, 2018, 10:43 PM UTC

m_ransing wrote: post #400

zerr wrote: post #319

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I guess that trick would be harder to reproduce for my problem - bringing down compile times from 4 hours to 1 :)

In 4 hour duration, you can do some (or many) other thing. In 30 seconds, you can not, those 30 seconds are pure waste.

Post by dennis_jeeves » Mon, Nov 19, 2018, 10:53 PM UTC

yesenadam wrote: post #378

dennis_jeeves wrote: post #356

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Hey Yholio, don't even bother to explain to the nuts here, who are questioning your 'ethics'. They do not have a nuanced view of ethics. For them the rules, as laid out by the authorities (in your case the university) is the template of what is 'ethical', they are incapable of thinking beyond that. The frightening thing is that they unfortunately represents the vast majority of people.

Wow. How that comment hasn't been flagged yet I have no idea. People who don't agree with you are 'nuts', yet you have a nuanced view of ethics? That's the most condescending, deluded thing I've heard in years. "For them.." blah blah.. you don't know us; in my case at least, your assumptions couldn't be more wrong, but what do you know or care; you've decided who the in- and out- groups are here.

Post by toutouast » Tue, Nov 20, 2018, 11:41 AM UTC

guidovranken wrote: post #43

Years ago I wrote an emulator for the Intel 8086 processor in C++. It's deceivingly difficult because the instruction encoding is complex and the emulation of each instruction has to have a very high fidelity. In a sense, software at the CPU instruction level is a chaotic system, as each instruction can influence the system state to a critical degree, so if there is a slight deviation from the spec/hardware, a snowba…