Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mathematician Solves Sensitivity Conjecture in Two Pages (2019)

quantamagazine.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 107 posts

Re: Mathematician Solves Sensitivity Conjecture in Two Pages (2019)

#71

Post by kevinskii »

wenc wrote: post #16

I remember this article from 2019. I remember the writing style struck me then as being a little strange. My first thought was "who's the mathematician"? But the article doesn't actually mention the author's name until a few paragraphs down, electing instead to put the spotlight on Scott Aaronson and other commentators. I felt then as I do now that it was a little lacking in respect.

I read it as more of an attempt to frame Hao Huang’s accomplishment in a way that a lay audience could better appreciate it. I didn’t get any sense that it was disrespectful.

Re: Mathematician Solves Sensitivity Conjecture in Two Pages (2019)

#72

Post by xiaodai »

enjoyyourlife wrote: post #62
wenc wrote: post #16

I remember this article from 2019. I remember the writing style struck me then as being a little strange. My first thought was "who's the mathematician"? But the article doesn't actually mention the author's name until a few paragraphs down, electing instead to put the spotlight on Scott Aaronson and other commentators. I felt then as I do now that it was a little lacking in respect.

The name of the mathematician is Hao Huang

Huang Hao. Chinese family name姓 first

Re: Mathematician Solves Sensitivity Conjecture in Two Pages (2019)

#73

Post by johntb86 »

wenc wrote: post #16

I remember this article from 2019. I remember the writing style struck me then as being a little strange. My first thought was "who's the mathematician"? But the article doesn't actually mention the author's name until a few paragraphs down, electing instead to put the spotlight on Scott Aaronson and other commentators. I felt then as I do now that it was a little lacking in respect.

Perhaps it's just that the article isn't written in inverted pyramid style? In non-newspaper writing (e.g. a novella) having the main character be introduced in the 8th paragraph wouldn't be that odd.

Re: Mathematician Solves Sensitivity Conjecture in Two Pages (2019)

#74

Post by PartiallyTyped »

angry_octet wrote: post #31
wenc wrote: post #16

I remember this article from 2019. I remember the writing style struck me then as being a little strange. My first thought was "who's the mathematician"? But the article doesn't actually mention the author's name until a few paragraphs down, electing instead to put the spotlight on Scott Aaronson and other commentators. I felt then as I do now that it was a little lacking in respect.

I agree, it's extremely distasteful. I feel the author has cut their teeth writing clickbait headlines to make information extraction harder, the way a supermarket puts the milk at the far corner of the store. I want a link/cite to the original paper in the first para.

> the way a supermarket puts the milk at the far corner of the store

I never noticed, but I can only recall a single instance from a set of 10 or so where that isn't the case.

Any links on related content to the topic?

Re: Mathematician Solves Sensitivity Conjecture in Two Pages (2019)

#75

Post by jcagalawan »

_rerr wrote: post #39
scythmic_waves wrote: post #5

From Scott Aaronson's blog (linked in the article): > Another Update: In the comments section, my former student Shalev Ben-David points out a simplification [1] of Huang’s argument, which no longer uses Cauchy’s interlacing theorem. I thought there was no way this proof could possibly be made any simpler, and I was wrong! [1] https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4229#comment-1813084

I really enjoyed Ben-David (and Shalev-Schwartz)'s book "Understanding machine learning". It's essentially about theory though, not "learn all about machine learning in torchsorflow in 10 days".

Different Ben-David. You're talking about Shalev's dad Shai.

Re: Mathematician Solves Sensitivity Conjecture in Two Pages (2019)

#76

Post by jldugger »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #74
angry_octet wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, it's extremely distasteful. I feel the author has cut their teeth writing clickbait headlines to make information extraction harder, the way a supermarket puts the milk at the far corner of the store. I want a link/cite to the original paper in the first para.

> the way a supermarket puts the milk at the far corner of the store I never noticed, but I can only recall a single instance from a set of 10 or so where that isn't the case. Any links on related content to the topic?

There's a econtalk or maybe a planet money that goes into detail on this: the cold chain is super important in food safety, especially for stuff like milk. You want to be able to move from refrigerated milk truck to grocery store food fridge rapidly, so you put the milk near the loading dock. And of course, you keep the loading dock as far away from customers as possible so they're not inconvenienced.

Moving the cold chain closer to checkout involves additional expenses, so it works more for higher margin products, and ones a bit more forgiving if there's a thaw, like Coke, Monster energy drinks, and canned coffee from Starbucks.

So the question becomes: would you pay 50 cents more for milk from a fridge at checkout, when you can get the same thing at the back?

EDIT: it was the host of econtalk, appearing on NPR Planet money:https://www.npr.org/2014/08/01/337034378/everyone-goes-to-th...

Re: Mathematician Solves Sensitivity Conjecture in Two Pages (2019)

#77

Post by ErikVandeWater »

xmprt wrote: post #65
bidirectional wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been interesting to watch the rapid degradation of the term clickbait, we've quickly gone from the original targets of the term ("Local mother discovers one small trick", "He did X, you WON'T believe what happened next"), to it now being used in probably a third of HN's comment sections to describe any title which is even mildly editorialised and not a longwinded statement of plain facts.

If anything I think the term clickbait is used more appropriately now. "Local mother discovers one small trick" is terrible clickbait because most people are used to it now in the same way a Nigerian prince scam won't work on most people. Clickbait is anything that gets you to click on an article. In some cases, it can be good clickbait and an equally good article and in other cases it can be bad clickbait where the…

The connotation of clickbait is essential to its definition.

Re: Mathematician Solves Sensitivity Conjecture in Two Pages (2019)

#78

Post by alasdair_ »

alberto_ol wrote: post #32
anchpop wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of makes this seem funny in retrospect: > Aaronson and O’Donnell both called Huang’s paper the “book” proof of the sensitivity conjecture, referring to Paul Erdős’ notion of a celestial book in which God writes the perfect proof of every theorem. “I find it hard to imagine that even God knows how to prove the Sensitivity Conjecture in any simpler way than this,” Aaronson wrote.

A few comments below a guy called Don Knuth claims to have shortened the proof to one page https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4229#comment-1815290

> a guy called Don Knuth

I found this unreasonably funny, given we’re posting on a tech-focused forum. It’s like posting about “a proof by some dude called Albert Einstein” on a physics forum. :)

Re: Mathematician Solves Sensitivity Conjecture in Two Pages (2019)

#79

Post by dang »

LolWolf wrote: post #26

The sensitivity conjecture is actually pretty simple to understand, intuitively. (Its reduction to applications, and its proof, of course, are both a little bit more of the "magical" parts so-to-speak.) The 'canonical' way of thinking about it is in terms of the hypercube graph , which is defined in the following way: - The dimension-0 hypercube graph is... just a single vertex. . - The dimension-1 hypercube graph is…

This subthread was originally in reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26116077 but we detached it so that it can float freely to a higher place.

Re: Mathematician Solves Sensitivity Conjecture in Two Pages (2019)

#80

Post by dang »

LolWolf wrote: post #69
LolWolf wrote: post #26

The sensitivity conjecture is actually pretty simple to understand, intuitively. (Its reduction to applications, and its proof, of course, are both a little bit more of the "magical" parts so-to-speak.) The 'canonical' way of thinking about it is in terms of the hypercube graph , which is defined in the following way: - The dimension-0 hypercube graph is... just a single vertex. . - The dimension-1 hypercube graph is…

This is a bit of a random comment @dang, but it's always a bit of a shame when a long explanation gets posted and the comment that it is responding to dies or is downvoted for some reason or another. I've seen this happen a few times and am wondering if there is a possible fix? I guess this is the risk one takes when responding to comments, but it feels like there might be a reasonable tradeoff/possible solution! :)

Yes, it's a problem. We can do things but unfortunately they're all manual for now, so we have to know about it, and that's a bottleneck. Thanks for letting us know!
Post reply on HN