Nothing.
Some people don't understand things, that is not the same as understanding nothing.
I also understand ashtanga and programming.
Ask HN: What is the most complex topic you understand?
41–50 of 98 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the most complex topic you understand?
#42Germany.
Though I have to admit an ever increasing number of details are getting fuzzy as they fade into the rear-view mirror of my attention.
As a foreigner fluent in German, with a very diverse set of German friends, and years of experience living there, in three very different regions at different stages of my life, I will make the bold claim that I understand Germany, even if I probably understood it more in the past than I will in the future.
I’m sure there are many people who understand it better, deeper, more completely; but I’m not sure any of them are Germans. Ask the fish about water, etc.
I think this kind of sounds like hubris. I plead guilty, but with the mitigating circumstance that my claim to understanding isn’t any more hubristic than the next guy’s.
Austria, on the other hand, is a complete mystery to me.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most complex topic you understand?
#43Methods of self-organizing DHTs to optimize lookup performance. I had to learn hyperbolic geometry and figure out how to compute Delunay/Voronoi graphs on it, at scale, distributedly.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most complex topic you understand?
#44Entropy. It was hard for me to understand this arbitrary rule of things becoming less ordered over time. Was this just a fundamental natural law? The answer is no. Entropy is a logical consequence of probability and time. Why do things become more chaotic over time? Because chaotic configurations have a higher probability of occurring. There are far more disordered configurations of things then there are ordered, thi…
Master that entropy and you too can enjoy sending data over Internet without changing one bit of data: pulse-width modulation of inter-packet delay gaps.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most complex topic you understand?
#45My girlfriend. Of course it's not a complete understanding, and there's always new things to learn. But that's part of the wonder and enjoyment.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most complex topic you understand?
#46Germany. Though I have to admit an ever increasing number of details are getting fuzzy as they fade into the rear-view mirror of my attention. As a foreigner fluent in German, with a very diverse set of German friends, and years of experience living there, in three very different regions at different stages of my life, I will make the bold claim that I understand Germany, even if I probably understood it more in the…
Would you mind explaining a bit what you mean with understand Germany?
I am German and my girlfriend is from Brazil. We talk a lot about cultural differences and how Germans are. So I am curious.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most complex topic you understand?
#47I guess it might be 'graph hashing', also known as canonicalization. So this is related to some other things, like the Weisfeiler-Leman Algorithm, and Morgan numbers, and partition refinement. The idea is that to compare two graphs (networks, or Eulerian graphs) for equality one way to do that is to 'hash' the graph. The resulting canonical representations of the graphs are then compared directly for equality. I impl…
In a distant past I started working on something similar, but reached the limits of my mind before doing anything useful. Tangential question: is there a difference in the context of graphs between canonicalization and normalization?
Re: Ask HN: What is the most complex topic you understand?
#48The electrical properties and strength of covalent molecular bonds during DNA splicing Also microinstruction vulnerabilities of CPUs.
Those are two very different areas. How did you come to learn about each one?
Re: Ask HN: What is the most complex topic you understand?
#49data sync
Re: Ask HN: What is the most complex topic you understand?
#50Germany. Though I have to admit an ever increasing number of details are getting fuzzy as they fade into the rear-view mirror of my attention. As a foreigner fluent in German, with a very diverse set of German friends, and years of experience living there, in three very different regions at different stages of my life, I will make the bold claim that I understand Germany, even if I probably understood it more in the…
What are some major issues/concerns that you see for the present or near future of Germany?