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

The emoji problem (2022)

artofproblemsolving.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 71 posts

Re: The emoji problem (2022)

#21

Post by amenghra »

patapong wrote: post #16
dmurray wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody can do this on their own. You don't get to do this by having a great aptitude for high school maths and then being exposed to one or two more concepts that just intuitively click - which is enough to be competitive at the level you describe, though not enough to make the US Olympiad team. You get the level of understanding necessary to create this blog post by already having worked through several textbooks an…

The picture says 95% are unable to solve this - I wonder what the correct percentage is. Closer to 99.999% I would guess, based on your explanation.

Originally, more like 99.999995%

Re: The emoji problem (2022)

#24

Post by adzm »

On a related tangent, when I was teaching my younger kids about math and helping with homework, I would often rewrite things as a formula, or rewrite the formula itself once they got to that point. However instead of things like x I would use things like fluffy cloud, star, etc. They thought it was annoying but it still kept them interested and have said they've done the same when helping their peers. It's easy to forget what it was like learning these abstractions, and it was important to show that x was nothing special, it could be a sun, it could be the phrase "total number of kittens"

Re: The emoji problem (2022)

#25

Post by socalgal2 »

voidUpdate wrote: post #10
oytis wrote: post #4

It's year 2025, why doesn't the author use actual fruit emoji for variable names?

While current year is 2025, the year the language was made in probably isnt

Good or not, many languages choose not to support emoji, even newer ones.

The reasons are complicated but, many people prefer unicode normalization so that different forms of what appear to be the same word are considered the same word. People argue whether or not this is important but it can certainly be argued that it would be frustrating to get an error like

    let café = 1;
    café += 1;  // error, unknown identifier 'café'
The error happens in non-normalizing languages because those to idenifiers are not the same unicode.

But, choosing a normalization affects emoji as well. Worse, when new ones are added the normalization rules can change.

Re: The emoji problem (2022)

#26

Post by jerf »

gus_massa wrote: post #14
ysofunny wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you seem to be missing this idea that mathematics must be doable alone, individually this appears to be what sets mathematics appart from science? I mean, it's not like Euler, or Poincaré, and so on, are really there with you when "doing math" point being, mathematics is not a team game. but everything else is??

When I'm teaching congruence or the Gauss method to solve equation systems, I tell my students: " You can solve the midterm alone or with the ghost of Gauss sit on the side chair. "

I like that. "Standing on the shoulder of giants" is a fairly common way to phrase this, and it captures truth as well, but "on a team with the greatest mathematicians of history" is pretty fun too.

Pity I'm by far the weakest link in such team-ups. :)

Re: The emoji problem (2022)

#30

Post by aragonite »

oytis wrote: post #4

It's year 2025, why doesn't the author use actual fruit emoji for variable names?

When trying to understand complex C codebase I've often found it helpful to rename existing variable as emojis. This makes it much easier to track which variables are used where & to take in the pure structure of the code at one glance. An example I posted previously: https://imgur.com/F27ZNfk

Unfortunately most modern languages like Rust and JS follow the XID_Start/XID_Continue recommendation (not very well-motivated imo) which excludes all emoji characters from identifiers.

Post reply on HN