Undergraduate Disproves 40-Year-Old Conjecture, Invents New Kind of Hash Table

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Ignorance of Conventional Wisdom & Innovation

  • The quoted line about the student not knowing the conjecture sparks debate about whether ignorance of prior work can enable breakthroughs by avoiding mental constraints.
  • Others argue this is romanticized: most real advances come from people deeply trained in the field, with this case being an exception rather than a model.

Juniors, LLMs, and Software Practice

  • Some claim high-performing teams should always include juniors to ask naïve questions and attempt big, open-ended tasks.
  • Others note that in practice, juniors mostly get “talked back into” conventional approaches, not breakthroughs.
  • LLMs raise concern that juniors may think even less, just pasting prompts and code, worse than the “StackOverflow era.”
  • Counterpoint: blindly committing LLM output is unlikely to succeed; review and debugging still require understanding.

Modern Physics, Orthodoxy, and Breakthroughs

  • One thread questions whether modern physics is “stuck” due to orthodoxy and lack of recent dramatic breakthroughs.
  • Responses list significant advances (Higgs, gravitational waves, neutrino physics, quantum computing theory) and stress that limits are mostly experimental/technological, not ideological.
  • Some see physics near “completion” at current experimental scales; others emphasize we know our foundations are incomplete but can’t yet test alternatives.

Cranks, Credentials, and Gatekeeping

  • There’s tension between tolerating self-taught “cranks” versus the time cost and noise they impose (spam manuscripts, low SNR).
  • Credentials are framed as a heuristic for triaging attention, not as a fundamental refutation of ideas.
  • Over-aggressive ridicule of bad ideas is criticized as discouraging curiosity and questions.

Defying Experts & the Theranos Example

  • A side discussion uses Theranos to ask if ignoring experts can ever yield “impossible” technologies (e.g., tiny-sample blood tests).
  • Several commenters object: Theranos is a case where experts were simply right; using it as a positive example of challenging consensus is misleading.
  • Broader point: challenging orthodoxy is sometimes valuable, but most “experts are wrong” stories end in failure, not revolution.

Conjectures, Romantic Narratives, and Scientific Progress

  • Multiple comments stress that a conjecture is meant to be falsified; this is not an “overthrow of a theory.”
  • The outsider-genius narrative is seen as emotionally appealing (underdog vs institutions) but statistically rare.
  • References to ideas like “science progresses one funeral at a time” appear, with some skepticism about over-idealizing such stories.

Desire for Algorithmic Detail

  • Several readers are disappointed that the Quanta/Wired piece barely explains the hash-table algorithm.
  • The original paper is linked for those wanting technical details; some note a B-tree-like flavor and speculate there might be a simpler underlying idea.

Practicality, Performance, and Memory Tradeoffs

  • Concerns:
    • Resizing may be very complex and could invalidate pointers except under chaining.
    • Multiple hash computations per key may be too costly, making it slower than modern open-addressing tables in practice.
  • Some suggest it could still be useful where hashes can be memoized (e.g., string interning) or where maximum table size is known.
  • Skeptics challenge others to implement it and compare against top-tier existing implementations; they suspect this is mainly a theoretical result.
  • Memory usage is questioned; small GitHub implementations suggest higher overhead, though the paper’s design (log‑sized arrays 1,2,4,8,…) is cited to ask what exactly drives that overhead.
  • A specific confusion is raised about why the data structure forms a “funnel” (unequal array sizes) instead of equal-sized arrays—suspected to be a memory vs. performance tradeoff, but not clearly explained in the article.

Authorship Norms and Credit

  • Some feel the discoverer should be first author but note the paper is alphabetical.
  • Others explain that in theoretical CS and adjacent areas, alphabetical ordering is common, unlike many other CS subfields where first/last authorship indicates contribution or advisor roles.

Meta: Repeated HN Discussions & Culture

  • Commenters note this story and even specific arguments have appeared on HN before, leading to self-aware jokes about repetition, “eternal September,” and whether the site is full of bots or just “old farts” rehashing the same debates.