Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> It may not work perfectly in 100% of the cases, but that doesn't mean reversing a string is no longer possible.

I don't understand why in maths finding one single counter-example is enough to disprove a theorem yet in programming people seem to be happy with 99.x % of success rate. To me, "It may not work perfectly in 100% of the cases" exactly means "no longer possible" as "possible" used to imply that it would work consistently, 100% of the time.



It is very useful in engineering to do things that are mathematically impossible, by simply ignoring or rejecting the last 1%.

Sometimes that's unacceptable, because you really do care about 100% of cases. When it isn't, you get really cool "impossible" tools out of it :)


Because programming is not a science (or at most it is an applied science).

By your logic any software that has a single bug would be useless, and if that were the case this entire profession wouldn't exist.


Because you have additional information that separates it from the general case.

Even in mathematics if you add additional constraints you can solve subclasses of problems.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: