
Ask HN: What are day to day “problems” that have verified solutions? - joshspankit
Especially interested in those things that keep coming up at workplaces, at home, or anywhere between.<p>Maybe the people with these problems have not (yet) been exposed to the solution, or maybe it runs counter to intuition and doesn&#x27;t &#x27;stick&#x27;, but our collective knowledge knows. And <i>you</i> know. It might even drive you a little crazy that it keeps coming up.<p>Some examples: Date formatting ( https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1179&#x2F; ) and data integrity (Reed–Solomon error correction), or even more &quot;mundane&quot; things like how to fairly split something up between two people (one splits, the other chooses).
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muzani
This is an excellent question, and I'm disappointed this hasn't received more
attention.

Secretary problem - applicable to anything where you have a lot of choices,
such as marriage, getting a job (not just hiring), picking a business partner,
anything you have to accept/refuse.

The solution is you reject the first 37% of applicants, use that to establish
a benchmark, and then pick the first one who is better than any rejected.
You're 37% likely to find the best candidate. But such is life. In other
words, once you marry someone out of 10 choices, there's 63% odds you'll find
someone better later.

There's Amdahl's Law/Gustafson's Law, explained nicely here:
[https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/1033.php](https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/1033.php)

Basically, upon first observations, Amdahl's Law seems true... even if you put
10x more effort into something, it seems like the total output is 42% higher.
But this total output being 42% higher means that you can also do X, Y, and Z,
42% faster. Having Z 42% faster leads to A being 20% faster, leading to B
being 8% faster, and B is a feedback back into the loop.

In more practical terms, much faster computers means software is written
slightly faster, but slightly faster software allows for more complicated
electronics CAD, which allows us much faster computers, which allows for even
more advanced technical developments like Internet and cryptocurrency.

In short, if you're locked on Amdahl's Law (minor gains for tremendous
effort), find a way to utilize Gustafson's Law (looping the gains back).

