Top all-time · #673
bit-player.org
Personal blog · bit-player.org · on HN as bit-playermathscience
bit-player.org is a personal blog at bit-player.org about math and science. Since 2008, 94 different Hacker News readers have linked it 208 times, most often “World3, the Public Beta (2012)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Sometimes recommended · 15 of 39 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers recommend Brian Hayes's blog for computing, maths and curiosities, followed up further than most, and beautifully illustrated.
- Recommended for · 15 comments
- 'interesting'; 'well worth following'; 'always writes great stuff'; one post gives intuition for a hard problem.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 39 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- World3, the Public Beta (2012)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2012-04-15
- Third Base: On Ternary (2001) [pdf]5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-02-25
- The Mind Wanders (2018)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-08-03
- A slight discrepancy4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2011-07-18
- Bit-player: An amateur's outlook on computation and mathematics4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2012-10-04
- Brain Hayes on the Zune Bug3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2009-01-08
- My God, It’s Full of Dots3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-09-27
- /3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-01-26
- MathJax Turns 3.03 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-03-14
- AI and the End of Programming3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-09-13
What Hacker News says?
Brian Hayes's bitplayer: http://bit-player.org/ Brian Hayes was once an editor of Scientific American. The blog covers a variety of topics, some related to computer science or math, some not. It reminds me a bit of the old Computer Recreations column that used to run in Scientific American.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted The 39th Root of 92 as a story · 217 points
HN discussion“There’s a simple explanation. MCAS is not meant to control an unstable aircraft. It is meant to restrain the aircraft from entering the regime where it becomes unstable. This is the same strategy used by other mechanisms of stall prevention—intervening before the angle of attack reaches the critical point. However, if Brady is correct about the instability of the 737 MAX, the task is more urgent for MCAS. Instabili…
Comment linking /2019/737-the-max-mess
on “My Letter to the Editor of New York Times Magazine”Submitted Massachusetts gas fires: Another technological tragedy as a story · 216 points
HN discussionIt seems that knowing the famous anecdote about Gauss: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/gausss-day-of-reck... http://bit-player.org/wp-content/extras/gaussfiles/gauss-sni... would have helped as well.
Comment linking /wp-content/extras/gaussfiles/gauss-snippets.html
on “I cheated on my Microsoft interview (2019)”Submitted Foldable Words as a story · 206 points
HN discussionHere are a bunch of blogs from my RSS reader that I think are worth reading. Some of them haven't updated in a while, but the archives may be worth a look anyway. * Blogs with a math focus: http://blog.sigfpe.com http://bit-player.org http://mathr.co.uk/blog/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/ * Blogs with a programming languages focus: https://existentialtype.wordpress.com https://bluishcoder.co.nz http://blog.ezyang.…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What programming blogs do you follow?”Submitted The keys to the keydom as a story · 152 points
HN discussionOh! I remembered more details about it if it helps. It has to do with e being the "most efficient" numbering base. The reason e is the "most efficient" has to do with wanting to minimize both the size of the alphabet of symbols as well as the number of digits in an average computation. If you allow for a non-integer base, and a non-integer number of digits, the optimum base is e. e rounds to 3. ;-) Now, full disclos…
Comment linking /wp-content/extras/bph-publications/AmSci-2001-11-Hayes-ternary.pdf
on “Email exchange between MIT Media Lab and the IOTA Foundation [pdf]”Submitted Does having prime neighbors make you more composite? as a story · 147 points
HN discussionAnother explanation (a bit clearer in my opinion): http://bit-player.org/2011/the-n-ball-game
Comment linking /2011/the-n-ball-game
on “High-dimensional spheres are "spikey"”Submitted MathJax Turns 3.0 as a story · 136 points
HN discussionA comment there mentions the specific time that causes it: I found that the crash problem occurs when the datetime is after 2017 Dec 02, 12:15am. The problem does not happen at 12:14am, but once the time goes past 12:15am, and I do a hard reset, the problem returns. ...the real question then, is what is special about 2017-12-02 00:15 ? It's not a leap day[1], there are no leap seconds, and nothing about the epoch ti…
Comment linking /2009/the-zune-bug
on “App with local notification will crash iOS Springboard on Dec. 2”Submitted My God, It’s Full of Dots as a story · 130 points
HN discussionhttp://bit-player.org/wp-content/extras/bph-publications/AmS...
Comment linking /wp-content/extras/bph-publications/AmSci-2001-11-Hayes-ternary.pdf
on “Base 3 Computing Beats Binary”Submitted Prime After Prime as a story · 127 points
HN discussionthis model is very sensitive to certain inputs if smidged a little bit yield vastly different projections. Models are more convincing when they are robust to that sort of thing. For instance go here: http://bit-player.org/extras/limits/ltg.html and try increasing the "output consumed (fraction)" input a little bit.
Comment linking /extras/limits/ltg.html
on “Predict civilization collapse with Python and World3 model”Submitted Where's my petabyte disk drive? as a story · 127 points
HN discussionEven Microsoft is not immune to date bugs - remember their Zunes freezing on a leap year? http://bit-player.org/2009/the-zune-bug This was in software, not hardware, more serious than just the date being wrong, and they didn't even provide a fix other than "wait until the day passes": http://gizmodo.com/5121822/official-fix-for-the-zune-30-fail
Comment linking /2009/the-zune-bug
on “Compensate for Rockchip calendar deviation on November 31st”Submitted Limits to Growth (1972) as a story · 99 points
HN discussionI don't think he has gone: both his blog [0] and the American Scientist site [1] refer to him as a senior writer in the present tense, and he had an article about deep dreaming in the Nov-Dec 2015 issue [2]. His blog is interesting, and has posts more frequent than his magaine articles. [0]: http://bit-player.org/about-the-author [1]: https://www.americanscientist.org/authors/detail/brian-hayes [2]: https://www.amer…
Comment linking /about-the-author
on ““American Scientist” Understands Nothing about the Traveling Salesman Problem”Submitted Prime After Prime (2016) as a story · 90 points
HN discussionBest way of finding if there are rectangles: > We encode the rows of the grid in a set of bit vectors–four vectors for each row, representing the four possible colors. For example, the red vector for a row has a 1 at each position where the corresponding node is red, and zeroes elsewhere. The blue vector has 1s for blue nodes, and so forth. Now we can detect a rectangle merely by taking the logical AND of two rows (…
Comment linking /2009/the-17x17-challenge
on “The 17x17 problem solved”Submitted Traffic Jams in JavaScript as a story · 80 points
HN discussionThis post explains the problem enough to give an intuitive understanding of why it's difficult: http://bit-player.org/2009/the-17x17-challenge
Comment linking /2009/the-17x17-challenge
on “The 17x17 problem solved”Submitted Pumping the Primes as a story · 78 points
HN discussionThe example they give of randomly changing one coloring and getting a whole bunch of rectangles makes me wonder if there are any points in that coloring that you could change without destroying the solution. I doubt there are any, but it probably wouldn't take that long to write a program to check... EDIT: And after reading this, I'm starting to wonder about other ways to use this solution to search for others, such…
Comment linking /2009/17-x-17-a-nonprogress-report
on “The 17x17 problem solved”Submitted Who was Aleph Null? (2013) as a story · 77 points
HN discussionYou can play with the actual model here: http://bit-player.org/extras/limits/ltg.html (github here: https://github.com/bit-player/limits ) It appears sensitive to that "output consumed" fraction, which I don't understand.
Comment linking /extras/limits/ltg.html
on “The Limits to Growth (1972)”Submitted Magnetism Simulations: Three Months in Monte Carlo as a story · 77 points
HN discussion
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