Top all-time · #18933
Bo Waggoner
Personal blog · bowaggoner.com/blahgmathprogramming
Bo Waggoner writes The Tiger's Stripes, a personal blog at bowaggoner.com about math and programming. Since 2017, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 7 times, most often “Adversarial Binary Search (or, how to fleece Ballmer)”. The last post was in 2020, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Bo Waggoner's blog for theory-flavoured posts on game theory and binary search games, plus essays on computer science as a discipline and a short story about DNS resolvers.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Adversarial Binary Search (or, how to fleece Ballmer)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-09-06
What Hacker News says?
I enjoyed the comment. You might like my short story along the same lines from a few years ago: https://bowaggoner.com/writeups/robust.html
Comment linking /writeups/robust.html
on “Every device with FB app is now DDoSing recursive DNS resolvers”Submitted Adversarial Binary Search (or, how to fleece Ballmer) as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThere is a much wider generalization here which is studied under the name of "property elicitation" in computer science, machine learning, and statistics. The generic question is: Given a loss function, what "property" of the distribution minimizes average loss; and given a "property", characterize all such loss functions. For example, Bregman divergences are (essentially) all losses that "elicit" the mean of a dist…
Comment linking /blog/series.html
on “Modes, Medians and Means: A Unifying Perspective”I recently was researching bitcoin, blockchain, etc, and I found it surprisingly difficult to find good but relatively short resources! I synthesized what I found into some slides that you might find helpful[1]. Apologies if this seems like self-promoting my own slides -- and I should say I am not at all an expert here -- but I created them mainly because I had trouble finding a "primer", so maybe they can help othe…
Comment linking /talks/2017/bitcoin-etc.pdf
on “Ask HN: A good primer on cryptocurrencies?”CS as practiced today contains elements of math, engineering, and the sciences (though rarely at the same time). I have a bit on this you might find interesting: http://bowaggoner.com/whatiscomputerscience.html#medium
Comment linking /whatiscomputerscience.html
on “Blum: “The proof is wrong. I shall elaborate precisely what the mistake is.””A more extensive analysis of Nash equilibria including a numerical solution for the full game is presented in https://bowaggoner.com/blahg/2024/09-06-adversarial-binary-s...
Comment linking /blahg/2024/09-06-adversarial-binary-search/
on “The expected value of the game is positive regardless of Ballmer’s strategy”See also https://bowaggoner.com/blahg/2024/09-06-adversarial-binary-s... using the Multiplicative Weight Update algorithm ( https://www.jeremykun.com/2017/02/27/the-reasonable-effectiv... a recurring feature on HN) to compute an approximate Nash equilibrium up to n = 100.
Comment linking /blahg/2024/09-06-adversarial-binary-search/
on “Analysis of adversarial binary search game”