Top all-time · #2476
davidbau.com
Personal blog · davidbau.com/archivesprogrammingscience
davidbau.com is a personal blog at davidbau.com about programming and science. Since 2009, 29 different Hacker News readers have linked it 36 times, most often “The Mystery of 355/113 (2010)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-02, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (14) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Commenters link David Bau's site mostly for code and tools: seedrandom.js, a Python pi spigot, templet.py and a JavaScript learning book. Two comments praise his posts about teaching his children to program.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 14 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- The Mystery of 355/113 (2010)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2012-07-24
- Random Seeds, Coded Hints, and Quintillions3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-01-25
- Someday we will all program in Python2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2009-06-22
What Hacker News says?
This is very nicely done, but I still prefer the simplicity of < http://davidbau.com/colors/ >. Despite being only 2-dimentional, I find that layout strangely more intuitive. I think the author manually tweaked the color positions, so that may be the reason.
Comment linking /colors/
on “Show HN: Sorted CSS Colors – Sort the named CSS colors in a nice way”Submitted The Mystery of 355/113 (2010) as a story · 198 points
HN discussionHere is pi, written as a number to infinite precision (from http://davidbau.com/archives/2010/03/14/python_pipy_spigot.h... ): def pi_decimal_digits(): q, r, t, j = 1, 180, 60, 2 while True: u, y = 3*(3*j+1)*(3*j+2), (q*(27*j-12)+5*r)//(5*t) yield y q, r, t, j = 10*q*j*(2*j-1), 10*u*(q*(5*j-2)+r-y*t), t*u, j+1 If you mean that pi can't be written as a number to infinite precision using place-value notation (as oppos…
Comment linking /archives/2010/03/14/python_pipy_spigot.html
on “1931: Kurt Gödel shows limits of math, logic, computing, AI”Submitted The Mystery of 355/113 as a story · 192 points
HN discussionMy kids aren't quite old enough, but I recently enjoyed the following stories: "Haaarg, world!" (writing a vampire-themed number-guessing game with a six-year-old): http://davidbau.com/archives/2005/07/29/haaarg_world.html Madlibs with a 13-Year-Old: https://nedbatchelder.com/text/madlibs.html
Comment linking /archives/2005/07/29/haaarg_world.html
on “Ask HN: Please share your experience teaching your kids to program”Submitted Two kinds of vibe coding as a story · 135 points
HN discussionI agree. This is something that XMLSchema got both right and wrong. The XMLSchema basic datatypes [0] are well defined and for the most part fit nicely in host languages. However, they really screwed up with the complex types making it difficult to map onto programming languages for multiple reasons (sequence/choice can't be easily modeled in most programming languages without intermediate types, extension versus re…
Comment linking /archives/2003/11/14/the_design_of_xmlbeans_part_1.html
on “Q – A Data Language”Submitted Someday we will all program in Python as a story · 53 points
HN discussionIt is ridiculous that even in light of the COMODO HTTPS hack, the writer would go as far as to say that SSL/TLS is a better solution. The writer also ignores that there are potential solutions to many of the problems pointed out: In case of random number generation, check out seedrandom: http://davidbau.com/archives/2010/01/30/random_seeds_coded_h... And while it's true that the server may always send "poisoned" Jav…
Comment linking /archives/2010/01/30/random_seeds_coded_hints_and_quintillions.html
on “Javascript Cryptography Considered Harmful”Submitted Conformal map visualizer as a story · 5 points
HN discussionYes another interesting python templating library, templet.py: http://davidbau.com/downloads/templet.py And some notes about the implementation: http://davidbau.com/archives/2007/03/11/python_string_functi...
Comment linking /archives/2007/03/11/python_string_functions.html
on “Pure python html templating using with statements ”Submitted Dario's Weird Race to the Top as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIf you want to mess around with these sorts of visualizations yourself, I recommend checking out David Bau's little web app for it: http://davidbau.com/conformal
Comment linking /conformal
on “Visualizing Complex Functions”Submitted Global Catastrophizing (2021) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI'll wait for the cryptographers to weigh in; but, it's in Javascript.. already a language that's going to be hard to Do It Right in. (The first third of the code is a BigInteger implementation) Then, I looked to see if the standard constant-time comparisons were in there to resist timing attacks. No dice there. So... cool. He put a nice wrapper on JSAES[1], jsSHA2[2] by way of webtoolkit.info[3], RSA and ECC in Jav…
Comment linking /archives/2010/01/30/random_seeds_coded_hints_and_quintillions.html
on “Cryptico.js - strong encryption system utilizing RSA and AES for javascript”Submitted The Mystery of 355/113 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSeems like a good time to post 355/113 http://davidbau.com/archives/2010/03/14/the_mystery_of_35511... One of the best easy to remember approximations of Pi
Comment linking /archives/2010/03/14/the_mystery_of_355113.html
on “Pi Day”Submitted In Defense of Curiosity as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHere's an interactive book on learning to program using javascript and jQuery: http://davidbau.com/javascript/learn/00-preface.html
Comment linking /javascript/learn/00-preface.html
on “Why Johnny can't code”Submitted Does Computer Science Still Exists? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionCountdown to HTML/JS reversi on 5 screens in 3... 2... Update: its already done (works for me on Chrome, ipad and iphone at least). http://davidbau.com/reversi/
Comment linking /reversi/
on “Adobe: Same code on five screens”Submitted In Defense of Curiosity as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis is an excellent series of blog posts about a father trying to teach his 6 year old son to program a simple game. Maybe you can draw some inspiration from it. http://davidbau.com/archives/2005/07/27/a_programming_questi...
Comment linking /archives/2005/07/27/a_programming_question.html
on “Ask HN: My nephew wants to learn programming. What should I recommend?”Submitted Someday we will all program in Python (2009) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionDavid Bau's seedrandom.js is quite interesting: [It] defines a method Math.seedrandom() that, when called, substitutes an explicitly seeded RC4-based algorithm for Math.random(). Also supports automatic seeding from local or network sources of entropy. http://davidbau.com/encode/seedrandom.js
Comment linking /encode/seedrandom.js
on “Learning JavaScript: Generating Random Whole Numbers”Submitted Local Variable Debugging with see.js as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt is interesting to compare the teaching technique to the recently posted Zed Shaw Python book. The examples "start at the end" and begin using objects and jQuery right away rather than building up from the nuts and bolts of numbers, functions, and syntax. Since it is JavaScript running in the browser, it is nicely interactive. It's not complete yet, but you can see other examples still to be added: http://davidbau…
Comment linking /archives/2010/04/17/tutorial_cannon_game.html
on “Teaching children to program by JavaScript examples”Submitted Complex Function Viewer as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Complex Function Viewer as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Conformal Map Viewer as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
