Top all-time · #6999
Kevin's Blog
Personal blog · kevingal.comprogrammingmath
Kevin's Blog is a personal blog at kevingal.com about programming and math. Since 2019, 11 different Hacker News readers have linked it 17 times, most often “Finding Mona Lisa in the Game of Life”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-26, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Linked for write-ups on recreating the Mona Lisa in Conway's Game of Life and on hash collision probability, including a collision calculator. One commenter called one write-up a really nice piece of work.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Finding Mona Lisa in the Game of Life5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-01-28
- The probability of a hash collision (2022)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-08-28
- /apps/collision.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-06-05
What Hacker News says?
That's a really nice write up. It's insane how similar our approaches are. Could it be a case of [1] (but on a non grand scale) :P? I can list my sources of inspiration: [2] [3] [4]. I also tried training convolutional networks, using the soft life set-up, but failed to get them to converge. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery [2] https://kevingal.com/blog/mona-lisa-gol.html [3] https://arxiv.org/ab…
Comment linking /blog/mona-lisa-gol.html
on “Finding Mona Lisa in the Game of Life”Submitted Graphics livecoding in Common Lisp as a story · 213 points
HN discussionA similar post can be found here (2020, implemented with backsearch): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22552006 https://kevingal.com/blog/mona-lisa-gol.html
Comment linking /blog/mona-lisa-gol.html
on “Finding Mona Lisa in the Game of Life”Submitted Finding Mona Lisa in the Game of Life as a story · 167 points
HN discussionAssuming for the sake of argument this were a real service checking for matches, the chances of a hash collision with SHA256 is effectively 0.[1] I entered the limit for BIGINT (9223372036854775807), and the approximation of the probability of a hash collision after generating 9223372036854775807 items in SHA256 is zero. The exact probability would probably take eons to calculate, but it's vanishingly close to zero.…
Comment linking /apps/collision.html
on “Is anybody using this private key?”Submitted The probability of a hash collision (2022) as a story · 140 points
HN discussionCalculate the probability then. With 64 bits 2^32 tries have a possibility of ~0.39347 collisions. Which is unlikely, not likely. You need at least 10x more to get a good probability of %97. Which needs ~40m with 8 cores on my CPU. Which is not a practical flyby attack anymore. With a big GPU it would though. https://kevingal.com/apps/collision.html I do calculate 32bit collisions for all hash functions regularly. B…
Comment linking /apps/collision.html
on “Optimizing 128-bit Division (2020)”Submitted Board Games and Markov Chains as a story · 82 points
HN discussionSubmitted Not Growing a Language as a story · 77 points
HN discussionSubmitted Finding Mona Lisa in the Game of Life (2020) as a story · 40 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Probability of a Hash Collision as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Probability of a Hash Collision as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Random RGB values that average to N; or, Pointlessness and Probability as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted An Earnest Guide to Symbols in Common Lisp as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Obese websites and planet-sized metronomes as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Finding Mona Lisa in the Game of Life as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Finding Mona Lisa in the Game of Life as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
