Top all-time · #3868
Michael Trick
Personal blog · mat.tepper.cmu.edu/blogmathscience
Michael Trick writes Mike Trick's Operations Research Blog, a personal blog at mat.tepper.cmu.edu about math and science. Since 2009, 20 different Hacker News readers have linked it 25 times, most often “Finding Love Optimally ”. The last post was in 2016, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Michael Trick's CMU Operations Research blog for applying optimization ideas to everyday problems, such as using the Secretary problem to choose a spouse and the Traveling Salesman Problem.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Finding Love Optimally 4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2011-09-29
- Complete Enumeration Arguments Deemed Harmful3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-01-12
- Finding Love Optimally2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-05-22
What Hacker News says?
apropos, http://en.nothingisreal.com/wiki/Why_I_Will_Never_Have_a_Gir... and http://mat.tepper.cmu.edu/blog/?p=1392
Comment linking /blog/?p=1392
on “Late bloomer, not a loser. (I hope) ”Submitted Finding Love Optimally as a story · 150 points
HN discussionThe Secretary problem is quite related to marriage... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem Michael Trick, a well known Operations Research professor at CMU, wrote about applying it to his own life http://mat.tepper.cmu.edu/blog/?p=1392 [Edit:] He assumed we wanted to be married to the best possible spouse by the age of 40. The optimal strategy, given his assumptions, is to date until age 26, and then marry…
Comment linking /blog/?p=1392
on “Why women lose the dating game”Submitted “American Scientist” Understands Nothing about the Traveling Salesman Problem as a story · 128 points
HN discussionWas his name Michael? http://mat.tepper.cmu.edu/blog/?p=1392
Comment linking /blog/?p=1392
on “Secretary Problem”Submitted Complete Enumeration Arguments Deemed Harmful as a story · 49 points
HN discussionThe linked post mentions a previous post [1] where he mentions that proving you have the optimal path doesn't always require N! cost: > If you have an instance of the TSP of practical interest (i.e. it makes a difference to your life if you solve it or not, and it is really a TSP, not the result of some weird set of set of reductions from some other problem), then I bet you the Concorde program of Bill Cook and othe…
Comment linking /blog/?p=6995
on ““American Scientist” Understands Nothing about the Traveling Salesman Problem”Submitted Scheduling Major League Baseball as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI think this is just one of the pitfalls that the author points out: it is not the sheer number of possibilities that defines the difficulty of a problem. He links to his previous blog post http://mat.tepper.cmu.edu/blog/?p=6995 with a nice example: sorting. “Sorting a bunch of numbers! Hoo-wee, that’s a hard one. If I had 1000 numbers, I would have to check all orderings of the numbers to find the sorted order. Tha…
Comment linking /blog/?p=6995
on ““American Scientist” Understands Nothing about the Traveling Salesman Problem”Submitted A Love Letter to the Traveling Salesman Problem as a story · 4 points
HN discussionMost modern solvers like CPLEX and Gurobi have built-in heuristics [1] that are automatically selected and applied without user intervention. They typically exploit the structure of the problem or encode the experiences of the developers over large problem testsets. The default heuristics for commercial solvers are actually pretty darned good these days and there's typically no need to hand-pick them. In the MIP wor…
Comment linking /blog/index.php/2012/09/25/fischetti-speeds-up-optimization-with-randomness/
on “Mass Transit Optimization for Buses: The Depot Problem”Submitted New results on linear programming formulations of the Traveling Salesman Problem as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis gets posted on HN occasionally, and when it does I post this fun blog post by Michael Trick, a CMU Operations Research professor, who used the Secretary problem to pick his wife: http://mat.tepper.cmu.edu/blog/?p=1392
Comment linking /blog/?p=1392
on “Secretary Problem”Submitted Hey Buddy, Can I Sell You an NP Hard Problem? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Finding Love Optimally as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Finding Love Optimally as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Finding Love Optimally as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Crowdsourcing The Travelling Salesman as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted What is Operations Research? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Quantum computing and operations research as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Help Santa Plan His Tour (Twice) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted An Operations Research Nobel? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Integer programming is sexy as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted A New Approach to MaxFlow? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Michael Trick’s Operations Research Blog : Whither Data Mining? as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
