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Nick Matteo
Personal blog · kundor.github.iomathprogramming
Nick Matteo's personal blog at kundor.github.io covers math and programming. Since 2022, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 4 times, most often “Finding Waldo in π”. The last post was in 2022, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link these posts on Where's Waldo-style images found in the digits of π, including an explanation of how such images are cheated. The comments cite them as sources or counterexamples, without judging the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Math & Code & Stuff
Most-linked posts?
- Finding Waldo in π3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-03-31
What Hacker News says?
It’s kind of obvious that they are cheating: 23,074,248th through 23,075,235th hexadecimal digits is approximately 500 bytes. Finding 500 exact bytes in a random sequence would take a very long expected sequence :-) They do explain what they do: https://kundor.github.io/Cheating-images/
Comment linking /Cheating-images/
on “Finding Waldo in π”Submitted Finding Waldo in π as a story · 234 points
HN discussionHere's a counterexample: https://kundor.github.io/Finding-Waldo/
Comment linking /Finding-Waldo/
on “Boltzmann brain”Not really. He generated some partially colliding 96 bit hashes, then threw away non-matching characters, and claimed to have a collision. If you let me pick which bits matter for collision detection, then I can make any secure hash collide with itself. On a related note, someone took the end of Contact to heart, and definitively proved that God is a Where's Waldo? fan: https://kundor.github.io/Finding-Waldo/
Comment linking /Finding-Waldo/
on “Colliding Secure Hashes”
