Best of 2023

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2023. 189 posts.

Math & Algorithms
140

NP-hard does not mean hard (2017)

When NP-hardness pops up on the internet, say because some silly blogger wants to write about video games, it’s often tempting to conclude that the problem being proved NP-hard is actually very hard! “Scientists proved Super Mario is NP-hard? I always knew there was a reason I wasn’t very good at it!” Sorry, these two…

145

Demystifying Tupper's Formula

A book I was recently reading mentioned a mathematical curiosity I haven't seen before - Tupper's self-referential formula . There are some resources about it online, but this post is my attempt to explain how it works - along with an interactive implementation you can try in the browser.