Best of 2023

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2023. 221 posts.

Math & Algorithms
40

BB(3, 3) is Hard

I’m excited to share a 3 state, 3 symbol Turing Machine that cannot be proven to halt or not (when starting on a blank tape) without solving a Collatz-like problem. Therefore, solving the \(BB(3, 3)\) problem is at least as hard as solving this Collatz-like problem, a class of problem for which Paul Erdős famously…

51

A Curious Integral

Note: These pages make extensive use of the latest XHTML and CSS Standards . They ought to look great in any standards-compliant modern browser. Unfortunately, they will probably look horrible in older browsers, like Netscape 4.x and IE 4.x. Moreover, many posts use MathML, which is, currently only supported in…

53

Breaking RSA with a quantum computer?

A group of Chinese researchers have just published a paper claiming that they can—although they have not yet done so—break 2048-bit RSA. This is something to take seriously. It might not be correct, but it’s not obviously wrong. We have long known from Shor’s algorithm that factoring with a quantum computer is easy…

56

Lerp

Lerp is the nickname for Linear Interpolation between two points. It's a fairly simple effect to implement but can really improve the look of your animations if you're moving an object from a point A to point B.