Brian Hayes
bit-player.org · Personal blog · on HN since 2008
Brian Hayes, a former Scientific American editor, writes Bit-player about computation, mathematics and simulations, with careful illustrations.
What HN saysHN commenters call it an excellent blog worth following, praising its deep follow-ups on small curiosities and comparing it to Scientific American's Computer Recreations.
94HN people shared it
35linked it in comments
167stories submitted
3.4Kstory points
2 years agolast shared
2008people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Bit-player: An amateur's outlook on computation and mathematics7 people · 1 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
- 2World3, the Public Beta (2012)5 people · 13 points · first shared 2012 · 1 comments on HN
- 3Third Base: On Ternary (2001) [pdf]5 people · 2 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 4A slight discrepancy4 people · 86 points · first shared 2011 · 13 comments on HN
- 5The Mind Wanders (2018)4 people · 46 points · first shared 2018 · 2 comments on HN
- 6MathJax Turns 3.03 people · 139 points · first shared 2020 · 34 comments on HN
- 7My God, It’s Full of Dots3 people · 135 points · first shared 2019 · 15 comments on HN
- 8Magnetism Simulations: Three Months in Monte Carlo3 people · 80 points · first shared 2021 · 16 comments on HN
- 9The Teetering Towers of Abstraction3 people · 65 points · first shared 2020 · 4 comments on HN
- 10Brain Hayes on the Zune Bug3 people · 16 points · first shared 2009 · 14 comments on HN
- 11Home-baked Graphics3 people · 7 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
- 12AI and the End of Programming3 people · 4 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 13Prime After Prime2 people · 217 points · first shared 2016 · 16 comments on HN
- 14Foldable Words2 people · 209 points · first shared 2021 · 20 comments on HN
- 15Does having prime neighbors make you more composite?2 people · 149 points · first shared 2021 · 43 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
imurray · 2012-10-04
The author, Brian Hayes, has an excellent blog at http://bit-player.org/ which is well worth following. Lots of posts about simple curiosities followed up much further than most people bother, and beautifully illustrated.
The post pointing to this American Scientist article adds “For crypto buffs, there’s an Easter egg in the first illustration.”
spdegabrielle · 2016-05-20
Brian Hayes always writes great stuff
http://bit-player.org
smcameron · 2021-05-27
Brian Hayes's bitplayer: http://bit-player.org/
Brian Hayes was once an editor of Scientific American. The blog covers a variety of topics, some related to computer science or math, some not. It reminds me a bit of the old Computer Recreations column that used to run in Scientific American.
userbinator · 2017-12-02
A comment there mentions the specific time that causes it:
I found that the crash problem occurs when the datetime is after 2017 Dec 02, 12:15am. The problem does not happen at 12:14am, but once the time goes past 12:15am, and I do a hard reset, the problem returns.
...the real question then, is what is special about 2017-12-02 00:15 ? It's not a leap day[1], there are no leap seconds, and nothing about the epoch timestamp stands out either. I'd love to read about the cause of this bug.
[1] Leap years have caused similar problems before: http://bit-player.org/2009/the-zune-bug
shagie · 2017-10-29
After some digging, it is "Mathematical Recreations: A Subway Named Turing", Scientific American (September): 104,106-107 by Ian Steward which can be read at http://dev.whydomath.org/Reading_Room_Material/ian_stewart/Commutersan… (the key memory points that confirms it is the conversational mode and the passage "And I swear there's a sign just along the tunnel that reads 'flip-flop 7743A/91.'"
Though A.K. Dewdney did write on a similar topic - Dewdney, A. K. 1987. Algopuzzles: wherein trains of thought follow algorithmic tracks to solutions. Scientific American 256(6):128–130.
and http://bit-player.org/wp-content/extras/bph-publications/AmSci-2007-03… is a some other interesting puzzles on the subject.
jckt · 2013-01-25
Slightly off-topic, but Brian Hayes (mentioned several times in the article) has a very good blog here:
http://bit-player.org/
mibbitier · 2012-04-27
McDonalds are the biggest and most successful restaurant in the world. But I doubt any chef would describe their food as being fantastic.
When I want to eat a really nice meal with friends or family, I rule out McDonalds. Does this make me a "fanboi tool"?
Microsoft have a pretty long history of date related bugs in their software and products stretching back years. They do not seem to understand how leap years work.
Windows 98: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/150947.stm
Zune: http://bit-player.org/2009/the-zune-bug
Excel: "Excel 2000 incorrectly assumes that the year 1900 is a leap year"
Exchange 2007: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/04/microsoft_admits_to_exchange_l…
etc etc
experiment0 · 2012-02-13
Best way of finding if there are rectangles:
> We encode the rows of the grid in a set of bit vectors–four vectors for each row, representing the four possible colors. For example, the red vector for a row has a 1 at each position where the corresponding node is red, and zeroes elsewhere. The blue vector has 1s for blue nodes, and so forth. Now we can detect a rectangle merely by taking the logical AND of two rows (an operation that could be a single machine instruction). A rectangle exists if and only if at least two bits are set in the resulting vector.
-- http://bit-player.org/2009/the-17x17-challenge
Thats some lovely hacking.
randolph_carter · 2010-01-26
I enjoy http://bit-player.org - it's a blog by Brian Hayes, who writes on computing science for American Scientist magazine (but is currently on sabbatical from the magazine, hopefully not from the blog).
panic · 2017-07-25
Here are a bunch of blogs from my RSS reader that I think are worth reading. Some of them haven't updated in a while, but the archives may be worth a look anyway.
* Blogs with a math focus:
http://blog.sigfpe.com
http://bit-player.org
http://mathr.co.uk/blog/
https://www.johndcook.com/blog/
* Blogs with a programming languages focus:
https://existentialtype.wordpress.com
https://bluishcoder.co.nz
http://blog.ezyang.com
http://akkartik.name
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org
http://mrale.ph
* Blogs with a UI design focus:
http://www.brandonwalkin.com/blog/
http://ignorethecode.net/blog/
http://interuserface.net
* Blogs with a graphics / 3D rendering focus:
http://c0de517e.blogspot.com
http://diaryofagraphicsprogrammer.blogspot.com
https://directtovideo.wordpress.com
http://graphicrants.blogspot.com
http://www.reedbeta.com
http://www.realtimerendering.com/blog/
https://blog.demofox.org
http://eelpi.gotdns.org/blog.wiki.html
* Other interesting / more general programming blogs (many of these have a "systems" focus):
http://danluu.com
http://ewontfix.com
http://chneukirchen.org/blog/
http://neverworkintheory.org
http://apenwarr.ca/log/
https://www.snellman.net/blog/
https://www.pvk.ca
http://psy-lob-saw.blogspot.com
https://randomascii.wordpress.com
http://fastcompression.blogspot.com
https://fgiesen.wordpress.com
http://blog.plover.com
http://chneukirchen.org/trivium/
http://rachelbythebay.com/w/
tocs3 · 2025-03-12
Just read the Brian Hayes essay "AI and the end of programming" from 2023. It is a nice story about his experience with getting chatgpt to do some programing tasks and related discussion. As a spoiler he does not see the current state of thing as "the end of programing".
[1] : http://bit-player.org/2023/ai-and-the-end-of-programming
abetusk · 2024-12-30
For the lazy, the blog post that accompanies it (2012):
http://bit-player.org/2012/world3-the-public-beta
The source code:
https://github.com/bit-player/limits
I haven't read "The Limits of Growth" but I assume it's from a "peak oil" perspective, predicting societal collapse once oil runs out. I think it's pretty clear we're past idea now, with solar energy and other renewable being deployed globally because of the exponentially decreasing economic costs.
One thing I do find interesting is the cyclic nature of the booms and busts of population growth predicted by the model. Even if the assumptions of the model are invalid (short term finite supply of energy) it still might explain some gross level behavior.
tunesmith · 2023-12-24
You can play with the actual model here: http://bit-player.org/extras/limits/ltg.html (github here: https://github.com/bit-player/limits)
It appears sensitive to that "output consumed" fraction, which I don't understand.
ThePhysicist · 2023-08-14
Reminds me of this story (My Life as a Forth interpreter), which was discussed on HN before: http://bit-player.org/wp-content/extras/bph-publications/CompLang-1986…
cwmma · 2023-04-11
A company tried to put it on toilet paper but Roger Penrose claimed ownership so they had to stop http://bit-player.org/2017/sir-roger-penroses-toilet-paper
jaclaz · 2022-06-05
It seems that knowing the famous anecdote about Gauss:
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/gausss-day-of-reckoning
http://bit-player.org/wp-content/extras/gaussfiles/gauss-snippets.html
would have helped as well.
svat · 2021-08-12
The existing ways of putting math on the web are all already here too, and have been for a long time. Apart from the old way of generating images by running TeX (still used by Wikipedia, for instance), both of the most common libraries used for typesetting (MathJax and KaTeX) can produce either HTML+CSS or SVG which are well-supported by browsers, and both of them (KaTeX since the beginning, and MathJax since version 3.0) can be run server-side so that no JavaScript needs to run on the user's browser. And regardless of whether or when the "native in-browser" rendering of MathML becomes good enough and widespread enough, the "native in-browser" rendering of HTML+CSS and SVG will continue to exist and be well-supported. (See the last section of http://bit-player.org/2020/mathjax-turns-3-0 for some interesting conclusions.)
andai · 2021-01-03
Somewhere down tonight's ternary rabbit hole I found this wonderful Scientific American article, Third Base[0]:
The Jewel in the Triple Crown
“Perhaps the prettiest number system of all,” writes Donald E. Knuth in The Art of Computer Programming, “is the balanced ternary notation.” As in ordinary ternary numbers, the digits of a balanced ternary numeral are coefficients of powers of 3, but instead of coming from the set {0, 1, 2}, the digits are –1, 0 and 1. They are “balanced” because they are arranged symmetrically about zero. For notational convenience the negative digits are usually written with a vinculum, or overbar, instead of a prefixed minus sign.
[0] (pdf) http://bit-player.org/wp-content/extras/bph-publications/AmSci-2001-11…
benmarks · 2019-10-14
“There’s a simple explanation. MCAS is not meant to control an unstable aircraft. It is meant to restrain the aircraft from entering the regime where it becomes unstable. This is the same strategy used by other mechanisms of stall prevention—intervening before the angle of attack reaches the critical point. However, if Brady is correct about the instability of the 737 MAX, the task is more urgent for MCAS. Instability implies a steep and slippery slope. MCAS is a guard rail that bounces you back onto the road when you’re about to drive over the cliff.”
http://bit-player.org/2019/737-the-max-mess
aaron-santos · 2018-08-30
I found the in-browser version of the World 3 model fun to play with http://bit-player.org/extras/limits/ltg.html
loxias · 2018-02-25
Oh! I remembered more details about it if it helps. It has to do with e being the "most efficient" numbering base. The reason e is the "most efficient" has to do with wanting to minimize both the size of the alphabet of symbols as well as the number of digits in an average computation. If you allow for a non-integer base, and a non-integer number of digits, the optimum base is e. e rounds to 3. ;-)
Now, full disclosure, I'm not entirely sure I believe in this, I'm just citing sources but check these out:
http://bit-player.org/wp-content/extras/bph-publications/AmSci-2001-11…
https://hackaday.com/2016/12/16/building-the-first-ternary-microproces…
Also, Don Knuth likes balanced ternary, and, well, I guess that counts for something.
(again, personally I have no idea if I think it's nonsense or not)
jamessb · 2016-04-26
I don't think he has gone: both his blog [0] and the American Scientist site [1] refer to him as a senior writer in the present tense, and he had an article about deep dreaming in the Nov-Dec 2015 issue [2]. His blog is interesting, and has posts more frequent than his magaine articles.
[0]: http://bit-player.org/about-the-author
[1]: https://www.americanscientist.org/authors/detail/brian-hayes
[2]: https://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/2015/6/computer-vision-an…
madcaptenor · 2015-11-16
Brian Hayes did some experiments with running on a track and connected them to this paper: http://bit-player.org/2015/the-long-run
ocfnash · 2015-10-16
Brian Hayes wrote a nice article about this a few months ago in American Scientist [1] and also wrote a little JS demo to tinker with linked from here [2].
1. http://www.americanscientist.org/libraries/documents/20156171629461121…
2. http://bit-player.org/2015/traffic-jams-in-javascript
bit-player · 2015-08-07
PDF version here: http://bit-player.org/bph-publications/AmSci-2002-03-Hayes-NPP.pdf (from the author's website)
mthq · 2014-03-17
The site owner thinks he is being DDOS'ed: http://bit-player.org/2014/net-pests/
tantalor · 2013-04-20
tomerv · 2012-05-19
Another explanation (a bit clearer in my opinion): http://bit-player.org/2011/the-n-ball-game
mvzink · 2012-02-12
This post explains the problem enough to give an intuitive understanding of why it's difficult: http://bit-player.org/2009/the-17x17-challenge