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Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
First comments on top threads
HN comment orderWhen I was around 14 years old I was baby sitting a kid who was 3 or 4 or something. He came up to me and said "I bet I can say a bigger number than you." clearly proud of what he had just learnt in preschool. I accepted the challenge, he took a deep breath and said "Five hundred!", so I said "Five hundred and one". He looked determined and said "Ok then! Five hundred and fifty hundred and…
“Who can name the bigger number? Whoever has the deeper paradigm.” In 2001, David Moews ran a BIGNUM BAKEOFF competition on the comp.lang.c newsgroup, where each entry had to be a C program (512 non-whitespace characters or fewer) returning a number from main(). The winner is the program that returns the largest number, assuming an arbitrarily-large int type. http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c/browse_thread/thr... After reading Scott Aaronson's wonderful essay, you won't be surprised to hear that the…
I was given this test when I was 13 by my grade 8 teacher. I wrote something along the lines of: (7)^(7^(7^(9^(9 ... )))))) after realizing about second into the challenge that the extra time taken to draw a 9 vs a 7 was worth it. To my surprise, when we got back from lunch I was told that there was a tie for first place. I thought "how could this possibly be?" It turned out that the way the…
I would've said graham's number! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham%27s_number
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 3
- Total points
- 614
- Total comments
- 309
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
