Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Breaking a meaningless world record: computing Γ(1/4) to 500b digits

After five weeks of nearly non-stop computation, a new record for the computation of the value has been set: 500 billion digits of precision computed with Alexander Yee’s y-cruncher. This is the Gamma function, which when evaluated with the input , results in Motivation There isn’t a pra

This project documents the computation of the mathematical constant Gamma(1/4) to 500 billion digits. Created in 2020, it represents a computational achievement with no practical application beyond the challenge… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Breaking a meaningless world record: computing Γ(1/4) to 500b digits launched in 2020; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

1GC
Goldbach Conjecture up to 4*10^18+7*10^13▲244
Achieved a new world record in verifying the Goldbach Conjecture using grid computing, by extending the verification up to 4 quadrillion (4×10¹⁸) + 70 trillion (7×10¹³). My grid computing system - Gridbach is a cloud-based distributed computing system accessible from any PC or smartphone. It requires no login or app installation. The high-performance WASM (WebAssembly) binary code is downloaded as browser content, enabling computation on the user’s browser. [Website] https://gridbach.com/ [Medium]…
2025 · medium.com · its alternatives →
2IM
I made a calculator that works over disjoint sets of intervals▲314
I've been studying interval arithmetic for the past few weeks and it's a really interesting field because while there is a ton of super interesting research published over the past decades, it has never really gotten the recognition that it deserves, IMO. One reason for this is that standard interval arithmetic has really poor handling of division by intervals containing zero. If you compute 1 / [-1, 2] in regular interval arithmetic, you get either [-∞, +∞], or you have to say that the operation is undefined. Both solutions are virtually useless. The real answer of course is [-∞, -1] U…
Apr 2026 · victorpoughon.github.io · its alternatives →
3AD
All desktop software calculators are wrong, so I had to build my own▲286
A new calculator software cannot really bring attention (https://chachatelier.fr/chalk/) However, I wrote a full article explaining why I had to build something "new" that does not behave like usual desktop calculator softwares : TL;DR All "small" calculator softwares I know share the same design flaws. And the GUI is not the only stumbling block in their poor efficiency. Handling correctly numerical approximations - expected or not - is crucial to trust the results. It is usually not done in lightweight tools. It should. So I prove that if I could do it, OS manufacturers…
2022 · its alternatives →
4
A nibble-oriented CPU in Verilog to build a scientific calculator▲119
The core question: how did HP's scientific calculators actually work at the gate level? That rabbit hole led to building one from scratch. The architectural decision everything else follows from: a decimal calculator should store numbers as BCD — one decimal digit per 4-bit nibble. A standard byte-oriented CPU (Z80, 6502) fights that layout constantly. So I designed a small custom CPU in Verilog where 4 bits is the natural data width and memory is nibble addressable. What the project covers: - Custom CPU: Harvard architecture, 12-bit ISA, 8-state execution FSM, hardware stack guard with a…
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
5LN
Large Numbers Hypothesis Revisited▲64
I was reviewing Dirac's Large Numbers Hypothesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_large_numbers_hypothesis) and decided to give it a second go, now with measurements of fundamental constants more precise than 100 years ago. And I stumbled upon a value for Hubble's constant that's uncannily close. Here are the full calculations. https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1K1qoUFvqZp1fWbpcKJWq63nflgwS0ZHh?usp=sharing Meaningless, or meaningful coincidence?
2021 · its alternatives →
6
The Kilobyte's Gambit▲118
Try beating 1024 bytes of Javascript
2021 · vole.wtf · its alternatives →
7
Sameshi – a ~1200 Elo chess engine that fits within 2KB▲230
I made a chess engine today, and made it fit within 2KB. I used a variant of MinMax called Negamax, with alpha beta pruning. For the board representation I have used a 120-cell "mailbox". I managed to squeeze in checkmate/stalemate in there, after trimming out some edge cases. I am a great fan of demoscene (computer art subculture) since middle school, and hence it was a ritual i had to perform. For estimating the Elo, I measured 240 automated games against Stockfish Elo levels (1320 to 1600) under fixed depth-5 and some constrained rules, using equal color distribution. Then converted…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
8
SineRider, a math puzzle game▲181
Messing with your TI-84 graphing calculator is a rite of passage for every teenager who has ever been bored in a math class. In 2013 I was that teenager, and it gave me an idea for a tiny game about sledding on graphs. This project grew into my white whale, and I spent my twenties trying and failing to finish it alone. I shelved the game when I started working for Hack Club in 2018—until last May, when a few community members took it off the shelf. The project took on a life of its own, and turned into a year of nights and weekends from a global team of 20+ teens in 8+ countries. Today…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
9
A hash array-mapped trie implementation in C▲171
Long-simmering side project that is finally ready to see the light. HAMTs are a cool persistent data structure and implementing one has been a lot of fun. Beyond the code, there is likely some value in the extensive and largely complete implementation docs; basic benchmarks are linked in the README, too. Kind of aiming to be "the libavl for HAMTs". That is obviously a high and aspirational bar but a distinct possibility if it stirs up a little interest and/or contribution. Anyways, it's time for this to go out, collect feedback and maybe even some use outside of toy projects. Let me…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
10IW
I was playing with fundamental constants and 13.8 b years popped out▲56
I was playing around with fundamental constants and out popped 13.8 billion light years. What is going on? the wavelength of an electron mass photon / (2pi) * the charge radius of a proton / the black hole radius of a proton = 13.8 billion light years ((h / (m_e * c * 2pi)) * (h / (m_p * c * pi/2)) / (2G * m_p / c^2)) = 13.8 billion light years…
2021 · its alternatives →
11AT
A tiny LLM running at 21,000 tok/s on a $250 FPGA (Live Demo)▲79
A 3.16M-parameter INT4 transformer running entirely in the on-chip memory of a Xilinx Kria KV260. Zero DRAM in the token loop, 59,965 tok/s on the fabric, bit-exact. Chat with it live.
Aug 2026 · mikeayles.com · its alternatives →
12IM
I'm 17 and I created a Forth interpreter for the TI-84+ calculator▲56
https://github.com/siraben/ti84-forth Hi HN! For the past year I've been getting into programming in Z80 assembly (especially for the TI-84+). More recently I've been learning about the Forth programming language and after a lot of searching online (in vain) for a Forth interpreter for the TI-84, I decided to write one myself. It's been fun demoing this to others, because it's a very unexpected use of a calculator. It's my largest project to date, and I'm interested to know what the HN community thinks, please feel free to critique my code! -- Ben
2018 · its alternatives →
13
I Ching simulator with accurate Yarrow Stalk probabilities▲63
I built this because I wanted a digital I Ching that honors the original math, rather than just Math.random(). Technical detail for the curious: The simulation follows the traditional Yarrow Stalk algorithm (Da Yan). The core of this algorithm relies on modulo-4 arithmetic on the stalks remaining after a random split. To make it physically realistic, I used a Box-Muller transform to simulate the user splitting the stalks with a Gaussian distribution (since humans naturally tend to split near the middle), rather than a uniform random split. I was worried this 'human bias' might skew the…
Dec 2025 · castiching.com · its alternatives →
14
I developed a fast general purpose sorting algorithm▲56
The world's fastest general purpose sorting algorithm, 60% faster than Quicksort - hackware1993/ChenSort
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
15
A reimplementation of Google's sparsehash in C▲22
A simple re-implementation of Google's sparsehash as a learning excercise. - qpfiffer/Simple-Sparsehash
2015 · github.com · its alternatives →
16NX
Nevermind XOR – Deep Learning Has an Issue with Sin▲34
More precisely, even the best neural networks can not be trained to approximate periodic functions using stochastic gradient descent. (empirically, prove me wrong!) Contents Simulating a clock Simplifying the problem Why can’t we train the sin? What to do about it? Simulating a clock The problem tha
2022 · lostmsu.github.io · its alternatives →
17TK
The King Wen Permutation: [52, 10, 2]▲65
I analyzed two orderings of the 64 I Ching hexagrams and found the permutation cycle decomposition between them is [52, 10, 2] with zero fixed points. Nobody has done this kind of analysis before and this cycle type has not been reported in the literature. You can verify it yourself.
Mar 2026 · gzw1987-bit.github.io · its alternatives →
18
A reference implementation of Turing's paper “On Computable Numbers”▲63
Hey HN! I've been curious about the history of computer science and decided to try to read Turing's 1936 paper where he conceptualizes the Turing Machine, etc. I had trouble understanding the paper, read The Annotated Turing by Charles Petzold (which is wonderful), but felt that reading a reference implementation would help formalize my understanding. When I couldn't find an open source implementation, I decided to write my own. The implementation includes: - Abbreviated tables (m-functions) - Conversions to Standard Descriptions and Description Numbers - A working universal machine - A…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
19WS
Wordle-style game for Fermi questions▲35
Some months ago @andrewrn tried to create a Wordle-style site for order-of-magnitude thinking. This was a wonderful idea, but the actual site was somewhat over-engineered and confusing. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43632278) In the past week, I looked at this idea again and built a very simple site which gives you a new Fermi estimation question every day: How many new cars were sold in the US in 2024?; How many humans have ever lived (including those currently alive)?; How many chickens are slaughtered for meat every year? To win, you need a guess within ±20% of the…
2025 · fermiquestions.org · its alternatives →
20
Solving Sudoku reasoning via Energy Geometric models▲18
We were genuinely impressed by Yann LeCun’s recent announcement about his Sudoku solver based on Energy-Based Models here: https://logicalintelligence.com/yann-lecun So we (a software engineer and prodigy mathematician) worked in the weekend to see if we can beat it and we did! If Kona solves puzzles in 313 milliseconds, we currently solve 270,000 puzzles per second! We do not know the internal mechanics behind Logical Intelligence’s system, but we are happy to share ours in the webpage there is a full description, code and also a paper published. Why people are obsessed with…
Feb 2026 · davisgeometric.com · its alternatives →
21
Zero-power photonic language model–code▲18
The model uses a 1024-dimensional complex Hilbert space with 32 layers of programmable Mach–Zehnder meshes (Reck architecture) and derives token probabilities directly via the Born rule. Despite using only unitary operations and no attention mechanism, a 1024×32 model achieves coherent TinyStories generation after < 1.8 hours of training on a single consumer GPU. This is Part 1 - the next step is physical implementation with $50 of optics from AliExpress.
Nov 2025 · zenodo.org · its alternatives →
22
val – An arbitrary precision calculator language▲34
Wrote this to learn more about the `chumsky` parser combinator library, rustyline, and the `ariadne` error reporting crate. Such a nice DX combo for writing new languages. Still a work in progress, but I thought I'd share :)
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
23
A tiny and platform-agnostic true random number generator for FPGA/ASIC▲27
It is based on phase noise, consumes less than 60 LUT4s/FFs and achieves up to 7.99 bits of entropy per byte. Feel free to comment if you have any questions, ideas or thoughts :)
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
242S
2025 = sum(I^3) for I = 0..9▲12
This year's number is kinda fun: 2025 = 0^3 + 1^3 + 2^3 + 3^3 + 4^3 + 5^3 + 6^3 + 7^3 + 8^3 + 9^3 Which is equivalent to: 2025 = (0 + 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9) ^ 2 = 45 ^ 2 Next time this will happen is 1000 years from now, in 3025. See y'all then!
2025 · its alternatives →

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