A handbook of integer sequences

What Hacker News says

1. gwernApr 2024
   OEIS is fun but the bare homepage probably isn't too helpful. I highly recommend Sloane's memoir about the history of OEIS: http://neilsloane.com/doc/HIS50.pdf "_A Handbook of Integer Sequences_ 50 Years Later", Sloane 2023
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2. jd3Apr 2024
   Russ Cox (who recently did a deep dive into the xz attack shell script[0][1]) of Bell Labs Plan9 and Google golang fame re-wrote the OEIS in golang in the summer of 2009[2][3] and now serves as the foundation's president[4]

   > "Here, however, we ran into a very serious problem. In the summer of 2009, when we tried to get the OEIS working as a wiki, we discovered that the Mediawiki software was not capable of handling the kind of queries that arise in looking up sequences. This was a disaster."

   > "It took us over a year to resolve this problem. In the end, Russ Cox completely rewrote all the programs needed to maintain the database and answer queries - a huge task! NJAS's colleague David Applegate has also been of enormous help in getting the new system working. As a result of their work, the new OEIS was finally launched on November 11, 2010. It is now possible for anyone in the world to propose a new sequence or an update to an existing sequence. To do this, users must first register. A group of about 130 editors has been formed, whose job it is to review submissions before they become a permanent part of the OEIS."

   > "So, after nearly two years of struggle, the OEIS was finally able to operate without NJAS having to approve every change. After 46 years of running the database, this came as a great relief to him."[2]

   > "It's true. The original software was an email auto-reply implemented in shell. The first web version of the software was CGI invoking roughly the same shell script. I didn't have anything to do with those. The next web version (which I wrote in ~2006) was CGI invoking C with an mmap'ed index file. The third web version (which I wrote in ~2010 and is the one running today) is a Go HTTP server, fronted by Apache."

   > "Note that I'm only talking about the software for the "interactive" UI, not the database itself. The database itself goes back to punched cards and the original interactive UI was a pair of published books (first A Handbook of Integer Sequences, and then the Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences)."[5]

   [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39902241

   [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39903685

   [2]: https://oeis.org/wiki/Welcome#OEIS:_Brief_History

   [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9920020

   [4]: https://oeisf.org/board/

   [5]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9927038

   https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rsc

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3. DonHopkinsJan 2023
   My favorite hard core nerd insult used to be "Your idea of a hot date is looking up dirty words in the unabridged dictionary," but now I'm going to use "Your idea of a hot date is looking up 69 in the Handbook of Integer Sequences."
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4. Turbo_hedgehogOct 2015
   Sloane kept his collection first on punched cards, then in a “handbook”—A Handbook of Integer Sequences, published in 1973, with the copyright held by Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he started working in 1968. In 1995 he launched an automated email lookup service called Superseeker, whereby the curious submitted sequence queries and the database replied with answers. In 1996 he opened up his repository for public browsing at oeis.org. With the lab’s blessing, Sloane put it up on the research division’s website.
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5. rscJul 2015
   It's true. The original software was an email auto-reply implemented in shell. The first web version of the software was CGI invoking roughly the same shell script. I didn't have anything to do with those. The next web version (which I wrote in ~2006) was CGI invoking C with an mmap'ed index file. The third web version (which I wrote in ~2010 and is the one running today) is a Go HTTP server, fronted by Apache.

   Note that I'm only talking about the software for the "interactive" UI, not the database itself. The database itself goes back to punched cards and the original interactive UI was a pair of published books (first A Handbook of Integer Sequences, and then the Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences).

   Show morethread