Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nydhal | Hacker News Reader

Euler was a mathematician after all. Now thinking about it I wonder what project Djikstra would look like, or say maybe project Stallman.

View on HN

Project Stallman: Find the Github project with the most open-source license term violations (then convince them to fix it).

Project Stallman would be finding a project with open-source license and convincing them to adopt copyleft instead.

Or maybe find all projects which aren't using the GPLv3+ or are using the word Linux without prefixing GNU/ or GNU+ or GNU- or GNU* appropriately or allow running, distributing, compiling, touching or ingesting of proprietary code.

There's a Project Rosalind (named after Rosalind Franklin) which is sort of like Project Euler for bioinformatics: http://rosalind.info/about/

Project Rosalind (which has mostly been subsumed by the larger Stepik effort I believe?) is fantastic and a much more directed, progressive setup than Project Euler. I enjoyed PR greatly, and each problem led naturally to the next, whereas PE is just random problems and one might be monstrously difficult and on an utterly different topic than the next. A comprehensive mathematics project that grew in complexity the way PR does for bioinformatics would be unbelievably awesome.

I like https://rosalind.info bioinformatics problems because:

- There are problem explanations and an accompanying textbook.

- You can structure the solutions with unit tests that test for known good values.

- There's a graph of problems.

I think a Project Turing might be an interesting one, solving problems specific to computer science (maybe something like pathfinding, evolutionary algorithms, data structures, etc)

Or simply writing programs against the classic Turing machine. I wrote one out by hand 25 years ago, 3 pages I think to add two integers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com