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Comment by isoprophlex | Hacker News Reader

Ugh. It truncated the 19xx from my birth year. I was initially pleasantly surprised to get a 6 digit result for an 8 digit input... but alas I'm not special, in terms of pi birthday compression ratio ;)

Edit:

- "enter date in any format"

- Okay, interesting... I enter day-year-month

- "there's something wrong with the date you entered!"

Lol

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This one seems to work better: https://www.angio.net/pi/

~167 millionth digit for me.

beat you at ~10millionth

Im -260k can anyone beat that here?

135,025. Brings back memories of /. UIDs.

40397 (10/17/72)

This subthread is about locating the full date including century.

Nice! I would also be interested in the position of your credit card number

85...

It didn't find mine using YYYYMMDD format.

Mine is not present! I look forward to its position being revealed later in my life.

Wow, this site is a blast from the past in terms of UI but oh boy, it's much much much faster than the Wolfram one!

Also, very interesting how it works (https://www.angio.net/pi/how.html)

Thank you. :-)

I'm definitely a systems programmer, not a UI person. Suggestions or questions welcome, of course, but I usually only spend a day per year on the pi searcher. I re-wrote it in rust last year for fun, though.

Out of curiosity, do you make a lot of money from the ads? I find small niche sites like this to be somewhat less nice to use because of the ads, especially on mobile where they take up lots of limited real estate. And it seems to me that they can’t be generating that much money given the niche topic. But maybe I’m wrong!

No. I should prune them, honestly. I earn about $100 / month on them; I played around with it at some point mostly to understand the advertising ecosystem. Half of the links to Amazon are broken at this point. My hosting costs are about $20 per month now thanks to optimization to the search engine and offloading larger objects and pi fragments to cloudflare. (Used to be higher)

I do want the site to be at least "self-maintaining", though.

(Sorry uBlock user here so I Saw no ads)

Maybe you can try to setup a custom t-shirt with the desired number in the Pi sequence, like the original article has.

Thanks again for the site!

That's a fun idea. Thanks! Hmmm.

And very welcome. It turns 25 this year, which is really weird - it's older than my students! grins

You should show the site to your students by using it to look for the birth date of your site :)

Your UI beats the stuffing out of the Wolfram abomination

> this site is a blast from the past

> I'm frequently asked where people can get such a ridiculously large amount of pi. Be warned that 50 million digits of pi takes up 50 megabytes. This can take up to 4 hours to download with a 28.8k modem!

I love the old internet. Users gave a shit about other users.

Here's a deep link to the digit search form

https://www.angio.net/pi/digits.html

I wonder how much that information already narrows down your birth date.

Well, that was a stupid amount of fun.

Longest "Pi" sequence found: 31415926

For the digits 0-9, there are stretches 8 (i.e. 11111111) long for all the digits, but 6, 7, and 8 have 9 digit stretches (which given the property that a 9 digit random number would be in there at ~9.5%, is an anomaly!).

12345678 exists, but not 123456789. Similarly counting backward, but 876543210 exists. 012345678 does not.

And, yes, my birthday is in there, both at MMDDYYYY and YYYYMMDD.

Anyway, silly amount of fun.

I don't understand why they went through the trouble.

It even pings this script first

https://www.wolframcloud.com/objects/user-ca9f3e2e-1c45-4ace...

to get a checksum ("ck") that it then passes to the Pi searcher in the query string, which appears to be the last 8 digits of the MD5 checksum of the date, e.g.

    import hashlib
    print(hashlib.md5("12-30-56".encode()).hexdigest()[-8:])

Unfortunately passing invalid dates seem to once again crash the image generator that presents the results.

Valid:

https://www.wolframcloud.com/objects/microsites/mypiday/pida...

Invalid:

https://www.wolframcloud.com/objects/microsites/mypiday/pida...

In all seriousness, why isn't this just "find any number in pi"?

Well, there is something wrong with that format :), it's not sorted either ascending or descending. :) But yeah, nonsense text on their part, they are clearly parsing it.

Neither is mm-dd-yy!

Yes, there is something badly wrong with that format too. :)

Same. It was way less satisfying to see MM.DD.YY format instead of MM.DD.YYYY date in pi.

Yeah...the truncation is opposite of what is said in input prompt

'Enter your birthdate (or other date) in any format'

It doesn’t accept evil formats, clearly

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