It does make me wonder how much hidden knowledge is hidden in parts of the internet; maybe this is the only genius mathematical thing we've found on 4chan...
That was the shining hope of the internet. "Information wants to be free" and now it could be available to anyone with a modem vs just in university or municipal libraries. Now, we have megasites that dominate the web's attention with very trivial and banal content that makes looking for that information nearly impossible.
Who knows what kind of weird mathematical or scientific things have been discovered by hobbyists and posted on some obscure forum thread or abandoned blog that wasn't appreciated by anyone?
Like, if someone had a proof for the Goldbach Conjecture, and for whatever reason posted about it on the WatchUSeek forums (just as a throwaway example), it could just lay dormant for who knows how long? The audience on WatchUSeek might not realize the significance of a such a discovery, and maybe not even the poster, so it doesn't get any recognition and just never gets picked up.
I mean, going with the example in the original post, I don't know much about Superpermutations (only a little after this post went viral), so if I had seen this 4chan post in the wild, I would just assume it's some guy doing a bit of math that I wasn't familiar with. I wouldn't be able to spot that this was actually a contribution to anything.
On the other hand, it is nice and convenient if everything is indexed.
I dunno. Conflicted.
Still, I do wonder what cool (and real) stuff on the internet that people don't really know about is actually significant.
Lot of technical communities are there nowadays, lot of ideas are just out of view from anything public.
Phrack probably has hundreds or maybe thousands of citations to it at this point.
(It's a fun bit of lore that she was once on /b)
Of course the other factor is your own comprehension powers; I can't comprehend math or complex algorithms, so I don't actually know if there are any that I could apply to my usual software development problems.
(I doubt it, it's high level front end stuff, all the complex bits are lower down)
I don’t know enough about operating systems to really know if there’s anything clever in there, but that gets to your point; part of the issue comes down to the ability to understand what you’re reading, as you pointed out.
If I had seen the original 4chan post back when it was new, I wouldn’t have thought much of it, because I don’t know anything about superpermutations or combinatorics. If I had seen the post, I would have thought “oh there’s some math I never learned, cool” and moved on, not realizing its significance.