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Comment by wodenokoto | Hacker News Reader

Clicking around the previous discussions, it appears that the original question was posted on /sci/, a science and math board on 4chan, and not an anime board, as everybody who writes about this states.

This is apparently an archive of the original post:

http://4watch.org/superstring/

It's a question to a math community, using an anime meme template and referencing another anime. The discussion is very much not some anime fans having fun with a silly question, not knowing they are dealing with frontiers of math. Instead it is math enthusiast having a go at what they know is a difficult problem. One even links to a stackexchange question, stating that this is an open problem, and the poster of the link says that if they solve it, they should post it to arxiv.

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I fear I'm responsible for this misconception. At first we didn't realise the proof had originated on 4chan – Nathaniel Johnston originally found the proof on Wikia, and the 4chan archive was only discovered later.

When I tweeted about it, I said “The best known lower bound for the minimal length of superpermutations was proved by an anonymous user of a wiki mainly devoted to anime.”, by which I meant Wikia (which was pretty anime-centric at the time).

I think, combined with the fact that the problem was posed to 4chan in terms of Haruhi, and because it makes a funnier story, that the anime angle has been a bit exaggerated.

Having said that, the author of the proof is not (to the best of my knowledge) a mathematician, nor does he have any apparent desire to publish his result in a conventional form, so it's still a pretty unexpected place for such a result to originate.

>At first we didn't realise the proof had originated on 4chan – Nathaniel Johnston originally found the proof on Wikia

>by an anonymous user of a wiki mainly devoted to anime.”, by which I meant Wikia (which was pretty anime-centric at the time).

The Wikia in question is the official 4chan /sci/ Wikia.

Is /sci/ on 4chan a real hub of traditional research and professional academia? I think I’d be confused by all the distinctions you anime fans are drawing here.

I know. My description was aimed at people who had never heard of Wikia, and certainly didn't understand its substructure. But I realise it sounds wrong to people like you who do understand that, and I wish I'd worded it more carefully.

Regardless, thanks for bringing this to the broader attention of the world!

This is a common misconception, so much so that whiners about anime pics is a common occurrence on 4chan. 4chan is a board primarily for anime fans and thus for example it's normal and acceptable for there to be anime related posts in all of the boards, while it's not acceptable for other topics to bleed out of their own boards.

4chan dates back from a time where you'd have, say, forums for people who like X, and that forum might also have off-topic boards for stuff like food, travel, politics, and other off-topic discussion. While there are people who are interested in specific topics in said boards, everyone on the site across all boards are expected to like X.

As 4chan is wide open and due to the existence of /b/, there is thus a constant flow of people who aren't anime fans whinging about anime in the non-anime boards, who are generally ignored or rebuked.

I haven't been a regular visitor for some years, so some cultural loss might be expected, but certainly at the time that this happened, 4chan was still solidly an anime community.

Here are a few examples (which also demonstrate that while it's hard to define 4chan users in any way simply because it's an undefined set of random people that might visit and leave at any time, the only commonality would that most (not all; the so-call "redditors"/"tourists") are anime fans:

https://4archive.org/board/qa/thread/382065/whats-the-deal-w...

https://4archive.org/board/qa/thread/564357/its-acceptable-t...

Calling 4chan an anime board is probably accurate, it started as a copy of 2chan, which was anime-focused. Taking a cursory look at the catalog of most boards on the site will confirm this, you will find an anime reaction pic with high probability.

Indeed. I would even dare to say most of /sci/ don't want to be associated with anime at all.

Unlike sites like Reddit where an overarching hivemind will dominate the entire site to the point where your cooking, gardening and Reality TV subs will all contain American politics for some ungodly reason, 4chan still seems to be siloed in to specifically focused communities.

Ignore /b/, /pol/, r9k and all the weeb stuff and you can find some properly good communities which remind me of the old internet. /sci/, /mu/, /biz/ and /fit/ can all have their moments from time to time.

Some of the content that pops up on /t/ are extremely interesting from a data hoarding/lost media perspective

I vaguely remember a poster having digitised his entire niche Serbian breakfast cartoon collection

A lot falls through the rather wide cracks in legal distribution methods

I can very confidently state /biz/ does not have its moments.

the rise of crypto broke that board

> Ignore the weeb stuff

Good luck doing that on 4chan

> Ignore the weeb stuff

Go away

I'd ask the boring Israeli/US boycott Muppets get off my graphics card benchmark sub but alas, we dont all get want we want.

Until then you can use some 4chan boards if you ignore all the weeb shit.

The original intent for all the boards was for anime fans to talk about something within their group (ie with other anime fans) that wasn't /a/nime itself. There's a screencap from an old /g/ thread on the same topic (someone complaining about all the weebs shitting up their board; meanwhile the board is literally named that because of "gijitsu"). But over time many of the board cultures shifted to the extent that they have / want very little association with anime.

It's an anime website though.

How so? It's a very general-purpose image board and has a been for a long time.

The two aren't contradictory, it's more that due to historic traditions as an offshoot of 2chan and cross-board culture, "otaku" culture still exerts a strong influence on most of the boards.

4chan has more valuable information than Reddit. Reddit has a lot of echo chambers with useless information

The problem is actually finding that information, once a thread dies it becomes a nightmare to find them again and it's only aggravated by time as it gets buried under other similar threads on archiver sites. You can't really search posts by users due to the anonymous nature (you can, but using handles is frowned upon over there), most threads don't have title subjects and even those that do have hundreds of identical reposts every few days as they reach the max number of posts, or they simply die due to being buried by more popular threads. It's a fool's errand trying to recover anything from archiver sites that's older than a couple of days.

The archive of the post is linked in the mathsci.wikia.com page: https://warosu.org/sci/thread/S3751105#p3751197

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