Infinite pancakes, anyone? | Hacker News Reader

Infinite pancakes, anyone?

nytimes.com

34 pointscainxinth22 comments

As someone who reads comments first, I’d like to nominate this is the most confusing article ever.

Top comments includes, comments on a university course, pancake recipes and questions about basketball matches against the dead musician Prince.

I don’t mind the occasional joke in an hn thread. I’ve made several myself. But I’m disappointed that this thread is seemingly all jokes and no actual discussion of the article.

I’m no mathematician, but as best I can tell, this is describing a novel approach to the “lazy caterers problem”: “Given an integer n, denoting the number of cuts that can be made on a pancake, find the maximum number of pieces that can be formed by making n cuts.” [1]

Their method was to use weirdly shaped, sometimes infinite knives, computing optimal arrangements, and recognizing the resulting region counts as known integer sequences.

[1] https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/dsa/the-lazy-caterers-problem/

Yeah, this comment section descended into Reddit :(

As someone who didn't read the article, or any of the other comments, I just want to say reading the comments first is the only way to HN.

Do we have to beat Prince at a game of basketball first?

Only if you play blouses.

>The notion of “concrete mathematics” was meant as an antidote, of sorts, to new trends in “abstract mathematics” (a.k.a. “new math.”)

I thought it was because it was a course covering a combination of discrete and continuous topics?

The real unlock for pancakes is making the batter the night before. Cold batter from the fridge gives you fluffier pancakes than fresh batter, and you don't have to measure anything at 8am.

Doesn't the baking powder makes its bubbles and run out, leaving behind flat batter?

It depends on the other ingredients. If you use buttermilk or seltzer (which you should), then don't let it rest more than 5-10 minutes.

I think people commenting need to qualify what they consider a pancake in their posts. Baking powder is definitely new to me, I'm used to { flour, eggs, milk }. With baking powder you'd get a sort of... flabby dough thing? And... pancakes for breakfast? I'm guessing its something US-specific.

And if it is a US thing, I'll just mention the pancake soup here.

Yeah us US folk love our dessert for breakfast

yup, I make crepes (not small thick US pancakes) only with flour, eggs, milk and a pinch of salt, though we call them pancakes here

Same here. Do you make soup from the leftovers the next day? For people not familiar with this, you let them dry out a bit overnight, then cut them into thin strips and cook them with chicken stock and chives.

first time hearing using them in soup, anyway there are none left, if I am not in the mood for sweet, I will just put on them some Chinese spicy sauce :-)

While this seems like good advice for breakfast, I'm not sure it's going to help too much with figuring out how to cut an infinite mathematical pancake with an oddly-shaped mathematical knife.

It's a very different but rather interesting puzzle!

I'm not sure the last time I enjoyed math. Breakfast, however...

IHOP already has this covered: https://www.ihop.com/en/specials/bottomless-pancakes

Gotta order their breakfast first though, which luckily is better than their pancakes (imo).

That’s interesting, the cloudflare screening whatever it is thinks my phone’s a bot. Safari on an iPhone 11 with Firefox installed as an ad blocker.

Me too, from Firefox in Linux and no (!) blockers. Weird. Maybe geo-fenced for not being in the US, sometimes companies do that which is ... weird.

Disappointingly, the article does not contain a cool household appliance that will dispense infinite pancakes at the touch of a button.

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