now featuring an atom feed!
I hosted HammerWars 2025 last November , Purdue’s biggest programming contest with 100+ participants from Purdue WL, Indy and UIUC and I’ve been thinking about recording the process long before the event. I think it’s fair to say this is my highest-impact work to date, and this post could be helpful for organizers in similar straits. It’s also for my own reflection. Though I take responsibility…
Prologue My friend and fellow club president Kevin Yu was working on a HeroCTF challenge (Revoked) in the same room, and I became curious. I pointed out that the Python library for JWTs discarded = padding, apparently solving two challenges (Revoked and Revoked Revenge). We moved on to the Evil Cloner challenge , skipping the comparatively trivial “Spring Drive” because Kevin didn’t want to touch…
note: hyperbole for entertainment Oh dear. You stayed up too late fixing borrow checker errors. It’s the night before an important final, but Ferris has other plans for you, which, unfortunately, are disjoint from studying. While staring at the hopeless ten line snippet preventing you from doing anything ever again, you drift off, dreaming about your aborted attempt to capture a goddamn variable…
how it works I adore Wikipedia’s random page capability – frantically hitting next at 3 AM to learn about a rural county or plant species is among my highest pleasures. I would redirect my new tab page, which I open every five minutes in lockstep with closing Hacker News, to Special:Random, but the problem is that these pages are very rarely math-related. Instead of using a random forest of…
status: written for school. it’s… ok, but not great. Before high school, I did not understand why math was useful. When my dad took me to the AoPS learning center across the street to be interviewed for taking their pre-algebra course, I questioned how this world of abstract nonsense could ever be purposed for the bigger picture — how does fudging symbols ease world poverty? What more did you need…