Making any integer with four 2s (2025)
46 comments
- Points151
- Comments37
46 comments
Story details from Hacker News ↗ · linked article on eli.thegreenplace.net.
Making any integer with four 2s (2025) was first seen on Hacker News · Front page on Nov 7, 2026. Since then it has appeared in 67 checks on 2 different days. Its best position was #10 of 30, reached on Nov 8, 13:24 UTC. It is #10 right now, holding steady at #10 over the last 6 checks.
Position on Hacker News · Front page at every check (lower is better).
Best rank per day (UTC).
points as reported by Hacker News.
A few top-level comments from Hacker News, shortened. Read the full thread on Hacker News.
i know everyone plays with their own rules, but from my perspective, a square root spends a 2 - it's not an operator like + or ! . there's an implicit "2" since you could also take the cube root or fourth root
22 is cheating because 22 = 2*10+2 is arbitrary in base 10. If you write 22 in some base, you have to write the base, and that's an extra number.
there is a related problem (inspired by an interview questions from ITA software, a part of Google now) that asks to find the smallest positive integer that cannot be expressed using a digit K (in [2,9]) N times in an expression that involves the four basic arithmetic operations and the parentheses: +, -, *, /, (,…
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Yes. As of Nov 8, 15:39 UTC it is #10, holding steady at #10 over the last 6 checks.
#10 on Hacker News · Front page, on Nov 8, 13:24 UTC. Trendoday checks this list every 15 minutes.
It was first seen on Nov 7, 2026 and has been on the list on 2 days (67 checks) since.
151 points and 37 comments; submitted by germanrabbit on Nov 7, 2026.