• One is a historical question: who first used these numbers and when? who copied from where?
• The other is a conceptual question: why might someone choose these numbers, what do they "mean", how do we interpret these constants?
The former is purely a question of facts and there is nothing to "explain the nature of the numbers", and this is what the answerer on Stack Exchange seems to have interpreted it as. Under this interpretation saying things like "the modulus is the period" is not really germane to the question; what's required is to search sources and try to find the chronologically earliest one. (The answer doesn't seem to have done a definitive job, but it's a reasonable start.)
This is like synchronic vs diachronic in linguistics: in the latter interpretation you mainly just want to understand the random-number generator.
Never found it again on the site. Years ago I remember digging up a link to the question but got the 404 page when I followed it.
(The question was deleted in July 2014 and undeleted in December 2020: https://stackoverflow.com/posts/3637668/revisions , so right now anyone can see it. BTW with ≥10000 reputation one can see deleted posts, per https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges and https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools — e.g., as you mentioned you have ~16k points, try the much-mirrored "programmer joke" deleted question (linked from e.g. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/76584).)
I wonder if the answer survives in an old data dump or in the Archive?
> providing a link and not answer is a poor model because links decay so quickly.
Providing a link and not answer is not the stackexchange model. On the Stack Exchange network, such answers are often (not always, of course) commented with a request to expand the answer.
That might be true in many places, and I agree with the general sentiment that the answer should provide an answer and not just a link to an answer. But wikipedia links are generally pretty stable. It’s not some random blog post.
Who invented this algorithm and tested the distribution? Is there a paper or something to cite?
That would have made another question.
i don't think it's SE's fault as much as it is a historical rough edge between two fields (computer programming and applied mathematics).
the first constant is klaatu, the second is barada and the third is nikto.
(NR also tends to be fairly rigorous in terms of citations, for the curious)
I googled all these things and I can't still make any sense of your comment except that it's intentionally confusing with some popular fiction references?
It's doubly famous because Sam Raimi recycled it in "Army of Darkness" as an incantation to dispel the curse of the Necronomicon (book of the dead, portrayed as the arch book of black magic in any number of stories), which our hapless anti-hero Ash fucks up and thus unleashes the armies of the dead on a roughly medieval and wholly unprepared world.
If you like campy horror movies, there is so much camp in Army of Darkness that there's barely any room for the horror. It is technically a sequel but it works as a standalone movie. I watched it years before I finally sat down and watched The Evil Dead.
I feel like SE being stack exchange is pretty clear here.
The remaining reference is not an acronym or abbreviation, nor do I think it looks like one.
Then it appears on HN, and more people half guessing, but better content in general.
Based on yesterday's post, BYTE magazine would have actually given an answer with both why and how.
EDIT: Granted, the link DOES go to Wikipedia which has a great explanation, but in general, providing a link and not answer is a poor model because links decay so quickly.