As someone without a math-degree, OEIS has been surprisingly great just for helping bridge "my unscalable brute force test program spit out these numbers" to "oh, <i>that's</i> what what this kinda thingy is called and what class of problem it is."<p>Let me give you a concrete example, back from some online puzzle by a Large Internet Search company. You have X items of unique heights, and the question is how many ways you can line them up so that someone looking from one end can see Y distinct non-occluded heights, and someone looking from the other side can see Z distinct heights.<p>IIRC manually experimenting with small numbers revealed a pattern that OEIS said was Stirling Numbers of the first kind [0]. Simply having this jargon/label available made it possible to access work other people did on it in the past.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_numbers_of_the_first_kind" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_numbers_of_the_first_...</a>
A new sequence should be added to the OEIS that comprises the unix timestamps of each individual submission of the OEIS to HN.<p><a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&query=The%20On-Line%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Integer%20Sequences&sort=byDate" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&query=The%20On-Line%20...</a>