Hacker News Reader

That's what I have found to be the case: time is in short supply

This algorithm is asymptotically faster than the state of the art, but it isn't faster in practice. At least not yet!

Somebody somewhere might be Ramanujan, but the average person is going to be a whole lot better served by reading literature than trying to reinvent the field.

I'd certainly Google for some algos before writing one myself.

Years ago, however, I came across a paper for optimal convex polygon decomposition that had zero implementations and the paper was so complicated.. couldn't figure out how to implement it myself. I came up with something new and published it which was apparently enticing enough to be picked up by at least one game library. So that was neat.