There is (was?) also Gnokii [1] for old Nokia phones, which I've used successfully. I even managed to port a small part of it to Arduino to send a message automatically (code [2] and write-up [3]), but these days there are shields with much better interfaces than the Nokia FBus (e.g. using the SIM900 chip [4]).
Why did you not ask the same question when the link was posted 5 days ago? That was the second time it was submitted by the same person in as many days. The real question is who cares? If it gets voted to the front page it is because people want to see it...
Because it had been posted over a year ago prior to being posted a week ago. And yes, you are right in pointing out that the same person submitted it twice in two days, but the first time it appears that nobody saw it. IMO, this is within the HN repost guidelines, but that's a matter of interpretation.
But I agree with you that "If it gets voted to the front page it is because people want to see it..."
My anecdotal experience is that most may start with math for their first degree, but then (or during) pivot to some related but more applied area like CS, Econ, etc.
The idea is that as time goes by, computers become twice as fast (Moore's law), but problems also become twice as big. With a quadratic algorithm, you will need twice as much time to solve the problems of the bigger size, even on the faster computer. See page 22 of http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr15/cos126/lec...
1: http://www.gnokii.org/ 2: https://github.com/giech/arduino_nokia_6310i 3: https://ilias.giechaskiel.com/posts/arduino_sms/index.html 4: http://www.simcom.ee/modules/gsm-gprs/sim900/