Author here.
In the article I explicitly mention that the second part (about high degree polynomial and descrete exponentation) is based on Diffie-Hellman's 1976 paper and presents their one-way function constructions, not MD5 or SHA family (my goal is to cover the history of hashing from the beginning, so I haven't done a research on modern systems yet).
As for the quantum computing stuff, I should have stated more clearly that I'm referring only to quantum computer allowing to calculate descrete logarithms rather fast, and provided a source such as https://math.mit.edu/~shor/elecpubs.html containing a link to the paper Algorithms for quantum computation: Discrete logarithms and factoring by Peter Shor. (I'm planning on covering post-quantum cryptography after I'm done with modern algorithms)
Exactly! The idea was to show how asking the right question can completely change the result, which von Mises himself uses as a core argument in his original article. He tells the story about math bureau showing that they weren't wrong mathematically, they were just answering the wrong question
That's a very interesting approach! Such a big difference between 366 people for 100% and only 23 for 50% would have been much more intriguing. Thanks, I'll keep it in mind for the future posts:)
As for the quantum computing stuff, I should have stated more clearly that I'm referring only to quantum computer allowing to calculate descrete logarithms rather fast, and provided a source such as https://math.mit.edu/~shor/elecpubs.html containing a link to the paper Algorithms for quantum computation: Discrete logarithms and factoring by Peter Shor. (I'm planning on covering post-quantum cryptography after I'm done with modern algorithms)