Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 494 posts.
A group of Chinese researchers have just published a paper claiming that they can—although they have not yet done so—break 2048-bit RSA. This is something to take seriously. It might not be correct, but it’s not obviously wrong. We have long known from Shor’s algorithm that factoring with a quantum computer is easy…
All their wonders in one table
Update 2017-01-09: Laci claims to have found a workaround to the previously posted error, and the claim is again quasipolynoimal time! Updated arXiv paper to follow. Update 2017-01-04: Laci has posted an update on his paper. The short version is that one small step of his analysis was not quite correct, and the result…
I have a little secret: I don’t like the terminology, notation, and style of writing in statistics. I find it unnecessarily complicated. This shows up when trying to read about Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. Take, for example, the abstract to the Markov Chain Monte Carlo article in the Encyclopedia of…
This blog is written by Hanno Böck. Unless noted otherwise, its content is licensed as CC0 .
During my internship at Jane Street 1 , one of my projects was a config editing tool that at first sounded straightforward but culminated in me designing a custom tree diffing algorithm using dynamic programming, relentlessly optimizing it and then transforming it into an A* accelerated path finding algorithm. This…
Tutorials and articles of Inigo Quilez on computer graphics, fractals, math, art, demoscene, shaders and more.
Just days after we celebrated my wife’s 40th birthday, she came down with COVID, meaning she’s been isolating and I’ve been spending almost all my time dealing with our kids. But …
Personal website of David R Hagen, scientific software engineer
A deep dive into spectral analysis of diffusion models of images, revealing how they implicitly perform a form of autoregression in the frequency domain.
If you read my recent post about Postgres you may have noted that Postgres operates primarily with fixed-size blocks of memory called “pages.” By default, Postgres pages are 8KB. This number is tuned to match operating system page sizes which are tuned to match hardware cache sizes. If you were to run Postgres on…
The internet is big. Really big . You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think the /22 you got as a LIR was big, but that’s just peanuts to the internet.
There is a well-known puzzle based on the premise of an �infinite� grid of resistors connecting adjacent nodes of a square lattice. A small portion of such a grid is illustrated below.
Note: this post was originally written in January 2016. It is now very outdated. Please see this example of how to visualize convnet filters for an up-to-date alternative, or check out chapter 9 of my book "Deep Learning with Python (2nd edition)".
FizzBuzz is a common coding problem asked in technical screenings or interviews. It goes something like this:
Around 2006, my friend Dan Christensen created a fascinating picture of all the roots of all polynomials of degree ≤ 5 with integer coefficients ranging from -4 to 4:
Update (April 14): On the suggestion of my TA Justin Yirka, I gave GPT-4 problem 2 from the final exam, along with its own answers and my and Justin’s grading comments, and asked it whether i…
"Emails show [Chris Cristie]'s aides did plan bridge gridlock," says Salon . To a transportation engineer, the aides are innocent: bridges can't have gridlock. While we often say "gridlock" to mean "bad traffic," it has a technical meaning.
Not all instructions on modern processors cost the same. Additions and subtractions are cheaper than multiplications which are themselves cheaper than divisions. For this reason, compilers frequently replace division instructions by multiplications. Roughly speaking, it works in this manner. Suppose that you want to…
This summer, cruising down the I-5 through California’s Central Valley to the Los Angeles Basin, I unwittingly stumbled upon a most exasperating development: the country strip mall . First, let me state that I don’t hate. I’ve got nothing against Petco, Starbucks, OfficeMax, et al. When overcome by the desire for a…
Investigation to find a better rational approximation for pi. Can we get out more digits than we put in? Chance to win a prize if you can do bette
Monte Carlo simulations (or methods ) is the technique of applying randomness and the Law of large numbers to the solution of various scientific and engineering problems. One of its first documented uses was by Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann for nuclear weapon simulations after WWII [1] .
Yesterday, David Benjamin posted a pretty esoteric note on the IETF’s TLS mailing list. At a superficial level, the post describes some seizure-inducingly boring flaws in older Canon printers…
