Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 45 posts.
Most commodity processors support single-precision IEEE 754 floating-point numbers. Though they are ubiquitous, they are often misunderstood. One of my readers left a comment suggesting that picking an integer in [0,232) at random and dividing it by 232, was equivalent to picking a number at random in [0,1). I am not…
For today’s post, I’ve drawn material not just from one paper, but from five! The subject matter is ‘word2vec’ – the work of Mikolov et al. at Google on efficient vect…
Why graphical representation and visualization are so important to...
Out there in the wider world—OK, OK, among Luboš Motl, and a few others who comment on this blog—there appears to be a widespread opinion that P≠NP is just “a fashionable dogma of…
New British train station design identified as cellular automata rule 30. Generating rule-based patterns. And a website that lets you try it yourself.
Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov was one of the giants of 20th-century mathematics. I’ve always found it amazing that the same man was responsible both for establishing the foundations of …
For those who just want the survey itself, not the backstory, it’s here. (Note: Partly because of the feedback I’ve gotten on this blog, it’s now expanded to 121 pages!) Upda…
Introduction / Warning Link to heading Any traditional introductory statistics course will teach students the definitions of modes, medians and means. But, because introductory courses can’t assume that students have much mathematical maturity, the close relationship between these three summary statistics can’t be…
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…
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…
Cyrille Rossant's small ray-tracer is an nice self-contained Python program (using NumPy) that renders this 400×300 image in about 15 seconds on a fast PC:
If you enjoy this article, I have published a book explaining the internals of Git through implementation: Building Git .
TLA+ is a formal specification and verification language intended to help engineers specify, design and reason about complex, real-life algorithms and software or hardware systems. We explore its motivation, application and principles of design.
