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Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 16 posts.
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Implementing Regular Expressions
This page collects resources about implementing regular expression search efficiently.
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Ask HN: How do you solve hard problems if you can't make incremental progress?
Ron Jeffries attempts to create a sudoku solver - here , here , here , here and here . (You really ought to read these articles. They are u...
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Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations
(Note: this post is `just for fun;’ no premeds, doctors, researchers, or nobel laureates were meant to be offended in the writing of this post.) The bane of many American physics grad student…
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Yacc is dead: An update
The draft of " Yacc is Dead " that David Darais and I posted on arXiv received some attention, so we'd like to share updates and feedback.
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Scott Aaronson explains his $200k bet (8 Signs A Claimed P≠NP Proof Is Wrong)
As of this writing, Vinay Deolalikar still hasn’t retracted his P≠NP claim, but a clear consensus has emerged that the proof, as it stands, is fatally flawed. The first reason is that weR…
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Regular Expression Matching in the Wild
The first two articles in this series, “ Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast ” and “ Regular Expression Matching: the Virtual Machine Approach ,” introduced the foundation of DFA-based and NFA-based regular expression matching. Both were based on toy implementations optimized for teaching the basic…
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Chicago undergraduate mathematics bibliography
Somehow I became the canonical undergraduate source for bibliographical references, so I thought I would leave a list behind before I graduated. I list the books I have found useful in my wanderings through mathematics (in a few cases, those I found especially un useful), and give short descriptions and comparisons…
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Operational Transformation (algorithm behind Wave, Google Docs)
Almost exactly a year ago, Google made one of the most remarkable press releases in the Web 2.0 era. Of course, by "press release", I actually mean keynote at their own conference, and by "remarkable" I mean potentially-transformative and groundbreaking. I am referring of course to the announcement of Google Wave , a…
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Do C compilers disprove Fermat's Last Theorem?
(You probably already have realized this.) The reason the compiler produced code that terminated was based upon the fact that the values being altered (i.e., a, b and c) within the “while” loop are never referenced again after the loop. But, once you added code which printed the resulting values it was forced to…
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Maze Generation: Eller's Algorithm
Algorithms, circle mazes, hex grids, masking, weaving, braiding, 3D and 4D grids, spheres, and more!
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Are you one of the 10% of programmers who can write a binary search?
There are some programming books that I’ve read from cover to cover repeatedly; there are others that I have dipped into many times, reading a chapter or so at a time. Jon Bentley’s 19…
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R.J. Lipton - A proof that P is not equal to NP
A serious proof that claims to have resolved the P=NP question. Vinay Deolalikar is a Principal Research Scientist at HP Labs who has done important research in various areas of networks. He also h…
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Knuth's 'Earthshaking Announcement' due tomorrow
(I'm still looking for the catchiest way to appreciate the number MMXXVI. Exercise 7.2.1.6–122 gives 1234+.5*6+789 and -1+2345*6/7+8+9 and 1+(2/3)*45*67.8-9 ; other suggestions are welcome. The most elegant that I've seen so far is a beauty that was suggested independently by Arnaud Lefebvre and by Evangelos…
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P vs. NP for Dummies
A reader named Darren commented on my last post: I have this feeling that this whole P and NP thing is not only a profound problem that needs solving, but something that can be infinitely curious t…