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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. 26 posts.
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Kill Math
The power to understand and predict the quantities of the world should not be restricted to those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract symbols.
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Fibonacci Flim-Flam.
physics, history of science, pseudoscience, hoaxes, writing, education, skepticisism, humor, quotes, illusions, 3d stereo photography.
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Complex numbers have never been so intuitive to me
Imaginary numbers always confused me. Like understanding e, most explanations fell into one of two categories: Gee, what a great way to encourage math in…
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Quake's Fast Inverse Square Root
I'm no graphics expert, but appreciate why square roots are useful. The Pythagorean theorem computes distance between points, and dividing by distance helps…
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Maze-generation algorithms, with JS demos
Algorithms, circle mazes, hex grids, masking, weaving, braiding, 3D and 4D grids, spheres, and more!
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Crit-bit Trees: the best way to store sets
A crit-bit tree can be used as a high-speed associative array. For example, an array mapping 54 to 1, 19 to 2, 99 to 3, 85 to 4, and 88 to 5 can be stored as a crit-bit tree containing 54=1, 19=2, 99=3, 85=4, and 88=5. The smallest string in the crit-bit tree larger than 85= is 85=4.
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Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine
This paper appeared in Communications of the ACM in April 1960. It is the original paper on Lisp.
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Donut math - How donut.c works
There has been a sudden resurgence of interest in my "donut" code from 2006 , and I've had a couple requests to explain this one. It's been five years now, so it's not exactly fresh in my memory, so I will reconstruct it from scratch, in great detail, and hopefully get approximately the same result.
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Algorithmic symphonies from one line of code
Lately, there has been a lot of experimentation with very short programs that synthesize something that sounds like music. I now want to sha...
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Darts, Dice, and Coins: A beautiful article on a beautiful algorithm
Earlier this year, I asked a question on Stack Overflow about a data structure for loaded dice . Specifically, I was interested in answering this question:
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Java Hangs When Converting 2.2250738585072012e-308
Konstantin Preißer made an interesting discovery , after reading my article “ PHP Hangs On Numeric Value 2.2250738585072011e-308 ”: Java — both its runtime and compiler — go into an infinite loop when converting the decimal number 2.2250738585072012e-308 to double-precision binary floating-point. This number is…
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Smaller than Bloom filters
I've been looking at what would be needed in order to have a global view of CRLs in browsers. At the moment revocation has three problems: privacy (by asking the CA about the status of a certificate you're revealing to them what you're looking at), performance (OCSP checks take hundreds of milliseconds which adds up…
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PHP 5.3.3 hangs on numeric value 2.2250738585072011e-308
I stumbled upon a very strange bug in PHP; this statement sends it into an infinite loop:
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Succinct Data Structures: Cramming 80,000 words into a Javascript file
<img src="http://zwibbler.com/shared/1024.png"/> jQuery creator John Resig needs a little help storing lists of words in his side project. Let's go overkill and explore a little known branch of computer science called Succinct Data Structures.
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A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)
(A play in 4 acts. Please feel free to exit along with the stage character that best represents you. Take intermissions as you see fit. Click on the stage if...
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Patent 5,893,120 reduced to mathematical formulae
I have previously argued that the Bilski ruling renders all software unpatentable in the US because any method of manipulating information ...
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The Prime That Wasn’t
Life, technology, and other good things
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Lovelace's Leap
There's a great deal said about Ada, Countess of Lovelace that I find misguided. And, worse, the real intellectual triumph of Lovelace is ...
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Finding Love Optimally
Like many in operations research, my research interests often creep over into my everyday life. Since I work on scheduling issues, I get particularly concerned with everyday scheduling, to the consternation of my friends and family (“We should have left six minutes ago: transportation is now on the critical path!”)…
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Compiling to λ-calculus
Though it contains forms only for function applications, variable references and anonymous functions, it is equivalent to a Turing machine.
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