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How Not To Sort By Average Rating
Users are rating items on your website. How do you know what the highest-rated items are?
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 30 posts.
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Does one have to be a genius to do maths?
Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly. (José Ortega y Gasset, “Notes on t…
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Alligator Eggs
In 2007, I met Philip Wadler at a conference, who mentioned to me that he wanted to teach lambda calculus to his eight-year-old children.
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Nearly all binary search and merge sort implementations are broken (2006)
Posted by Joshua Bloch, Software EngineerI remember vividly Jon Bentley's first Algorithms lecture at CMU, where he asked all of us incoming Ph.D. ...
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Analysis of bank PIN numbers
Is your PIN number too predictable? Detailed analysis on PIN number databases.
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Mona Lisa in 50 polygons, using a genetic algorithm (2008)
This weekend I decided to play around a bit with genetic programming and put evolution to the test, the test of fine art 🙂
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Math For Programmers
Probability theory might be the most useful area for programmers, but it is also a blurry field, difficult to learn right. You might check this book for details, and there is also an free, online draft version available. The Logic of Science
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How you eat corn on the cob predicts whether you're an analyst or algebraist
I like learning about odd connections between disparate things. This probably is the oddest example that I know. Broadly speaking, mathemat...
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Fields medalist Tim Gowers: Elsevier — my part in its downfall
The Dutch publisher Elsevier publishes many of the world’s best known mathematics journals, including Advances in Mathematics, Comptes Rendus, Discrete Mathematics, The European Journal of Co…
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Damn Cool Algorithms: Quadtrees and Hilbert Curves
Last Thursday night at Oredev, after the sessions, was "Birds of a Feather" - a sort of mini-unconference. Anyone could write up a topic on the whiteboard; interested individuals added their names, and each group got allocated a room to chat about the topic. I joined the "Spatial Indexing" group, and we spent a…
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Damn Cool Algorithms: Cardinality Estimation
Posted by Nick Johnson | Filed under python , cardinality-estimation , damn-cool-algorithms
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Did NSA Put a Secret Backdoor in New Encryption Standard? (2007)
Random numbers are critical for cryptography: for encryption keys, random authentication challenges, initialization vectors, nonces, key-agreement schemes, generating prime numbers and so on. Break the random-number generator, and most of the time you break the entire security system. Which is why you should worry…
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Making MathBox: Presentation-Quality Math with Three.js and WebGL
Presentation-quality math with Three.js and WebGL.
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Damn Cool Algorithms: Fountain Codes
Posted by Nick Johnson | Filed under bittorrent , lt-codes , damn-cool-algorithms , fountain-codes
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Mastering Linear Algebra in 10 Days: Astounding Experiments in Ultra-Learning
The MIT Challenge My friend Scott Young recently finished an astounding feat: he completed all 33 courses in MIT’s fabled computer science curriculum, from Linear ... Read more
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A Better Strategy for Hangman
Learn the optimal strategy for playing Hangman.
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Traveling Salesman: the most misunderstood problem
Whenever people start talking about NP-Complete problems, or even NP problems, one of the first examples they reach for is the classic Traveling Salesperson Problem. TSP makes sense because it int...
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The Opposite of a Bloom Filter
A Bloom filter is a data structure that may report it contains an item that it does not (a false positive), but is guaranteed to report correctly if it contains the item (“no false negatives”). The opposite of a Bloom filter is a data structure that may report a false negative, but can never report a false positive…
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The Mathematical Hacker
The programming profession is blessed with a number of gifted essayists. Today I will pick on three of my favorites — Eric Raymond, Paul Graham, and Steve Yegge — because they all seem to disagree about why (and whether) mathematics is relevant to the practicing programmer. Their attitudes might be summarized as:
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How Far Can You Get From McDonald's?
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…
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All Rational Approximations of Pi Are Useless
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
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Map Simplification with Visvalingam's Algorithm
An interesting challenge in cartography is getting data of the appropriate resolution. As Lewis Fry Richardson observed , the more precisely you measure the length of a coastline, the longer it appears; geographic shapes have infinite complexity. Digital displays, in contrast, are limited by pixels. Choosing too high…
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What is static program analysis?
The halting problem asks whether the execution of a specific program for a given input will terminate.
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Factorization diagrams in Haskell
Meta Title: Math, Sports Data & IPTV: A Portugal Guide Meta Description: Explore how math-minded sports fans use IPTV in Portugal to watch live football, Champi