1
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 25 posts.
2
Ten Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough is Wrong
Yesterday several people asked my opinion of a preprint claiming to solve the Graph Isomorphism problem in deterministic polynomial time. I responded: If I read all such papers, then I wouldn’t hav…
3
D-Wave: Truth finally starts to emerge
Wrap-Up (June 5): This will be my final update on this post (really!!), since the discussion seems to have reached a point where not much progress is being made, and since I’d like to oblige …
4
5
Feynman vs. The Abacus
A Japanese man came into the restaurant. I had seen him before, wandering around; he was trying to sell abacuses. He started to talk to the waiters, and challenged them: He said he could add numbers faster than any of them could do.
6
Deciphering the Business Card Raytracer
I recently came across Paul Heckbert's business card raytracer. For those that have never heard of it: It is a very famous challenge in the Computer Graphics field that started on May 4th, 1984 via a post on comp.graphics by Paul Heckbert ( More about this in his article " A Minimal Ray Tracer " from the book Graphics…
7
The StarCraft path-finding hack
StarCraft pathfinding looked impossible to fix until one ugly hack changed everything. Here's the trick that shipped.
8
An Intuitive (and Short) Explanation of Bayes’ Theorem
Bayes’ theorem was the subject of a detailed article. The essay is good, but over 15,000 words long — here’s the condensed version for Bayesian newcomers like…
9
Why there is no Hitchhiker’s Guide to Mathematics for Programmers
For those who aren’t regular readers: as a followup to this post, there are four posts detailing the basic four methods of proof, with intentions to detail some more advanced proof techniques in the future. You can find them on this blog’s primers page. Do you really want to get better at mathematics? Remember when…
10
11
Creating Shazam in Java
This domain is available for sale. Check out price, information and more on Dovendi.com
12
English Letter Frequency Counts: Mayzner Revisited
Here's what we can do with today's computing power (using publicly available data and the processing power of my own personal computer; I'm not relying on access to corporate computing power):
13
The Fallacy of Cracking Contests (1998)
In this issue: The Fallacy of Cracking Contests How to Recognize Plaintext News The Doghouse: Iomega Zip Disks Counterpane Systems News Final Report from the Commerce Department Technical Advisory Committee on Key Recovery Comments From Readers About "CRYPTO-GRAM"
14
15
Ultimate Tic Tac Toe
Once at a picnic, I saw mathematicians crowding around the last game I would have expected: Tic-tac-toe.
16
Wounded QR Codes
How do QR codes work? How much is it possible to distort one and still have it readable?
17
Modelling a Basic Income with Python and Monte Carlo Simulation
Basic Income is a popular policy floating around the internet lately. The idea consists of declaring that the government will pay each living adult a fixed amount of money every month - an amount comparable to a minimum wage job. This policy would then replace all current welfare programs - welfare, unemployment …
18
Stochastic Superoptimization
An “optimizer” should really be called an “improver”, and a “superoptimizer” should be called an “optimizer” 🙂
19
The Existential Risk of Mathematical Error
Mathematical mistake/error-rates limit our understanding of rare risks and ability to defend against them.
20
Two dozen mathematicians wrote a 600 page book in 6 months on GitHub
Since spring, and even before that, I have participated in a great collaborative effort on writing a book on Homotopy Type Theory. It is finally finished and ready for public consumption. You can get the book freely at http://homotopytypetheory.org/book/ . Mike Shulman has written about the contents of the book , so I…
21
Reddit’s empire is founded on a flawed algorithm
Reddit has a bug in their code. This bug is currently present in their production platform, and has been for years. It affects one of the most important algorithms in the entire site, the “Hot” ranking algorithm for link popularity. It has real, demonstrable negative effects. It has been reported to Reddit’s technical…
22
23
24
Why Hacker News should use a different Deterministic Algorithm, Not a Random One
NetworkSolutions.com - Original domain name registration and reservation services with variety of internet-related business offerings. Quick, dependable and reliable.
25