Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 40 posts.
[This essay in Spanish] [This essay in French] [This essay in Chinese] In an old joke, two noblemen vie to name the bigger number. The first, after ruminating for hours, triumphantly announces "Eighty-three!" The second, mightily impressed, replies "You win." A biggest number contest is clearly pointless when the…
Attention conservation notice : Once, I was one of the authors of a paper on cellular automata . Lawyers for Wolfram Research Inc. threatened to sue me, my co-authors and our employer, because one of our citations referred to a certain mathematical proof, and they claimed the existence of this proof was a trade secret…
The original paper that introduced the simulation argument
Graham's number is so big, we need a whole new set of tools to even discuss it.
It turns out that finite state machines are useful for things other than expressing computation. Finite state machines can also be used to compactly represent ordered sets or maps of strings that can be searched very quickly.
This text is designed to accompany your study of introductory digital signal processing. 1 It’s an eccentric piece of not-so-rigorous literature with a preoccupation for explaining things using interactive visualizations, animations and sound. 2 My goal is to explain the Discrete Fourier Transform using a miniature…
I’ve been meaning to link to this post at the arXiv blog , which is a great source of quirky and interesting new papers. In this case they are pointing to a speculative but interesting paper by Martin Perl and Holger Mueller, which suggests an experimental search for gradients in dark energy by way of atom…
neural networks , deep learning , representations , NLP , recursive neural networks
A series by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Racial segregation has always been a pernicious social problem in the United States. Many factors have contributed to segregation including prejudice, zoning laws, housing discrimination, and loan discrimination. Although much effort has been extended to desegregate our schools, churches, and neighborhoods, the US…
This post is to announce the start of a new mathematics journal, to be called Discrete Analysis. While in most respects it will be just like any other journal, it will be unusual in one important w…
Update (Dec. 16): If you’re still following this, please check out an important comment by Alex Selby, the discoverer of Selby’s algorithm, which I discussed in the post. Selby querie…
I'm assuming you're familiar with the basic idea of what a Turing machine is . There are a few parts to building one in Magic: a tape extending in two directions storing cells of a few different "colours"; a processing head that can read the current cell's colour, write a new colour and change its state if necessary…
PowerPoint must die.
This morning I had the pleasure to be a mathematical guest in my daughter’s third-grade class, full of inquisitive eight- and nine-year-old girls, and we had a wonderful interaction. Followin…
Those of you who know what public-key cryptography is may have already heard of ECC , ECDH or ECDSA . The first is an acronym for Elliptic Curve Cryptography, the others are names for algorithms based on it.
Glen Weyl has uploaded a new version of his paper, Quadratic Voting (written with Steven Lalley), to SSRN, which now includes the completed proofs. Quadratic voting is the most important idea for l…
Jump to follow-up “Statistical regression to the mean predicts that patients selected for abnormalcy will, on the average, tend to improve. We argue that most improvements attributed to the p…
Clifford Algebra, a.k.a. Geometric Algebra, is a most extraordinary synergistic confluence of a diverse range of specialized mathematical fields, each with its own methods and formalisms, all of wh…
A few weeks ago, Hensen et al., of the Delft University of Technology and Barcelona, Spain, put out a paper reporting the first experiment that violates the Bell inequality in a way that closes off…
On the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Stephen Wolfram discusses the nature of space and time, and fundamental theory of physics.
Dual_EC was almost certainly an NSA backdoor. Extended Random is the TLS extension that would have made it practical to exploit. Did NSA plant that one too? A look at the evidence.
Update (Dec. 14): The long wait is over! Here’s Laci’s paper on the arXiv. So far, I’ve read it only deeply enough to note that it contains the following sentence: A group G ≤ S…
Eigenvalues/vectors are instrumental to understanding electrical circuits, mechanical systems, ecology and even Google's PageRank algorithm. Let's see if visualization can make these ideas more intuitive.
