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The control group is out of control (2014)
I. Allan Crossman calls parapsychology the control group for science. That is, in let’s say a drug testing experiment, you give some people the drug and they recover. That doesn’t tell …
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 23 posts.
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A trip through the Graphics Pipeline
Welcome. This is the index page for a series of blog posts I’m currently writing about the D3D/OpenGL graphics pipelines as actually implemented by GPUs. A lot of this is well known among gra…
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Nearly all binary searches and mergesorts 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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Galactic-Scale Energy (2011)
[ An updated treatment of this material appears in Chapter 1 of the Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (free) textbook , and also appears as part of an article in Nature Physics in 2022.]
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Ssss: Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme (2006)
Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme
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Torsors (2010)
When you first read about "torsors", they're bound to seem a bit too darn sophisticated for their own good. Mostly this is because nobody explains them very well. So, I want to convince you that they're actually very simple and natural. I'll do this by giving you three examples from physics:
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A step by step backpropagation example (2015)
Background Backpropagation is a common method for training a neural network. There is no shortage of papers online that attempt to explain how backpropagation works, but few that include an example…
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Binary Lambda Calculus (2020)
Binary lambda calculus ( BLC ) is a minimal, pure functional programming language invented by John Tromp in 2004, 1 based on a binary encoding of the untyped lambda calculus in De Bruijn index notation.
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Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print
(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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Wordle-solving state of the art: all optimality results so far
Almost all mathematical questions one could have about Wordle are settled by now. I summarize here what is known so far.
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Visualizing Bayes Theorem (2009)
I recently came up with what I think is an intuitive way to explain Bayes’ Theorem. I searched in google for a while and could not find any article that explains it in this particular way.
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I can't let go of “The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation”
Organizing my thoughts regarding an argument about the Dunning-Kruger study and statistics in general
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Someone’s Been Messing with My Subnormals
TL;DR: After noticing an annoying warning, I went on an absurd yak shave, and discovered that because of a tiny handful of Python packages b...
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Damn Cool Algorithms: Levenshtein Automata
Posted by Nick Johnson | Filed under python , tech , coding , damn-cool-algorithms
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Noether's Theorem in a Nutshell (2020)
Noether's theorem is an amazing result which lets physicists get conserved quantities from symmetries of the laws of nature. Time translation symmetry gives conservation of energy; space translation symmetry gives conservation of momentum; rotation symmetry gives conservation of angular momentum, and so on.
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A 9-line summary of textbook physics
All their wonders in one table
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Markov chain Monte Carlo without the bullshit (2015)
I have a little secret: I don’t like the terminology, notation, and style of writing in statistics. I find it unnecessarily complicated. This shows up when trying to read about Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. Take, for example, the abstract to the Markov Chain Monte Carlo article in the Encyclopedia of…
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