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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 22 posts.
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Binary Decision Diagrams (2010)
Suppose you want to visit every state capitol exactly once, traveling on highways. Which route is shortest? Which route is longest? What is the mean and standard deviation of all the routes?
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Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) Sampling, Part 1: The Basics (2019)
In this first post of Tweag’s four-part series on Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling algorithms, you will learn about why and when to use them and the theoretical underpinnings of this powerful class of sampling methods. We discuss the famous Metropolis-Hastings algorithm and give an intuition on the choice of its free…
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Swift Algorithms
I’m excited to announce Swift Algorithms, a new open-source package of sequence and collection algorithms, along with their related types.
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How to Read a Log Scale
What log scales tell us.
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How SHA-2 works step-by-step (SHA-256)
Learn to code from scratch with hands-on lessons, a structured curriculum, and real projects. Stop watching tutorials, start writing code for free now.
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2+1=4, by quinoa
I was struck the other day by the following: The cooking instructions on my Bob’s tri-colored quinoa package said to combine 2 cups of water with 1 cup of dried quinoa, which would ultimately create 4 cups of cooked quinoa. See image above. My first reaction was to believe …
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Crooked to the Millimetre
The technology pioneered by the ETH spin-off incon.ai allows blocks to be positioned with pinpoint accuracy, creating structures with aesthetic designs and augmented acoustics.
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Understanding Programs Using Graphs
I want to show you a little of what this sea-of-nodes graph data structure looks like and how it works, and I think it’s worth doing this for this for a couple of reasons.
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Basic Intro to Elliptic Curve Cryptography (2019)
Learn cryptography in Go by building ciphers, hashes, password security, and encryption tools. Understand security beneath the library call.
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The formula for pi buried in a hydrogen atom
When most people think about pi, they associate the mathematical constant with arcs and circles. Mathematicians, however, are accustomed to seeing it in a variety of fields. But two University physicists were still surprised to find it lurking in a quantum mechanics formula for the energy states of the hydrogen atom.
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Back-of-the-envelope estimates of next quarter’s unemployment rate
Layoffs are certainly one of the effects of battling COVID-19. What sort of unemployment rate might we see in the second quarter of 2020?
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When Bloom filters don't bloom
Last month finally I had an opportunity to use Bloom filters. I became fascinated with the promise of this data structure, but I quickly realized it had some drawbacks. This blog post is the tale of my brief love affair with Bloom filters.
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Peter Montgomery Has Died
Peter was born in San Francisco, California, on September 25, 1947. He went to UC Berkeley in 1967 and received a BA in Mathematics in 1969 and an MA in 1971. Peter’s undergraduate advisor was Derrick H. Lehmer, an excellent match given Peter’s research interests since high school: integer factorization.
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Why numbering should start at zero (1982)
To denote the subsequence of natural numbers 2, 3, ..., 12 without the pernicious three dots, four conventions are open to us
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Using neural networks to solve advanced mathematics equations
Facebook AI has developed the first neural network that uses symbolic reasoning to solve advanced mathematics problems.
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Want to make good business decisions? Learn causality
In some organizations, earnest efforts to be “data-driven” devolve into a culture of false certainty in which the influence of metrics is dictated not by the...
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How strong is your knot?
MIT mathematicians and engineers have developed a mathematical model that predicts how stable a knot is, based on several key properties, including the number of crossings involved, and the direction in which the rope segments twist as the knot is pulled tight.