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Doing First Grade Math in Rust's Type System
MIT student who enjoys performance engineering, compilers, and creating unconventional code
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,391 posts.
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Generating SVG for the prime knots
How I created a wall poster of knot diagrams.
603
Why Aren't We Sieve-Ing?
Long-time readers of this blog will know that I have mixed feelings about caches. One on hand, caching is critical to the performance of systems at every layer, from CPUs to storage to whole distributed architectures. On the other hand, caching being this critical means that designers need to carefully consider what…
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When random numbers are too random: Low discrepancy sequences (2017)
Random numbers can be useful in graphics and game development, but they have a pesky and sometimes undesirable habit of clumping together. This is a problem in path tracing and monte carlo integrat…
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What has a 1 in a million chance? (2010)
If you overheard the phrase "1 in a million chance" in someone else's casual conversation, what might they be talking about?
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Learning Regular Languages with L* Algorithm
Research in Software Engineering from Rahul Gopinath
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The Curious Case of MD5
Recently I came across a puzzling fact: the International Criminal Court hashes electronic evidence with MD5, even though MD5 is badly broken. So, why are lawyers using broken, outdated technology? The answer involves the common law system, cultural isolation, and a single man named Don L. Lewis.
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Understand how transformers work by demystifying the math behind them
Understand how transformers work by demystifying all the math behind them
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Double encryption: Analyzing the NSA/GCHQ arguments against hybrids
In 2019, Google and Cloudflare ran an experiment where they upgraded HTTPS for many "real users’ connections" to use post-quantum encryption. They then reported statistics on how affordable this was. Google had also run a similar experiment in 2016: "While it's still very early days for quantum computers, we're…
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What I've learned about flow fields so far
Noise functions and the tiniest bit of trigonometry can take you a long way towards making art.
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A* tricks for videogame path finding
A* Tricks for Videogame Path Finding, A* (A-star) Search Algorithm
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Using a Markov chain to generate readable nonsense with 20 lines of Python
Describes a simple Markov chain algorithm to generate reasonable-sounding but utterly nonsensical text, and presents some example outputs as well as a Python implementation.
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High Precision Mapping from Scratch
The fun of owning rural property is that knowing where your land actually starts and ends is a guess usually. Sure, you have a parcel description, and maybe even an online service with “official” GIS boundaries (for us here in New Brunswick, this is GeoNB ). However, since it’s in the middle of the forest, the odds of…
614
How random is xkcd? (2015)
Apparently Randall Munroe gets a lot of messages saying that the “random” button on xkcd is biased.
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Formally modeled Dreidel for no good reason
I can mathematically prove the game's not fun.
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4B If Statements
I recently stumbled upon this screenshot while researching social media on the train. Of course, it was followed by a cascade of spiteful comments, criticizing this fresh programmer’s attempt to solve a classical problem in computer science. The modulus operation.
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Bayesians moving from defense to offense
Erik van Zwet, Sander Greenland, Guido Imbens, Simon Schwab, Steve Goodman, and I write :
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How Many People? Ancient Demography
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2023121 points5 commentscited by 3History & Retro Computing details
One of the first questions anyone asks about past societies is, ‘how many people were there?’ It is one of those basic bits of information and generally speaking those of us who teach t…
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Math Team
and other horrible things you do to get into stanford
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SVD Image Compression
Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is a fundamental concept in linear algebra, and it is particularly important in the field of machine learning for tasks such as dimensionality reduction, data compression, and noise reduction.
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3Blue1Brown Calculus Blog Series
Mathematics with a distinct visual perspective. Linear algebra, calculus, neural networks, topology, and more.
622
Causal Trees
Projects and Ramblings
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Embeddings, vectors, and arithmetic
An embedding is the representation of a piece of text like a word, sentence, or paragraph. Traditionally this value is in the form of a mathematical vector - a point in space. You can think of it as analogous to coordinates on a map that just happens to have many, many dimensions.
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Magical Fibonacci Formulae
The following Python function computes the Fibonacci sequence , without loops, recursion or floating point arithmetic:
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Scrambling eggs for Spotify with Knuth's Fibonacci hashing
In this blog post, we explore Spotify's journey from using the Fisher-Yates shuffle to a more sophisticated song shuffling algorithm that prevents clustering of tracks by the same artist. We then connect this challenge to Fibonacci hashing, and propose a novel, evenly distributed artist shuffling method.
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Forecasts need to have error bars
Richard Rosenfeld in the most recent Criminologist published a piece about forecasting national level crime rates. People complain about the FBI releasing crime stats a year late, academics are wor…
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Let's try to understand AI monosemanticity
Inside every AI is a bigger AI, trying to get out
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The Dunning-Kruger effect is autocorrelation
Do unskilled people actually underestimate their incompetence?