The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,391 posts.
This is a Mega-Update ®™ that focuses on features that people have been requesting for a long time. I have a ton of stuff in Miegakure that could be shared with 4D Toys but what takes development time is not the cool 4D stuff but all the UI/UX around it. First of all because there is the VR version, the mouse/keyboard…
A different view on two's complement math.
Regular expressions are extremely powerful. This is something I read at least once or twice every day while reading articles and blogs on the Web.
I was buying a used book through Amazon this evening. Three resellers offered the book at essentially the same price. Here were their ratings: 94% positive out of 85,193 reviews 98% positive out of 20,785 reviews 99% positive out of 840 reviews Which reseller is likely to give the best service? Before you assume it's
A visual, interactive introduction to hash functions.
The mathematical field of information theory attempts to mathematically describe the concept of “information”. In the first two posts, we discussed the concepts of self-information and information entropy. In this post, we step through Shannon’s Source Coding Theorem to see how the information entropy of a probability…
Generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Midjournery are able to replicate (and often exceed) human-like performance on tasks like taking exams, generating text and making art.
In the demoscene, there's never a boundary that can't be pushed. My recent 4k demo "Boo!" ( YouTube ), released at X 2023, is a humble attempt to contribute to this ongoing evolution. In particular, it pioneers a new way of computing lines.
The myth A few years ago I saw a StackOverflow question (but I cannot find it now): allegedly Andrew Gelman blogged that Bayesian models would not overfit and would only underfit (I also cannot find Andrew’s blog post now but I think what he meant by “Bayesian models only underfits” is that you can never fully model…
A book I was recently reading mentioned a mathematical curiosity I haven't seen before - Tupper's self-referential formula . There are some resources about it online, but this post is my attempt to explain how it works - along with an interactive implementation you can try in the browser.
I recently read the article Beautiful Branchless Binary Search by Malte Skarupke. In it they discuss the merits of the following snippet of C++ code implementing a binary search :
On April 8, 2020, John Horton Conway developed symptoms of COVID-19. On April 11, 2020, he succumbed to the disease. 1 2 3 4
The definitons of the transform (to expansion coefficients) and the inverse transform are given below:
People always talk about "P vs NP" like P problems are easy and NP problems are hard. This is a useful day-to-day model but also an oversimplification....
When learning a new programming language, there is usually a table in the documentation that shows the various operators that can be used with numbers.
A brief overview of the formal specification landscape
Diffusion models are trained to reverse a stochastic process through score matching. However, a lot of diffusion models rely on a small but critical implementation detail called thresholding. Thresholding projects the sampling process to the data support after each discretized diffusion step, stabilizing generation at…
A catalogue of software constructs, languages, or APIs which are unexpectedly Turing-complete; implications for security and reliability.
I read a blog post by Alex Muscar, “Beautiful Binary Search in D”. It describes a binary search called “Shar’s algorithm”. I’d never heard of it and it’s i…
A curious pattern in polar plots with prime numbers, together with discussion of Dirichlet's theorem
A self-contained introduction to Gröbner bases and solving polynomial systems
Some anomalies/questions which are not necessarily important, but do puzzle me or where I find existing explanations to be unsatisfying.
The uncanny resemblance between double descent and a 50 year old theory from psychology
Tutorials and articles of Inigo Quilez on computer graphics, fractals, math, art, demoscene, shaders and more.
In 2005, id Software released the source code for their 1999 game Quake III Arena under the GPL-2 license. In the file code/game/q_math.c , there is a function for calculating the reciprocal square root of a number which at first glance seems to use a very peculiar algorithm:
