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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,391 posts.
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Reminder of Complexity
An impressive poster summarizing biochemical pathways reminds us how complex life is, and how interconnected the world is.
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Faster than radix sort: Kirkpatrick-Reisch sorting
Radix sort sorts n w-bit integers by splitting them up into chunks of logn\log nlogn bits each, and sorting each chunk in linear time. Thus it achieves O(nw/logn)O(nw/\log n)O(nw/logn) time.
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The Contagion of Concern: Game theory of how anxiety spreads
Founder, Investor, Author
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Reinventing the Wheel: Discovering the Optimal Rolling Shape with PyTorch (2019)
It is thought that the wheel was invented more than five thousand years ago, yet modern machine learning tools were only developed in the past few decade...
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Modern Portfolio Theory: A Case Study on Turnips
And how having friends makes the stalk market a lot more profitable.
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The radix 2^51 trick (2017)
Starting from the “ones” position, we add 6 + 6 = 12, write down a 2 and carry a 1. We proceed to the left, one position at a time, until there are no more digits to add.
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Solving the “Miracle Sudoku” in Prolog
Writing a solver for “Miracle Sudoku” puzzles in Prolog.
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Quines: self-replicating programs (2005)
A “ quine ” (or “ selfrep ”) is a computer program which prints its own listing. This may sound either impossible, or trivial, or completely uninteresting, depending on your temper and your knowledge of computer science. Actually, it is possible, and there are some interesting ideas involved (in particular, writing a…
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Roman Finger Counting
I recently wrote a final paper on the history of written numerals. In the process, I discovered this fascinating tidbit that didn’t really fit in my paper, but I wanted to put it somewhere. So I’m writing about it here.
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Ryanair, Hamiltonian Cycles, and using graph theory to find cheap flights (2018)
Using graph theory and Ryanair route data to find cheap multi-city flight loops through Europe.
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4D Toys: how objects bounce and roll in 4D – paper accepted to SIGGRAPH 2020
Excited to announce that my technical paper “ N-Dimensional Rigid Body Dynamics ” was accepted to SIGGRAPH 2020 ! Very proud to present research developed for 4D Toys & Miegakure at such a prestigious conference.
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A brief introduction to the beauty of Information Theory
Lambdaclass's blog about distributed systems, machine learning, compilers, operating systems, security and cryptography.
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Computational Category Theory in Python III: Monoids, Groups, and Preorders
Parts 1 and 2 are found here and here
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Let’s Invent B(+)-Trees
Say we have some things, and we want to be able to store and look them up in order. We could just put them in a big sorted array:
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Life Is Made of Unfair Coin Flips
It’s time we did a non-pandemic related newsletter issue. So this week we’ll do something more fun. Today we’re going to talk about an interesting journal article that came out two weeks ago,…
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Cofactor Explained: Clearing Elliptic Curves' dirty little secret
Efficient elliptic curves tend not to have a prime order. This discusses the problems this causes, and the solutions.
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Doing a math assignment with the Lean theorem prover
Note: this post was written for Lean 3; the latest version, Lean 4, is a very different language. Turn back the clock to 2009: a confused physics major newly infatuated with math and computer science, I enrolled in MATH 273: Numbers and Proofs at the University of Calgary. This wasn’t my first encounter with…
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An Overview of Bayesian Inference (2019)
A few weeks ago I wrote about Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts and how it relates to Bayesian inference. In this post I want to back up a little bit and explain what Bayesian inference is, and eventually rediscover the idea of a paradigm shift just from understanding how Bayesian inference works.
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The field of “useful reals” between rational and real numbers (2019)
Most schools teach number systems the same way. First they teach natural numbers (or “counting numbers”), then integers, rationals, reals, and complex numbers, in that order. Rationals are countable and reals are not, but that’s okay. Once you start taking roots, you need a number system more powerful than a countable…
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Basic skeletal animation with geometric algebra
Klein - Realtime Projective Geometric Algebra
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Math Symbols Explained with Python
Learn the meaning behind mathematical symbols used in Machine Learning using your knowledge of Python.
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PigPaxos: Removing the Scalability Bottlenecks in Paxos
This is our most recent work, started and led by Aleksey Charapko . (This is a joint post with him.) You can get the paper at arxiv.org . Th...
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The 2,500 year old history of why Python’s all([]) returns True
How a Python function relates to a two thousand year old debate in philosophy