The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,391 posts.
Peter Dorman points to this post on statistical significance and p-values by Timothy Taylor, editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, a highly influential publication of the American Economic Association.
Every square has exactly 3 units and 20 peers. For example, here are the units and peers for the square C2 :
RSA has been a staple of public key cryptography for over 40 years, and is still being used today for some tasks in the newest TLS 1.3 standard. This post describes the theory behind RSA - the math that makes it work, as well as some practical considerations; it also presents a complete implementation of RSA key…
One reason to know how your data structures work is so that when your problem has unusual constraints you can tweak how they work to fit the problem better or work faster. In this article I’ll talk about four different fun tweaks to the concept of a hash table that I made in the process of using hash tables to…
I am currently working my way through Higher-Order Perl , a highly recommended tome on effective and practical use of functional programming techniques in Perl. As you’d expect from a book that spends a lot of time discussing such concepts as function composition and recursion, the subject of tree traversal makes a…
The artist M.C. Escher drew many lovely tilings, which he called “regular divisions of the plane”. He worked hard to ensure that his tilings were of lifelike animal forms such as birds and fish. He filled notebooks with hand-drawn sketches of tilings, many of which later found their way into his woodcuts. If you’d…
The lectures assume no prior knowledge of the Paxos consensus algorithm or of TLA+, the language in which the specifications are written. In fact, the lectures constitute a crash course on TLA+. If you're interested just in the algorithm, you will probably find the specs annoying and will try to read only the…
SAT is often described as the "mother of all NP-complete problems." This post goes over what SAT is and why it is considered to be so important. A simple SAT solver is implemented using Python in the process.
I’m thrilled to report that I’m a co-author of the article “ An ultra-stable gold-coordinated protein cage displaying reversible assembly “, which was recently published in Nature . This work is the result of an exciting collaboration between biochemists, physicists, structural biologists, mathematicians, and others…
The other day I ordered a book on art history from Amazon… which reminded me of the movie Angels and Demons , which reminded me of ambigrams. Ambigrams are those stylized words that look the same when you turn them upside down. Here is the classic, by John Langdon .
Sleuthing into the history of a 1930 book on quantum mechanics previously owned by Alan Turing and a lambda calculus note tucked inside.
[latexpage] 本文之中文翻譯在此 Overview Trigonometry is a very essential building block to a huge portion of game math. That's why I've chosen this topic for the first tutorial of my new Gamedev Tutorials series. Having a solid understanding of basic of trigonometry can go a long way for game development. It is used…
You’re lying on a beautiful beach when you feel a tap on your shoulder, and suddenly you’re not at the beach at all — you’re in a classroom. The student who woke you looks apologe…
This morning I had a shower for 6.11686718 minutes. For breakfast I had 189.41576911 ml of fruit juice, followed by 75.24902503 g of muesli topped with 36.55668786 ml of milk and 15.44171338 g of yogurt.
I had an interesting discussion at work today (among people I think would all call themselves statisticians!) about the distinction(s) between statistics and machine learning. It is something I am …
The graph on the left shows a third example, taken from analytical chemistry: a straight-line calibration data set where X = concentration and Y = instrument reading (Y = a + b X). Click to download that data . The blue dots are the data points. They don't all fall in a perfect straight line because of random noise…
Data Visualization can be a great tool for mathematical exploration and experimentation. In this article, I show you an example using Matplotlib and Python.
The Sensitivity Conjecture, which I blogged about here, says that, for every Boolean function f:{0,1}n→{0,1}, the sensitivity of f—that is, the maximum, over all 2n input strings x∈{0,1}n, of…
Occasional writings about Haskell.
Restate Some Basic Concepts and Math in Bayesian Filter
Investigation of Talebs claims about IQ using real data.
Interactive article explaining alpha compositing concepts.
At Google, our organization designs, owns, and maintains a number of optimization models that automate the planning of Google’s datacenter growth and health. As is pretty standard in supply chain optimization and planning, these models are often integer linear programs. It’s a core competency of operations research…
I love the feeling of having a new way to think about the world. I especially love when there’s some vague idea that gets formalized into a concrete concept. Information theory is a prime example of this.
Stephen Wolfram shares his memories of mathematical physicist Mitchell Feigenbaum. Also a detailed discussion of his work and big discovery of a universal constant for functions approaching chaos via period doubling.
I'm the kind of person who reads encyclopedias front to back just for fun, and I've been fascinated by mathematical special functions at least since my first encounter with the gamma function as a teenager. My work implementing numerical and symbolic algorithms in mpmath , Arb and other software projects during the…
Diablo1 is a classic 1996 hack and slash rogue-like. several fans took it upon themselves to reverse-engineer the source code. I began a week long deep dive into how exactly did lead developer, Dav…
Programmers love to discuss programming languages. We not only debate their technical merits and aesthetic qualities, but they become integrated into our personal identities, along with the values and traits that we associate with them. Some even defend a form of Linguistic Determinism that thinking is confined to…
