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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,391 posts.
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Reinforcement Learning – Bandit Problems
Table of Contents
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The path that the decimal number system took from India to medieval Europe
In every day life we all do our calculations, whether for the taxman, our purchases, paying the household bills or in some academic discipline, using the place value decimal number system. It consi…
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The 8000th Busy Beaver number eludes ZF set theory (2016)
I’ve supervised a lot of great student projects in my nine years at MIT, but my inner nerdy teenager has never been as personally delighted by a project as it is right now. To…
1535
Towards λ-calculus
lambdaway is built on a wiki engine, lambdatank, and a small Lisp dialect, lambdatalk.
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The quadratic formula and low-precision arithmetic
The familiar quadratic formula can give the wrong answer in a program due to numerical precision issues. This post shows what can go wrong and how to fix it. Especially important in low-precision arithmetic.
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Fully Homomorphic Encryption: Secret Key Homomorphic Encryption Over Integers
In the previous post we discussed homomorphic encryption in it’s most abstract terms we presented Paillier as a partially homomorphic encryption . Thank you @mortendahlcs for making a clarification about the terms described :
1538
The Great Theorem Prover Showdown
Functional programming and immutability are hot right now. On one hand, this is pretty great as there’s lots of nice things about functional programming. On the other hand, people get a little overzealous and start claiming that imperative code is unnatural or that purity is always preferable to mutation. I think that…
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The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories (2014)
I. “Silliest internet atheist argument” is a hotly contested title, but I have a special place in my heart for the people who occasionally try to prove Biblical fallibility by pointing …
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Mapping the internet with Hilbert curves
The internet is big. Really big . You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think the /22 you got as a LIR was big, but that’s just peanuts to the internet.
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Mathematics I Use (2012)
An explanation of the forms of mathematics I use on a daily basis as a working software engineer.
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Losing the Nobel Prize
There’s a fascinating new book just now appearing in book stores, Losing the Nobel Prize, by astronomer Brian Keating. An excerpt from the book is available at Nautilus, with the title How My…
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Shortest bit sequence that's never been sent over the Internet (2017)
We can never know for sure because we don't have a comprehensive list of all the data. But what can we say probabilistically? Restating it like so:
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Proof-Of-Work is a Decentralized Clock
This is an explanation of the key function on Proof-of-Work in the Bitcoin blockchain. It focuses on the one feature of Proof-of-Work that is essential and shows that other features often talked about such as security are secondary side-effects, useful, but not essential. This explanation rests on illustrating a few…
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Jupyter, Mathematica, and the Future of the Research Paper
Economist. Policy Entrepreneur. Geek. Co-recipient of the 2018 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. University Professor at NYU. Focused on urbanization; cooperation at scale of millions and billions; science; technology; economic development; long-term growth; code as language.
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For mathematicians, = does not mean equality
Every now and then I hear some ridiculous things about the equals symbol. Some large subset of programmers—perhaps related to functional programmers, perhaps not—seem to think that = should only and ever mean “equality in the mathematical sense.” The argument usually goes, Functional programming gives us back that…
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Progress on longstanding open problems
For those who haven’t seen it: Aubrey de Grey, better known to the world as a radical life extension researcher, on Sunday posted a preprint on the arXiv claiming to prove that the chromatic …
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The Mathematics of 2048: Optimal Play with Markov Decision Processes
Finding provably optimal strategies for 2048 using Markov Decision Processes
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Hash-based Signatures: An illustrated Primer
Over the past several years I’ve been privileged to observe two contradictory and fascinating trends. The first is that we’re finally starting to use the cryptography that researchers h…
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Planets evenly spaced on log scale
The distances to the planets are fairly evenly distributed on a logarithmic scale, not only in our solar system but in extrasolar systems as well.
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The secret life of NaN
The floating point standard defines a special value called Not-a-Number (NaN) which is used to represent, well, values that aren’t numbers. Double precision ...
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Supertasks
Background Reading: Earman and Norton, Infinite Pains: The Trouble with Supertasks and Comments on Laraudogoita's Supertask
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Gravitational attraction of stars and cows
One attempt at rationalizing astrology is to say that the gravitational effects of celestial bodies impact our bodies. To get an idea how hard the stars and planets pull on us, let's compare their gravitational attraction to that of cows at various distances. Newton's law of gravity says that the gravitational…
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Probabilistic Filters By Example
Probablistic filters are high-speed, space-efficient data structures that support set-membership tests with a one-sided error. These filters can claim that a given entry is definitely not represented in a set of entries, or might be represented in the set. That is, negative responses are conclusive, whereas positive…
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Applied Category Theory
It just became a lot easier to learn about applied category theory, thanks to this free book: • Brendan Fong and David Spivak, Seven Sketches in Compositionality: An Invitation to Applied Cate…
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