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Death of the sampling theorem?
tl;dr: A team from Columbia University led by Ken Shepard and Rafa Yuste claims to beat the 100 year old Sampling Theorem [1,2]. Apparently anti-aliasing filters are superfluous now because one can…
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,391 posts.
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You need 16 times the sample size to estimate an interaction than a main effect
In causal inference, it is often important to study varying treatment effects: for example, a treatment could be more effective for men than for women, or for healthy than for unhealthy patients. Suppose a study is designed to have 80% power to detect a main effect at a 95% confidence level. Further suppose that…
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Attacking Merkle Trees with a second preimage attack
Hacking, hardware, software, and general curiosities of computing machinery! Docendo discumus.
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Compressing and enhancing hand-written notes (2016)
I wrote a program to clean up scans of handwritten notes while simultaneously reducing file size.
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A whirlwind introduction to dataflow graphs
While in the middle of writing “Reading bits in far too many ways, part 3”, I realized that I had written a lot of background material that had absolutely nothing to do with bit I/O and…
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Probabilistic Programming and Bayesian Methods for Hackers (2013)
Bayesian Methods for Hackers : An intro to Bayesian methods + probabilistic programming with a computation/understanding-first, mathematics-second point of view.
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I don’t understand Graph Theory
Graph theory represents one of the most important and interesting areas in computer science. But at the same time it’s one of the most…
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So You Think You Have a Power Law (2007)
Regular readers who care about such things — I think there are about three of you — will recall that I have long had a thing about just how unsound many of the claims for the presence of power law distributions in real data are, especially those made by theoretical physicists, who, with some honorable exceptions…
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Just teach my kid the math
This is a new thing for me - I'm hosting a blog post by a colleague/friend - James Tanton. You can find James' original post here. One reason it's being re-hosted here is because Medium is apparently blocked in some countries: Egypt Malaysia ..... possibly others. It is astounding to me that mathematics - of all…
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Programmer's guide to polynomials and splines
This is a brief introduction into polynomials. From how to make a polynomial run through your set of points to how to make it into a spline.
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How to Study Mathematics (2017)
This essay describes a number of strategies for studying college level mathematics. It has sections entitled
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A collection of things that are Turing-complete by accident (2013)
A list of things that were not supposed to be Turing-complete, but are.
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Using k-d trees to efficiently calculate nearest neighbors in 3D vector space
What would the world look like if there were only 16 colors? I use k-d trees to perform nearest neighbor search to find out.
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An Introduction to Cache-Oblivious Data Structures
If you read my recent post about Postgres you may have noted that Postgres operates primarily with fixed-size blocks of memory called “pages.” By default, Postgres pages are 8KB. This number is tuned to match operating system page sizes which are tuned to match hardware cache sizes. If you were to run Postgres on…
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Three Meanings of E=mc²
It’s so much more than mass-energy equivalence; it’s the key to unlocking the quantum Universe.
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Paxos derived
Lamport's fault-intolerant state machine replication algorithm In 1978, Lamport published his classic "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of E...
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Making Sense of Super Smash Bros. Melee
Draft: v1.1 | Posted: 1/9/2018 | Updated: 1/29/2018 | confidence of success: 85% | estimated time to completion: 1/15/2018 | importance: High
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Using Self-Organizing Maps to Solve the Traveling Salesman Problem
Using Self-Organizing Maps to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem The Traveling Salesman Problem is a well known challenge in Computer Science: it consists on finding the shortest route possible that traverses all cities in a given map only once. Although its simple explanation, this problem is, indeed, NP-Complete…