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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,393 posts.
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Let's Play Ancient Greek Geometry
Today I’m releasing Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Geometry . It’s a Compass and Straightedge tool/puzzle game written in JavaScript. I’ve always thought Geometric Construction felt like a puzzle, so to me this pairing was quite natural. Compass and Straight edge is a technique for constructing shapes out of circles…
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Two dozen mathematicians wrote a 600 page book in 6 months on GitHub
Since spring, and even before that, I have participated in a great collaborative effort on writing a book on Homotopy Type Theory. It is finally finished and ready for public consumption. You can get the book freely at http://homotopytypetheory.org/book/ . Mike Shulman has written about the contents of the book , so I…
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Ultimate Tic Tac Toe
Once at a picnic, I saw mathematicians crowding around the last game I would have expected: Tic-tac-toe.
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Shakespeare.txt.jpg: A JPEG compression experiment
Experimenting with JPEG compressing text.
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Feynman vs. The Abacus
A Japanese man came into the restaurant. I had seen him before, wandering around; he was trying to sell abacuses. He started to talk to the waiters, and challenged them: He said he could add numbers faster than any of them could do.
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Elsevier journals: has anything changed?
Greg Martin, a number theorist at UBC (the University of British Columbia in Vancouver) doesn’t think so, so he has decided to resign from the editorial board of Elsevier’s Journal of N…
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How far can you overhang blocks?
How hungover can you get? Kids blocks and Calculus!
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42
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, the number 42 is the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything”. But he didn’t say wha…
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Statistical Formulas For Programmers
When someone says “7 is greater than 5”, you declare that they’re really the same.
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Creating Shazam in Java
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D-Wave: Truth finally starts to emerge
Wrap-Up (June 5): This will be my final update on this post (really!!), since the discussion seems to have reached a point where not much progress is being made, and since I’d like to oblige …
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Ten Years of Purely Functional Data Structures (2008)
In 1998, I published a book called Purely Functional Data Structures . Ten years later, the book is still selling well. (Every time I get ...
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Bezier Curves and Picasso
Pablo Picasso Simplicity and the Artist Some of my favorite of Pablo Picasso’s works are his line drawings. He did a number of them about animals: an owl, a camel, a butterfly, etc. This piece called “Dog” is on my wall: Dachshund-Picasso-Sketch (Jump to interactive demo where we recreate “Dog” using the math in this…
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Bayes' rule in Haskell (2007)
Random code snippets, projects and musings about software from Eric Kidd, a developer and occasional entrepreneur.
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A non-mathematical explanation of one way functions
Alice and Bob are crossword enthusiasts. Every morning they rush to complete the Daily Telegraph cryptic crossword . One morning Alice fini...
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Stochastic Superoptimization
An “optimizer” should really be called an “improver”, and a “superoptimizer” should be called an “optimizer” 🙂
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The StarCraft path-finding hack
StarCraft pathfinding looked impossible to fix until one ugly hack changed everything. Here's the trick that shipped.
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The Elsevier boycott one year on
A few days ago was the anniversary of the beginning of the Cost of Knowledge boycott of Elsevier. It seems a good moment to take stock of what the boycott has achieved and to think about what progr…