331
Finding Atari Games in Randomly Generated Data
Discovering Atari Games in Randomly Generated Data
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
332
The new Gödel Prize winner tastes great and is less filling
David Zuckerman The 2025 Gödel Prize has been awarded to Eshan Chattopadhyay and David Zuckerman for their paper Explicit two-source extrac...
333
Reflections on Sudoku, or the Impossibility of Systematizing Thought
I reflect on the Entscheidungsproblem how it relates to Sudoku solvers. It's a little weird. .
334
Gaussian integration is cool
Brief discussion on gaussian quadrature and chebyshev-gauss quadrature
335
You need much less memory than time
Just as I was complaining that we haven't seen many surprising breakthroughs in complexity recently, we get an earthquake of a result to st...
336
Sharing everything I could understand about gradient noise
You've most likely heard about gradient noise through the name Perlin noise , which refers to one particular implementation with various CPU optimizations. Because it's an incredible tool for creative work, it's used virtually everywhere: visual effects, video games, procedural mathematical art, etc. While getting it…
337
A Lean companion to Analysis I
Almost 20 years ago, I wrote a textbook in real analysis called “Analysis I”. It was intended to complement the many good available analysis textbooks out there by focusing more on foun…
338
Gradients Are the New Intervals
At the New England Symposium on Graphics , James Tompkin compared graphics researchers to magpies: they're easily distracted by shiny objects and pretty renderings.
339
Estimating Logarithms
While reading through the fantastic book *[The Lost Art of Logarithms](https://www.lostartoflogarithms.com/)* by [Charles Petzold](https://www.charlespetzold.com/) I was nerd-sniped by a [simple method](https://www.lostartoflogarithms.com/chapter04/) of estimating the logarithm of any number base 10. According to the…
340
De Bruijn notation, and why it's useful
At least a familiarity with the lambda calculus, including how it is evaluated. Some base knowledge of programming languages is also assumed.
341
A visual exploration of vector embeddings
For Pycon 2025, I created a poster exploring vector embedding models, which you can download at full-size . In this post, I'll translate ...
342
What does “Undecidable” mean, anyway
An explainer for people who don't know computer science and are mildly curious
343
Square Theory
The story starts in Crosscord, the crossword Discord server. Over 5,000 users strong, the server has emerged as a central hub for the online crossword community, a buzzing, sometimes overwhelming, sometimes delightful town square where total noobs, veteran constructors, and champion solvers alike come together to talk…
344
Revisiting the algorithm that changed horse race betting (2023)
Explore Bill Benter’s iconic horse betting strategy, enhanced with modern code and contrasted against three decades of evolving data.
345
There Is No Diffie-Hellman but Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman
When I first learned about Diffie-Hellman and especially elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman, I had one rather obvious question: Why elliptic curves? Why use this strange group that seems rather arbitrar…
346
The scientific “unit” we call the decibel
Celebrating a rare dumpster fire in the kingdom of science.
347
Convolutions, Polynomials and Flipped Kernels
This is a post about multiplying polynomials, convolution sums and the connection between them.
348
Deep Learning Is Applied Topology
Everything lives on a manifold
349
A shower thought turned into a Collatz visualization
I recently went on a nice long SCUBA diving trip with my wife and daughters. Lots of diving implies lots of showers, and lots of showers means lots of shower-thoughts! [1] An especially interesting one I had turned into a nice way to visualize some aspects of the Collatz Conjecture.
350
Diffusion models explained simply
Transformer-based large language models are relatively easy to understand. You break language down into a finite set of “tokens” (words or sub-word components…
351
A leap year check in three instructions
How to test for leap years (until year 102499) in the proleptic Gregorian calendar with just three 32-bit instructions, with detailed explanation of the bit-level tricks.
352
353
Using obscure graph theory to solve programming languages problems
Usually I write about solutions to problems I’ve worked out, but I’ve found myself increasingly becoming interesting in where solutions come from. Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading Boorstin’s excellent The Discoverers , which I’d strongly recommend.
354
Sierpiński Triangle? In My Bitwise and?
Exploring a peculiar bit-twiddling hack at the intersection of 1980s geek sensibilities.
355
Reservoir Sampling
Choosing fairly when you don't know how many you're choosing from.
356
Progress toward fusion energy gain as measured against the Lawson criteria
Today we’ve released a pre-publication version of an update to our 2022 paper “Progress toward fusion energy breakeven and gain as measured against the...
357
358
Geometrically understanding calculus of inverse functions (2023)
The Legendre transformation tells you how the inverse map acts on integrals
359
Unparalleled Misalignments
This is a list of Unparalleled Misalignments, pairs of non-synonymous phrases where the words in one phrase are each synonyms of the words in the other. I've maintained this list since 2018; attributions (when known) can be seen on hover.
360