The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 75 posts.
Clever student: I know! $latex x^{0}$ = $latex x^{1-1}$ = $latex x^{1} x^{-1}$ = $latex \frac{x}{x}$ = $latex 1$. Now we just plug in x=0, and we see that zero to the zero is one! Cleverer …
Best algorithms book I ever read I took a fair amount of time looking at data structures and algorithms while I was st...
wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at Philosophy.
(A play in 4 acts. Please feel free to exit along with the stage character that best represents you. Take intermissions as you see fit. Click on the stage if...
Update (August 11, 2011): Thanks to everyone who offered useful feedback! I uploaded a slightly-revised version, adding a “note of humility” to the introduction, correcting the footnot…
This is about the “secret ingredient” in my EXE packer kkrunchy, which was used in our (Farbrausch) 64k intros starting from “fr-030: Candytron”, and also in a lot of other …
While he was over in the UK for a book tour and lecture series, Professor Donald Knuth made time to talk to BCS editor Justin Richards about his life.
There are hundreds of gas stations around San Francisco in the California Bay area. One might think that gas stations would spread out to serve local neighborhoods. But this idea is contradicted by a common observation. Whenever you visit a gas station, there is almost always another in the vicinity, often just across…
To write a program to check if an integer is a power of two, you could follow two basic strategies: check the number based on its decimal value, or check it based on its binary representation. The former approach is more human-friendly but generally less efficient; the latter approach is more machine-friendly but…
There has been a sudden resurgence of interest in my "donut" code from 2006 , and I've had a couple requests to explain this one. It's been five years now, so it's not exactly fresh in my memory, so I will reconstruct it from scratch, in great detail, and hopefully get approximately the same result.
Imaginary numbers always confused me. Like understanding e, most explanations fell into one of two categories: Gee, what a great way to encourage math in…
This web page is a revised and extended version of Appendix A from the book Conceptual Structures by John F. Sowa. It presents a brief summary of the following topics for students and general readers of that book and related books such as Knowledge Representation and books on logic, linguistics, and computer science.
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
You know the Fibonacci numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, … Each number is the sum of the previous two. Let’s say the zeroth Fibonacci number is zero, so: $latex \begin{array}{r@{\…
The power to understand and predict the quantities of the world should not be restricted to those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract symbols.
I've been looking at what would be needed in order to have a global view of CRLs in browsers. At the moment revocation has three problems: privacy (by asking the CA about the status of a certificate you're revealing to them what you're looking at), performance (OCSP checks take hundreds of milliseconds which adds up…
I have previously argued that the Bilski ruling renders all software unpatentable in the US because any method of manipulating information ...
A voting system that sidesteps Arrow's theorem entirely. The scare quotes around
Life, technology, and other good things
<img src="http://zwibbler.com/shared/1024.png"/> jQuery creator John Resig needs a little help storing lists of words in his side project. Let's go overkill and explore a little known branch of computer science called Succinct Data Structures.
