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What is static program analysis?
The halting problem asks whether the execution of a specific program for a given input will terminate.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 103 posts.
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Myths about Hash Tables
A hash table is data structure that is used to search for exact matches to a search key. For searching, they work like this: Take a search key (example: the word “cat”) Hash the search …
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All Rational Approximations of Pi Are Useless
Investigation to find a better rational approximation for pi. Can we get out more digits than we put in? Chance to win a prize if you can do bette
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A group of Finnish math teachers write an open textbook in a weekend hackathon
A group of Finnish mathematics researchers, teachers and students write an upper secondary mathematics textbook in a booksprint. The event s...
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Alligator Eggs
In 2007, I met Philip Wadler at a conference, who mentioned to me that he wanted to teach lambda calculus to his eight-year-old children.
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Did NSA Put a Secret Backdoor in New Encryption Standard? (2007)
Random numbers are critical for cryptography: for encryption keys, random authentication challenges, initialization vectors, nonces, key-agreement schemes, generating prime numbers and so on. Break the random-number generator, and most of the time you break the entire security system. Which is why you should worry…
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Analysis of bank PIN numbers
Is your PIN number too predictable? Detailed analysis on PIN number databases.
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Damn Cool Algorithms: Cardinality Estimation
Posted by Nick Johnson | Filed under python , cardinality-estimation , damn-cool-algorithms
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Girls Need Math
The other day a programmer-friend sent an e-mail to me and three other women. It read:
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Tabasco Sort: a super-optimal merge sort
Paul Khuong's personal blog. Some Lisp, some optimisation, mathematical or computer.
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Damn Cool Algorithms: Homomorphic Hashing
Posted by Nick Johnson | Filed under homomorphic-hashing , damn-cool-algorithms , fountain-codes
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Dynamic Programming versus Memoization
_posted by Shriram Krishnamurthi_ [Edit on 2012-08-27, 12:31EDT: added code and pictures below. 2012-08-27, 13:10EDT: also incorporated some comments.] I wrote this on the Racket educators' mailing list, and Eli Barzilay suggested I post it here as well...
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Parrondo's Paradox: How two ugly parents can make a beautiful baby
"How two ugly parents (mathematically) can make a beautiful baby"
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Finding Unity in the Math Wars
I usually avoid current events, but recent skirmishes in the math world prompted me to chime in. To recap, there've been heated discussions about math…
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Fixing Hacker News: A mathematical approach
There is a certain phenomenon that seems to happen in almost every online community of user-generated content. A community is created: the ...
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Stop teaching calculating; Start teaching math
Conrad Wolfram's 2010 talk on reforming maths education to teach real-world computational methods using computers.
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Does one have to be a genius to do maths?
Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly. (José Ortega y Gasset, “Notes on t…
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How you eat corn on the cob predicts whether you're an analyst or algebraist
I like learning about odd connections between disparate things. This probably is the oddest example that I know. Broadly speaking, mathemat...
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A New Way To Solve Linear Equations (over finite fields)
Impossible but true: a new approach to linear systems Prasad Raghavendra is an expert in many aspects of complexity theory, especially the foundations of approximation theory. He recently was a col…
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10-year-old problem in theoretical computer science falls
Interactive proofs — mathematical games that underlie much modern cryptography — work even if players try to use quantum information to cheat.
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An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem
Bayes’ Theorem for the curious and bewildered; an excruciatingly gentle introduction.
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The Two Egg Problem
Analysis of the classic "dropping two eggs from a building" interview question
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The Opposite of a Bloom Filter
A Bloom filter is a data structure that may report it contains an item that it does not (a false positive), but is guaranteed to report correctly if it contains the item (“no false negatives”). The opposite of a Bloom filter is a data structure that may report a false negative, but can never report a false positive…