The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
What does the math tell us about how many job applicants we should look at before hiring one? While onboarding our new employees, how can ideas from the TCP networking protocol help us to identify the optimal workload for them? Why would giving employees unlimited vacation days most likely lead to less vacation being…
The word "kayak" is a palindrome, but it isn't visually symmetric. The word "bud" is visually symmetric, but not a palindrome.
Bored of algorithms? Here are my recommendations that are exciting, understandable, and sometimes even useful!
The above is the title of a talk by computer scientist Cynthia Rudin. here’s the abstract:
A walkthrough of 46 lines of code that render a 3D ASCII donut using signed distance functions.
This post is an unofficial sequel to one of my first blog posts from 2007, which was entitled “Quantum mechanics and Tomb Raider”. One of the oldest and most famous allegories is Plato&…
Bill Tavis designed this lovely vintage-style map of the familiar fractal shape, the Mandelbrot set. He is selling a poster version of the map, starting at the
Welcome. This is the index page for a series of blog posts I’m currently writing about the D3D/OpenGL graphics pipelines as actually implemented by GPUs. A lot of this is well known among gra…
Looking over the solutions mega-thread , it seems like not many people discovered this trick; when I posted about it , people found it to be noteworthy.
Let us say that I ask you to find the number I am thinking about between -1000 and 1000, by repeatedly guessing a number. With each guess, I tell you whether your guess is correct, smaller or larger than my number. A binary search algorithm tries to find a value in an interval by repeating … Continue reading Fast…
My son is in 11th grade. Below you’ll find a HW question which was given in my son’s statistics class. How would you answer?
In this post we take a look a how the mathematical idea of a convolution is used in probability. In probability a convolution is a way to add two random variables. Using a slightly ridiculous, mad-science, example we walk through multiple way to compute a convolution and ultimate arrive at the formu
Create And Share Mathematical Tiling Patterns
Category theory is a domain of mathematics that exerts a strange influence over programmers. One thing that can be said for sure about category theory is tha...
Matt Parker, employing the enviably pithy prose typical of a content creator forged on the unforgiving fires of social media, asked the simple question back in 2018: > How thick is a three-sided coin? Translated into mathematician-ese, this means > What aspect ratio of a flipped coin leads to the chance of landing on…
Collaborative peer-to-peer applications sometimes need to operate on sequences of objects with a consistent order across all peers. For example, a peer-to-peer photo album application might need to sync the order in which photos appear in an album.
You sometimes feel the need to make all of your integers positive, without losing any information. That is, you want to map all of your integers from 'signed' integers (e.g., -1, 1, 3, -3) to 'unsigned integers' (e.g., 3,2,6,7). This could be useful if you have a fast function to compress integers that fails to ……
When you first read about "torsors", they're bound to seem a bit too darn sophisticated for their own good. Mostly this is because nobody explains them very well. So, I want to convince you that they're actually very simple and natural. I'll do this by giving you three examples from physics:
I've started learning about spectrum analysis a long time ago at university, but failed to gain a true insight in how it works under the hood. For me, it was just some magical math formulas I had to memorize and know about. I knew the theory but it didn't really click .
Let’s play a game. I’m thinking of a number from 1 to 100. You guess, and I tell you whether my number is higher or lower.
Leverage is actually reasonably easy to understand, both in the math and in the implications for financial firms.
Binary lambda calculus ( BLC ) is a minimal, pure functional programming language invented by John Tromp in 2004, 1 based on a binary encoding of the untyped lambda calculus in De Bruijn index notation.
An eigenvalue of a square matrix $LATEX A$ is a scalar $latex \lambda$ such that $latex Ax = \lambda x$ for some nonzero vector $latex x$. The vector $latex x$ is an eigenvector of $LATEX A$ and it…
Let’s say we want to store some data on multiple drives, so that we can recover from drive failures.
Posted by Joshua Bloch, Software EngineerI remember vividly Jon Bentley's first Algorithms lecture at CMU, where he asked all of us incoming Ph.D. ...
Background Backpropagation is a common method for training a neural network. There is no shortage of papers online that attempt to explain how backpropagation works, but few that include an example…
