The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
In 1582, under the inter gravissimas papal bull, the Catholic world transitioned from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar . This new calendar shortened the length of the year from 365.25 days to 365.2425 , a reduction of just 0.002% .
On 2026 August 5, within a few minutes of 06:35 UTC, an upper stage (section) of a rocket used for a lunar mission will hit the moon. This may be of some (probably minor) scientific interest, and we may learn some things from it. It doesn't present any danger to anyone, though it does highlight a certain carelessness…
I didn’t want to buy a trampoline. It wasn’t the money.
On my Introduction to A* page I cover the basics of the A* graph search algorithm for finding shortest paths. Here’s an example from the town of Denerim in Dragon Age Origins. Try moving the start and goal to see A* in action:
Abel Jansma is a scientist studying emergence, higher-order interactions, information theory, and complex systems across biology and artificial intelligence.
I've long had a soft spot for dependently-typed languages like Coq Rocq and Lean. They offer the possibility of a type system capable of encoding and enforcing arbitrarily subtle invariants. The sort of thing that, in regular languages, ends up (at best) as a comment, and which quickly gets lost as the size of the…
What are we really doing?
Hannah Fry is Professor of the Public Understanding of Mathematics in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP). She joined the University of Cambridge in January 2025, becoming the first person ever to hold the role.
Animate compact tetrahedral cages and reuse static mini-BLASes to ray-trace hundreds of millions of triangles in real time, dramatically cutting per-frame update and memory costs for dense foliage, grass, and crowds.
An illustrated guide that starts from the basics, explains the Jacobian Conjecture, and follows what happened to it in July 2026.
The notorious Jacobian conjecture can be formulated concretely over the complex numbers as follows. Conjecture 1 (Jacobian Conjecture) Let $latex {F:{\bf C}^n \rightarrow {\bf C}^n}&fg=000000$ …
It’s been an interesting few weeks for counterexamples. This post is basically my perspective of what has been going on in the world of formalization, AI tools and, in particular, counterexam…
A tutorial Formal Verification using Lean for cryptographic engineers. Implement and prove correctness of the One-Time pad following a cryptography book.
One of the oldest theorems in mathematics is that there are infinitely many primes. Euclid (the geometer!) proved this around 300 BCE, and for centuries afterwards the story ended there. There are infinitely many primes -- so what else is there to ask about them?
Making English more enjoyable to write.
Claim: as specified, the UTS #35 transliteration-rule language is Turing-complete. This is an exception in Unicode, where algorithms are deliberately bounded and always terminate. The specification defines a revisiting cursor with no rewrite limit. ICU's implementation implements a per-call cap, but the spec itself…
On building Mr. Baby Paint, a radically simple co-op drawing app for toddlers & accidentally discovering a flood-fill cellular automata, plus developing pixel-fattening algorithms for bitmap fonts.
The parallel parentheses matching problem can be parallelized in different manners depending on the use case and is a good example of how stacks map to parallel hardware.
Since I’m a good mood today—at a beautiful science camp with my kids, high in the mountains near Big Bear Lake in California—I thought I’d blog about something positive. Las…
Some connections between things, which I have not seen elsewhere. Maybe they mean something?
Every once in a while the internet gets talking about Geometric Algebra (henceforth GA) and how it’s a new theory of math that fixes everything that’s wrong with linear algebra and multivariable calculus. When I come across this stance I am compelled to respond with something like: “wait wait, it’s not true! GA is…
i become stupid
An operational NAND gate in Age of Empires II , built with the game's scenario editor. This one can also be built within the game in a two-player setup but it's a lot easier (so to speak) to just script it.
Copyright (C) 2010-2012, Dell, Inc . You are permitted to copy and distribute material from this book provided (1) any material you distribute includes this license, (2) the material is not modified, and (3) you do not charge a fee or require any other considerations for copies or for any works that incorporate…
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
Exploiting the quirks of human vision to make images smaller, without looking awful.
In 1980, Intel released the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor, a chip that could make math up to 100 times faster. As well as arithmetic...
Let me tell you about a language. But if you wish to go play instead go here. It's going to get a little abstract below. There is a Canvas to Compose Upon The canvas is a square with the largest circle that has a radius of ρ. There are
What happens inside an LLM when it tries to calculate with nothing but matrices.
An accidentally fast variable-length integer encoding
