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Rendering a Buddhabrot at 4K and Other Bad Ideas
Benedikt Bitterli's Portfolio
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 132 posts.
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Singular Value Decomposition Part 2: Theorem, Proof, Algorithm
I’m just going to jump right into the definitions and rigor, so if you haven’t read the previous post motivating the singular value decomposition, go back and do that first. This post will be theorem, proof, algorithm, data. The data set we test on is a thousand-story CNN news data set. All of the data, code, and…
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Don’t invert that matrix (2010)
There is hardly ever a good reason to invert a matrix. What do you do if you need to solve Ax = b where A is an n x n matrix? Isn't the solution A−1 b? Yes, theoretically. But that doesn't mean you need to actually find A−1. Solving the equation Ax = b is
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The Relativistic Rocket
Thanks to Alan R. Wilson for correcting a two-word typo involving GPS satellites. Thanks to Aron Yoffe for suggesting the newtonian comparison. Thanks to Tom Fuchs for suggesting the analogy to the stone thrown upwards. Fuel numbers added by Don Koks, 2004. Updated by Phil Gibbs, 1998. Thanks to Bill Woods for…
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A beginner's guide to Big O notation (2009)
Thoughts on software engineering from Rob Bell
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A Guide to Bayesian Statistics
A guide for getting started with Bayesian Statistics! Start your way with Bayes' Theorem and end up building your own Bayesian Hypothesis test!
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Neural Networks Are Impressively Good at Compression
I’m trying to get into neural networks. There have been a couple big breakthroughs in the field in recent years and suddenly my side project of messing around with programming languages seeme…
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Markov Chain Monte Carlo Sampling
📍 This article has moved. Read the current version at This is the third part in a short series of blog posts about quantum Monte Carlo (QMC). The series is derived from an introductory lecture I ga…
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“American Scientist” Understands Nothing about the Traveling Salesman Problem
I like to think there are some solid foundations to my life. I will be able to do the Monday New York Times crossword and I will not be able to do the Thursday version. My dental hygienist will not be satisfied with the amount of flossing I do. I will get my favorite spaghetti meal served on my birthday.
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Backblaze Releases the Reed-Solomon Java Library for Free
Today we are releasing our latest open-source project: Backblaze Reed-Solomon Java library for erasure coding. Click for details on how to use and download.
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How Kalman Filters Work
This articles describes how Kalman filters and other state estimation techniques work, focusing on building intuition and pointing out good implementation techniques.
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Sorry ARIMA, but I’m Going Bayesian
When people think of “data science” they probably think of algorithms that scan large datasets to predict a customer’s next move or interpret unstructured te...
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NYC subway math
Apparently MTA (the company running the NYC subway) has a real-time API. My fascination for the subway takes autistic proportions and so obviously I had to analyze some of the data.
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Tools for thought: graphical algebra and Fourier analysis
" I think a lot of mathematics is really about how you understand things in your head. […]
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What if You Only Invested at Market Peaks?
What happens when you only invest at the peaks of the market by being the world's worst market timer.
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Four pitfalls of hill climbing
An animated look at local maxima, novelty effects, differentiation, emergent maxima.
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Toward an exploratory medium for mathematics
The world's oldest complete piece of surviving music is the 3,400-year-old Hurrian cult hymn . The hymn was found inscribed on clay tablets excavated from the ancient city of Ugarit, in modern-day Syria. Sometime after the hymn was composed, the idea of using notation to record music was lost. Writing two millennia…
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Black Hole Tech?
In celebration of the detection of gravitational waves, Stephen Wolfram looks forward and discusses what technology black holes could make possible.
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So you still don't understand Hindley-Milner? (2013)
I was out for drinks with Josh Long and some other friends from work, when he found out I "speak math." He had come across this …
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