The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
I have been seeing this paper by cryptographer Peter Schnorr making the rounds: “Fast Factoring Integers by SVP Algorithms.” It describes a new factoring method, and its abstract ends with the provocative sentence: “This destroys the RSA cryptosystem.” It does not. At best, it’s an improvement in factoring—and I’m not…
Stephen Wolfram shares a glimpse into his conversations with Solomon Golomb, developments on shift registers, polyominoes, scientific contributions.
The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect is a collaborative effort aimed at a general audience by Judea Pearl , a professor of computer science at UCLA, and Dana Mackenzie , a science writer. As a medical student with a laughably poor formal education in statistics, I believe I qualify as a card-carrying…
The ubiquitous IEEE floating-point standard defines two numbers to represent zero, the positive and the negative zeros. You also have the positive and negative infinity. If you compute the inverse of the positive zero, you get the positive infinity. If you compute the inverse of the negative zero, you get the negative…
Schnorr has claimed new factoring methods that “destroy RSA”. This should be easy to demonstrate with well known challenges.
[Photo by Alejandra Mavroski.] Myrtle called it The article that launched a thousand posts…, and counting comments on this and several other blogs, that may not be too much of an exaggeration…
A visual explanation of multi-level modeling
A blog about life, programming, math, logic, and physics.
An interactive, illustrated timeline of historic moments in humankind's quest for information. With annotations by Jeremy Norman.
An introduction to the TCC course “Formalising Mathematics”
To infinity and beyond!
Note: These pages make extensive use of the latest XHTML and CSS Standards . They ought to look great in any standards-compliant modern browser. Unfortunately, they will probably look horrible in older browsers, like Netscape 4.x and IE 4.x. Moreover, many posts use MathML, which is, currently only supported in…
Blog of Raph Levien.
You might have heard people say that functional programming is more academic, and real engineering is done in imperative style. I’m going to show you that real engineering is functional, and …
Learn cryptography in Go by building ciphers, hashes, password security, and encryption tools. Understand security beneath the library call.
In this article we’ll look at how to implement the Elo rating system in code.
Packing up the household for a recent move, I was delving into shoeboxes, photo albums, and file folders that had not been opened in decades. One of my discoveries, found in an envelope at the back of a file drawer, was the paper sleeve from a drinking straw, imprinted with a saccharine message:
This paper shows that models which result from gradient descent training (e.g., deep neural nets) can be expressed as a weighted sum of simi...
There’s an old theory that memory is actually encoded in part in RNA. The argument is pretty simple: there’s no obvious way for all that sensory data to be captured in synapses as long …
You see, there are two memory accesses per one character of the input string (at average). Hence, the total number of all memory accesses can be len*2 at worst.
Blog of Raph Levien.
There are a whole bunch of popular interview questions that can be solved in one of two ways: Either using common data structures and algorithms in a sensible manner, or by using some properties of...
My little donut.c has been making the rounds again, after being featured in a couple YouTube videos (e.g., Lex Fridman and Joma Tech ). If I had known how much attention this code would get over the years, I would have spent more time on it.
Most undergraduate computer sciences courses teach students about tail call optimization (TCO) , and even if you don't have a formal computer science background the concept is talked about enough that you might be familiar with it anyway, especially if you've ever done any functional programming. However, I think the…
