The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 215 posts.
Hi, I wrote my new favorite hash table. This came about because last year I wrote the fastest hash table (I still make that claim) and this year one of the organizers of the C++Now conference asked…
This post is actually about artificial intelligence, and argues a position that many AI researchers will disagree with. Specifically, it arg...
by Andrew Boyd Today, we meet in the middle. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
(This was originally a sponsor talk given at PyCon 2018. Unfortunately there is no video.)
Early this year a software engineer, Shaun Gilchrist, reached out to me after reading a blog post of mine from many years ago, about my informal search for hidden patterns in the prime numbers. The Ulam Spiral revealed non-random patterns, but they didn’t quite match up. Both Shaun and I had long felt there was […]
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 13 April 2018. One way to understand China is to look at the statistics. Real income per person has increased nearly tenfold since 1990. Si…
In 1949, in a festschrift devoted to Einstein , Kurt Gödel published a very short but profound paper titled “A Remark About the Relati...
I decided to write an article about a thing that is second nature to embedded systems programmers – low level bit hacks. Bit hacks are ingenious little programming tricks that manipulate integers in a smart and efficient manner. Instead of performing operations (such as counting the number of 1 bits in an integer)…
Table of Contents
In every day life we all do our calculations, whether for the taxman, our purchases, paying the household bills or in some academic discipline, using the place value decimal number system. It consi…
I’ve supervised a lot of great student projects in my nine years at MIT, but my inner nerdy teenager has never been as personally delighted by a project as it is right now. To…
lambdaway is built on a wiki engine, lambdatank, and a small Lisp dialect, lambdatalk.
Have you ever done a puzzle that has no beginning or end? Where you don’t know up from down? Get lost in the infinite galaxy puzzle. The infinity puzzles™ are a new type of jigsaw puzzle insp…
The familiar quadratic formula can give the wrong answer in a program due to numerical precision issues. This post shows what can go wrong and how to fix it. Especially important in low-precision arithmetic.
In the previous post we discussed homomorphic encryption in it’s most abstract terms we presented Paillier as a partially homomorphic encryption . Thank you @mortendahlcs for making a clarification about the terms described :
Functional programming and immutability are hot right now. On one hand, this is pretty great as there’s lots of nice things about functional programming. On the other hand, people get a little overzealous and start claiming that imperative code is unnatural or that purity is always preferable to mutation. I think that…
[Note: There is a followup to this post .] There has been a lot written over the past decade (and even longer) about problems associated with null hypothesis statistical testing (NHST) and p values. Personally, I have found most of these arguments unconvincing. However, one of t
I. “Silliest internet atheist argument” is a hotly contested title, but I have a special place in my heart for the people who occasionally try to prove Biblical fallibility by pointing …
The internet is big. Really big . You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think the /22 you got as a LIR was big, but that’s just peanuts to the internet.
An explanation of the forms of mathematics I use on a daily basis as a working software engineer.
There’s a fascinating new book just now appearing in book stores, Losing the Nobel Prize, by astronomer Brian Keating. An excerpt from the book is available at Nautilus, with the title How My…
We can never know for sure because we don't have a comprehensive list of all the data. But what can we say probabilistically? Restating it like so:
