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Logical fallacies in software engineering
How our mind falls short trying to short cut.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
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Von Neumann’s critique of automata theory and logic in computer science (1947)
These remarks from “THE GENERAL AND LOGICAL THEORY OF AUTOMATA” 1947 are enormously insightful – no surprise. Von Neumann essentially predicts the emergence of the field of analysis of algorithms and algorithmic complexity. Not only does he point out the importance of understanding how many steps it will take to carry…
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What's the difference between 0/0 and 1/0?
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Notes on Weight Initialization for Deep Neural Networks
Neural networks involve long sequence of multiplications, usually between a matrix and a vector, say \(a*x\). The result of this sequence of multiplications will either have a huge magnitude or be reduced to 0. We can divide \(a\) by a number ( scaling_factor ) to scale down its magnitude to the right level. Proper…
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Modern SAT solvers: fast, neat and underused
In the previous two parts we used a SAT solver as a black box that we feed input into, and it will (usually quickly) spit out an answer. In this part, we will look at how SAT solvers work and what heuristics and other tricks they employ in their quest for performance.
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I Got a Knuth Check for 0x$3.00
Donald Knuth is a computer scientist who is so committed to the correctness of his books that he offers one US hexadecimal dollar ($2.56, 0x$1.00) for any “bug” found in his books, where a bug is anything that is “technically, historically, typographically, or politically incorrect”. I wanted to get a Knuth check for…
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Matrices as Tensor Network Diagrams
In the previous post, I described a simple way to think about matrices, namely as bipartite graphs. Today I'd like to share a different way to picture matrices—one which is used not only in mathematics, but also in physics and machine learning. Here's the basic idea. An $m\times n$ matrix $M$ with real entries…
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Going Critical
Learn how things spread with playable simulations
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Faster arithmetic by flipping signs
Over the years, I picked up a number of tricks to optimize code. Today I’ll talk about one of them.
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Playing with model trains and calling it graph theory
You’ve probably played with model trains, for instance with something like the Brio set shown below.1 And if you’ve built a layout with a model train set, yo...
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Mathematical Jargon Failures
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Everything Is Correlated
Anthology of sociology, statistical, or psychological papers discussing the observation that all real-world variables have non-zero correlations and the implications for statistical theory such as ‘null hypothesis testing’.
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Meditations on Moloch (2014)
I. Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem on Moloch:What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and u…
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ProtonMail now offers elliptic curve cryptography
Proton Mail has become the first and only encrypted email provider to support elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), providing more security and performance.
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P = NP Proofs: Advice to claimers
Advice to claimers The Claimers The Claimers are a gang on the hit AMC television series The Walking Dead. They are the main antagonists in the second half of the zombie-apocalypse show’s Sea…
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I found two identical packs of Skittles among 468 packs
This article was discussed on Hacker News, and was cited in The Mathematical Gazette. Introduction This is a follow-up to a post from earlier this year discussing the likelihood of encountering two…
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How the quantum search algorithm works
An explanation of how the quantum search algorithm works, & introduction to the design of quantum algorithms
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Graphical Introduction to Dynamic Programming
I’ve been helping a friend understand dynamic programming (DP for short), so I’ve been on the lookout for good resources. The topic is covered all across the web, but I found many of them focused on the code, and not enough on the beautiful visualizations that shed light into how DP works.
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What Is a Manifold?
In machine learning, the term manifold is thrown around a lot—in fact, there’s even a branch of machine learning dealing with learning the structure of manifolds. Said branch is aptly named manifold learning . Inspired by fantastic visualizations of shapelet mining algorithms , this post aims to give a visual…
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Random Forests for Complete Beginners
The definitive guide to Random Forests and Decision Trees.
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Explaining Sex Rate Changes
According to the Post, polls say 28% of US men age 18-30 report not having sex in the last year, almost 3 times as many as a decade ago.
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Second-Order Thinking: What Smart People Use to Outperform (2016)
Second-order thinking is a mental model that smart people like Warren Buffett & Howard Marks use to avoid problems. Read this article to learn how it works.
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93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs
TLDR: read the paper and view the gallery of pretty Perl programs. In this paper, we aim to answer a long-standing open problem in the programming languages community: is it possible to smear paint on the wall without creating valid Perl?
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Loop invariants can give you coding superpowers
A loop invariant is a simple yet powerful tool for designing, testing, modifying, documenting and proving code correct.
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Why Do Buses Bunch?
Created by Lewis Lehe (of Setosa and UC Berkeley Trans. Eng. ) with design and art by Dennys Hess . Thanks to Ian Johnson for good advice. Tools: d3 , Angular Material , Coffeescript , Browserify , Gulp and Five-Hour Energy Drink .