1801
Losing the Nobel Prize
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…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
1802
Shortest bit sequence that's never been sent over the Internet (2017)
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:
1803
Proof-Of-Work is a Decentralized Clock
This is an explanation of the key function on Proof-of-Work in the Bitcoin blockchain. It focuses on the one feature of Proof-of-Work that is essential and shows that other features often talked about such as security are secondary side-effects, useful, but not essential. This explanation rests on illustrating a few…
1804
1805
Jupyter, Mathematica, and the Future of the Research Paper
Economist. Policy Entrepreneur. Geek. Co-recipient of the 2018 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. University Professor at NYU. Focused on urbanization; cooperation at scale of millions and billions; science; technology; economic development; long-term growth; code as language.
1806
For mathematicians, = does not mean equality
Every now and then I hear some ridiculous things about the equals symbol. Some large subset of programmers—perhaps related to functional programmers, perhaps not—seem to think that = should only and ever mean “equality in the mathematical sense.” The argument usually goes, Functional programming gives us back that…
1807
Progress on longstanding open problems
For those who haven’t seen it: Aubrey de Grey, better known to the world as a radical life extension researcher, on Sunday posted a preprint on the arXiv claiming to prove that the chromatic …
1808
The Mathematics of 2048: Optimal Play with Markov Decision Processes
Finding provably optimal strategies for 2048 using Markov Decision Processes
1809
Hash-based Signatures: An illustrated Primer
Over the past several years I’ve been privileged to observe two contradictory and fascinating trends. The first is that we’re finally starting to use the cryptography that researchers h…
1810
Planets evenly spaced on log scale
The distances to the planets are fairly evenly distributed on a logarithmic scale, not only in our solar system but in extrasolar systems as well.
1811
The secret life of NaN
The floating point standard defines a special value called Not-a-Number (NaN) which is used to represent, well, values that aren’t numbers. Double precision ...
1812
1813
Supertasks
Background Reading: Earman and Norton, Infinite Pains: The Trouble with Supertasks and Comments on Laraudogoita's Supertask
1814
Gravitational attraction of stars and cows
One attempt at rationalizing astrology is to say that the gravitational effects of celestial bodies impact our bodies. To get an idea how hard the stars and planets pull on us, let's compare their gravitational attraction to that of cows at various distances. Newton's law of gravity says that the gravitational…
1815
Probabilistic Filters By Example
Probablistic filters are high-speed, space-efficient data structures that support set-membership tests with a one-sided error. These filters can claim that a given entry is definitely not represented in a set of entries, or might be represented in the set. That is, negative responses are conclusive, whereas positive…
1816
Applied Category Theory
It just became a lot easier to learn about applied category theory, thanks to this free book: • Brendan Fong and David Spivak, Seven Sketches in Compositionality: An Invitation to Applied Cate…
1817
1818
Death of the sampling theorem?
tl;dr: A team from Columbia University led by Ken Shepard and Rafa Yuste claims to beat the 100 year old Sampling Theorem [1,2]. Apparently anti-aliasing filters are superfluous now because one can…
1819
1820
You need 16 times the sample size to estimate an interaction than a main effect
In causal inference, it is often important to study varying treatment effects: for example, a treatment could be more effective for men than for women, or for healthy than for unhealthy patients. Suppose a study is designed to have 80% power to detect a main effect at a 95% confidence level. Further suppose that…
1821
1822
Attacking Merkle Trees with a second preimage attack
Hacking, hardware, software, and general curiosities of computing machinery! Docendo discumus.
1823
1824
Compressing and enhancing hand-written notes (2016)
I wrote a program to clean up scans of handwritten notes while simultaneously reducing file size.
1825
Reptile: A Scalable Meta-Learning Algorithm
Stay up to speed on the rapid advancement of AI technology and the benefits it offers to humanity.
1826
Famous cryptographers’ tombstone cryptogram decrypted
The Sophos Blog
1827
1828
Sin and Cos: The Programmer's Pals
In this article I shall discuss several game programming techniques, all revolving around a central theme: the sine and cosine functions. This article will explain sine, cosine, vectors, atan2, and some useful special effects such as how to make homing missiles and how bitmap rotation works. I shall start with the…
1829
1830
A whirlwind introduction to dataflow graphs
While in the middle of writing “Reading bits in far too many ways, part 3”, I realized that I had written a lot of background material that had absolutely nothing to do with bit I/O and…