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How 4000 Physicists Gave a Vegas Casino Its Worst Week (2015)
Learn about public engagement activities from the American Physical Society
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
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Probabilistic Programming and Bayesian Methods for Hackers (2013)
Bayesian Methods for Hackers : An intro to Bayesian methods + probabilistic programming with a computation/understanding-first, mathematics-second point of view.
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The Erdős paradox: When a mathematical number and Wikipedia collide
An interview with the author of a recent Medium piece on mathematician Paul Erdős, the mathematical degree of separation that his collaborations inspired, and Wikipedia’s gender gap.
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A Global Optimization Algorithm Worth Using
Here is a common problem: you have some machine learning algorithm you want to use but it has these damn hyperparameters . These are number...
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I don’t understand Graph Theory
Graph theory represents one of the most important and interesting areas in computer science. But at the same time it’s one of the most…
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So You Think You Have a Power Law (2007)
Regular readers who care about such things — I think there are about three of you — will recall that I have long had a thing about just how unsound many of the claims for the presence of power law distributions in real data are, especially those made by theoretical physicists, who, with some honorable exceptions…
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Just teach my kid the math
This is a new thing for me - I'm hosting a blog post by a colleague/friend - James Tanton. You can find James' original post here. One reason it's being re-hosted here is because Medium is apparently blocked in some countries: Egypt Malaysia ..... possibly others. It is astounding to me that mathematics - of all…
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Programmer's guide to polynomials and splines
This is a brief introduction into polynomials. From how to make a polynomial run through your set of points to how to make it into a spline.
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How to Study Mathematics (2017)
This essay describes a number of strategies for studying college level mathematics. It has sections entitled
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Interpretable Machine Learning Through Teaching
Stay up to speed on the rapid advancement of AI technology and the benefits it offers to humanity.
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A collection of things that are Turing-complete by accident (2013)
A list of things that were not supposed to be Turing-complete, but are.
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Using k-d trees to efficiently calculate nearest neighbors in 3D vector space
What would the world look like if there were only 16 colors? I use k-d trees to perform nearest neighbor search to find out.
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An Introduction to Cache-Oblivious Data Structures
If you read my recent post about Postgres you may have noted that Postgres operates primarily with fixed-size blocks of memory called “pages.” By default, Postgres pages are 8KB. This number is tuned to match operating system page sizes which are tuned to match hardware cache sizes. If you were to run Postgres on…
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Three Meanings of E=mc²
It’s so much more than mass-energy equivalence; it’s the key to unlocking the quantum Universe.
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Optimizing hash tables: hiding the hash code
Several JavaScript data structures such as Map, Set, WeakSet, and WeakMap use hash tables under the hood. This article explains how V8 v6.3 improves hash table performance.
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Paxos derived
Lamport's fault-intolerant state machine replication algorithm In 1978, Lamport published his classic "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of E...
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Making Sense of Super Smash Bros. Melee
Draft: v1.1 | Posted: 1/9/2018 | Updated: 1/29/2018 | confidence of success: 85% | estimated time to completion: 1/15/2018 | importance: High
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Using Self-Organizing Maps to Solve the Traveling Salesman Problem
Using Self-Organizing Maps to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem The Traveling Salesman Problem is a well known challenge in Computer Science: it consists on finding the shortest route possible that traverses all cities in a given map only once. Although its simple explanation, this problem is, indeed, NP-Complete…
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Clojure Numerics: Orthogonalization and Least Squares
How to solve linear systems that have many solutions, or those that have no solutions at all? That's the theme for a thick math textbook, of course, but from...
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One model to learn them all
One model to learn them all Kaiser et al., arXiv 2017 You almost certainly have an abstract conception of a banana in your head. Suppose you ask me if I’d like anything to eat. I can say the word ‘…
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What the Four Color Theorem Can Teach Us About Writing Software
A visual exploration of what The Four Color Theorem can say about software complexity.