The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
Computers often need random numbers. Most times, random numbers are not actually random... in the sense that they are the output of a mathematical function that is purely deterministic. And it is not even entirely clear what "really random" would mean. It is not clear that we live in a randomized universe... it seems…
Continued from part 1. Once I was about a thousand words into describing background for GEMM, it became pretty clear that it made more sense to group the numerical math papers into one post, so her…
This started out on Twitter and I expected having to write up maybe 50 or so, but then it made the rounds. I don’t think I have 1200+ papers that I’d recommend reading, and even if I di…
Learn Machine Learning (ML) and be ahead of the pack in the Software industry. Machine Learning is a sub-field of Artificial Intelligence (A.I), which is heavily used in modern software systems. Machine Learning algorithms can improve software (a robot) and it's ability to solve problems through gaining experience and…
I recently had a problem where part of the solution was to do a series of pointer accesses that would walk around a chunk of memory in pseudo-random order. Sattolo's algorithm provides a solution to this because it produces a permutation of a list with exactly one cycle, which guarantees that we will reach every…
Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov was one of the giants of 20th-century mathematics. I’ve always found it amazing that the same man was responsible both for establishing the foundations of …
A look at why Chebyshev's Inequality holds true and some potential applications.
Access to this page requires authorization. You can try signing in or changing directories .
I’ve been talking a lot recently about how quantum algorithms don’t work. But last week JR Minkel, an editor at Scientific American, asked me to write a brief essay about how quantum al…
The Laziest Programmer - Because someone else has already solved your problem.
An interactive essay on the joys and pitfalls of histograms
Heights are normally distributed because height is determined by many factors. But why are other things with many inputs not normally distributed?
Machine Learning at Berkeley is a student organization at UC Berkeley. Click to read ML@B Blog, by Machine Learning at Berkeley, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.
One of the saddest and most fascinating things about applied cryptography is how little cryptography we actually use. This is not to say that cryptography isn’t widely used in industry —…
When adding two integers i and j of bitlength b, the result will be of bitlength b + 1 in the worst case. This means they can easily be naively added. If the result is larger or equal to F p one has only to subtract p from the result, i.e.:
Every time I want to quickly understand something about an advanced type system or programming language concept I get lost when I see something like this on Wikipedia:
In this article, I hope to convince you that the quintic equation is unsolvable, in the sense that I can’t write down the solution to the equation \[ ax^5 + bx^4 + cx^3 + dx^2 + ex + f = 0 \] using only addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, raising to an integer power, and taking an integer root. In fact, I…
The most recent Smarter Every Day (#172) explains a phenomenon that results from rolling shutter . You’ve likely seen this effect in some of your own digital photographs. When a CMOS digital camera captures a picture, it reads one row of the sensor at a time. If the subject of the picture is a fast-moving object…
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
Heap's algorithm for constructing all permutations is efficient and simple but not easy to understand. This article explains Heap's algorithm by example.
