2041
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
2042
Insert D-Wave Post Here
In the two months since I last blogged, the US has continued its descent into madness. Yet even while so many certainties have proven ephemeral as the morning dew—the US’…
2043
Reverse Engineering the Hacker News Ranking Algorithm
A data-driven exploration of how the Hacker News ranking algorithm works.
2044
Some fun with π in Julia
A Pi Day tour of π in Julia: how Julia represents π, computing it with inline assembly and Taylor series (Madhava and Machin), and finding guaranteed bounds with interval arithmetic.
2045
The Patriot Missile Failure
On February 25, 1991, during the Gulf War, an American Patriot Missile battery in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, failed to track and intercept an incoming Iraqi Scud missile. The Scud struck an American Army barracks, killing 28 soldiers and injuring around 100 other people. A report of the General Accounting office…
2046
Abacus use can boost math skills
The abacus counting device dates back thousands of years but has, in the past century, been replaced by calculators and computers. But studies show that abacus
2047
Tutorial for Wykobi – A C++ Computational Geometry Library
Wykobi Tutorial
2048
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2050
Making math more Lego-like
A trio of Harvard researchers has developed a new 3-D pictorial language for mathematics with potential as a tool across a wide spectrum, from pure math to physics.
2051
The Amazing Power of Word Vectors (2016)
For today’s post, I’ve drawn material not just from one paper, but from five! The subject matter is ‘word2vec’ – the work of Mikolov et al. at Google on efficient vect…
2052
2053
How many floating-point numbers are in the interval [0,1]?
Most commodity processors support single-precision IEEE 754 floating-point numbers. Though they are ubiquitous, they are often misunderstood. One of my readers left a comment suggesting that picking an integer in [0,232) at random and dividing it by 232, was equivalent to picking a number at random in [0,1). I am not…
2054
Two-part Rubik's algorithms
When Rubik’s Cube first appeared decades ago, I jumped on it. I bought one, and spent an entire summer fiddling with it. Over that summer, I developed a solving technique that has stuck with me. My technique is not the fastest; that was never the goal. My algorithms make sense to me because they are constructed, and…
2055
I Wrote My Fastest Hashtable
I had to get there eventually. I had a blog post called “I Wrote a Fast Hashtable” and another blog post called “I Wrote a Faster Hashtable.” Now I finally wrote the fastest…
2056
Lessons from the History of Attacks on Secure Hash Functions
This document is a work-in-progress. Please contact the author if you see errors or omissions. Most of the secure hash functions ever designed have turned out to be vulnerable to collision attacks.
2057
Announcing the first SHA-1 collision
Posted by Marc Stevens (CWI Amsterdam), Elie Bursztein (Google), Pierre Karpman (CWI Amsterdam), Ange Albertini (Google), Yarik Markov (Goog...
2058
The Myers diff algorithm: part 1
If you enjoy this article, I have published a book explaining the internals of Git through implementation: Building Git .
2059
Anagram Scoring
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
2060
From math to machine: translating a function to machine code
In this post I'm going to explore how a mathematical concept can be redefined in progressively more computer-oriented terms, all the way from high level languages down to machine code, ready for direct execution by a computer. To that end, I'm going to define the same logic in several different but related formats:
2061
2062
Multiplying and dividing with Hindu-Arabic numerals and with Roman ones
Last Sunday the eminent British historian of the twentieth century, Richard Evans, tweeted the following: Let’s remember we use Arabic numerals – 1, 2, 3 etc. Try dividing MCMLXVI by XX…
2063
The Three Ways of XOR
We all know the XOR operation. It’s the cousin of NOT, AND and OR. Like AND and OR, it is a binary boolean function. Unlike them, most programming languages ...
2064
The Axiom of Choice Is Wrong (2007)
When discussing the validity of the Axiom of Choice, the most common argument for not taking it as gospel is the Banach-Tarski paradox. Yet, this never particularly bothered me. The argument …
2065
The beauty of mixed-radix bases
On the relationship between mixed-radix bases and array indexing
2066
Kalman filters and functional programming
A paper on Kalman filtering and functional folds that I alluded to previously has been split into several papers and posted online.
2067
The Algorithms Behind Probabilistic Programming
We recently introduced our report on probabilistic programming. The accompanying prototype allows you to explore the past and future of the New York residential real estate market. This post gives a feel for the content in our report by introducing the algorithms and technology that make probabilistic programming…
2068
A story of a designer learning math
The free website builder with a design agent that takes you from idea to launch. Changes stay editable, with hosting, CMS, analytics, SEO, and AEO built in.
2069
A very casual introduction to Fully Homomorphic Encryption (2012)
Craig Gentry on board the mothership. (credit) A couple of weeks ago I polled readers for the subjects that they were interested in. You gave me some excellent responses, and I promise they’r…
2070