The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
Are the prime numbers sprinkled randomly along the number line, like windblown seeds? Of course not: Primality is not a matter of chance but a product of simple arithmetic. A number is prime if and only if no smaller positive integer other than 1 divides it evenly.
Note: the following is a record of some whimsical mathematical thoughts and computations I had after doing some grading. It is likely that the sort of problems discussed here are in fact well studi…
graph theory, music theory
I used Perlin noise for the fog effect and title screen in Under Construction. I tweeted about my efforts to speed it up, and several people replied either confused about how Perlin noise works or not clear on what it actually is. I admit I only (somewhat) understand Perlin noise in the first place because I’ve…
When I posted about decals last week, a number of readers commented that they would be interested in posts about linear algebra as it…
Stephen Wolfram shares a glimpse into his conversations with Solomon Golomb, developments on shift registers, polyominoes, scientific contributions.
This month, a bunch of ‘logic hackers’ have been seeking to determine the precise boundary between the knowable and the unknowable. The challenge has been around for a long time. But on…
Benedikt Bitterli's Portfolio
I’m just going to jump right into the definitions and rigor, so if you haven’t read the previous post motivating the singular value decomposition, go back and do that first. This post will be theorem, proof, algorithm, data. The data set we test on is a thousand-story CNN news data set. All of the data, code, and…
There is hardly ever a good reason to invert a matrix. What do you do if you need to solve Ax = b where A is an n x n matrix? Isn't the solution A−1 b? Yes, theoretically. But that doesn't mean you need to actually find A−1. Solving the equation Ax = b is
Thanks to Alan R. Wilson for correcting a two-word typo involving GPS satellites. Thanks to Aron Yoffe for suggesting the newtonian comparison. Thanks to Tom Fuchs for suggesting the analogy to the stone thrown upwards. Fuel numbers added by Don Koks, 2004. Updated by Phil Gibbs, 1998. Thanks to Bill Woods for…
Thoughts on software engineering from Rob Bell
A guide for getting started with Bayesian Statistics! Start your way with Bayes' Theorem and end up building your own Bayesian Hypothesis test!
I’m trying to get into neural networks. There have been a couple big breakthroughs in the field in recent years and suddenly my side project of messing around with programming languages seeme…
📍 This article has moved. Read the current version at This is the third part in a short series of blog posts about quantum Monte Carlo (QMC). The series is derived from an introductory lecture I ga…
I like to think there are some solid foundations to my life. I will be able to do the Monday New York Times crossword and I will not be able to do the Thursday version. My dental hygienist will not be satisfied with the amount of flossing I do. I will get my favorite spaghetti meal served on my birthday.
Today we are releasing our latest open-source project: Backblaze Reed-Solomon Java library for erasure coding. Click for details on how to use and download.
This articles describes how Kalman filters and other state estimation techniques work, focusing on building intuition and pointing out good implementation techniques.
When people think of “data science” they probably think of algorithms that scan large datasets to predict a customer’s next move or interpret unstructured te...
Apparently MTA (the company running the NYC subway) has a real-time API. My fascination for the subway takes autistic proportions and so obviously I had to analyze some of the data.
" I think a lot of mathematics is really about how you understand things in your head. […]
