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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
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What if You Only Invested at Market Peaks?
What happens when you only invest at the peaks of the market by being the world's worst market timer.
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Four pitfalls of hill climbing
An animated look at local maxima, novelty effects, differentiation, emergent maxima.
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Toward an exploratory medium for mathematics
The world's oldest complete piece of surviving music is the 3,400-year-old Hurrian cult hymn . The hymn was found inscribed on clay tablets excavated from the ancient city of Ugarit, in modern-day Syria. Sometime after the hymn was composed, the idea of using notation to record music was lost. Writing two millennia…
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Black Hole Tech?
In celebration of the detection of gravitational waves, Stephen Wolfram looks forward and discusses what technology black holes could make possible.
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So you still don't understand Hindley-Milner? (2013)
I was out for drinks with Josh Long and some other friends from work, when he found out I "speak math." He had come across this …
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Three and a half degrees of separation
At Meta, research permeates everything we do. We believe the most interesting research questions are derived from real world problems.
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How convolutional neural networks see the world
Note: this post was originally written in January 2016. It is now very outdated. Please see this example of how to visualize convnet filters for an up-to-date alternative, or check out chapter 9 of my book "Deep Learning with Python (2nd edition)".
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How Hamming codes work
Detecting (and correcting) errors in digital signals.
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The Three Cultures of Machine Learning
Everyone should read Leo Breiman's 2001 article, Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures . (Summary: Traditional statisticians start with a distribution. They try to identify the parameters of the distribution from data that were actually generated from it. Applied statisticians start with data. They have no idea where…
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Number of legal Go positions computed
L19 = 208168199381979984699478633344862770286522453884530548425639456820927419612738015378525648451698519643907259916015628128546089888314427129715319317557736620397247064840935
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2^74207281-1 is Prime
GIMPS has discovered a new Mersenne prime number: 2^74207281-1 is prime! Discovered: 2016 Jan 07
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The Dying Art of Mental Math Tricks
Mathematics, applications of mathematics to life in general, and my life as a mathematician.
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Category Theory and Declarative Programming
This is part 11 of Categories for Programmers. Previously: Natural Transformations. See the Table of Contents. Introduction to Part II In the first part of the book I argued that both category theo…
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Is there any point to the 12 times table?
Jon McLoone on why we learn times tables, whether knowing them to 12 is better than to 10, approximation multiplication, & education recommendations
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When Greedy Algorithms Are Good Enough (2014)
Greedy algorithms are among the simplest and most intuitive algorithms known to humans. Their name essentially gives their description: do the thing that looks best right now, and repeat until nothing looks good anymore or you’re forced to stop. Some of the best situations in computer science are also when greedy…
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Why it’s harder to forge a SHA-1 certificate than to find a SHA-1 collision
It’s well known that SHA-1 is no longer considered a secure cryptographic hash function. Researchers now believe that finding a hash collision (two values that result in the same value when SHA-1 is applied) is inevitable and likely to happen.
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There's Math.random(), and then there's Math.random()
V8’s Math.random implementation now uses an algorithm called xorshift128+, improving the randomness compared to the old MWC1616 implementation.
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Regression to the mean is the main reason ineffective treatments appear to work
Jump to follow-up “Statistical regression to the mean predicts that patients selected for abnormalcy will, on the average, tend to improve. We argue that most improvements attributed to the p…
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Why I decided not to enter the $100k global warming time-series challenge
Interesting applied project for your students , or as a warning for decisions under uncertainty / statistical significance. Real money on the line so the length of time and number of entries required to get a winner may be an interesting dataset after this is all done.
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Google, D-Wave, and the case of the factor-10^8 speedup
Update (Dec. 16): If you’re still following this, please check out an important comment by Alex Selby, the discoverer of Selby’s algorithm, which I discussed in the post. Selby querie…