2251
Confirmed: The Last Great Prediction Of The Big Bang
A leftover glow unlike any other — of neutrinos — has finally been seen.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
2252
Biggest image in the smallest space
What’s the biggest pixel size of a PNG image in the smallest number of bytes? I wanted to try to create an image that could be downloaded but whose pixel buffer would be too big to store in the RAM of a PC. Here is a PNG image of 6,132,534 bytes (5.8 MB) and 225,000 × 225,000 pixels (50.625 gigapixels), which, if…
2253
Categories for Programmers: The Yoneda Lemma
This is part 15 of Categories for Programmers. Previously: Representable Functors. See the Table of Contents. Most constructions in category theory are generalizations of results from other more sp…
2254
Why telephone keypads are arranged the way they are
Why are the push buttons on a telephone arranged the way they are?
2255
Linear Algebra: What matrices are
Most high school students in the United States learn about matrices and matrix multiplication, but they often are not taught why matrix multiplication works the way it does. Adding matrices is easy…
2256
Indices Point Between Elements
If you’re familiar with nearly any mainstream programming language, and I asked you to draw a diagram of an array, the array indices, and the array elements, odds are good you’d produce a diagram something like this: In this post, I want to persuade you to replace that image, or, at least, to augment it with an…
2257
An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory
First of all, don’t panic. I’m going to try in this post to introduce you to quantum field theory, which is probably the deepest and most intimidating set of…
2258
Gravity's Oldest Puzzles
Every now and then the orbital motion of a body doesn’t match our prediction. And that might lead to interesting discoveries.
2259
A Beginner’s Guide to Eigenvectors, Covariance, PCA and Entropy
The Eclipse Deeplearning4j Project. Eclipse Deeplearning4j has 5 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.
2260
Google’s S2, geometry on the sphere, cells and Hilbert curve
Update - 05 Dec 2017: Google just announced that it will be commited to the development of a new released version of the S2 library, amazing news, repository can be found here. Google's S2 library is a real treasure, not only due to its capabilities for spatial indexing but also because it is a library that
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Classical music generation with recurrent neural networks
Writeup for my first major machine learning project.
2262
Is Extended Random a Malicious NSA Plot?
Dual_EC was almost certainly an NSA backdoor. Extended Random is the TLS extension that would have made it practical to exploit. Did NSA plant that one too? A look at the evidence.
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How to implement a spreadsheet
My friend Lindsey Kuper recently remarked on Twitter that spreadsheets were commonly understood to be the most widely used dataflow program...
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Nibble Sort
A while back, John Regehr posted the Nibble Sort Programming Contest on his blog. The objective was to write a program that sorts the 4-bit components (nibbles) of 64-bit words as fast as possible. For example, 0x42badc0ffeed00d5 should result in 0xffeedddcba542000 after sorting.
2267
Deriving the Reddit Formula
A few things about Reddit’s hot formula have always bothered me. The formula has obviously been a success when it comes to setting the Internet on fire, but I have to wonder:
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Will Our Understanding of Math Deteriorate Over Time?
Scientific American writes about rescuing the enormous theorem (classification of finite simple groups) before the proof vanishes. How can...
2270
Why Deep Learning Works II: the Renormalization Group
Deep Learning is amazing. But why is Deep Learning so successful? Is Deep Learning just old-school Neural Networks on modern hardware? Is it just that we have so much data now the methods work b…
2271
Physical Intuition, Not Mathematics (2011)
“What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”
2272
The Vector Space of the Polish Parliament in Pictures
In fact, only of the lower house, the Sejm. During its current term, 460 deputies voted 5545 times since the 8th of November 2011. The Sejm website publishes the individual results of the votes as …
2273
1/999999999999999999999998999999999999999999999999
Divide the number 999,999,999,999,999,999,999,998,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999 into 1 and express the result as a decimal expansion, and you’ll find the Fibonacci sequence presented in tidy 24-digit strings: (Thanks, David.)
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Calculating the intersection area of 3 or more circles
While attempting to learn Javascript and D3.js a couple months ago, I wrote a little library for displaying area proportional venn diagrams .
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Bayes’ Theorem – What is it and what is it good for?
Bayes’ Theorem tells us how to rationally assess the probability of a certain statement of interest being true, given some evidence. Insofar as science consists in creating hypotheses, collecting e…
2277
Top mathematical achievements of the last 5ish years, maybe
I have recently been going through my book Maths 1001 making updates for a forthcoming foreign edition (of which more in future). So I have been looking over mathematical developments since approxi…
2278
Breaking the Zyzzyva encryption
The article here sums up pretty well the debacle that North American tournament Scrabble players have been faced with since the…
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Clifford Algebra: A visual introduction (2014)
Clifford Algebra, a.k.a. Geometric Algebra, is a most extraordinary synergistic confluence of a diverse range of specialized mathematical fields, each with its own methods and formalisms, all of wh…
2280
Algorithmic surrealism: A slow-motion guide to high-frequency trading
Please note: Part 1 of this essay appeared in the Feb 2015 edition of Contributoria . It is published and modified here under a...