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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
What the Next Generation Needs Is Math, Not Programming
It is the intelligent analysis of information that would be critical in a decade from now.
Computer scientists prove that a 40-year-old algorithm is optimal
Computer scientists from MIT find that a 40-year-old algorithm for determining the “edit distance” between symbols cannot be optimized any further.
Rationality: From AI to Zombies
A series by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Is there such a thing as half a derivative?
The original question was: Another one of those questions of the type “does this make sense”. You have first derivatives and second derivatives. f'(x), f”(x) or sometimes dy/dx …
John and Alicia Nash, 1928,1933-2015
Our condolences Awesome Stories source John Nash and his wife Alicia were killed in a taxi accident on the New Jersey Turnpike Saturday afternoon. They were on their way back from Norway where he a…
Elliptic Curve Cryptography: A Gentle Introduction – Part II
In the previous post , we have seen how elliptic curves over the real numbers can be used to define a group. Specifically, we have defined a rule for point addition : given three aligned points, their sum is zero ($P + Q + R = 0$). We have derived a geometric method and an algebraic method for computing point…
NSA in P/poly: The Power of Precomputation
Even after the Snowden revelations, there remained at least one big mystery about what the NSA was doing and how. The NSA’s classified 2013 budget request mentioned, as a priority item, R…
About the supposed factoring of a 4096 bit RSA key
This blog is written by Hanno Böck. Unless noted otherwise, its content is licensed as CC0 .
Elliptic Curve Cryptography: a gentle introduction
Those of you who know what public-key cryptography is may have already heard of ECC , ECDH or ECDSA . The first is an acronym for Elliptic Curve Cryptography, the others are names for algorithms based on it.
Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science
Attention conservation notice : Once, I was one of the authors of a paper on cellular automata . Lawyers for Wolfram Research Inc. threatened to sue me, my co-authors and our employer, because one of our citations referred to a certain mathematical proof, and they claimed the existence of this proof was a trade secret…
Wolfram Language
Transcript of Stephen Wolfram's talk at SXSW 2015 on the present and future of computing: Wolfram Language, image recognition, language-design philosophy, tweetable programs, computational thinking for kids, natural language as input, symbolic programming, deployment, automation of programming, Internet of Things…
After 100 Years, Ramanujan Gap Filled (2013)
History of mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan’s lost notebooks and an exploration of solutions to those equations using Mathematica.
Quadratic Voting (2014)
Glen Weyl has uploaded a new version of his paper, Quadratic Voting (written with Steven Lalley), to SSRN, which now includes the completed proofs. Quadratic voting is the most important idea for l…
Energy Is Not Conserved (2010)
I’ve been meaning to link to this post at the arXiv blog , which is a great source of quirky and interesting new papers. In this case they are pointing to a speculative but interesting paper by Martin Perl and Holger Mueller, which suggests an experimental search for gradients in dark energy by way of atom…
If 1+x is 1, how much is 1-x?
► Versión en Español (The title should be "if (= (+ 1 x) 1), how much is (- 1 x)?", but ...) Toy floating point Mathematically, if we...
Chord progressions of 25,000 songs
Systems thinker who ended up in data. Mostly working out why organisations can't answer their own questions.
Finding an Optimal Keyboard Layout for Swype
An overview of my work on optimizing phone keyboard layouts for Swype and T9. There's some interesting history here as well as a novel simulation-based approach to keyboard optimization.
Math for eight-year-olds: graph theory for kids
This morning I had the pleasure to be a mathematical guest in my daughter’s third-grade class, full of inquisitive eight- and nine-year-old girls, and we had a wonderful interaction. Followin…
Deep Learning, NLP, and Representations
neural networks , deep learning , representations , NLP , recursive neural networks
12-minute Mandelbrot: fractals on a 50 year old IBM 1401 mainframe
When I found out that the Computer History Museum has a working IBM 1401 computer [1] , I wondered if it could generate the Mandelbrot frac...
Rationality: From AI to Zombies
Between 2006 and 2009, senior MIRI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote several hundred essays for the blogs Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong, collectively called
Planets in the Fourth Dimension
You probably that planets go around the sun in elliptical orbits. But do you know why? In fact, they’re moving in circles in 4 dimensions. But when these circles are projected down to 3-dimen…
Lint for Math
Can we remove simple errors from math proofs? simple-talk interview source Stephen Johnson is one of the world’s top programmers. Top programmers are inherently lazy: they prefer to build too…
Number of legal 18x18 Go positions computed. One more to go
L19 = 208168199381979984699478633344862770286522453884530548425639456820927419612738015378525648451698519643907259916015628128546089888314427129715319317557736620397247064840935