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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
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Understanding Variance, Co-Variance, and Correlation
An explanation of Variance, Covariance and Correlation in rigorous yet clear terms providing a more general and intuitive look at these essential concepts.
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Show HN: Interactive Essay on Signals, Sampling and the Fourier Transform
This text is designed to accompany your study of introductory digital signal processing. 1 It’s an eccentric piece of not-so-rigorous literature with a preoccupation for explaining things using interactive visualizations, animations and sound. 2 My goal is to explain the Discrete Fourier Transform using a miniature…
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Small Introduction to Markov Chains
Introduction A Markov Chain is a set of transitions from one state to the next; Such that the transition from the current state to the next depends only on the current state, the previous and future states do not effect the probability of the transition. A transitions independence from future and past sates is called…
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Bayes' Theorem with Lego
Find Bayes' Theorem confusing? Let's break down this famous formula using Lego to help you build up a better intuition for this foundational concept!
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Who Can Name the Bigger Number?
[This essay in Spanish] [This essay in French] [This essay in Chinese] In an old joke, two noblemen vie to name the bigger number. The first, after ruminating for hours, triumphantly announces "Eighty-three!" The second, mightily impressed, replies "You win." A biggest number contest is clearly pointless when the…
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Are You Living In a Computer Simulation? (2003)
The original paper that introduced the simulation argument
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From 1,000,000 to Graham's Number
Graham's number is so big, we need a whole new set of tools to even discuss it.
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May Bayes Theorem Be with You
The frequentist paradigm enjoys the most widespread acceptance forstatistical analysis. Frequentist concepts such as confidence intervalsand p-values dominat...
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A regular expression to check for prime numbers
Regular expressions are extremely powerful. This is something I read at least once or twice every day while reading articles and blogs on the Web.
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Impossible Escape?
Can you use math to escape from, what seems like, an impossible prison escape problem based on coins and a chessboard?
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Computational Geometry in Python
This post is a simplified version of the accompanying notebook to chapter 6 of my upcoming book Mastering SciPy. Click anywhere on this box for more information.
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Schelling's Model of Segregation
Racial segregation has always been a pernicious social problem in the United States. Many factors have contributed to segregation including prejudice, zoning laws, housing discrimination, and loan discrimination. Although much effort has been extended to desegregate our schools, churches, and neighborhoods, the US…
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Maze Generation in Thirteen Bytes (2012)
Update 12/7/2012 @ 13:46: Peter Ferrie smashed my record by a single byte, so the record is now held by him at 12 bytes. Congrats, and I feel like a fool for missing it :-) I’ve tacked on h…
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How did Einstein Think?
John D. Norton Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Center for Philosophy of Science University of Pittsburgh http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton This page at http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies Prepared to accompany cityLIVE! "everything einstein" November 15, 2007, 6:30 pm The New Hazlett Theater…
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Eigenvectors and eigenvalues explained visually
Eigenvalues/vectors are instrumental to understanding electrical circuits, mechanical systems, ecology and even Google's PageRank algorithm. Let's see if visualization can make these ideas more intuitive.
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The Simulated Annealing Algorithm
Simulated annealing is a method for finding a good (not necessarily perfect) solution to an optimization problem. If you're in a situation where you want to maximize or minimize something, your problem can likely be tackled with simulated annealing.
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Path Tracing 3D Fractals
In some ways path tracing is one of the simplest and most intuitive ways to do ray tracing.
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Hopefully the last post I'll ever write on Dual EC DRBG
I’ve been working on some other blog posts, including a conclusion of (or at least an installment in) this exciting series on zero knowledge proofs. That’s coming soon, but first I want…
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If Scheme's numbers were like Scheme
Scheme's numbers are not like the rest of its library. They're older, and they're mostly borrowed from other languages (Maclisp and Common L...
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Brainfuck Optimization Strategies
In almost every computation a great variety of arrangements for the succession of the processes is possible, and various considerations must influence the selection amongst them for the purposes of a Calculating Engine. One essential object is to choose that arrangement which shall tend to reduce to a minimum the time…
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