The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 266 posts.
Hello there. This is an open access book entitled: “Romeo and Julia, where Romeo is Basic Statistics”. So I guess it’s gonna be about a programming language named Julia and its usage for basic statistics.
This tutorial aims to give a gentle introduction to diffusion models, with a running example to illustrate how to build, train and sample from a simple diffusion model from scratch.
The existence claim for the singular value decomposition (SVD) is quite strong: “Every matrix is diagonal, provided one uses the proper bases for the domain and range spaces” (Trefethen & Bau III, 1997) . MIT professor Gilbert Strang has a wonderful lecture on the SVD, and he includes an existence proof for the SVD…
Space Engine ...
A deep dive into the Probabilistic B-tree or Prolly Tree data structure including examples. Prolly Trees are used to create version controlled databases.
Every now and again you come across something that stretches your brain in a new direction. Last week I stumbled on a magic trick of a Choose Your Own Adventure: Al Leonardi’s Ace of Aces, a paper …
A (directed) graph is a set of nodes, connected by arrows (edges). The nodes and edges may contain data. Here are some graphs: All graphs made with graphviz (source) Graphs are ubiquitous in software engineering: Package dependencies form directed graphs, as do module imports. The internet is a graph of links between…
Physics likes optimization! Subject to its boundary conditions, the time evolution of a physical system is a critical point for a quantity called an action. This point of view sets the stage for Noether's principle , a remarkable correspondence between continuous invariances of the action and conservation laws of the…
Since the 2019 SIGGRAPH course [1], Geometric Algebra, and Euclidean PGA (plane-based or projective geometric algebra) in particular, has been gaining traction within the computer graphics and machine learning communities [2, 3, 4]. Despite its broad applicability, including for higher dimensional geometry and…
Interactive article explaining the physics of an airfoil and what makes airplanes fly
I was asked (again) today to explain why integer division in Python returns the floor of the result instead of truncating towards zero like...
Drawing with the Fourier Series
I recently stumbled upon a blog post by Alejandra González (a.k.a @blyxyas) that seeks to compress a tic-tac-toe game state into as few bits as possible. She arrived at a solution in 18 bits. This got me thinking, can we do better?
A visual, interactive guide to what bloom filters are, when you would use them, and how they work.
Compute this limit more accurately with one weird trick!
The enduring success of her early 19th century novels are in large part due to their persistent relevance
Cut out everything that's not surprising.
Making math a daily habit
This blog is intended to be a place to share ideas and results that are too weird, incomplete, or off-topic to turn into an academic paper, but that I think may be important. Let me know what you think! Contact links to the left.
Tired of equations and matrices? Ready to learn the easy way? This post explains the Kalman Filter simply with pictures and examples!
A blog about math by Nic Ford
In many large-scale web services, multiple layers of stateless and stateful services are seperated by load balancers. Load balancing can be done with dedicated hardware, with dedicated software load balancers, using DNS trickery or through a load-balancing mechanism in the client. In large systems, the resources and…
Musings on Hofstadter’s phenomenal book about computation, consciousness, and epistemology.
The boolean satisfiability problem (“SAT” for short) is arguably the most famous NP-complete problem in theoretical computer science. According to Wikipedia, it is “the problem of determining if there exists an interpretation that satisfies a given Boolean formula ”; or, in simpler terms, if there is at least one…
This article attempts to outline, in informal terms, a new theory of combinators, related to the theory of Combinatory Logic pioneered by Moses Schonfinkel, Haskell Curry, and others in the 1930s. Although not essential, an understanding of the classical theory of combinators may be helpful (see the links at the…
