The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 238 posts.
The first of a series of envisioned blog posts on lambda calculus, and Lisp. It’s unclear exactly where to start: there is a whole heap of interesting issues, both theoretical and in terms of concrete implementations, which tangle and interconnect. A particular application of lambda calculus is a very salient…
There's a cute math puzzle that can be interesting to folks on very different levels:
Or four kinds, or six kinds, I'm not picky about how you count them
I’m adding immutable vectors to my language, Ivan, and needed to pick a suitable data structure to implement them. Clojure uses Persistent Vectors (PVs) which support lookups, updates, and appends all in ‘effectively’ constant time. However, it doesn’t have efficient insert or merge operations. Relaxed Radix Balanced…
Generating primes using the Buenos Aires constant.
Recently I was called on to explain the ‘XOR’ operator to somebody who vaguely knew of its existence, but didn’t have a good intuition for what it was useful for and how it behaved.
“Welcome to math class, boys and girls! Today we’ll be drawing a picture that gestures beyond the limits of mortal comprehension.”
Basketball has evolved into a game of calculated decision-making. From a game of points, assists, and rebounds, it has progressed into using thousands of data points to optimize every element of the game.
Cryptographic schemes are based on the computational difficulty of solving some ‘hard’ problem. For example, RSA (specifically, RSA-2048) is based on the difficulty of a problem like this:
Here is a rough approximation of float multiplication (source): float rough_float_multiply(float a, float b) { constexpr uint32_t bias = 0x3f76d000; return bit_cast<float>(bit_cast<uint32_…
This article is about using Fortune’s Algorithm to generate Voronoi Diagrams in O(nlogn) time. If I’d known how hard it would be I wouldn’t have started it. If you are intending to implement it with the intent to actually use it, rather than as an exercise, I would recommend not using Fortune’s. Unless you are doing a…
It is thought that Euclid wrote Elements in about 300 BC, but Oliver Byrne turned it into one of the true gems of visualization — and made it about 100 times more readable. By seamlessly combining typeset text (Caslon, if you’re interested) with minimalist geometric drawings in primary col
V8’s Math.random implementation now uses an algorithm called xorshift128+, improving the randomness compared to the old MWC1616 implementation.
Hamilton’s quaternion number system $latex {\mathbb{H}}&fg=000000$ is a non-commutative extension of the complex numbers, consisting of numbers of the form $latex {t + xi + yj + zk}&f…
Gradient descent is the preferred way to optimize neural networks and many other machine learning algorithms but is often used as a black box. This post explores how many of the most popular gradient-based optimization algorithms such as Momentum, Adagrad, and Adam actually work.
Chris Grossack's math blog and professional website.
Cosine similarity - the duct tape of AI. Convenient but often misused. Let's find out how to use it better.
Generating an infinite world with the Wave Function Collapse algorithm - Personal blog about game development, programming and making
Posted by Joshua Bloch, Software EngineerI remember vividly Jon Bentley's first Algorithms lecture at CMU, where he asked all of us incoming Ph.D. ...
The difference between misinformation and disinformation is the difference between ignorance and malice. Trolling is somewhat different, incorporating an element of provocation and narcissism. But what the hell is this?
Stephen Wolfram discusses understanding proofs discovered using automated theorem proving. Based on Wolfram’s proof of the simplest axioms of logic of Boolean algebra.
Large language models like ChatGPT & Claude have become ubiquitous in today’s world. I visited a friend for the New years eve and was impressed by how ChatGPT was being extensively used within the family. The friend’s little kid is going to grow up in a world, where turning to large language models (LLM) for quick…
Earlier this year I decided to put my main project Tangerine on hold indefinitely and began prototyping a new renderer in an unfamiliar language using a totally new graphics API with the goal of overcoming all of Tangerine's technical shortcomings. The new renderer is an eccentric CPU ray tracer called Star Machine…
A blog about computers, functional languages, Lisp, and Scheme.
Intel released the powerful Pentium processor in 1993, establishing a long-running brand of high-performance processors. 1 The Pentium incl...
Perturbation and rescaling for efficient rendering of fractal images.
