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Analysis of bank PIN numbers
Is your PIN number too predictable? Detailed analysis on PIN number databases.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
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Damn Cool Algorithms: Cardinality Estimation
Posted by Nick Johnson | Filed under python , cardinality-estimation , damn-cool-algorithms
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Girls Need Math
The other day a programmer-friend sent an e-mail to me and three other women. It read:
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Tabasco Sort: a super-optimal merge sort
Paul Khuong's personal blog. Some Lisp, some optimisation, mathematical or computer.
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Damn Cool Algorithms: Homomorphic Hashing
Posted by Nick Johnson | Filed under homomorphic-hashing , damn-cool-algorithms , fountain-codes
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Dynamic Programming versus Memoization
_posted by Shriram Krishnamurthi_ [Edit on 2012-08-27, 12:31EDT: added code and pictures below. 2012-08-27, 13:10EDT: also incorporated some comments.] I wrote this on the Racket educators' mailing list, and Eli Barzilay suggested I post it here as well...
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Parrondo's Paradox: How two ugly parents can make a beautiful baby
"How two ugly parents (mathematically) can make a beautiful baby"
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Finding Unity in the Math Wars
I usually avoid current events, but recent skirmishes in the math world prompted me to chime in. To recap, there've been heated discussions about math…
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Fixing Hacker News: A mathematical approach
There is a certain phenomenon that seems to happen in almost every online community of user-generated content. A community is created: the ...
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Stop teaching calculating; Start teaching math
Conrad Wolfram's 2010 talk on reforming maths education to teach real-world computational methods using computers.
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Does one have to be a genius to do maths?
Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly. (José Ortega y Gasset, “Notes on t…
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How you eat corn on the cob predicts whether you're an analyst or algebraist
I like learning about odd connections between disparate things. This probably is the oddest example that I know. Broadly speaking, mathemat...
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A New Way To Solve Linear Equations (over finite fields)
Impossible but true: a new approach to linear systems Prasad Raghavendra is an expert in many aspects of complexity theory, especially the foundations of approximation theory. He recently was a col…
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10-year-old problem in theoretical computer science falls
Interactive proofs — mathematical games that underlie much modern cryptography — work even if players try to use quantum information to cheat.
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An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem
Bayes’ Theorem for the curious and bewildered; an excruciatingly gentle introduction.
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The Two Egg Problem
Analysis of the classic "dropping two eggs from a building" interview question
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The Opposite of a Bloom Filter
A Bloom filter is a data structure that may report it contains an item that it does not (a false positive), but is guaranteed to report correctly if it contains the item (“no false negatives”). The opposite of a Bloom filter is a data structure that may report a false negative, but can never report a false positive…
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Mihai Pătraşcu 1982–2012
A pathbreaking researcher taken too soon from us (src) Mihai Pătraşcu passed away on Tuesday of brain cancer, having not yet reached age 30. We, Dick and Ken, did not know about his year-…
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Can a person be identified by just the way they type?
Do a detailed analysis of your own typing style, just using Mathematica. Can a person be identified just by the way they type? See group data analysis.
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Why Multi-armed Bandit algorithms are superior to A/B testing (with Math)
In a recent post, a company selling A/B testing services made the claim that A/B testing is superior to bandit algorithms. They do make a compelling case that A/B testing is superior to one particular not very good bandit algorithm, because that particular algorithm does not take …