The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
An interesting challenge in cartography is getting data of the appropriate resolution. As Lewis Fry Richardson observed , the more precisely you measure the length of a coastline, the longer it appears; geographic shapes have infinite complexity. Digital displays, in contrast, are limited by pixels. Choosing too high…
Learn about the basics of multi armed bandit testing & algorithms, the difference b/w multi-armed bandit testing and A/B testing, its application in the real world.
When my friends hear me say that I’m buying a lottery ticket for a big draw I often get ...
I wore my Prime Factorization Sweater to KidlitCon09 , and it shows up in all my pictures, so I think it’s time for me to explain it.
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The Complexity of Things Previously on this blog (quite a while ago), we’ve investigated some simple ideas of using randomness in artistic design (psychedelic art, and earlier randomized css …
Water is complicated and fascinating stuff! There are at least sixteen known crystal phases of ice, many shown in this diagram based on the work of Martin Chaplin: (Click for a larger version.) For…
Learn about public engagement activities from the American Physical Society
I’m eager to summarize the (largely excellent) discussion of last week’s nightmares and to talk about what it all means. I’ll surely get to that in the next few days. But meanwhil…
Users are rating items on your website. How do you know what the highest-rated items are?
Probability theory might be the most useful area for programmers, but it is also a blurry field, difficult to learn right. You might check this book for details, and there is also an free, online draft version available. The Logic of Science
Learn the optimal strategy for playing Hangman.
This theorem is one of the most important proven in the twentieth century. Here are a few brief selections that will help you start to understand it. Gödel’s original paper “On Formally Undecidable Propositions” is available in a modernized translation . It’s also in print from Dover in a nice, inexpensive edition …
Suppose you go around taking extremely close-up black-and-white pictures of randomly chosen natural and unnatural objects (rocks, trees, streams, buildings, etc.). What do they look like? Well, eac…
Korteweg-de Vries Institute for Mathematics
This summer, cruising down the I-5 through California’s Central Valley to the Los Angeles Basin, I unwittingly stumbled upon a most exasperating development: the country strip mall . First, let me state that I don’t hate. I’ve got nothing against Petco, Starbucks, OfficeMax, et al. When overcome by the desire for a…
THE 17x17 PROBLEM HAS BEEN SOLVED!!!!! On Nov 30, 2009 I posted here the following challenge: If someone emails me a 4-coloring of...
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. ...
