The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 266 posts.
For reasons beyond the scope of this entry, I have been investigating elliptical and ovoid shapes. The Wikipedia article for Moss’s egg has a link to a tutorial on Euclidean Eggs by Freyja Hreinsdóttir which (amongst other things) describes how to construct the “four point egg”. I think it is a nicer shape than Moss’s…
I often drive between Boston and New Haven. While on the road, I find myself pondering a simple question: If my only goal is to arrive as fast as possible, how fast should I drive? Ignoring things …
A deep dive into investigating and reducing the flutter distortion on the soundtrack of Steamboat Willie (1928).
I first encountered Jenkins in 2007 while contributing to the Apache Nutch project. It was called Hudson back then. The nightly builds for the project ran on Hudson at that time. I remember sifting through my emails and reviewing build result notifications to keep an eye on the patches that got merged into the trunk…
Humans are notoriously bad at coming up with random numbers. I wanted to be able to quickly generate “random enough” numbers. I’m not looking for anything that great, I just want to be able to come up with the random digits in half a minute. Some looking around brought me to an old usenet post by George Marsaglia…
An online book about collision detection using Processing.
Backpropagation is the key algorithm that makes training deep models computationally tractable. For modern neural networks, it can make training with gradient descent as much as ten million times faster, relative to a naive implementation. That’s the difference between a model taking a week to train and taking 200,000…
I recently passed 100 days of practicing math every single day 💯 I’ve wanted to beef up my math chops for a while, but I needed a good reason that would justify the time investment. Plus…
Our AI system surpasses the state-of-the-art approach for geometry problems, advancing AI reasoning in mathematics
While reading Real-World Cryptography , I came across the "million message attack" . This is an attack that Daniel Bleichenbacher demonstrated in 1998, which effectively broke RSA with a particular encoding function called PKCS #1 . It was only mentioned briefly, so I dug in and decided to try to understand the…
This post is an anecdote from over a decade ago, of which I lost the actual code. So please forgive me if I do not accurately remember all the details. Some details are also simplified so that anyone that likes computer security can enjoy this article, not just those who have played World of Warcraft (although the…
This year’s Advent of Code has been brutal (compare the stats of 2023 with that of 2022, especially day 1 part 1 vs. day 1 part 2). It included a problem to solve with dynamic programming as soon as day 12, which discouraged some people I know. This specific problem was particularly gnarly for Advent […]
MIT student who enjoys performance engineering, compilers, and creating unconventional code
How I created a wall poster of knot diagrams.
We estimate the magnitude of speed improvement for optimization solvers and computer hardware in the 35 years from 1989 to 2024.
Long-time readers of this blog will know that I have mixed feelings about caches. One on hand, caching is critical to the performance of systems at every layer, from CPUs to storage to whole distributed architectures. On the other hand, caching being this critical means that designers need to carefully consider what…
Random numbers can be useful in graphics and game development, but they have a pesky and sometimes undesirable habit of clumping together. This is a problem in path tracing and monte carlo integrat…
If you overheard the phrase "1 in a million chance" in someone else's casual conversation, what might they be talking about?
Research in Software Engineering from Rahul Gopinath
Recently I came across a puzzling fact: the International Criminal Court hashes electronic evidence with MD5, even though MD5 is badly broken. So, why are lawyers using broken, outdated technology? The answer involves the common law system, cultural isolation, and a single man named Don L. Lewis.
Understand how transformers work by demystifying all the math behind them
In 2019, Google and Cloudflare ran an experiment where they upgraded HTTPS for many "real users’ connections" to use post-quantum encryption. They then reported statistics on how affordable this was. Google had also run a similar experiment in 2016: "While it's still very early days for quantum computers, we're…
Noise functions and the tiniest bit of trigonometry can take you a long way towards making art.
A* Tricks for Videogame Path Finding, A* (A-star) Search Algorithm
Describes a simple Markov chain algorithm to generate reasonable-sounding but utterly nonsensical text, and presents some example outputs as well as a Python implementation.
