The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 215 posts.
Something central, very central, is missing in historical accounts of scientific and technological discovery. The discourse and controversies focus on the role of luck as opposed to teleological programs (from telos, "aim"), that is, ones that rely on pre-set direction from formal science. This is a faux-debate: luck…
Blog of Raph Levien.
Graphs provide us with a very useful data structure.
"He's done it again!" was my first thought as I looked at the back of a postcard sized Pixar flier [1] which was covered in code. In the lower right corner, the blob of statements and expressions had been signed by none other than Andrew Kensler. For those who are not familiar with him, Andrew is the programmer who…
The Wavefunction Collapse Algorithm teaches your computer how to riff. The algorithm takes in an archetypical input, and produces procedurally-generated outputs that look like it.
[By prior agreement, this post will be cross-posted on Microsoft’s Q# blog, even though it has nothing to do with the Q# programming language. It does, however, contain many examples th…
I first participated in Advent of Code (AoC) in 2017. My co-workers at Formlabs introduced it to me. This year (2018), quite a lot of Formlabs folks are taking part and we have a nice private leaderboard going. I'm having a lot of fun with it. I've been staying up until midnight to work on the problems as soon as…
Recently I found a paper being presented at NeurIPS this year, entitled Neural Ordinary Differential Equations, written by Ricky Chen, Yulia Rubanova, Jesse Bettencourt, and David Duvenaud from the University of Toronto. The core idea is that certain types of neural networks are analogous to a discretized differential…
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· Read in · 1499 words · All posts in series · [dropcap]This[/dropcap] trick is unlike the others we’ve conjured. It will not reveal a clever manipulation of a probability or an integral or a…
I haven’t posted here much lately, and I admit, it’s because I’ve gotten sidetracked thinking about curves again. I did my PhD thesis on curves, so spent years thinking about them, then put that on hold for a while, aside from some work in crunching font file sizes down.
Understanding an effective way of sampling from complex distributions with 3d-demonstrations
If you work with anything that can be modeled mathematically, you most likely know that many things you work on can be expressed with algebras. However, if you are not a graduate of a computer science course or similar you might not know how ubiquitous they are and how often you rely on some of them. (And I don’t mean…
For the last four years I’ve been working on a book for programmers who want to learn mathematics. It’s finally done, and you can buy it today. The website for the book is pimbook.org, which has purchase links—paperback and ebook—and a preview of the first pages. You can see more snippets later in the book on the…
Some reflections on an accidental Twitterstorm, the future of AI and deep learning, and what happens when you confuse a schoolbus with a…
I recently attended the Matthias Felleisen Half-Time Show, a symposium held in Boston on 3rd November in celebration of Matthias’s 60th birthday. I was honoured to be able to give a talk ther…
Here's a talk on "Math And Analogies" I did for the Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) in Seattle. What's this? Well, it's a number. Probably written down a…
Using graph theory and Ryanair route data to find cheap multi-city flight loops through Europe.
Map any 3D point on or above a triangle-subdivided sphere to a triangle index in constant time, without recursion, table lookups or complicated branching logic.
Consider a scenario in which you are tasked with managing the security of a bank's vault. The vault is considered impenetrable without a key, which you are g...
It’s fairly clear when one should buy a particular stock. One should buy stock when it is undervalued. What I have always wondered about is how much stock one should buy. A few months ago I stumbled upon the answer which is given by the Kelly criterion . It says that one should invest an amount to maximize one’s…
A handy rule of thumb for creating a confidence interval for the probability of an event you haven't seen happen yet.
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I'd like to introduce a series of blog posts and their corresponding Python Notebooks gathering notes on the Deep Learning Book from Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua B...
Stay up to speed on the rapid advancement of AI technology and the benefits it offers to humanity.
Euler's identity seems baffling: It emerges from a more general formula: Yowza -- we're relating an imaginary exponent to sine and cosine! And somehow…
