The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 221 posts.
The fun of owning rural property is that knowing where your land actually starts and ends is a guess usually. Sure, you have a parcel description, and maybe even an online service with “official” GIS boundaries (for us here in New Brunswick, this is GeoNB ). However, since it’s in the middle of the forest, the odds of…
Apparently Randall Munroe gets a lot of messages saying that the “random” button on xkcd is biased.
I can mathematically prove the game's not fun.
I recently stumbled upon this screenshot while researching social media on the train. Of course, it was followed by a cascade of spiteful comments, criticizing this fresh programmer’s attempt to solve a classical problem in computer science. The modulus operation.
Erik van Zwet, Sander Greenland, Guido Imbens, Simon Schwab, Steve Goodman, and I write :
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2023121 points5 commentscited by 3History & Retro Computing details
One of the first questions anyone asks about past societies is, ‘how many people were there?’ It is one of those basic bits of information and generally speaking those of us who teach t…
and other horrible things you do to get into stanford
Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is a fundamental concept in linear algebra, and it is particularly important in the field of machine learning for tasks such as dimensionality reduction, data compression, and noise reduction.
Mathematics with a distinct visual perspective. Linear algebra, calculus, neural networks, topology, and more.
Projects and Ramblings
An embedding is the representation of a piece of text like a word, sentence, or paragraph. Traditionally this value is in the form of a mathematical vector - a point in space. You can think of it as analogous to coordinates on a map that just happens to have many, many dimensions.
We introduce FunSearch, a method for searching for “functions” written in computer code, and find new solutions in mathematics and computer science. FunSearch works by pairing a pre-trained LLM, whose goal is to provide creative solutions in the form of computer code, with an automated “evaluator”, which guards…
The following Python function computes the Fibonacci sequence , without loops, recursion or floating point arithmetic:
In this blog post, we explore Spotify's journey from using the Fisher-Yates shuffle to a more sophisticated song shuffling algorithm that prevents clustering of tracks by the same artist. We then connect this challenge to Fibonacci hashing, and propose a novel, evenly distributed artist shuffling method.
Posted by Robin Kothari and Rolando Somma, Research Scientists, Google Research, Quantum AI Team Quantum computers promise to solve some problems e...
Richard Rosenfeld in the most recent Criminologist published a piece about forecasting national level crime rates. People complain about the FBI releasing crime stats a year late, academics are wor…
Inside every AI is a bigger AI, trying to get out
Do unskilled people actually underestimate their incompetence?
A rewrite of this blog post with many new insights and updates appeared in Jan 2026
Emergency special: The information we need to understand what Q* is was right in front of us, but the memes are more fun than reality.
Watabou’s Cave Generator is one in a series of RPG-ready map generators that Watabou has created over the years. All his work oozes style, but the cave generator was always the one I found mo…
A Lindemayer system or LSystem for short consists of an alphabet of symbols that can be used to make strings, a collection of production that expand each symbol into some larger string of symbols, an initial “axiom” string from which to begin construction, and a mechanism for translating the generated strings into…
Frequency-domain blue noise generator
learning about B-Trees...in factorio
But, I guess he did win the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2020 so I can't really brag. However, it was a great surprise when looking at two pa...
A recent paper The Reversal Curse points out an apparent failure in large large language models like GPT-4. From the abstract: We expose a surprising failure of generalization in auto-regressive large language models (LLMs). If a model is
Premature optimisation might be the root of all evil, but overdue optimisation is the root of all frustration. No matter how fast hardware becomes, we find it easy to write programs which run too slow. Often this is not immediately apparent. Users can go for years without considering a program’s performance to be an…
