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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 460 posts.
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Consistency Models
Jepsen analyzes the safety properties of distributed systems–most notably, identifying violations of consistency models. But what are consistency models? What phenomena do they allow? What kind of consistency does a given program really need?
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Why Hacker News should use a different Deterministic Algorithm, Not a Random One
NetworkSolutions.com - Original domain name registration and reservation services with variety of internet-related business offerings. Quick, dependable and reliable.
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The Kalman filter: helping chickens cross the road
The Kalman Filter. Helping Chickens Cross the Road. David Austin Grand Valley State University I was running some errands recently when I spied the Chicken Robot ambling down the sidewalk, then vee…
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An illustrated guide to automatic sparse differentiation
In numerous applications of machine learning, Hessians and Jacobians exhibit sparsity, a property that can be leveraged to vastly accelerate their computation. While the usage of automatic differentiation in machine learning is ubiquitous, automatic sparse differentiation (ASD) remains largely unknown. This post…
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John Coltrane illustrates the mathematics of jazz
The Jazz of Physics: Albert Einstein and John Coltrane had a lot in common. The so-called “Coltrane circle” or “Circle of Fifths,” but incorporates Coltrane’s own innovations. Coltrane gave the drawing to saxophonist and professor Yusef Lateef in 1967, who included it in the Repository of Scales and
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Some thoughts about the reports of supposed evidence of election irregularities
The Internet lit up on Monday over the news, reported in New York Magazine , that a team of computer scientists and lawyers had reported to the Clinton campaign that “they’ve found persuasive evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked. ”
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Why don't machine learning research agents overfit?
New research indicates that AI agents learn compressible models of data, which don’t have enough space to enable memorization.
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Theoretical Machine Learning Lecture Series: Deep Learning and Cognition
Deep learning, which is the reemergence of artificial neural networks, has recently succeeded as an approach towards artificial intelligence. In many fields, including computational linguistics, deep learning approaches have largely displaced earlier machine learning approaches, due to the superior performance they…
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Why Don't Computer Scientists Learn Math?
I recently attended the Heidelberg Laureate Forum , in which some older researchers--mainly Fields Medalists and Turing Award winners--talked to and with young researchers. The young researchers ranged from a few students just entering university to young faculty members, most being graduate students. They came from…
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2025 Turing award given for quantum information science
Bennett, an American physicist at IBM Research, and Brassard, a Canadian computer scientist at the Université de Montréal, are widely recognized as founders of quantum information science, a field at the intersection of physics and computer science that treats quantum mechanical phenomena not merely as properties of…
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The Flummoxagon
We’re excited to announce Flummoxagon, a new geometric puzzle game that might just leave you flummoxed. Imagine a mash-up of Pentominoes and Sudoku. Your goal is to fit all the pieces into the hexa…
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Unexpected link between pure mathematics and genetics
An interdisciplinary team of mathematicians, engineers, physicists, and medical scientists have uncovered an unexpected link between pure mathematics and genetics.
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Interpretable Machine Learning Through Teaching
Stay up to speed on the rapid advancement of AI technology and the benefits it offers to humanity.
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Using secondary school maths to demystify AI
Educators can show in secondary school maths that AI systems don’t think, making maths more interesting while teaching core concepts of AI.
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The definitive guide to “modulo bias” and how to avoid it (2020)
The Latest News from Research at Kudelski Security
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Quanta to publish popular math and physics books by Terence Tao and David Tong
Quanta Books is delighted to announce two new upcoming books by mathematician Terence Tao and theoretical physicist David Tong. Six Math Essentials will be Tao’s first math book written for a popular…
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Paul Erdős (2000)
Erdős posed and solved problems in number theory and other areas and founded the field of discrete mathematics.
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Step-by-Step Math
Have you ever given up working on a math problem because you couldn’t figure out the next step? Wolfram|Alpha can guide you step by step through the process of solving many mathematical problems, from solving a simple quadratic equation to taking the integral of a complex function.
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How to Read a Log Scale
What log scales tell us.
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Factoring RSA 260
How Devin and a Cognition researcher built the world’s highest-performance GPU lattice siever, to make factoring numbers 10x cheaper than the previous…
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PISA 2025 Students' reading and mathematics performance declined across the OECD
Student performance across OECD countries has continued to decline, reaching the lowest average ever recorded by the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in mathematics and reading. Across the OECD, one in five 15-year-old students is now a low performer in science, mathematics and reading, up…
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Understanding is a poor substitute for convexity (2012)
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…
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Optimizing hash tables: hiding the hash code
Several JavaScript data structures such as Map, Set, WeakSet, and WeakMap use hash tables under the hood. This article explains how V8 v6.3 improves hash table performance.
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Scarcity, Inventory, and Inequity: A Deep Dive into Airline Fare Buckets
Airline pricing may seem mystifying, but behind every airfare is a complex system of fare buckets and inventory controls. Airlines don't just sell seats - they manage a dynamic inventory of fares, divided into booking classes (fare buckets) with different prices and rules. For the technically curious, understanding…
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Calculating a record-breaking 31.4T digits of Pi with GCP
Pi in the sky: Calculating a record-breaking 31.4 trillion digits of Archimedes’ constant on Google Cloud