Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,391 posts.
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 […]
Lambda calculus is for wimps. Real programmers use combinatory logic.
Using graph theory and Ryanair route data to find cheap multi-city flight loops through Europe.
In the previous two parts we used a SAT solver as a black box that we feed input into, and it will (usually quickly) spit out an answer. In this part, we will look at how SAT solvers work and what heuristics and other tricks they employ in their quest for performance.
Facts and figures on U.S. stock market returns from 1871 to 2024. Annual returns, likelihood of losing money, best / worst months, and more.
This is a brief write-up of a trick I learned that helps me write code faster and more accurately. I say "trick", but it's really something I started to do without noticing as I moved further into my career. When you're working on something difficult, sketch a
Pets do the darndest things, especially if you teach them a bit of math.
KOITOTO hadir dengan mengutamakan kemudahan akses serta dukungan bagi pengguna yang membutuhkan informasi seputar layanan dan navigasi situs.
The Sensitivity Conjecture, which I blogged about here, says that, for every Boolean function f:{0,1}n→{0,1}, the sensitivity of f—that is, the maximum, over all 2n input strings x∈{0,1}n, of…
Chris Grossack's math blog and professional website.
Back in May of 2022 I transferred teams at Google to work on Fully Homomorphic Encryption (newsletter announcement). Since then I’ve been working on a variety of projects in the space, including being the primary maintainer on github.com/google/fully-homomorphic-encryption, which is an open source FHE compiler for…
One of the questions of the 2026 acx prediction contest is whether Nvidia’s stock price will close below $100 on any day in 2026. At the time of writing, it trades at $184 and a bit, so going down to $100 would be a near halving of the stock value of the highest valued company in the world.
In software, you frequently need to check whether some objects is in a set. For example, you might have a list of forbidden Web addresses. As someone enters a new Web address, you may want to check whether it is part of your black list. Or maybe you have a large list of already used … Continue reading Xor Filters…
A generalised solution to distributed consensus Howard & Mortier, arXiv’19 This is a draft paper that Heidi Howard recently shared with the world via Twitter, and here’s the accompanying …
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…
While I was writing the Wolfenstein 3D book [1] , I wanted to demonstrate how much of a handicap it was to work without floating points. My attempts at understanding floating points using canonical [2] articles [3] were met with resistance from my brain. I tried to find a different way. Something far from $(-1)^S *…
Skip lists are a wonderful data structure, but it is hard to get\ right. This blog post presents various techniques to optimize and\ improve the implementation of skip lists.
Update (April 27): Boaz Barak—Harvard CS professor, longtime friend-of-the-blog, and coauthor of my previous guest post on this topic—has just written an awesome FAQ, providing his pers…
You can find a PDF version of this blog post here . A weighted graph is a data structure consisting of some vertices and edges, and each...
The definitive guide to Random Forests and Decision Trees.
Announcing a $12,288 bounty (tripled to charity) for cracking the five seeds selected by the NSA in the '90s for the NIST elliptic curve standard.
Divide the number 999,999,999,999,999,999,999,998,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999 into 1 and express the result as a decimal expansion, and you’ll find the Fibonacci sequence presented in tidy 24-digit strings: (Thanks, David.)
A beginner-friendly introduction to stochastic calculus, focusing on intuition and calculus-based derivations instead of heavy probability theory formalism.
So I’m two months into trying to teach a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem to a computer. We already have one interesting story, which I felt was worth sharing.
Writeup for my first major machine learning project.
Chapter 1: Row vs column picture
TL;DR: After noticing an annoying warning, I went on an absurd yak shave, and discovered that because of a tiny handful of Python packages b...
Why some systems -- as a consequence of their intrinsic dynamics -- require a control action that first pushes them the wrong way and makes things worse before it gets better.
