2071
Tabasco Sort: a super-optimal merge sort
Paul Khuong's personal blog. Some Lisp, some optimisation, mathematical or computer.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,393 posts.
2072
Picturing Mathematics
I’m a great believer in low-tech math. I don’t like to rely on things a computer tells me; what if there’s a bug in the code? I prefer trusting things that I can check for myself. At the same…
2073
Issues in the Proof that P ≠ NP
Some further comments into the recent claimed proof that P is not equal to NP Yuri Manin is a great mathematician, who has worked in various areas and also is well known for his many excellent expo…
2074
The Halting Problem is a terrible example of NP-Harder
It's a justifiable copout, but it's still a copout.
2075
When would you ever want bubblesort? (2023)
There are very few universal rules in software engineering, but there are are a lot of near-universal principles. Things like "prefer composition to...
2076
The Point of the Banach Tarski Theorem (2015)
One of my favourite Limited Audience Jokes (although technically it's actually a riddle) goes:
2077
Harvard Railroad Economics Exam (1906)
Final exam from Dr. Stuart Daggett's Harvard economics course on Railroad Practice taught in 1906-07.
2078
How Correlated Are You?
This post is an offshoot from Chapter 1 of Probably Overthinking It, which is available for pre-order now! Suppose you measure the arm and leg lengths of 4082 people. You would expect those measurements to be correlated, and you would be right. In the ANSUR-II dataset, among male members of the armed forces, this…
2079
Visually symmetric words
The word "kayak" is a palindrome, but it isn't visually symmetric. The word "bud" is visually symmetric, but not a palindrome.
2080
Empiricism and the limits of gradient descent
This post is actually about artificial intelligence, and argues a position that many AI researchers will disagree with. Specifically, it arg...
2081
Stochastic Superoptimization
An “optimizer” should really be called an “improver”, and a “superoptimizer” should be called an “optimizer” 🙂
2082
The best linear algebra books
If you would follow the road to linear algebra here are some trustworthy signposts.
2083
2084
Solomon Golomb (1932–2016)
Stephen Wolfram shares a glimpse into his conversations with Solomon Golomb, developments on shift registers, polyominoes, scientific contributions.
2085
Hopefully the last post I'll ever write on Dual EC DRBG
I’ve been working on some other blog posts, including a conclusion of (or at least an installment in) this exciting series on zero knowledge proofs. That’s coming soon, but first I want…
2086
Introduction to Digital Filters (2024)
INTRODUCTION TO DIGITAL FILTERS WITH AUDIO APPLICATIONS
2087
The missing digit of Stela C
One bad thing about archeologists is that some of the successful ones get a big head. People used to think the Olmecs, who made these colossal stone heads, were contemporary with the Mayans. But in…
2088
Parsing Advances
I find myself writing yet another toy parser, as one does during a Christmas break. It roughly follows Resilient LL Parsing Tutorial. Not because I need resilience, but mostly because I find producing a syntax tree and a collection of diagnostics a more natural fit for the problem than bailing out on the first error.
2089
Monte Carlo Crash Course: Sampling
In the previous chapter, we assumed that we can uniformly randomly sample our domain. However, it’s not obvious how to actually do so—in fact, how can a deterministic computer even generate random numbers? 1
2090
What it takes to transpose a matrix
Classical CPU architecture is a poor choice for performing matrix-oriented computations. Developers have to spend much effort to create efficient algorithms even for the problems appearing trivial on the surface. Matrix transpose is probably the most striking representative of such problems. It exposes numerous…
2091
Illustration Beyond Proof
[This is a guest post by Kate Stange and Edmund Harriss. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] In January a group of mathematicians, hi…
2092
Incremental Regular Expressions
This article was originally published in the Russian functional programming journal http://fprog.ru/ and this translation was intended to be published in Peter Seibel’s http://codequarterly.com/ journal, but as Peter eventually decided not to proceed with the journal, I am publishing it on my personal space.
2093
Translating My Z3 Tutorial to Coq
A blog about life, programming, math, logic, and physics.
2094
The exceptional Jordan algebra (2020)
In the early 1930s, Pascual Jordan attempted to formalise the algebraic properties of Hermitian matrices. In particular: Hermitian matrices form a real vector space: we can add and subtract Hermiti…
2095
From math to machine: translating a function to machine code
In this post I'm going to explore how a mathematical concept can be redefined in progressively more computer-oriented terms, all the way from high level languages down to machine code, ready for direct execution by a computer. To that end, I'm going to define the same logic in several different but related formats:
2096
The Hat, the Spectre and SAT Solvers (2024)
Introduction In this blog post you are going to read about two things:
2097
Information Theory with TensorFlow
Redirecting to https://www.mukeshmithrakumar.com/blog/deep-learning-with-tf2-probability-and-information-theory/ .
2098
Numbering should start at zero (1982)
To denote the subsequence of natural numbers 2, 3, ..., 12 without the pernicious three dots, four conventions are open to us
2099
What are the 'real numbers', really?
The short, simple answer used in calculus courses is that a real number is a point on the number line . That's not the whole truth, but it is adequate for the needs of freshman calculus. The freshman calculus course (at most universities nowadays) follows the 17th century style of Newton and Leibniz, emphasizing…
2100