2101
Markov Chain Monte Carlo Sampling
📍 This article has moved. Read the current version at This is the third part in a short series of blog posts about quantum Monte Carlo (QMC). The series is derived from an introductory lecture I ga…
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,851 posts.
2102
A Guide to Bayesian Statistics
A guide for getting started with Bayesian Statistics! Start your way with Bayes' Theorem and end up building your own Bayesian Hypothesis test!
2103
An election forecast that’s 50-50 is not “giving up”
tl;dr. In 2024, pre-election polls were off by about 2 percentage points. Election forecasters were aware of this and incorporated this into their uncertainties. But if you were not following the forecasts carefully, you might’ve not realized this. You might have mistakenly thought that, when predictions happened to…
2104
Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws
A wintertime climate change solution
2105
2106
There's Math.random(), and then there's Math.random() (2015)
V8’s Math.random implementation now uses an algorithm called xorshift128+, improving the randomness compared to the old MWC1616 implementation.
2107
A proof of proof by infinite descent
WARNING: the following contains a whole lot of pedantry about proving theorems at a level of detail such that you could likely convince a co...
2108
Scaling Down Deep Learning
A blog by Sam Greydanus
2109
Quaternions and spherical trigonometry
Hamilton’s quaternion number system $latex {\mathbb{H}}&fg=000000$ is a non-commutative extension of the complex numbers, consisting of numbers of the form $latex {t + xi + yj + zk}&f…
2110
2111
Unexplored Areas in Data Compression
A good colleague of mine, Rich Geldreich put up a interesting article talking about his viewpoints in future directions in lossless…
2112
Gray Code
What are Gray codes, and why are they so useful?
2113
Lessons from the History of Attacks on Secure Hash Functions
This document is a work-in-progress. Please contact the author if you see errors or omissions. Most of the secure hash functions ever designed have turned out to be vulnerable to collision attacks.
2114
How Rainbow Tables Work
I found the creator of Rainbow Table's paper, aimed at cryptanalysts, was pretty inaccessible considering the simplicity and elegance of Rainbow Tables, so this is an overview of it for a layman.
2115
How to escape a monster (using calculus)
You are sitting in a rowing boat in the middle of a circular lake. How do you escape from a smart monster on the shore who can run four times faster than you can row?
2116
My primality testing code is faster than Sir Roger Penrose's
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...
2117
Stats without Tears (2016)
Printer Friendly: The whole text in one file , all 164,000 words, convenient for printing. (The printed length will vary, depending to your browser settings. For me it’s 401 pages.)
2118
Demystifying Tupper's Formula
A book I was recently reading mentioned a mathematical curiosity I haven't seen before - Tupper's self-referential formula . There are some resources about it online, but this post is my attempt to explain how it works - along with an interactive implementation you can try in the browser.
2119
Parallel Parentheses Matching
The parallel parentheses matching problem can be parallelized in different manners depending on the use case and is a good example of how stacks map to parallel hardware.
2120
2121
Why does Heap's algorithm work? (2016)
Heap's algorithm for constructing all permutations is efficient and simple but not easy to understand. This article explains Heap's algorithm by example.
2122
Responsible Release of AI-Generated Mathematics
Responsible Release of AI-Generated Mathematics September 29, 2026 Back to main page Download PDF At present, some frontier AI labs are testing advanced mathematical problems on proprietary models …
2123
2124
The Math Inside the US Highway System
At first glance, the US highway seems like a jumble of roads: However, the numbers follow a grid, with rules nobody told me (image source, click to enlarge):
2125
The scrypt parameters
The recommended scrypt parameters in the Go docs were recently brought up for discussion given they haven’t changed since 2009.
2126
Understanding the Y Combinator
This article is about the Y combinator, a fixed-point combinator that provides a way of using recursion in scenarios and programming languages where symbols are not available. The concept of the Y combinator itself is closely related to lambda calculus (λ-calculus) and functional programming languages. More…
2127
A new quantum algorithm for classical mechanics with an exponential speedup
Posted by Robin Kothari and Rolando Somma, Research Scientists, Google Research, Quantum AI Team Quantum computers promise to solve some problems e...
2128
Degenerate matter: How reality deals with uncertainty
Casual introduction to the uncertainty principle from quantum mechanics and how it leads to neutron stars and superfluids
2129
Need Something Sorted? Sleep on It
An unexpected paradigm journey into sleep sort
2130
Computer scientists develop 'mathematical jigsaw puzzles' to encrypt software
The "software obfuscation" system encrypts software so that it only allows someone to use a program as intended while preventing any deciphering of the code behind it.