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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,851 posts.
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Jim Hefferon's Linear Algebra: A free textbook with fascinating applications
Random code snippets, projects and musings about software from Eric Kidd, a developer and occasional entrepreneur.
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The New Science of Causation
It seems like each new day brings another one of those headlines: regular sleep “linked to” life expectancy, playing video games “associated with” surgical prowess, bullies “at risk” of becoming criminals, and “does breastfeeding reduce a baby’s blood pressure?” (the old rhetorical question gambit). Sometimes the…
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Update on Deolalikar’s Proof that P≠NP
An update on the P not equal to NP proof Timothy Gowers, Gil Kalai, Ken Regan, Terence Tao, and Suresh Venkatasubramanian are some of the top people who are trying to unravel what is up with the cl…
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Proving P!=NP: "...Ryan has taken the first real baby step in decades."
On October 8th, when in my graduate complexity course as we discussed the 1987 Razborov-Smolensky result that one can't compute the Mod p b...
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Yacc is dead: An update
The draft of " Yacc is Dead " that David Darais and I posted on arXiv received some attention, so we'd like to share updates and feedback.
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SciPy - the embarrassing way to code
I’ve programmed in many languages before, indeed I’ve spent at least a year working in Basic, C, C++, C#, java, assembler, modula-2, powerhouse and prolog. One thing I’ve never done before is Matlab, well except a few basic exercises for some course I did way back. A couple of years ago I started using python and more…
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S. Cook: “This appears to be a relatively serious claim to have solved P vs NP.”
An email I was recently forwarded (a couple of steps removed) from Vinay Deolalikar from HP Labs:
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52 Factorial
They seem harmless enough, 52 thin slices of laminated cardboard with colorful designs printed on their sides. Yet, as another illustration of the mantra that complexity begins from the most simple systems, the number of variations that these 52 cards can produce is virtually endless. The richness of most playing card…
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You Don't Need Math Skills To Be A Good Developer - What About A Great One
Why everyday CRUD work needs little math, but search, machine learning, cryptography and other interesting fields need plenty.
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The 17x17 challenge. "Worth $289.00. This is not a joke."
The 17x17 challenge: worth $289.00. I am not kidding. Definition: The n x m grid is c-colorable if there is a way to c-color the vertic...
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How to determine if your A/B test is statistically significant
A/B testing tools often lie about whether something is "statistically significant." Here's an extremely simple, mathematically sound formula to compute it for yourself.
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Are you one of the 10% of programmers who can write a binary search?
There are some programming books that I’ve read from cover to cover repeatedly; there are others that I have dipped into many times, reading a chapter or so at a time. Jon Bentley’s 19…
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Notation And Thinking
Does notation shape our thinking? Kenneth Iverson was a mathematician who is most famous for designing APL. This was the name of his programming language, and it cleverly stood for “A Program…
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A bestiary of algorithmic trading strategies
One of the things which confronted me when I got interested in quantitative finance is the varieties of different kinds of quant. Now I realize this is pretty simple. Quants come in three basic var…
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Maze Generation: Eller's Algorithm
Algorithms, circle mazes, hex grids, masking, weaving, braiding, 3D and 4D grids, spheres, and more!
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Nobody Understands Probability
The goal of this post is to give an overview of Bayesian statistics as well as to correct errors about probability that even mathematically sophisticated people commonly make. Hopefully by the end …
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Some fun mathematical puzzles
Explore research at Microsoft, a site featuring the impact of research along with publications, products, downloads, and research careers.
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Why I left math
Reading how shocked Doron Zeilberger is at the state of modern mathematics reminded me of why I left the subject. Math departments regularl...
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Colorized Math Equations
Years ago, while working on an explanation of the Fourier Transform, I found this diagram: Most ideas aren't inherently confusing, but their technical…
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R.J. Lipton - A proof that P is not equal to NP
A serious proof that claims to have resolved the P=NP question. Vinay Deolalikar is a Principal Research Scientist at HP Labs who has done important research in various areas of networks. He also h…
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The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories (2014)
I. “Silliest internet atheist argument” is a hotly contested title, but I have a special place in my heart for the people who occasionally try to prove Biblical fallibility by pointing …
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