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Ask HN: How do you solve hard problems if you can't make incremental progress?
Ron Jeffries attempts to create a sudoku solver - here , here , here , here and here . (You really ought to read these articles. They are u...
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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The Busy Beaver Problem
Busy Beaver puts another one on the Turing Machine's tape (image from the book The New Turing Omnibus). The busy beaver problem is a fun theoretical computer science problem. Intuitively, the problem is to find the smallest program that outputs as many data as possible and eventually halts. More formally it goes…
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The Aggregate Magic Algorithms (2015)
There are lots of people and places that create and collect algorithms of all types ( here are a few WWW sites). Unfortunately, in building systems hardware and software, we in The Aggregate often have found it necessary to do relatively obscure low-level things very efficiently. Many of the tricks we've devised or…
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The Baby-Eating Aliens
(Part 1 of 8 in "Three Worlds Collide") • This is a story of an impossible outcome, where AI never worked, molecular nanotechnology never worked, bio…
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How Credit Card Numbers Are Generated
Visa,Master Card,Discover, and American Express credit card validation and generation techniques using the luhn algorithm.
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Visualizing the Fourth Dimension Using Color
Color can be used to indicate position in 4D space
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Intractability of Financial Derivatives
A new result by Princeton computer scientists and economists shows a striking application of computer science theory to the field of financial derivative design. The paper is Computational Complexity and Information Asymmetry in Financial Products by Sanjeev Arora, Boaz Barak, Markus Brunnermeier, and Rong Ge…
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Programming with Nothing (2011)
I love Ruby! I’ve used it every day for years and I’m not sick of it yet. It’s an easy language to love: it’s expressive, flexible and syntactically beautiful ; it has a unique combination of useful features like mixins , metaclasses and blocks ; it comes with a useful core library and comprehensive standard library …
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Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts Are Broken (2006)
Posted by Joshua Bloch, Software EngineerI remember vividly Jon Bentley's first Algorithms lecture at CMU, where he asked all of us incoming Ph.D. ...
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Energy Is Not Conserved (2010)
I’ve been meaning to link to this post at the arXiv blog , which is a great source of quirky and interesting new papers. In this case they are pointing to a speculative but interesting paper by Martin Perl and Holger Mueller, which suggests an experimental search for gradients in dark energy by way of atom…
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The odd one out - inspired by IQ tests
Mathematics, applications of mathematics to life in general, and my life as a mathematician.
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Bayes' Theorem explained by Yudkowsky
Bayes’ Theorem for the curious and bewildered; an excruciatingly gentle introduction.
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Maze-generation algorithms, with JS demos
Algorithms, circle mazes, hex grids, masking, weaving, braiding, 3D and 4D grids, spheres, and more!
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The Shocking State of Contemporary "Mathematics"
I just came back from attending the 1052nd AMS (sectional) meeting at Penn State, last weekend, and realized that the Kingdom of Mathematics is dead. Instead we have a disjoint union of narrow specialties , and people who know everything about nothing, and nothing about anything (except their very narrow acre). Not…
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A Calculus Analogy: Integrals as Multiplication
Integrals are often described as finding the area under a curve. This description is too narrow: it's like saying multiplication exists to find the area of…
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Discrete Analysis – A new type of math journal
This post is to announce the start of a new mathematics journal, to be called Discrete Analysis. While in most respects it will be just like any other journal, it will be unusual in one important w…
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Guessing the Teacher's Password
When I was young, I read popular physics books such as Richard Feynman’s QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. I knew that light was waves, so…
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A 3700-year-old proof that the diagonal of a unit square has length √2
Clicking on an image will bring up the same image at higher resolution (a download of about about 100 KB). Clicking on that in turn will download an image of about 300 KB.
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