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The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 460 posts.
The Millennium Prize Problems were unveiled by the Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) at a meeting in Paris in 2000 to celebrate “The Universality of Mathematical Thought”. These problems encapsulate some of the most difficult challenges that mathematicians were grappling with at the turn of the millennium. CMI’s…
Learn cryptography in Go by building ciphers, hashes, password security, and encryption tools. Understand security beneath the library call.
Developers take garbage collection for granted, but it's hard to see how it works. Watch 5 different GC algorithm visualizations.
We recently introduced our report on probabilistic programming. The accompanying prototype allows you to explore the past and future of the New York residential real estate market. This post gives a feel for the content in our report by introducing the algorithms and technology that make probabilistic programming…
We've been speculating for a long time that hash-based keyword lookup ought to be faster than binary search, but up to now we hadn't found a suitable tool for generating the hash function. Joerg Sonnenberger provided the inspiration, and sample code, to show us that rolling our own generator wasn't a ridiculous idea…
GIMPS has discovered a new Mersenne prime number: 2^57885161-1 is prime! Discovered: 2013 Jan 25
This is the companion website for the paper Understanding Optimization in Deep Learning with Central Flows , published at ICLR 2025.
In this article I shall discuss several game programming techniques, all revolving around a central theme: the sine and cosine functions. This article will explain sine, cosine, vectors, atan2, and some useful special effects such as how to make homing missiles and how bitmap rotation works. I shall start with the…
Rasmus Kyng has written the near-perfect algorithm. It computes the maximum transport flow at minimum cost for any kind of network – be it rail, road or electricity – at a speed that is, mathematically speaking, impossible to beat.
The free website builder with a design agent that takes you from idea to launch. Changes stay editable, with hosting, CMS, analytics, SEO, and AEO built in.
GIMPS has discovered a new Mersenne prime number: 2^74207281-1 is prime! Discovered: 2016 Jan 07
A reflection on cultural differences observed at the 2025 Joint Mathematics Meeting.
Avi Wigderson is the recipient of the 2023 ACM A.M. Turing Award for foundational contributions to the theory of computation, including reshaping our understanding of the role of randomness in computation, and for decades of intellectual leadership in theoretical computer science.
Note: These pages make extensive use of the latest XHTML and CSS Standards . They ought to look great in any standards-compliant modern browser. Unfortunately, they will probably look horrible in older browsers, like Netscape 4.x and IE 4.x. Moreover, many posts use MathML, which is, currently only supported in…
An exotic data structure and a whole lot of JOINs.
Auto-Tune — one of modern history’s most reviled inventions — was an act of mathematical genius.
Use 3D to visualize matrix multiplication expressions, attention heads with real weights, and more. Matrix multiplications (matmuls) are the building blocks of today’s ML models. This note presents mm, a visualization...
Here’s a program roughly 0% of programmers know how to write: generate a list of random tweets, without duplication. You may think you know how to do this, but you almost assuredly don’…
MIT mathematicians and engineers have developed a mathematical model that predicts how stable a knot is, based on several key properties, including the number of crossings involved, and the direction in which the rope segments twist as the knot is pulled tight.
I put together a list and explained why they are important.
