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Math & Algorithms

The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 460 posts.

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95

Dust: Pretraining Transformers Without Backpropagation

Deep learning has been built around backprop, the only credit assignment algorithm capable of training modern neural nets, including transformer-based language models. Backprop requires differentiability and produces first-order gradients, and deep learning’s architectures, optimizers, and hardware have co-evolved…

104

A Curious Integral

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…

113

Tog's Paradox

Tog’s Paradox (also known as The Complexity Paradox or Tog’s ComplexityParadox) is an observation that products aiming to simplify a task for users tend toinspire new, more complex tasks. It’s one ...