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How percentile approximation works and why it's more useful than averages
What percentile approximations are, how percentiles work in PostgreSQL, and calculating them efficiently on time-series data.
Topics /
Math & Algorithms
The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 28 posts.
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The solution of the Zodiac killer’s 340-character cipher
See how Mathematica was used to solve one of the cryptograms sent in a letter by the Zodiac Killer.
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The Inconsistency of Arithmetic (2011)
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…
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Penrose: From mathematical notation to beautiful diagrams
Materials from our SIGGRAPH '20 paper.
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Claude Shannon: The Mathematical Theory of Cryptography
The foundation of modern cryptography.
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The Boyer-Moore Fast String Searching Algorithm
Our algorithm has the peculiar property that, roughly speaking, the longer the pattern is, the faster the algorithm goes. Furthermore, the algorithm is ``sublinear'' in the sense that it generally looks at fewer characters than it passes. The algorithm is described in
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(Very) Basic Intro to Elliptic Curve Cryptography
Learn cryptography in Go by building ciphers, hashes, password security, and encryption tools. Understand security beneath the library call.
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Ribbon filter: Practically smaller than Bloom and Xor
What the research is: The Ribbon filter is a new data structure that is more space-efficient than the popular Bloom filters that are widely used for optimizing data retrieval. One of the ways that …
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Ordering movie credits with graph theory
How Graphs & Games Untangled "The Golden Hairball": A technical deep dive from the end credits experts at Endcrawl.
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Ideas in statistics that have powered AI
Andrew Gelman, a statistics professor at Columbia, and Aki Vehtari, a computer science professor at Finland’s Aalto University, recently published a list of the most important statistical ideas in the last 50 years. Here, they break it down in easy-to-understand terms.
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Game theory as an engine for large-scale data analysis
Modern AI systems approach tasks like recognising objects in images and predicting the 3D structure of proteins as a diligent student would prepare for an exam. By training on many example problems, they minimise their mistakes over time until they achieve success. But this is a solitary endeavour and only one of the…
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Hopfield Networks Is All You Need
Blog post
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An Illustrated Guide to Elliptic Curve Cryptography Validation
Cutting-edge cyber security research from NCC Group. Find public reports, technical advisories, analyses, & other novel insights from our global experts.
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What time-weighted averages are and why you should care
Learn how time-weighted averages are calculated and why they’re so powerful for data analysis. Read the full article on the Tiger Data blog.
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The Shortest Possible Game of Monopoly (2010)
OK, since no one is posting, you get to endure another Monopoly post! After our recent attempt to play the shortest actual game of Monopoly on record, we started to wonder about what the shortest T…
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Subatomic particle seen changing to antiparticle and back for the first time
Physicists have proved that a subatomic particle can switch into its antiparticle alter-ego and back again, in a new discovery revealed today. An extraordinarily precise measurement made by Oxford researchers using the LHCb experiment at CERN has provided the first evidence that charm mesons can change into their…
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Advancing AI theory with first-principles understanding of deep neural networks
Deep neural networks have long been considered too complex to understand from first principles — but new research does just that, presenting a theoretical framework for DNNs.
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Paul Erdős (2000)
Erdős posed and solved problems in number theory and other areas and founded the field of discrete mathematics.
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Camera Calibration from Scratch Using Rust
Learn the theory behind how to perform sensor and camera calibration.
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Native Type Theory
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…
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The Breeder's Equation
R is the response to selection, S is the selection differential, and h 2 is the narrow-sense heritability. This is the workhorse equation for quantitative genetics. The selective differential S, is the difference between the population average and the average of the parental population (some subset of the total…
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High Performance Correctly Rounded Math Libraries for 32-Bit Floating Point
Everyone uses math libraries. Surprisingly, mainstream math libraries do not produce correct results for several thousands of inputs. Developers are seldom aware of them, which affects reproducibil…
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Evaluating Search Algorithms
The three-step framework Shopify's Data Science & Engineering team built for evaluating new search algorithms.
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