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The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 2,391 posts.
I recently implemented a small program to visualize the inner workings of a scheme that compresses floating point timeseries by XORing subsequent values. The resulting visualizations are quite neat…
If you’ve done any 3D programming, you’ve likely encountered the zoo of techniques and representations used when working with 3D rotations. Some of them are better than others, depending on the situation.
Queueing theory is the scientific study of waiting in line. It can apply to familiar lines like those at the grocery store or bank but also to things like web s
For many of us, Bayesian statistics is voodoo magic at best, or completely subjective nonsense at worst. Among the trademarks of the…
Notes on Chapter 1 of Principia Mathematica
Ben Recht got my attention with a tweet about his blog post "The Higgs discovery did not take place.” I’m generally a fan of Ben’s writing, but I think he’s off base on a number of issues, and I’ll explain why. [Updated Oct 23rd, 2024] Ben's …
The MIT Challenge My friend Scott Young recently finished an astounding feat: he completed all 33 courses in MIT’s fabled computer science curriculum, from Linear ... Read more
This article explains how these four things fit together and shows some examples of what they are used for. Derivatives Derivatives are the most fundamental concept in calculus. If you have a funct…
Two acquaintances independently asked about this today, so it seems worth a write-up: recently (as of this writing), DeepMind published a new paper about a new practical fast matrix multiplication …
I've started learning about spectrum analysis a long time ago at university, but failed to gain a true insight in how it works under the hood. For me, it was just some magical math formulas I had to memorize and know about. I knew the theory but it didn't really click .
Reddit has a bug in their code. This bug is currently present in their production platform, and has been for years. It affects one of the most important algorithms in the entire site, the “Hot” ranking algorithm for link popularity. It has real, demonstrable negative effects. It has been reported to Reddit’s technical…
Making English more enjoyable to write.
Generating an infinite world with the Wave Function Collapse algorithm - Personal blog about game development, programming and making
When was the first time you had to use LaTeX? If you are like most people, it was probably suddenly forced upon you during your first math or CS class where you had to start writing proofs, with minimal guidance on how to get started. Unfortunately, this meant that while many people have good operational knowledge of…
As n increases, the distance from phi^n to the nearest integer decreases exponentially where phi is the golden ratio.
To celebrate being alive for a billion seconds, Daniel Bruin built a machine with 100 gears with a 10-to-1 gear ratio…meaning that the overall gear ratio is a g
Writing a solver for “Miracle Sudoku” puzzles in Prolog.
Gerrymandering distorts the will of the people, but the basic math of geographic representation makes it difficult to get rid of, unless we get rid of representation for geographic districts.
Some years ago, you blogged about a research article by Hasan and colleagues (2013) .
A positive vision for the future of mathematics: how our institutions can deepen human understanding as AI transforms mathematical research.
What does the math tell us about how many job applicants we should look at before hiring one? While onboarding our new employees, how can ideas from the TCP networking protocol help us to identify the optimal workload for them? Why would giving employees unlimited vacation days most likely lead to less vacation being…
How to create perfect secret messages that can be decoded using just your eyes.
Bogdan Georgiev, Javier Gómez-Serrano, Adam Zsolt Wagner, and I have uploaded to the arXiv our paper “Mathematical exploration and discovery at scale”. This is a longer report on…
For overdetermined reasons, I’ve lately found the world an increasingly terrifying and depressing place. It’s gotten harder and harder to concentrate on research, or even popular scienc…
So, you’ve probably heard of the Kelly Criterion in the context of gambling or maybe also in the context of investing. When gamblers talk about the Kelly Criterion they are often referring to the idea of sizing your bets, which is the very intuitive idea that if you bet too much of a percentage of your total wealth…
Every time you shuffle a deck of playing cards, it's probably a unique order, never before seen in human history.
You can just prove things, apparently.
I should state from the very beginning that the title of this post is a bit of a tease. I don’t know why nothing can go faster than the speed of light. No one does. It is a fundamental pos…
