Topics /
The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 212 posts.
If you've ever graphed equations, chances are you have only ever graphed equations in what I refer to as "Binary mode" - which draws a line where the equation is EXACTLY equal, and leaves white everywhere else.
A reference guide to fundamental machine learning equations with correct implementations and clear explanations of how they connect to each other.
Almost 20 years ago, I wrote a textbook in real analysis called “Analysis I”. It was intended to complement the many good available analysis textbooks out there by focusing more on foun…
How I overcame copying and modifying my own diff library from project to project by diving too deep into diff algorithms and coming out at the other end with new diff library in my hand.
People say many things about entropy: entropy increases with time, entropy is disorder, entropy increases with energy, entropy determines the arrow of time, etc.. But I have no idea what entropy is, and from what I find, neither do most other people. This is the introduction I wish I had when first told about entropy…
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…
Generating an infinite world with the Wave Function Collapse algorithm - Personal blog about game development, programming and making
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…
Among a few other integral tricks and techniques, Feynman's trick was a strong reason that made me love evaluating integrals, and although the technique itself goes back to Leibniz being commonly known as the Leibniz integral rule, it was Richard Feynman who popularized it, which is why it is also referred to as…
To be fair, nobody asks me this exact question. But people have regularly asked why Isabelle dispenses with proof objects. The two questions are essentially the same, because proof objects are intrinsic to all the usual type theories. They are also completely unnecessary and a huge waste of space. As described in an…
Anthology of sociology, statistical, or psychological papers discussing the observation that all real-world variables have non-zero correlations and the implications for statistical theory such as ‘null hypothesis testing’.
Exploring the world of constraint solvers with very simple examples.
A Bloom filter is a data structure designed to tell you, rapidly and memory-efficiently, whether an element is present in a set.
How I used a compressed trie data structure to encode Icelandic declension data.
The original motivation for the creation of Bloom filters is efficient set membership, using a probabilistic approach to significantly reduce the time and space required to reject items that are not members in a certain set.
In which I explore the biggest barrier in the busy beaver game. What is Antihydra, what is the Collatz conjecture, how are they connected, and what makes them so daunting?
The challenge The authoring platform of choice in many math-heavy disciplines is LaTeX. It produces typeset documents of excellent quality and handles formulas and mathematical diagrams extremely w…
Can Hollywood's stamp of artistic excellence still be trusted?
Here’s to being a preserving student for life.
I read a good post by one of the authors of the Isabelle theorem prover, that got me thinking. The author, Lawrence Paulson, observed that most math proofs are trivial, but writing them (preferably with a proof assistant) is a worthwhile activity, for reasons similar to safety checklists - “Not every obvious statement…
Personal website of David R Hagen, scientific software engineer
Benchmarks and theoretical explanation of why and when hashed radix sort beats hash tables.
I didn’t invent categories to study functors; I invented them to study natural transformations. — Saunders Mac Lane
Exploring a peculiar bit-twiddling hack at the intersection of 1980s geek sensibilities.
The Ivory Tower is a blog about software engineering and development philosophy by Anders Sundman.
There is a well-known puzzle based on the premise of an �infinite� grid of resistors connecting adjacent nodes of a square lattice. A small portion of such a grid is illustrated below.
