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The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 2,391 posts.
A major problem in detecting biased decisionmaking is the problem of unknown inputs. For example, suppose a venture capitalist has a public portfolio which has funded 75% male founders and 25% female. Is this venture capitalist biased against women? It's impossible to know - perhaps only 10% of his applicants were …
I can mathematically prove the game's not fun.
A more polished version of this article appeared on Nautilus on 2019 February 28. This version has some more material. How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Algebraic Geometry In my 50s, too old …
Some weeks ago I got involved in a discussion on Twitter about, which books to recommend on the history of calculus. Somebody chimed in that Steven Strogatz’s new book would tell you all that you n…
How our mind falls short trying to short cut.
I recently read “Adventure Time: Volume 1”, a comic book based on the smart animated series of the same name. In the comic, I found some odd looking messages at the …
Physics blog quantum computation
Sabine Hossenfelder’s new book Lost in Math should be starting to appear in bookstores around now. It’s very good and you should get a copy. I hope that the book will receive a lot of a…
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.
Update: NIST released a draft that modified their recommendations (Oct 2024) 1) . RSA 2048 is to be only considered “deprecated” after 2030. The draft states:
Space Engine ...
Stephen Wolfram explores minimal models and their visualizations, aiming to explain the underneath functionality of neural nets and ultimately machine learning.
How to manually test whether a large number is divisible by 7, 11, and 13 all at the same time.
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?
Those of you who know what public-key cryptography is may have already heard of ECC , ECDH or ECDSA . The first is an acronym for Elliptic Curve Cryptography, the others are names for algorithms based on it.
Update 2017-01-09: Laci claims to have found a workaround to the previously posted error, and the claim is again quasipolynoimal time! Updated arXiv paper to follow. Update 2017-01-04: Laci has posted an update on his paper. The short version is that one small step of his analysis was not quite correct, and the result…
There has been a sudden resurgence of interest in my "donut" code from 2006 , and I've had a couple requests to explain this one. It's been five years now, so it's not exactly fresh in my memory, so I will reconstruct it from scratch, in great detail, and hopefully get approximately the same result.
In part 1 of this series, we built a Sudoku solver based on translating Sudoku to SAT and then giving the resulting SAT instance to a SAT solver. We also benchmarked our solver and found out that it, unsurprisingly, loses to the state of the art of Sudoku solvers. Since
What are we really doing?
This incredible mathematical hat-trick is based on the paper Every positive integer is a sum of three palindromes by Javier Cilleruelo, Florian Luca and Lewis Baxter.
