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Life Is Made of Unfair Coin Flips
It’s time we did a non-pandemic related newsletter issue. So this week we’ll do something more fun. Today we’re going to talk about an interesting journal article that came out two weeks ago,…
Topics /
Math & Algorithms
The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 2,391 posts.
602
Circles do not exist
Many logos, drawings and other graphical designs have the following shape in it. What is this shape? If you thought: "Ah-ha! I'm smart and r...
603
Cache Eviction: When Are Randomized Algorithms Better Than LRU? (2014)
Once upon a time, my computer architecture professor mentioned that using a random eviction policy for caches really isn't so bad. That random eviction isn't bad can be surprising — if your cache fills up and you have to get rid of something, choosing the least recently used (LRU) is an obvious choice, since you're…
604
Alice's adventures in a differentiable wonderland
A free, self-contained introduction to neural networks and differentiable programming, from automatic differentiation to transformers, with additional chapters on advanced topics.
605
Accessible open textbooks in math-heavy disciplines
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…
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A Pragmatic Introduction to Signal Processing
A retirement project created and maintained by Tom O'Haver , Professor Emeritus , Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
608
The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem introduces an impressive result from OpenAI, who used an unreleased model to produce a resolution to the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of …
609
A statistical analysis of Rotten Tomatoes
Can Hollywood's stamp of artistic excellence still be trusted?
610
How far can you jump from a swing?
In this post I derive the physics of pumping a swing and the physics of jumping from a swing. Then, using both pieces I compute the optimal strategy of jumping from a swing to maximize the traveled distance. I propose this game as a new Olympic sport.
611
Finding Waldo in π
The SMBC comic Convert included as the “Votey button” a challenge to extract a Waldo visual from the digits of π.
612
The Recursive Universe
A few years ago I came across this video, showing a complex machine built entirely in Conway’s Game of Life:
613
Damn Cool Algorithms: Homomorphic Hashing
Posted by Nick Johnson | Filed under homomorphic-hashing , damn-cool-algorithms , fountain-codes
614
The microstructure of wealth transfer in prediction markets
Slot machines on the Las Vegas Strip return about 93 cents on the dollar. This is widely considered some of the worst odds in gambling. Yet on Kalshi, a CFTC-regulated prediction market, traders have wagered vast sums on longshot contracts with historical returns as low as 43 cents on the dollar. Thousands of…
615
Markov chain Monte Carlo without the bullshit (2015)
I have a little secret: I don’t like the terminology, notation, and style of writing in statistics. I find it unnecessarily complicated. This shows up when trying to read about Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. Take, for example, the abstract to the Markov Chain Monte Carlo article in the Encyclopedia of…
616
Collision Detection (2015)
An online book about collision detection using Processing.
617
Calculate the day of the week for any date in your head
The Doomsday Algorithm gives the day of the week for any date (and you can do it in your head)
618
Physics for Mathematicians – Introduction
A blog about math by Nic Ford
619
Damn Cool Algorithms: Cardinality Estimation
Posted by Nick Johnson | Filed under python , cardinality-estimation , damn-cool-algorithms
620
Proof-Of-Work is a Decentralized Clock
This is an explanation of the key function on Proof-of-Work in the Bitcoin blockchain. It focuses on the one feature of Proof-of-Work that is essential and shows that other features often talked about such as security are secondary side-effects, useful, but not essential. This explanation rests on illustrating a few…
621
We have proof automation now
I've long had a soft spot for dependently-typed languages like Coq Rocq and Lean. They offer the possibility of a type system capable of encoding and enforcing arbitrarily subtle invariants. The sort of thing that, in regular languages, ends up (at best) as a comment, and which quickly gets lost as the size of the…
622
Building a data compression utility in Haskell using Huffman codes
In this post we will implement a data compression program in about 150 lines of Haskell. It will use Huffman coding and handle arbitrary binary files using constant memory for encoding and decoding.
623
A tutorial quantum interpreter in 150 lines of Lisp
a personal blog
624
Faster than earcut: triangulating 3.7M map polygons in 489 ms
We published the triangulator of our map engine as earstrip, an ISC-licensed C++ and WebAssembly library. How it came to be: the ear clipper rebuilt one idea at a time and timed on 3.7 million polygons of real map data.
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Ice
Water is complicated and fascinating stuff! There are at least sixteen known crystal phases of ice, many shown in this diagram based on the work of Martin Chaplin: (Click for a larger version.) For…
627
Math Academy pulled me out of the Valley of Despair
Here’s to being a preserving student for life.
628
How to Fold a Julia Fractal
A tale of numbers that like to turn: a different look at complex numbers and the strange things they do.
629
About the supposed factoring of a 4096 bit RSA key
This blog is written by Hanno Böck. Unless noted otherwise, its content is licensed as CC0 .
630
Fast midpoint between two integers without overflow
Let us say that I ask you to find the number I am thinking about between -1000 and 1000, by repeatedly guessing a number. With each guess, I tell you whether your guess is correct, smaller or larger than my number. A binary search algorithm tries to find a value in an interval by repeating … Continue reading Fast…