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The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 70 posts.
Ever wondered how an Anti Aircraft Missile works? A plane can move at different speeds and altitudes, so how do you know when to fire your missile? Well you need to know two things: where the aircr…
An “optimizer” should really be called an “improver”, and a “superoptimizer” should be called an “optimizer” 🙂
The short, simple answer used in calculus courses is that a real number is a point on the number line . That's not the whole truth, but it is adequate for the needs of freshman calculus. The freshman calculus course (at most universities nowadays) follows the 17th century style of Newton and Leibniz, emphasizing…
Mathematical mistake/error-rates limit our understanding of rare risks and ability to defend against them.
A few days ago was the anniversary of the beginning of the Cost of Knowledge boycott of Elsevier. It seems a good moment to take stock of what the boycott has achieved and to think about what progr…
Here’s a followup to last month’s post about Penrose Tiling in Obfuscated Python. The Mandelbrot set is a traditional favorite among authors of obfuscated code. You …
The key detail to understand about the work in the Joux papers is that it is limited to solving discrete logarithm problems over fields of small characteristic . As interesting as the work is, mathematically, it should not be a great surprise to cryptographers: We've known for over a decade that small-characteristic…
Bayes’ theorem was the subject of a detailed article. The essay is good, but over 15,000 words long — here’s the condensed version for Bayesian newcomers like…
