Topics /
The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 163 posts.
An interactive exploration of quadtrees. Start with brute-force spatial search, build recursive space partitioning step by step, then use it for point lookups, range queries, nearest-neighbor search, collision detection, and image compression.
On building Mr. Baby Paint, a radically simple co-op drawing app for toddlers & accidentally discovering a flood-fill cellular automata, plus developing pixel-fattening algorithms for bitmap fonts.
NB: The title of this post is an intentional clickbait. Even though I do stand for its statement, a more honest one would be something like: It's NOT OK to compare floating-points using epsilons.
By the time I got out of bed yesterday, I had three people ask me if I'd seen the OpenAI announcement that the Partition Principle does not (...)
[This is a guest post by Thomas Hales. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] Mathematicians have been weighing in on what they value ab…
[This is a guest post by Rikab Gambhir. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] First, they came for the artists, and I did not speak out…
What is so special about the number 19?
Copyright (C) 2010-2012, Dell, Inc . You are permitted to copy and distribute material from this book provided (1) any material you distribute includes this license, (2) the material is not modified, and (3) you do not charge a fee or require any other considerations for copies or for any works that incorporate…
Stripe Across is a grog. We hope you enjoy it.
How TurboQuant compresses the KV cache without losing accuracy, and what that could mean for memory stocks
[This is a guest post by Karthik C. S., Amit Sahai, and Jie Xue. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] This is a good time for mathemat…
In recent months there has been a proliferation of AI-generated proofs of various old and new results, some of which have been formalized in the proof assistant language Lean. However, checking tha…
I recently saw an interesting YouTube video by “Physics for the Birds”. The main video is about matrixes, but he used flags to explain some of the operations on matrixes:
Monte Carlo simulations (or methods ) is the technique of applying randomness and the Law of large numbers to the solution of various scientific and engineering problems. One of its first documented uses was by Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann for nuclear weapon simulations after WWII [1] .
What statistics can teach us about observing 3 deaths at Burning Man in 2026.
Another interesting way to graphically derive the Golden Ratio using an equilateral triangle inscribed in a circle and the chord which passes through the midpoints of the sides of the equilateral triangle.
Why the HJB is Bellman's equation in continuous time, why continuous time matters, and how to solve the resulting control problem with neural policy iteration.
We have been using Signals in production for years via several modern front-end frameworks like Solid, Vue, and others, but few of us are able to explain how they work internally. I wanted to dig into it, especially diving deep into the push-pull based algorithm, the core mechanism behind their reactivity.
Interactive ternary chart of citrus ancestry
[This is a guest post by Álvaro Lozano-Robledo. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] TL;DR: Keep calm and carry on studying math. I wo…
[This is a guest post by the Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] We would …
A deep dive on flow maps.
[This is a guest post by Silvia De Toffoli and Eamon Duede. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] Silvia De Toffoli (University School …
When developing software to run in a Unix environment, you will often be able to use the same system features and benefit from good developer tools, regardless of the particular platform you're working on, as most processors will provide a rich instruction set and virtual memory, among other things.
The missing chapter of Hacker's Delight
Foundations: Games, Rationality, and Traps In organizations, strategies and execution are interdependent. Outcomes depend not just on what you do, but on what others do, and what they expect you to…
Since AlphaZero, lc0-style chess engines have been trained with RL. Specifically, you have the engine (search + model) play itself a bunch of times, and train the model to predict the outcome of the game.
Ok, this one is really best explained with a visualiser:
Nicholas Polson has, by my count using his SSRN page, already written 258 working papers in 2026 alone. He’s already written (or at least published to SSRN), six papers today, August 26, 2026.
Jim Calabro
