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The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 2,391 posts.
If you work with anything that can be modeled mathematically, you most likely know that many things you work on can be expressed with algebras. However, if you are not a graduate of a computer science course or similar you might not know how ubiquitous they are and how often you rely on some of them. (And I don’t mean…
Dual_EC_DRBG is an pseudo-random number generator promoted by NIST in NIST SP 800-90A and created by NSA. This algorithm is problematic because it has been made mandatory by the FIPS norm (and should be implemented in every FIPS approved software) and some vendors even promoted this algorithm as first source of…
Random numbers are critical for cryptography: for encryption keys, random authentication challenges, initialization vectors, nonces, key-agreement schemes, generating prime numbers and so on. Break the random-number generator, and most of the time you break the entire security system. Which is why you should worry…
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.
From Multi-Head to Latent Attention: The Evolution of Attention Mechanisms What is attention? In any autoregressive model, the prediction of the future tokens is based on some preceding context …
Discovering Atari Games in Randomly Generated Data
Harvard Magazine printed the following chart that confirms a trend in undergraduate majors that we all know about: students are favoring STEM majors at the expense of humanities.
It is frustrating to learn about principles such as maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), maximum a posteriori (MAP) and Bayesian inference in general. The main reason behind this difficulty, in my opinion, is that many tutorials assume previous knowledge, use implicit or inconsistent notation, or are even addressing a…
You may be interested in my new arXiv paper, joint work with Xi Cheng, an undergraduate at UC Davis (now heading to Cornell for grad school); Bohdan Khomtchouk, a post doc in biology at Stanford; a…
Faizan Muhmmad is a Software Engineer at Google
Look at this orange: Now look at this orange: It’s the same orange. But, look how much more orange it looks with the red mesh on top of it: If you buy bags of oranges (at least at many places in the US), they frequently come in this red mesh bag. This bag makes the oranges look more orange. Oranger. Here’s what that…
In the post on matrices in Codea I mentionned that an affine transformation (things like rotation, scaling, translation) ℝ 3 → ℝ 3 could be specified by giving four vectors. In this post I want to examine that a little more closely for the special case of a rotation. That is to say: how can I encode a rotation in ℝ 3…
My friend Lindsey Kuper recently remarked on Twitter that spreadsheets were commonly understood to be the most widely used dataflow program...
In every day life we all do our calculations, whether for the taxman, our purchases, paying the household bills or in some academic discipline, using the place value decimal number system. It consi…
I’ve been reading Pearl’s Causal Inference in Statistics , and one of the exercises poses this problem:
A bloom filter is one of those data structures you are probably already aware of, or have at least heard about. For those looking for a simple recap, they are a probabilistic data structure which can …
Curiosity killed the cat I've always been amazed by early game developers. Unlike today, they had to bend and twist software to its extre...
Through a couple of different avenues I wandered, yet again, down a rabbit hole leading to the topic of this post. The first avenue was through my main focus on a particular machine learning topic th
When I found out that the Computer History Museum has a working IBM 1401 computer [1] , I wondered if it could generate the Mandelbrot frac...
I was looking at my Google Calendar tonight and I realized that this software was encouraging a way of thinking about time which has signifi...
The subject of game AI generally begins with so-called perfect information games. These are turn-based games where the players have no information hidden from each other and there is no element of chance in the game mechanics (such as by rolling dice or drawing cards from a shuffled deck). Tic Tac Toe, Connect 4…
We recently made a Polylog video about a nonstandard way of understanding the P vs NP problem. As usual, our goal was to present an underrated idea in a broadly understandable way, while being slig…
"Big integers" have landed in Javascript, at least in Firefox and Chrome. One of my favorite things to do with high precision arithmetic is to calculate digits of π. From scratch, that is, using only addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
IBM Slapped the Buzzwords 'AI Interpretability' on Generalized Continued Fractions and their Series Transformations and was awarded a Patent
Draft: v1.1 | Posted: 1/9/2018 | Updated: 1/29/2018 | confidence of success: 85% | estimated time to completion: 1/15/2018 | importance: High
