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A Pretty Good Mathematical Model of Perfectionism
I struggle with perfectionism. Well, not so much “struggle with” — I’m f*cking great at it. It comes naturally. There are some upsides, but perfectionism is also associated …
Topics /
Math & Algorithms
The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 2,391 posts.
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Ten Years of Purely Functional Data Structures (2008)
In 1998, I published a book called Purely Functional Data Structures . Ten years later, the book is still selling well. (Every time I get ...
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Neural ODE's: Understanding how they model data
In this blogpost I explore how ODE’s can be used to solve data modelling problems. I take a deep dive into the data modelling problem at hand and present ODE...
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How to assign partial credit on an exam of true-false questions?
Note: the following is a record of some whimsical mathematical thoughts and computations I had after doing some grading. It is likely that the sort of problems discussed here are in fact well studi…
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A railroad simulation using discrete event simulation
In our previous post, we introduced how to utilize Discrete Event Simulation (DES) in PicoLisp. Now, let's explore another application: a railroad model…
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Understanding deep learning requires re-thinking generalization
Understanding deep learning requires re-thinking generalization Zhang et al., ICLR’17 This paper has a wonderful combination of properties: the results are easy to understand, somewhat surpri…
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How to make a Smith chart
Deriving the basic mathematical properties of the Smith chart from electrical engineering
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Algorithmic surrealism: A slow-motion guide to high-frequency trading
Please note: Part 1 of this essay appeared in the Feb 2015 edition of Contributoria . It is published and modified here under a...
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Deriving the Reddit Formula
A few things about Reddit’s hot formula have always bothered me. The formula has obviously been a success when it comes to setting the Internet on fire, but I have to wonder:
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Fibonacci Flim-Flam.
physics, history of science, pseudoscience, hoaxes, writing, education, skepticisism, humor, quotes, illusions, 3d stereo photography.
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Fast and easy Levenshtein distance using a trie (2011)
<img src="http://stevehanov.ca/blog/images/acer.jpg"/> If you have a web site with a search function, you will rapidly realize that most mortals are terrible typists. Many searches contain mispelled words, and users will expect these searches to magically work. This magic is often done using levenshtein distance. In…
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The essence of Reed-Solomon coding
Let’s say we want to store some data on multiple drives, so that we can recover from drive failures.
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Diffusion models explained simply
Transformer-based large language models are relatively easy to understand. You break language down into a finite set of “tokens” (words or sub-word components…
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The Soviet license plate game and Kolmogorov complexity
Physicist Lev Landau used to play a mental game with Soviet license plates [1]. The plates had the form of two digits, a dash, two more digits, and some letters. Rules of the game His game was to apply high school math operators to the numbers on both side of the dash so that the
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Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking
A core component of making great decisions is understanding previous decisions. If we don’t understand how we got “here,” we run the risk of making things much worse.
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Bitwise Division
Integer division is expensive. Much more expensive than multiplication. Much, much more expensive than addition. If you’re trying to make some integer operations really fast it’s bad news if you need to do division.
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John Coltrane's Tone Circle
An article about the John Coltrane Tone Circle, a 5-octave Circle of Fifths and a double-ring Hexatonic Circle as well. Interpretation, explanation ...
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Finding Mona Lisa in the Game of Life
Using a SAT solver to find Game of Life states that turn into pictures.
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Bloom Filters by example
A Bloom filter is a data structure designed to tell you, rapidly and memory-efficiently, whether an element is present in a set.
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