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Topics /
Math & Algorithms
The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 184 posts.
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A sane introduction to maximum likelihood estimation and maximum a posteriori
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…
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Neural Networks Are Essentially Polynomial Regression (2018)
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…
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A Million Digits of Pi in 9 Lines of JavaScript
"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.
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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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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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A Good Year for “A Programmer’s Introduction to Mathematics”
A year ago today I self-published “A Programmer’s Introduction to Mathematics” (PIM). In this short note I want to describe the success it’s had, summarize the complaints of some readers and the praise of others, and outline what’s next. Since publication PIM has sold over 11,000 copies. A rough chart showing the…
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Introduction to Bayesian Filter
Restate Some Basic Concepts and Math in Bayesian Filter
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Everything Is Correlated
Anthology of sociology, statistical, or psychological papers discussing the observation that all real-world variables have non-zero correlations and the implications for statistical theory such as ‘null hypothesis testing’.
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Understanding SAT by Implementing a Simple SAT Solver in Python (2014)
SAT is often described as the "mother of all NP-complete problems." This post goes over what SAT is and why it is considered to be so important. A simple SAT solver is implemented using Python in the process.
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Exploring Mathematics with Matplotlib and Python
Data Visualization can be a great tool for mathematical exploration and experimentation. In this article, I show you an example using Matplotlib and Python.
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“The Book of Why” by Pearl and Mackenzie
Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie sent me a copy of their new book, “The book of why: The new science of cause and effect.”
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What is ergodicity? (2016)
Why are election polls often inaccurate? Why is racism wrong? Why are your assumptions often mistaken? The answers to all these questions and to many others have a lot to do with the non-ergodicity…
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The Essence of Datalog (2018)
Mistral Contrastin's thought bubble, blog, and personal revelations.
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Quantum Computing for the Curious
Presented in an experimental mnemonic medium that makes it almost effortless to remember what you read
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P = NP Proofs: Advice to claimers
Advice to claimers The Claimers The Claimers are a gang on the hit AMC television series The Walking Dead. They are the main antagonists in the second half of the zombie-apocalypse show’s Sea…
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Why does F = ma?
By Michael Nielsen, November 23, 2019
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How the quantum search algorithm works
An explanation of how the quantum search algorithm works, & introduction to the design of quantum algorithms
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Taleb is wrong about IQ
Investigation of Talebs claims about IQ using real data.
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The lat/lon floating point delusion
This morning I had a shower for 6.11686718 minutes. For breakfast I had 189.41576911 ml of fruit juice, followed by 75.24902503 g of muesli topped with 36.55668786 ml of milk and 15.44171338 g of yogurt.
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Why EdDSA held up better than ECDSA against Minerva
"Minerva attack can recover private keys from smart cards, cryptographic libraries" , says the ZDNet headline. "The Czech team found a problem in the ECDSA and EdDSA algorithms used by the Atmel Toolbox crypto library to sign cryptographic operations on Athena IDProtect cards."
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Einsum Is All You Need – Einstein Summation in Deep Learning (2018)
Tim Rocktäschel — Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of Recursive; Professor of AI at UCL. Artificial General Intelligence, Open-Endedness, and Recursive Self-Improvement.
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A Brutal Look at Balanced Parentheses, Computing Machines, and Pushdown Automata
As discussed in Pattern Matching and Recursion , a well-known programming puzzle is to write a function that determines whether a string of parentheses is “balanced,” i.e. each opening parenthesis has a corresponding closing parenthesis, and the parentheses are properly nested.
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Playing with model trains and calling it graph theory
You’ve probably played with model trains, for instance with something like the Brio set shown below.1 And if you’ve built a layout with a model train set, yo...
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Trying to improve buffet lines using simulations
I have suspected for years that the classic buffet line system is a deeply flawed method, so I decide to simulate different methods to find out better ways
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Deep Learning in the Real World: Dealing with Non-Differentiable Loss Functions
Over the past few years, deep learning has been taking by storm many industries. From voice recognition to image analysis and synthesis, neural networks have turned out to be very efficient at solv…
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