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The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 151 posts.
Continuations are the least understood of all control-flow constructs. This lack of understanding (or awareness) is unfortunate, given that continuations permit the programmer to implement powerful language features and algorithms, including exceptions, backtracking search, threads, generators and coroutines.
It's all relative
I, Thomasina Coverly, have found a truly wonderful method whereby all the forms of nature must give up their numerical secrets and draw themselves through number alone…
To continue our post-voting, pre-vote-counting assessment (see also here and here ), I want to separate two issues which can get conflated: 1. Problems with poll-based election forecasts.
Computer Science, Machine Learning, Programming, Art, Mathematics, Philosophy, and Short Fiction
As part of social distancing efforts to slow down the spread of the novel coronavirus, several universities have now transitioned, or begun transitioning, to online teaching models. (My home unive…
Engineer friends often ask me: Graph Deep Learning sounds great, but are there any big commercial success stories? Is it being deployed in practical applications? Besides the obvious ones–recommendation systems at Pinterest, Alibaba and Twitter–a slightly nuanced success story is the Transformer architecture, which…
The Game of Life is based on very simple rules, but artificial neural networks struggle to learn its rules through the classic deep learning training process.
A global pandemic, apocalyptic fires, and the possible descent of the US into violent anarchy three days from now can do strange things to the soul. Bertrand Russell—and if he’d done no…
Note: this post was written for Lean 3; the latest version, Lean 4, is a very different language. Turn back the clock to 2009: a confused physics major newly infatuated with math and computer science, I enrolled in MATH 273: Numbers and Proofs at the University of Calgary. This wasn’t my first encounter with…
Unbelievably enough, it all comes back to Pythagoras.
For those who love numbers, and those who love them.
Before I go into the specifics of my record attempt, it is important for you to have some background information. Over the past few years I have been steadily acquiring server hardware to increase my knowledge of system administration and cyber security. This is not only for personal growth: it has also helped me…
[This is part one of a two-part series. The second part can be found here: Symmetries in Projective Geometric Algebra .]
Founder, Investor, Author
When it comes to hashing, sometimes 64 bit is not enough, for example, because of birthday paradox — the hacker can iterate through random $latex 2^{32}$ entities and it can be proven that wi…
When I launched bit-player.org in 2006, displaying any sort of mathematical notation on the web was torture. I would typeset an equation in LaTeX, convert the output to a JPEG image, upload the image file to a directory on the server, and embed a reference to the file in an HTML img tag. The process was cumbersome and…
Words by Rob Rix.
There is a new feature of Pages and Keynote, not mentioned in any of Apple’s publicity nor in any press coverage I’ve seen, that is really very interesting. Perhaps it will even one day prove to ha…
This is an example of an image vectorization algorithm. It shows the bilinear interpolation, polynomial approximation, differential analysis, and iterative algorithms working together to solve a practical problem
Recently, the formal methods specialist Hillel Wayne posted an interesting article discussing whether Donald Knuth was actually framed when Jon Bentley asked him to demonstrate literate programming . (Knuth came up with an 8-page long monolithic listing, whereas in a critique Doug McIlroy provided a six line shell…
Learn the meaning behind mathematical symbols used in Machine Learning using your knowledge of Python.
Here is my (extended) family tree: Everyone in the tree shares at least one common ancestor and at least one common descendant. This ...
Many theorems in mathematics are important enough that they have been proved repeatedly in surprisingly many different ways. Examples of this include the existence of infinitely many prime numbers , the evaluation of \(\zeta(2)\), the fundamental theorem of algebra (polynomials have roots), quadratic reciprocity (a…
