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The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 2,391 posts.
Problem: Show that all horses are of the same color. “Solution”: We will show, by induction, that for any set of $ n$ horses, every horse in that set has the same color. Suppose $ n=1$, this is obviously true. Now suppose for all sets of $ n$ horses, every horse in the set has the same color. Consider any set $ H$ of…
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…
By Michael Nielsen, November 23, 2019
Robert Vanderbei has written a beautiful series of articles and talks about a method for finding the radius of the earth based on a single photograph of a sunset over a large, calm lake.
A dimension is a physical quantity that can be measured, while a unit is a specific amount of a physical quantity. For example, time is a dimension, which can be measured in temporal units such as hours or seconds.
The boolean satisfiability problem (“SAT” for short) is arguably the most famous NP-complete problem in theoretical computer science. According to Wikipedia, it is “the problem of determining if there exists an interpretation that satisfies a given Boolean formula ”; or, in simpler terms, if there is at least one…
Visualizations and techniques for different maze generation algorithms.
The following Python function computes the Fibonacci sequence , without loops, recursion or floating point arithmetic:
Ok, this one is really best explained with a visualiser:
Database queries are a pretty surprisingly powerful tool that can solve seemingly intractable problems.
Can high school students really learn algebraic geometry? And what could it teach us about mathematics education?
[Photo by Alejandra Mavroski.] Myrtle called it The article that launched a thousand posts…, and counting comments on this and several other blogs, that may not be too much of an exaggeration…
It is the intelligent analysis of information that would be critical in a decade from now.
These days, the most common question I get goes something like this: A decade ago, you told people that scalable quantum computing wasn’t imminent. Now, though, you claim it plausibly is immi…
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.
The **Gaussian distribution**, or **normal distribution** is a key subject in statistics, machine learning, physics, and pretty much any other field that deals with data and probability.
My journey from building cricket bots to building “wind tunnels” with my collaborators — and finding the answer hidden in geometry.
Your security and privacy on the Internet (to the extent that such quaint notions still have meaning) depend on the difficulty of factoring certain large numbers. For example, take this 1,024-bit integer:
A blog about signals, programming, music, and other stuff.
An explanation of how the quantum search algorithm works, & introduction to the design of quantum algorithms
Jim Calabro
Generalized data structure synthesis Loncaric et al., ICSE’18 Many systems have a few key data structures at their heart. Finding correct and efficient implementations for these data structur…
Weblog/homepage for a developer/engineer/artist. DIY projects, opinions and code.
In this blog post, we explore Spotify's journey from using the Fisher-Yates shuffle to a more sophisticated song shuffling algorithm that prevents clustering of tracks by the same artist. We then connect this challenge to Fibonacci hashing, and propose a novel, evenly distributed artist shuffling method.
