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Z-order curve usage to decrease dimensionality to 1
Personal blog about system engineering and devops
Topics /
Math & Algorithms
The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 164 posts.
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Beyond public key encryption
One of the saddest and most fascinating things about applied cryptography is how little cryptography we actually use. This is not to say that cryptography isn’t widely used in industry —…
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On Melissa O’Neill’s PCG random number generator
Computers often need random numbers. Most times, random numbers are not actually random... in the sense that they are the output of a mathematical function that is purely deterministic. And it is not even entirely clear what "really random" would mean. It is not clear that we live in a randomized universe... it seems…
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Empirical Bayes for multiple sample sizes
The James-Stein Estimator with unequal variances
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The beauty of mixed-radix bases
On the relationship between mixed-radix bases and array indexing
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Multiplying and dividing with Hindu-Arabic numerals and with Roman ones
Last Sunday the eminent British historian of the twentieth century, Richard Evans, tweeted the following: Let’s remember we use Arabic numerals – 1, 2, 3 etc. Try dividing MCMLXVI by XX…
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Recognizing when two arithmetic expressions are essentially the same
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Two-part Rubik's algorithms
When Rubik’s Cube first appeared decades ago, I jumped on it. I bought one, and spent an entire summer fiddling with it. Over that summer, I developed a solving technique that has stuck with me. My technique is not the fastest; that was never the goal. My algorithms make sense to me because they are constructed, and…
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Papers I like (part 2)
Continued from part 1. Once I was about a thousand words into describing background for GEMM, it became pretty clear that it made more sense to group the numerical math papers into one post, so her…
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Colorized Math Equations
Years ago, while working on an explanation of the Fourier Transform, I found this diagram: Most ideas aren't inherently confusing, but their technical…
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The Aggregate Magic Algorithms (2015)
There are lots of people and places that create and collect algorithms of all types ( here are a few WWW sites). Unfortunately, in building systems hardware and software, we in The Aggregate often have found it necessary to do relatively obscure low-level things very efficiently. Many of the tricks we've devised or…
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The Patriot Missile Failure
On February 25, 1991, during the Gulf War, an American Patriot Missile battery in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, failed to track and intercept an incoming Iraqi Scud missile. The Scud struck an American Army barracks, killing 28 soldiers and injuring around 100 other people. A report of the General Accounting office…