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The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 163 posts.
Mathematical research traditionally involves a small number of professional mathematicians working closely on difficult problems. However, I have long believed that there is a complementary way to …
One bad thing about archeologists is that some of the successful ones get a big head. People used to think the Olmecs, who made these colossal stone heads, were contemporary with the Mayans. But in…
Classical CPU architecture is a poor choice for performing matrix-oriented computations. Developers have to spend much effort to create efficient algorithms even for the problems appearing trivial on the surface. Matrix transpose is probably the most striking representative of such problems. It exposes numerous…
[This is a guest post by Kate Stange and Edmund Harriss. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] In January a group of mathematicians, hi…
Let me tell you about a language. But if you wish to go play instead go here. It's going to get a little abstract below. There is a Canvas to Compose Upon The canvas is a square with the largest circle that has a radius of ρ. There are
On efficient algorithms, the exponential time hypothesis, and losing the plot.
<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…
Chess is a lot trickier than it looks. It has so many rules: castling, en passant, pawn promotion, pinning, the discovered check, and the de...
A closer look at the tesseract and the ways we can render it on the screen.
Actually building floating point from scratch!
An illustrated guide that starts from the basics, explains the Jacobian Conjecture, and follows what happened to it in July 2026.
Having played both parts in the kabuki play that is employee-employer matchmaking, I feel the way we play it is a zero-sum game. I wish it were not so. When this post started life in 2024, as a wall of text chat message, it was brutal out there, on both sides of the software industry interview table. The ZIRP had…
In this post I’m going to cover a neat technique for rendering regions of fog with varying density. I’ll start by covering some of the basic principles behind fog rendering and a few co…
