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The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 164 posts.
Deep convolutional networks have become a popular tool for image generation and restoration. Generally, their excellent performance is imputed to their ability to learn realistic image priors from a large number of example images. In this paper, we show that, on the contrary, the structure of a generator network is…
New British train station design identified as cellular automata rule 30. Generating rule-based patterns. And a website that lets you try it yourself.
Ranked a top 100 research university, VCU is a place where discovery and creativity go hand in hand. Located in downtown Richmond, Virginia, its more than 200 programs emphasize hands-on learning, creativity and engaging in the world around us.
So I have been working on Miegakure for a long time now, and I have created and accumulated many cool 4D things of all sorts. I think it’s about time that I share some of them, so…
Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov was one of the giants of 20th-century mathematics. I’ve always found it amazing that the same man was responsible both for establishing the foundations of …
While I was writing the Wolfenstein 3D book [1] , I wanted to demonstrate how much of a handicap it was to work without floating points. My attempts at understanding floating points using canonical [2] articles [3] were met with resistance from my brain. I tried to find a different way. Something far from $(-1)^S *…
In this essay, we are going to look at recursive algorithms, and how sometimes, we can organize an algorithm so that it resembles the data structure it manipulates, and organize a data structure so that it resembles the algorithms that manipulate it.
This HTML version of Think Bayes is provided for convenience, but it is not the best format for the book. In particular, some of the math symbols are not rendered correctly.
A detailed explanation of Bézier curves, and how to do the many things that we commonly want to do with them.
For those who just want the survey itself, not the backstory, it’s here. (Note: Partly because of the feedback I’ve gotten on this blog, it’s now expanded to 121 pages!) Upda…
I had to get there eventually. I had a blog post called “I Wrote a Fast Hashtable” and another blog post called “I Wrote a Faster Hashtable.” Now I finally wrote the fastest…
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
A data-driven exploration of how the Hacker News ranking algorithm works.
During some random discussion with my colleague today, I rediscovered an experiment I did quite some years ago: MP3 compression of image data. This is, feed raw 8-bit-per-pixel grayscale image data into an MP3 encoder, let it compress it, and decode the MP3 file again. After some conversion (the decoder will always…
Reinforcement Learning
Introduction / Warning Link to heading Any traditional introductory statistics course will teach students the definitions of modes, medians and means. But, because introductory courses can’t assume that students have much mathematical maturity, the close relationship between these three summary statistics can’t be…
A description of ECC without using advanced math
Principal component analysis (PCA) is a technique used to emphasize variation and bring out strong patterns in a dataset. It's often used to make data easy to explore and visualize.
Applying Principal Component Analysis to a data-set of short electronic music loops
This week I took a crack at writing a branchless UTF-8 decoder: a function that decodes a single UTF-8 code point from a byte stream without any if statements, loops, short-circuit operators, or other sorts of conditional jumps. You can find the source code here along with a test suite and benchmark:
Many problems of todays world require multiple decisions made throughout the lifetime of the problem. Choices are made based upon information, including previous decisions made in the problem. This article looks at how Dynamic Programming can be applied to help solve these problems in an efficient manner.
Recently, while browsing Twitter, I saw a few machine learning researchers post about an incident at one of their big conferences (NIPS) in…
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
