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The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
Every now and then I hear some ridiculous things about the equals symbol. Some large subset of programmers—perhaps related to functional programmers, perhaps not—seem to think that = should only and ever mean “equality in the mathematical sense.” The argument usually goes, Functional programming gives us back that…
Auto-Tune — one of modern history’s most reviled inventions — was an act of mathematical genius.
How I overcame copying and modifying my own diff library from project to project by diving too deep into diff algorithms and coming out at the other end with new diff library in my hand.
wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at Philosophy.
One model to learn them all Kaiser et al., arXiv 2017 You almost certainly have an abstract conception of a banana in your head. Suppose you ask me if I’d like anything to eat. I can say the word ‘…
Use 3D to visualize matrix multiplication expressions, attention heads with real weights, and more. Matrix multiplications (matmuls) are the building blocks of today’s ML models. This note presents mm, a visualization...
People say many things about entropy: entropy increases with time, entropy is disorder, entropy increases with energy, entropy determines the arrow of time, etc.. But I have no idea what entropy is, and from what I find, neither do most other people. This is the introduction I wish I had when first told about entropy…
This idea is a complete rip off an article that appeared in Wired a little while ago and it got me thinking what would my list for Compu...
How hungover can you get? Kids blocks and Calculus!
Schnorr has claimed new factoring methods that “destroy RSA”. This should be easy to demonstrate with well known challenges.
The Dutch publisher Elsevier publishes many of the world’s best known mathematics journals, including Advances in Mathematics, Comptes Rendus, Discrete Mathematics, The European Journal of Co…
[latexpage] 本文之中文翻譯在此 Overview Trigonometry is a very essential building block to a huge portion of game math. That's why I've chosen this topic for the first tutorial of my new Gamedev Tutorials series. Having a solid understanding of basic of trigonometry can go a long way for game development. It is used…
Elliptic curves are standardized, instead of being generated like Diffie-Hellman parameters. There's good reasons!
[This post has been cross-posted to Terence Tao’s blog.] When I was around 11 I heard for the first time about Fermat’s Last Theorem. I was immediately captivated by the problem stateme…
Here’s a program roughly 0% of programmers know how to write: generate a list of random tweets, without duplication. You may think you know how to do this, but you almost assuredly don’…
MIT mathematicians and engineers have developed a mathematical model that predicts how stable a knot is, based on several key properties, including the number of crossings involved, and the direction in which the rope segments twist as the knot is pulled tight.
I put together a list and explained why they are important.
A visual, interactive guide to what bloom filters are, when you would use them, and how they work.
Even after the Snowden revelations, there remained at least one big mystery about what the NSA was doing and how. The NSA’s classified 2013 budget request mentioned, as a priority item, R…
Reflections on the Summer of Math Exposition
Every time I want to quickly understand something about an advanced type system or programming language concept I get lost when I see something like this on Wikipedia:
If you’ve done any 3D programming, you’ve likely encountered the zoo of techniques and representations used when working with 3D rotations. Some of them are better than others, depending on the situation.
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In machine learning, the term manifold is thrown around a lot—in fact, there’s even a branch of machine learning dealing with learning the structure of manifolds. Said branch is aptly named manifold learning . Inspired by fantastic visualizations of shapelet mining algorithms , this post aims to give a visual…
A walkthrough of 46 lines of code that render a 3D ASCII donut using signed distance functions.
