Topics /
The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
Not music nerds, obviously. I don’t know anything about music. I know there are letters but sometimes the letters have squiggles; I know an octave doubles in pitch; I know you can write a pop song with only four chords. That’s about it. The rest has always seemed completely, utterly arbitrary. Why do we have twelve…
If you aren’t used to staring at math, Poisson’s equation looks a little intimidating:
Users are rating items on your website. How do you know what the highest-rated items are?
The story starts in Crosscord, the crossword Discord server. Over 5,000 users strong, the server has emerged as a central hub for the online crossword community, a buzzing, sometimes overwhelming, sometimes delightful town square where total noobs, veteran constructors, and champion solvers alike come together to talk…
Flattening images of curled pages, as an optimization problem.
A visual proof that a2 – b2 = (a + b)(a – b). Sophie Germain wrote, “It has been said that algebra is but written geometry and geometry is but diagrammatic algebra.”
We are all having to keep revising upwards our assessments of the mathematical capabilities of large language models. I have just made a fairly large revision as a result of ChatGPT 5.5 Pro, to whi…
Sonstiges - Learn more about palindromic dates in 2020 and in the near future. 2020-02-02 (YYYMMDD) or 02.02.2020 (DDMMYYY) and others.
Despite two linear algebra classes, my knowledge consisted of "Matrices, determinants, eigen something something". Why? Well, let's try this course format:
I remember seeing once the following photo from Flickr, and having my brain melt slightly from trying to figure out what went wrong: The issue was the propeller was rotating as the camera detector 'read out', i.e. there was some motion during the exposure of the camera. This is an interesting thing to think about…
Tech Notes on Cubic Bezier Curves, Perlin Noise, and Minimal Rotation Frames
Might not be the most reliable or useful contraption but it's definitely a fun one.
New British train station design identified as cellular automata rule 30. Generating rule-based patterns. And a website that lets you try it yourself.
Switching away from radians makes code simpler, faster, and more precise.
You might have heard people say that functional programming is more academic, and real engineering is done in imperative style. I’m going to show you that real engineering is functional, and …
Vincent Chen is a student at Stanford University studying Computer Science. He is also a Research Assistant at the Stanford AI Lab. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It’s not entirely clear what level of mathematics is necessary to get started in machine learning…
A visual introduction to big O notation.
A (directed) graph is a set of nodes, connected by arrows (edges). The nodes and edges may contain data. Here are some graphs: All graphs made with graphviz (source) Graphs are ubiquitous in software engineering: Package dependencies form directed graphs, as do module imports. The internet is a graph of links between…
TLDR: read the paper and view the gallery of pretty Perl programs. In this paper, we aim to answer a long-standing open problem in the programming languages community: is it possible to smear paint on the wall without creating valid Perl?
A continuous version of Conway's Life, using floating point values instead of integers: supports many interesting phenomena such as gliders that can travel in any direction, rotating pairs of gliders, wickstretchers and the appearance of elastic tension in the 'cords' that join the blobs. Slides showing how the rule…
What percentile approximations are, how percentiles work in PostgreSQL, and calculating them efficiently on time-series data.
See how Mathematica was used to solve one of the cryptograms sent in a letter by the Zodiac Killer.
We have public schools for a reason.
Use the right tool for the job.
Compression and LLMs are trying to solve the exact same problem: predicting what comes next. Learn the fundamentals of compression and how better prediction leads to better shrinkage.
Every layer is a memory store
