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The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 95 posts.
Pablo Picasso Simplicity and the Artist Some of my favorite of Pablo Picasso’s works are his line drawings. He did a number of them about animals: an owl, a camel, a butterfly, etc. This piece called “Dog” is on my wall: Dachshund-Picasso-Sketch (Jump to interactive demo where we recreate “Dog” using the math in this…
How do QR codes work? How much is it possible to distort one and still have it readable?
Last year, we discussed the first results of a long term effort to study the patterns found in the chords of popular songs. The reception that we got was incredibly positive, and we received a ton of great feedback. The two most common questions we’ve gotten from people have been: Our answer: Hooktheory Trends How...
Today, a witch doctor practices computer arithmetic. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them. The scene is a remote Ethiopian village in 1940. A Farmer offers his herd of 34 goats for sale…
I have been irritated that many recent introductions to machine learning/neural networks/whatever that fail to emphasise the most import trick in machine learning. Many internet resources don’t mention it, and even good textbooks often don’t drill it in to the reader the absolute criticality to success the trick is…
Here's what we can do with today's computing power (using publicly available data and the processing power of my own personal computer; I'm not relying on access to corporate computing power):
Random code snippets, projects and musings about software from Eric Kidd, a developer and occasional entrepreneur.
In 1998, I published a book called Purely Functional Data Structures . Ten years later, the book is still selling well. (Every time I get ...
A Bloom filter is a data structure designed to tell you, rapidly and memory-efficiently, whether an element is present in a set.
I hate the Pumping Lemma for regular languages. It’s a complicated way to express an idea that is fundamentally very simple, and it isn’t even a very good way to prove that a language is not regula…
Automatic differentiation is a well-studied technique for computing exact numeric derivatives. Dan Piponi has a great introduction on the subject , but to give you an overview, the idea is that you introduce an algebraic symbol such that but . Formulas involving are called dual numbers (e.g., , ) in much the same way…
In this issue: The Fallacy of Cracking Contests How to Recognize Plaintext News The Doghouse: Iomega Zip Disks Counterpane Systems News Final Report from the Commerce Department Technical Advisory Committee on Key Recovery Comments From Readers About "CRYPTO-GRAM"
Experimenting with JPEG compressing text.
Your security and privacy on the Internet (to the extent that such quaint notions still have meaning) depend on the difficulty of factoring certain large numbers. For example, take this 1,024-bit integer:
(I recently wrote a new post that you may also find interesting called Principal Component Analysis 4 Philosophers) Having been in the social sciences for a couple of weeks it seems like a large am…
If you'd rather read python than english you can go straight to the code on github: https://github.com/jminardi/volume-from-shadow
It is a wonder that we have yet to officially write about probability theory on this blog. Probability theory underlies a huge portion of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and statistics, and a number of our future posts will rely on the ideas and terminology we lay out in this post. Our first formal theory…
