Topics /

Math & Algorithms

The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.

Any year
784

Practical Reed-Solomon for Programmers

Recently I was doing some work decoding the new Galileo High Accuracy Service data. In short, this new service will allow Galileo (“European GPS”) users to achieve decimeter-level accuracy, which is nice. This “HAS” data is transmitted highly redundantly by making good use of Reed-Solomon encoding. To work with this…

791

Kill Math

The power to understand and predict the quantities of the world should not be restricted to those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract symbols.

792

When Bloom filters don't bloom

Last month finally I had an opportunity to use Bloom filters. I became fascinated with the promise of this data structure, but I quickly realized it had some drawbacks. This blog post is the tale of my brief love affair with Bloom filters.

794

Probabilistic Filters By Example

Probablistic filters are high-speed, space-efficient data structures that support set-membership tests with a one-sided error. These filters can claim that a given entry is definitely not represented in a set of entries, or might be represented in the set. That is, negative responses are conclusive, whereas positive…

797

The Q, K, V Matrices

At the core of the attention mechanism in LLMs are three matrices: Query, Key, and Value. These matrices are how transformers actually pay attention to different parts of the input. In this write-up, we will go through the construction of these matrices from the ground up.

807

A study of musical scales (2017)

PREFACE. This essay was written in 2009. Since then, a few errata have been corrected and I embedded the youtube videos, but there have been no substantial additions. I think it still holds up fairly well, but if I were to rewrite it today, I would change some things. My main regret is using the criteria of maximum…