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The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
The most recent Smarter Every Day (#172) explains a phenomenon that results from rolling shutter . You’ve likely seen this effect in some of your own digital photographs. When a CMOS digital camera captures a picture, it reads one row of the sensor at a time. If the subject of the picture is a fast-moving object…
Monoids are a pretty interesting concept in software development. Monoids are everywhere. Monoids are simple yet powerful. And Monoids have a lot to teach us about software, in particular about com…
However, no experiment with actual coin-tosses has been done to investigate whether the predicted effect is empirically observed. Diaconis et al noted, correctly, that to estimate the probability with a S.E. of 0.1% would require 250,000 tosses, but this seems unnecessarily precise. Let's work with numbers of tosses…
We describe a set of very unusual dice, and a two player game where you will always have the advantage. You can even teach your opponent how the game works, yet still win again! Finally, we will describe a new game for three players where you can expect to beat both players at the same time! Watch James Grime and…
How Stephen Wolfram helped with the theory of interstellar travel, communication with aliens and questions from the actors in “Arrival”, the movie.
In some organizations, earnest efforts to be “data-driven” devolve into a culture of false certainty in which the influence of metrics is dictated not by the...
A trio of Harvard researchers has developed a new 3-D pictorial language for mathematics with potential as a tool across a wide spectrum, from pure math to physics.
In 2007, I met Philip Wadler at a conference, who mentioned to me that he wanted to teach lambda calculus to his eight-year-old children.
So this is a bit of a deviation from my normal MATLAB oriented posts. In-fact MATLAB was not used once in this analysis! I've been followi...
This is lobste.rs comment as an article, so expect even more abysmal editing than usual.
Runescape has been a game near and dear to my heart since I was a child. Though I do not actively play anymore, it still functions as an interesting programming project substrate. Most recently, I created a bot that automatically executes trades on the Grand Exchange in order to conduct market making via common…
In recent months there has been a proliferation of AI-generated proofs of various old and new results, some of which have been formalized in the proof assistant language Lean. However, checking tha…
Every now and then the orbital motion of a body doesn’t match our prediction. And that might lead to interesting discoveries.
The source code implementing the projections below is only available on request for a small fee. It includes a demo application and an invitation to convert an image of your choice to verify the code does what you seek. For more information please contact the author .
About six years ago on this blog, I started thinking about trying to make a web-based game based around high-school algebra, and ended up using Scratch to write a short but playable puzzle game in …
We’ve been writing a bit about some odd tail behavior in the Fivethirtyeight election forecast, for example that it was giving Joe Biden a 3% chance of winning Alabama (which seemed high), it was displaying Trump winning California as in “the range of scenarios our model thinks is possible” (which didn’t seem right)…
Jon McLoone on why we learn times tables, whether knowing them to 12 is better than to 10, approximation multiplication, & education recommendations
[This is a guest post by Karthik C. S., Amit Sahai, and Jie Xue. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] This is a good time for mathemat…
Machine learning systems thrive on finding and exploiting statistical regularities. This is why they can't do causal reasoning.
Investigation to find a better rational approximation for pi. Can we get out more digits than we put in? Chance to win a prize if you can do bette
CMU researchers say getting political parties to equitably draw congressional district boundaries can be as easy as sharing cake.
Anyone who has taken even a cursory glance at the vast menagerie of programming languages should have at least heard the phrase "Hindley-Milner". F#, one of the most promising languages ever to emerge from the forbidding depths of Microsoft Research, makes use of this mysterious algorithm, as do Haskell, OCaml and ML…
For Pycon 2025, I created a poster exploring vector embedding models, which you can download at full-size . In this post, I'll translate ...
