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The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
While reading Real-World Cryptography , I came across the "million message attack" . This is an attack that Daniel Bleichenbacher demonstrated in 1998, which effectively broke RSA with a particular encoding function called PKCS #1 . It was only mentioned briefly, so I dug in and decided to try to understand the…
Welcome. This is the index page for a series of blog posts I’m currently writing about the D3D/OpenGL graphics pipelines as actually implemented by GPUs. A lot of this is well known among gra…
MIRI is releasing a paper introducing a new model of deductively limited reasoning: “Logical induction,” authored by Scott Garrabrant, Tsvi Benson-Tilsen,
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
We’ve trained a model to achieve a new state-of-the-art in mathematical problem solving by rewarding each correct step of reasoning (“process supervision”) instead of simply rewarding the correct final answer (“outcome supervision”). In addition to boosting performance relative to outcome supervision, process…
Dual_EC was almost certainly an NSA backdoor. Extended Random is the TLS extension that would have made it practical to exploit. Did NSA plant that one too? A look at the evidence.
The myth A few years ago I saw a StackOverflow question (but I cannot find it now): allegedly Andrew Gelman blogged that Bayesian models would not overfit and would only underfit (I also cannot find Andrew’s blog post now but I think what he meant by “Bayesian models only underfits” is that you can never fully model…
Bézier curves are a core building block of text and 2D shapes rendering. There are several approaches to rendering them, but one especially challenging problem, both mathematically and technically, is computing the distance to a Bézier curve. For quadratic curves (one control point), this is fairly accessible, but for…
An explainer for people who don't know computer science and are mildly curious
I’ve supervised a lot of great student projects in my nine years at MIT, but my inner nerdy teenager has never been as personally delighted by a project as it is right now. To…
There’s an old theory that memory is actually encoded in part in RNA. The argument is pretty simple: there’s no obvious way for all that sensory data to be captured in synapses as long …
In the last few months I taught three graduate mini-courses about string diagrams and graphical linear algebra – at Phd Open in Warsaw, a winter school in Estonia, and a graduate school in Le…
Deep dives into Cryptography and Privacy.
I recently had a problem where part of the solution was to do a series of pointer accesses that would walk around a chunk of memory in pseudo-random order. Sattolo's algorithm provides a solution to this because it produces a permutation of a list with exactly one cycle, which guarantees that we will reach every…
Data Visualization can be a great tool for mathematical exploration and experimentation. In this article, I show you an example using Matplotlib and Python.
Wykobi Tutorial
Everyone should read Leo Breiman's 2001 article, Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures . (Summary: Traditional statisticians start with a distribution. They try to identify the parameters of the distribution from data that were actually generated from it. Applied statisticians start with data. They have no idea where…
There is a certain phenomenon that seems to happen in almost every online community of user-generated content. A community is created: the ...
In a world-first experimental result, scientists at the University of Sydney have used a quantum computer to coax an atom to behave the same way as a photo-chemical process that underpins the speed of human vision and solar energy harvesting - only at speeds 100 billion times slower than in nature.
Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie sent me a copy of their new book, “The book of why: The new science of cause and effect.”
Experimenting with JPEG compressing text.
Here are ten things about numerical linear algebra that you may find surprising if you're not familiar with the field. Numerical linear algebra applies very advanced mathematics to solve problems that can be stated with high school mathematics. Practical applications often require solving enormous systems of…
