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The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
In this blog post, we explore Spotify's journey from using the Fisher-Yates shuffle to a more sophisticated song shuffling algorithm that prevents clustering of tracks by the same artist. We then connect this challenge to Fibonacci hashing, and propose a novel, evenly distributed artist shuffling method.
Intel released the powerful Pentium processor in 1993, establishing a long-running brand of high-performance processors. 1 The Pentium incl...
This is a from-scratch explanation of private information retrieval built using homomorphic encryption. I try to assume only a general math / computer science background. To simplify things, my explanations may not always match academic definitions. You can check out this paper or code for more.
Using transformed ellipses to estimate perspective transformations of text.
Continuations are the least understood of all control-flow constructs. This lack of understanding (or awareness) is unfortunate, given that continuations permit the programmer to implement powerful language features and algorithms, including exceptions, backtracking search, threads, generators and coroutines.
graph theory, music theory
I am proud to be among the list of 25 initial signatories — all Fields Medallists — to the declaration below, which grew out of discussions between ourselves over the last week. We have…
Get up close and personal with Schnorr and his now patent-free linear signature algorithm.
Investigation of Talebs claims about IQ using real data.
We thought we were accelerating fast enough. Turns out we weren't.
[This is a guest post by Francesco Maggi. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] Large language models (LLMs) and the research systems b…
“If you look at zero you see nothing; but look through it and you will see the world.”
Lucify.com is for sale. Contact the seller through NamePros to ask the price or make an offer. Interested in buying this domain name?
The tools of linear algebra are extremely useful when working in Euclidean space (e.g. \mathbb{R}^3 ). Wouldn’t it be great if we could apply these tools to additional mathematical constructs, such as functions and sequences? Hilbert space allows us to do exactly this - apply linear algebra to functions.
Statistical arbitrage (stat arb) is a pillar of quantitative trading that relies on mean reversion to predict the future returns of an asset. Mean reversion believes that if a stock has risen higher it’s more likely to revert in the short term which is the opposite of a momentum strategy that believes if a stock has…
Building on my previous post on sorting algorithms, I implemented the same algorithms using CUDA to explore performance improvements through parallel computing. The goal is to see how we can leverage the power of parallel computing to speed up our sorting algorithms. I went for a NVIDIA recruiting event some days ago…
Like many in operations research, my research interests often creep over into my everyday life. Since I work on scheduling issues, I get particularly concerned with everyday scheduling, to the consternation of my friends and family (“We should have left six minutes ago: transportation is now on the critical path!”)…
1) Foundational math. 2) Classical machine learning. 3) Deep learning. 4) Cutting-edge machine learning.
On your computer graphics journey, you will eventually run into some paper or code mentioning spherical harmonic functions. They are indeed a very useful tool: with just a few coefficients, they allow us to approximate a given function defined on a sphere. This can be very useful for modeling complex lighting.
How many board configurations are there in the game of 2048? Let's try to enumerate them.
Functional programming and immutability are hot right now. On one hand, this is pretty great as there’s lots of nice things about functional programming. On the other hand, people get a little overzealous and start claiming that imperative code is unnatural or that purity is always preferable to mutation. I think that…
(This was originally a sponsor talk given at PyCon 2018. Unfortunately there is no video.)
This morning I had a shower for 6.11686718 minutes. For breakfast I had 189.41576911 ml of fruit juice, followed by 75.24902503 g of muesli topped with 36.55668786 ml of milk and 15.44171338 g of yogurt.
Some reflections on an accidental Twitterstorm, the future of AI and deep learning, and what happens when you confuse a schoolbus with a…
(I'm still looking for the catchiest way to appreciate the number MMXXVI. Exercise 7.2.1.6–122 gives 1234+.5*6+789 and -1+2345*6/7+8+9 and 1+(2/3)*45*67.8-9 ; other suggestions are welcome. The most elegant that I've seen so far is a beauty that was suggested independently by Arnaud Lefebvre and by Evangelos…
