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Down with Determinants (1995)
This paper was published in the American Mathematical Monthly 102 (1995), 139-154.
Topics /
Math & Algorithms
The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
1622
Don't bet on the most likely winner
It's all relative
1623
Three Meanings of E=mc²
It’s so much more than mass-energy equivalence; it’s the key to unlocking the quantum Universe.
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World's shortest explanation of Gödel's theorem
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Hotelling’s Law (2011)
by Andrew Boyd Today, we meet in the middle. 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.
1628
Unparalleled Misalignments
This is a list of Unparalleled Misalignments, pairs of non-synonymous phrases where the words in one phrase are each synonyms of the words in the other. I've maintained this list since 2018; attributions (when known) can be seen on hover.
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Experiment with Penrose Tilings and other patterns
Create And Share Mathematical Tiling Patterns
1631
Faster convergence for diffusion models
Representation Alignment for Generation: Training Diffusion Transformers Is Easier Than You Think
1632
2D Terrain generation using midpoint displacement
Today I will present how to implement in Python a simple yet effective algorithm for proceduraly generating 2D landscapes. It is called Midpoint Displacement (or Diamond-square algorithm,…
1633
Why Data Structures Matter: left, right folds, btrees
Our experience on Day 0 of JPR11 yielded a nice example of the need to choose an appropriate implementation of an abstract concept. As I mentioned in the previous post, we experimented with Michael…
1634
Learning to Play the Chaos Game
I, Thomasina Coverly, have found a truly wonderful method whereby all the forms of nature must give up their numerical secrets and draw themselves through number alone…
1635
Nearly all binary search and merge sort implementations are broken (2006)
Posted by Joshua Bloch, Software EngineerI remember vividly Jon Bentley's first Algorithms lecture at CMU, where he asked all of us incoming Ph.D. ...
1636
PageRank explained
Picture this, the year is 1996. You find yourself frustrated with the incumbent search engines like AltaVista, which primarily does a content-based search (it'll give you an article on "Hotels for Chickens" if you search "Hotels" because the word matches). There's gotta be a better way, right? Well, in hindsight, of…
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The ABC conjecture has still not been proved
Five years ago, Cathy O’Neil laid out a perfectly cogent case for why the (at that point recent) claims by Shinichi Mochizuki should not (yet) be regarded as constituting a proof of the ABC conjecture. I have nothing further to add on the sociological aspects of mathematics discussed in that post, but I just wanted to…
1639
The Myers diff algorithm: part 1
If you enjoy this article, I have published a book explaining the internals of Git through implementation: Building Git .
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Abstract algebra for developers and people who hate math
Hi. I think math is really cool, but, most people (sadly) don't think so. This includes many programmers who in fact enjoy many of the sam...
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Visualizing Bayes Theorem (2009)
I recently came up with what I think is an intuitive way to explain Bayes’ Theorem. I searched in google for a while and could not find any article that explains it in this particular way.
1642
Review: The Book of Why
The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect is a collaborative effort aimed at a general audience by Judea Pearl , a professor of computer science at UCLA, and Dana Mackenzie , a science writer. As a medical student with a laughably poor formal education in statistics, I believe I qualify as a card-carrying…
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Building a Regex Engine in Fewer Than 40 Lines of Code
A blog about programming and modern web development, particularly Node.js and React
1645
Hash Functions all the way down
Update! I tested more hash functions in a follow-up post. See More Hash Function Tests .
1646
Why EdDSA held up better than ECDSA against Minerva
"Minerva attack can recover private keys from smart cards, cryptographic libraries" , says the ZDNet headline. "The Czech team found a problem in the ECDSA and EdDSA algorithms used by the Atmel Toolbox crypto library to sign cryptographic operations on Athena IDProtect cards."
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Zero Zero
I've been thinking about something that we always did junior year when I was on my high school soccer team. When we'd score a goal, we reali...
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Faster Than Dijkstra?
Does a new algorithm that improves on Dijkstra'a classic one actually deliver a practical benefit for networking?
1649
When Double Precision Is Not Enough
Using greater than double precision to calculate the eigenvalues of the lesp matrix.
1650
Why multi-armed bandit algorithm is not "better" than A/B testing
Learn about the basics of multi armed bandit testing & algorithms, the difference b/w multi-armed bandit testing and A/B testing, its application in the real world.