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The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
I like to think there are some solid foundations to my life. I will be able to do the Monday New York Times crossword and I will not be able to do the Thursday version. My dental hygienist will not be satisfied with the amount of flossing I do. I will get my favorite spaghetti meal served on my birthday.
When NP-hardness pops up on the internet, say because some silly blogger wants to write about video games, it’s often tempting to conclude that the problem being proved NP-hard is actually very hard! “Scientists proved Super Mario is NP-hard? I always knew there was a reason I wasn’t very good at it!” Sorry, these two…
In 1582, under the inter gravissimas papal bull, the Catholic world transitioned from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar . This new calendar shortened the length of the year from 365.25 days to 365.2425 , a reduction of just 0.002% .
The intended audience for this article is undergrad students who already have a good grasp of Java, or seasoned Java developers who would like to explore an in-depth analysis of various hash table implementations that use Open Addressing. The reader should be familiar with Java generics, collections, basic data…
The abacus counting device dates back thousands of years but has, in the past century, been replaced by calculators and computers. But studies show that abacus
Data, sports, payrolls, and memes
A local alternative to backpropagation. PC-ALM trains residual MLPs up to 1000 layers, nearly matching backprop's performance despite using only layer-local dynamics. PC-ALM equips each layer with a feedback control dynamical system that distributes and propagates supervision credit throughout a network.
An operational NAND gate in Age of Empires II , built with the game's scenario editor. This one can also be built within the game in a two-player setup but it's a lot easier (so to speak) to just script it.
Studying brain scan data from individuals — not group averages — reveals key brain-function differences in children who struggle with goal-oriented tasks, a Stanford Medicine study found.
What happens inside an LLM when it tries to calculate with nothing but matrices.
GITHUB HUGGING FACE MODELSCOPE DISCORD 🚨 This model mainly supports English. We will release bilingual (English and Chinese) math models soon. Introduction Over the past year, we have dedicated significant effort to researching and enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models, with a particular focus…
In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087, a chip that made floating-point operations much faster in the IBM PC and other systems. Although the 808...
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
Stay up to speed on the rapid advancement of AI technology and the benefits it offers to humanity.
First, I’m a human typing this post. I’m not going to tell you who I am. Sure, many will say that is cowardly and fair, but I actually don’t think it would bring much value. What matters more is that I describe why, and what I did and didn’t do during the last two weeks or so with the OpenClaw agent I set up, known as…
Let’s play a game. I’m thinking of a number from 1 to 100. You guess, and I tell you whether my number is higher or lower.
1. Introduction Shortly after the death of E.W. Dijkstra (1930-2002), K.R. Apt wrote an obituary under the title Portrait of a Genius [1]. At the time it seemed to me a bit over the top. Now, with …
For mathematical insight, according to the structuralist imperative, investigate mathematical structure and consider mathematical concepts only as invariant under isomorphism.
Here are the slides of my talk “The dawn of formalized mathematics” from the 8th European Congress of Mathematics , which is taking place online and in Protorož, Slovenia, from June 20 to 26, 2021:
It breaks my heart to write this post because the puzzle in question was 1) very expensive and 2) given to me by someone very dear to me who...
The article here sums up pretty well the debacle that North American tournament Scrabble players have been faced with since the…
The mathematical field of information theory attempts to mathematically describe the concept of “information”. In the first two posts, we discussed the concepts of self-information and information entropy. In this post, we step through Shannon’s Source Coding Theorem to see how the information entropy of a probability…
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All my life I've done mental arithmetic the 'wrong way': I've calculated from left-to-right, instead of right-to-left. So when I do somethi...
