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Deep Learning, NLP, and Representations
neural networks , deep learning , representations , NLP , recursive neural networks
Topics /
Math & Algorithms
The most popular blog posts about math & algorithms on Hacker News. 2,851 posts.
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Juris Hartmanis 1928–2022
A sure foundation for Computational Complexity source—wonderful 2015 CACM interview Juris Hartmanis passed away this morning. He was a professor in Cornell’s computer science department…
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Against Bayesianism – David Deutsch
Bayesianism, the doctrine that it's always rational to represent our beliefs in terms of probabilities, dominates the intellectual world, from decision theory to the philosophy of science. But does it make sense to quantify our beliefs about such ineffable things as scientific theories or the future? And what separates
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The largest number representable in 64 bits
This post is a rewrite of my earlier blog post from Nov 2023 with new insights and updates.
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How many dimensions is this?
A degree in mathematics might not save you from stacking boxes for a living.
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The Buenos Aires Constant
Generating primes using the Buenos Aires constant.
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Quicksort with Jenkins for fun and no profit
I first encountered Jenkins in 2007 while contributing to the Apache Nutch project. It was called Hudson back then. The nightly builds for the project ran on Hudson at that time. I remember sifting through my emails and reviewing build result notifications to keep an eye on the patches that got merged into the trunk…
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Square roots and maxima
A brief numerical and graphical check on a 3Blue1Brown video.
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Principles of TLA+
TLA+ is a formal specification and verification language intended to help engineers specify, design and reason about complex, real-life algorithms and software or hardware systems. We explore its motivation, application and principles of design.
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Mathematical marketing: a piece of calculus to change the way you advertise
If you make $10 profit each time you sell a product, what cost per conversion should you aim for? Answering this question isn't easy, but it can teach us a…
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Low-level x86 code compression for 64k intros
This is about the “secret ingredient” in my EXE packer kkrunchy, which was used in our (Farbrausch) 64k intros starting from “fr-030: Candytron”, and also in a lot of other …
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Héctor Garcia-Molina, 1953–2019
We all lost a great person Cropped from Mexican NotiCyTI obit Héctor Garcia-Molina died just before Thanksgiving. He was a computer scientist and Professor in both the Departments of Computer Scien…
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Floating-Point Printing and Parsing Can Be Simple and Fast
A floating point number f has the form f = m · 2 e where m is called the mantissa and e is a signed integer exponent . We like to read numbers scaled by powers of ten, not two, so computers need algorithms to convert binary floating-point to and from decimal text. My 2011 post “ Floating Point to Decimal Conversion is…
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An Overview of Bayesian Inference (2019)
A few weeks ago I wrote about Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts and how it relates to Bayesian inference. In this post I want to back up a little bit and explain what Bayesian inference is, and eventually rediscover the idea of a paradigm shift just from understanding how Bayesian inference works.
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Verifying GCC optimizations using an SMT solver
This post describes the implementation of pysmtgcc. See “GCC Translation Validation” for background information.
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How Many People? Ancient Demography
One of the first questions anyone asks about past societies is, ‘how many people were there?’ It is one of those basic bits of information and generally speaking those of us who teach t…
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Is π the Same in Every Universe?
Mathematician: That depends on what you mean by “universe.” Here’s a framing: A circle of radius R centered at a point P is the set of all points in the plane with distance R fro…
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Division by zero in type theory: a FAQ
How can a theorem prover use the convention that 1/0=0 and still be consistent?
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Floating points between zero and one
floating-points-between-zero-and-one - Chad Nauseam Home
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A Trampoline
I didn’t want to buy a trampoline. It wasn’t the money.
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Taming floating-point sums
Suppose you have an array of floating-point numbers, and wish to sum them. You might naively think you can simply add them, e.g. in Rust:
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Why cryptography is not based on NP-complete problems
Cryptographic schemes are based on the computational difficulty of solving some ‘hard’ problem. For example, RSA (specifically, RSA-2048) is based on the difficulty of a problem like this:
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Four Kinds of Optimisation
Premature optimisation might be the root of all evil, but overdue optimisation is the root of all frustration. No matter how fast hardware becomes, we find it easy to write programs which run too slow. Often this is not immediately apparent. Users can go for years without considering a program’s performance to be an…