Best of 2018

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2018. 36 posts.

Math & Algorithms
6

Sin and Cos: The Programmer's Pals

In this article I shall discuss several game programming techniques, all revolving around a central theme: the sine and cosine functions. This article will explain sine, cosine, vectors, atan2, and some useful special effects such as how to make homing missiles and how bitmap rotation works. I shall start with the…

18

Thoughts On Machine Learning Accuracy

This blog shares some brief thoughts on machine learning accuracy and bias. Let’s start with some comments about a recent ACLU blog in which they ran a facial recognition trial. Using Rekognition, the ACLU built a face database using 25,000 publicly available arrest photos and then performed facial similarity searches…

27

Consistency Models

Jepsen analyzes the safety properties of distributed systems–most notably, identifying violations of consistency models. But what are consistency models? What phenomena do they allow? What kind of consistency does a given program really need?