In every day life we all do our calculations, whether for the taxman, our purchases, paying the household bills or in some academic discipline, using the place value decimal number system. It consi…
Draft: v1.1 | Posted: 1/9/2018 | Updated: 1/29/2018 | confidence of success: 85% | estimated time to completion: 1/15/2018 | importance: High
I really like decision tables but they’ve fallen out of common knowledge. Let’s fix that. A decision table is a means of concisely representing branching and conditional computations. In the most basic form, you have some columns that represent the “inputs” as booleans and some columns that represent outputs and…
Array and hash table are probably the most important data structures. Some programming languages such as Perl, Lua and Javascript, almost build the language core on top of the two data structures. …
A remainder and a modulus look so very similar, but they are not the same thing and worse, are treated differently by different programming languages. Do you know how your language handles mod?
It’s fairly clear when one should buy a particular stock. One should buy stock when it is undervalued. What I have always wondered about is how much stock one should buy. A few months ago I stumbled upon the answer which is given by the Kelly criterion . It says that one should invest an amount to maximize one’s…
Blog of Raph Levien.
Recently, I’ve been playing Octopath Traveler, and I’m very disappointed with the poor texture filtering seen in this game. It is PS1-level, with severe shimmering artifacts, which ruins the nice pixel art. Tastefully merging retro pixel art with 3D environment is a very cool aesthetic to me, so I want it to look…
This post is adapted from this research paper that you can read/cite for more info. It analyzes and visualizes 100 cities around the world.
Lamport's fault-intolerant state machine replication algorithm In 1978, Lamport published his classic "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of E...
Riffling from factory order to complete randomness.
The previous post in this series was a quick introduction to the world of SAT and SAT solvers. In this post, we will convert a harder real-world problem, namely _master-key system_, into SAT and explore some of the more advanced techniques used to efficiently convert problems to SAT.
Generalized data structure synthesis Loncaric et al., ICSE’18 Many systems have a few key data structures at their heart. Finding correct and efficient implementations for these data structur…
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.)
Some reflections on an accidental Twitterstorm, the future of AI and deep learning, and what happens when you confuse a schoolbus with a…
It’s so much more than mass-energy equivalence; it’s the key to unlocking the quantum Universe.
The familiar quadratic formula can give the wrong answer in a program due to numerical precision issues. This post shows what can go wrong and how to fix it. Especially important in low-precision arithmetic.
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In the previous post we discussed homomorphic encryption in it’s most abstract terms we presented Paillier as a partially homomorphic encryption . Thank you @mortendahlcs for making a clarification about the terms described :
In causal inference, it is often important to study varying treatment effects: for example, a treatment could be more effective for men than for women, or for healthy than for unhealthy patients. Suppose a study is designed to have 80% power to detect a main effect at a 95% confidence level. Further suppose that…
