Top all-time · #18231
Kevin Ventullo
Personal blog · kevinventullo.com · on HN as kevinventullomathprogramming
Kevin Ventullo's personal blog at kevinventullo.com covers math and programming. Since 2018, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 14 times, most often “On Hashing Unordered Sets”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-21, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Kevin Ventullo's 2018 post on hashing unordered sets, which uses group actions and multisets. One commenter cites it for the missing math in a 2021 HN submission on the same topic.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Kevin Ventullo
Most-linked posts?
- On Hashing Unordered Sets3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-12-30
- 2-Adic Logarithms and Fast Exponentiation2 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2020-12-21
What Hacker News says?
This is quite a limited effort, but I occasionally write code and accompanying blog posts about subjects in the intersection of algebraic number theory and low-level computing: https://kevinventullo.com/ I’d like to think one day this stuff could end up in a compiler optimization or something, but I’m not too worried about it.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?”Submitted 2-Adic Logarithms and Fast Exponentiation as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAs a former number theorist turned software engineer, I’ve noodled on connections between algebraic number theory and fairly concrete applications here: https://kevinventullo.com/
Comment linking /
on “Mathematicians uncover a new way to count prime numbers”Submitted Fast Exact Integer Roots as a story · 2 points
HN discussionA few months back I wrote a blog post very much inspired by Dan’s post, though a little more academic: https://kevinventullo.com/2020/12/21/2-adic-logarithms-and-f... The idea is to exploit deeper structures in p-adic number theory to develop useful and novel algorithms with unsigned integer arithmetic, e.g. fast integer exponentiation. Feedback welcome! (Warning: math heavy)
Comment linking /2020/12/21/2-adic-logarithms-and-fast-exponentiation/
on “Ideal divisors: when a division compiles down to just a multiplication”Submitted Fast Integer Powers using 2-adic Numbers as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe "neat result" article linked at the top has some of the missing math: https://kevinventullo.com/2018/12/24/hashing-unordered-sets-... Restated, if abelian G acts transitively on a set X, X and G have the same size. There's a tacit assumption, then, that you want as many possible states as possible, which the group action result immediately belies. I'm not sure the author of TFA really thought through the implica…
Comment linking /2018/12/24/hashing-unordered-sets-how-far-will-cleverness-take-you/
on “Group actions and hashing unordered multisets (2021)”Submitted On Hashing Unordered Sets as a story · 2 points
HN discussionShameless self-promotion: https://kevinventullo.com/2020/12/21/2-adic-logarithms-and-f... I have a vague feeling that the relationship between 2-adic analysis and practical computation is underutilized, but I haven’t been able to nail down a compelling use case.
Comment linking /2020/12/21/2-adic-logarithms-and-fast-exponentiation/
on “2-adic numbering for binary tilings”Submitted Hashing Unordered Sets: How Far Will Cleverness Take You? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionYep, and that last number is the 2-adic representation of -4/3. It turns out a lot of ideas from calculus and real analysis carry over to the 2-adics, and this can lead to some interesting computational shortcuts since two’s complement is essentially native 2-adic arithmetic. I’ve blogged a bit about this here: https://kevinventullo.com/
Comment linking /
on “Two's complement unexpectedly shows up in infinite series”Submitted 2-Adic Logarithms and Fast Exponentiation as a story · 1 points
HN discussionShameless promotion of a blog post I made a few years ago connecting 2-adic numbers with computationally fast exponentiation: https://kevinventullo.com/2020/12/21/2-adic-logarithms-and-f...
Comment linking /2020/12/21/2-adic-logarithms-and-fast-exponentiation/
on “Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance”I wouldn’t say 100%. As a former number theorist-turned-SWE I’ve done a bit of tinkering applying ideas from basic p-adic analysis to low-level computing: https://kevinventullo.com/2020/12/21/2-adic-logarithms-and-f... Nothing too earth-shattering but it’s plausible something generally useful could come out of it.
Comment linking /2020/12/21/2-adic-logarithms-and-fast-exponentiation/
on “Long-Sought Math Proof Unlocks More Mysterious ‘Modular Forms’”