Top all-time · #7328
Marc B. Reynolds
Personal blog · marc-b-reynolds.github.iomathprogramming
Marc B. Reynolds's personal blog at marc-b-reynolds.github.io covers math and programming. Since 2017, 11 different Hacker News readers have linked it 18 times, most often “Moving integer division to floating-point is trivial”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-10, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Marc B. Reynolds's blog for technical posts on floating-point formats, posits, and random number generation and sampling. Comments mostly cite the posts as sources.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
blog-a-like
Most-linked posts?
- Moving integer division to floating-point is trivial3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-08-11
- /math/2019/02/06/Posit1.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-07-09
What Hacker News says?
The information in the above post is a merger of like, 20 different sources of information. Your standard cryptographic books from any undergraduate program will tell you about the basics of confusion / diffusion, but I don't think the concept is very difficult at all. Invertibility is hugely important but not discussed very much. It seems like crypto-experts 'obviously' know about it so they just don't talk about i…
Comment linking /math/2017/10/13/XorRotate.html
on “Show HN: SHA-256 explained step-by-step visually”Submitted Posit floating point numbers: thin triangles and other tricks (2019) as a story · 55 points
HN discussionThere have been several papers and blog posts written about the more recent posits proposals. https://marc-b-reynolds.github.io/math/2019/02/06/Posit1.htm... https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01959581v2 https://hal.inria.fr/hal-02131982 The bottom line is they are a tradeoff; they certainly aren't purely better than IEEE floats. Plus they seem to have a non-trivial hardware cost (one of the linked papers shows the adder is t…
Comment linking /math/2019/02/06/Posit1.html
on “John Gustafson’s crusade to replace floating point with something better”Submitted Moving integer division to floating-point is trivial as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI was thinking of this one. I don't think it's an LCG but I don't know much about randomness. http://marc-b-reynolds.github.io/shf/2016/04/19/prns.html
Comment linking /shf/2016/04/19/prns.html
on “The sad state of property-based testing libraries”Submitted An evil and odious map (partition into even/odd parity in increasing order) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSome good references on this which IMO should have been mentioned in the article: https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2022/03/05/sampling-fp-unit-inte... https://marc-b-reynolds.github.io/distribution/2017/01/17/De...
Comment linking /distribution/2017/01/17/DenseFloat.html
on “Perfect Random Floating-Point Numbers”Submitted A fast perfect shuffle for n≤64 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSee also: 'posit: thin triangle other tricks' - https://marc-b-reynolds.github.io/math/2019/02/06/Posit1.htm...
Comment linking /math/2019/02/06/Posit1.html
on “Advertising Tips for Computer Number System Designers [pdf]”Submitted Random number draws with fixed parity as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Fast / accurate floating point division with known divisor as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Higher density uniform floats as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Special cased quaternion log and exp as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Moving integer division to floating-point is trivial as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Moving integer division to floating-point is trivial as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Popcount walks: next, previous, toward and nearest as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Popcount walks: next, previous, toward and nearest as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Table of basic reversible integer operations as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
