Top all-time · #15787
SZCZ
Personal blog · blog.szczepan.org/blogmathother
SZCZ is a personal blog at blog.szczepan.org about math. Since 2026, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 8 times. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link SZCZ's maths posts, such as the Dark Alley Mathematics article on random points in a unit disk and its follow-up on Monte Carlo sampling, plus a Los Alamos primer on neutron counts.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Nothing too mind blowing.
Most-linked posts?
- /blog/monte-carlo/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-02-07
What Hacker News says?
Author here: when calculating this I _did_ assume a uniform (area) distribution on the unit disk. Now it does say > Three points are chosen independently and uniformly at random from the interior of a unit circle. which sounded OK to me at the time but I understand there could have been some ambiguity. Especially around the "uniform on area" part. Also, I think that with rejection sampling you could get the same wit…
Comment linking /blog/monte-carlo/
on “Dark Alley Mathematics”Submitted Los Alamos Primer as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe rest of the article answers that question. The followup article answers it more directly, and compares polar to rectangular. https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/monte-carlo/ Short answer: yes it’s uniform in area. In the absence of the specificity you want, area makes the most sense, right? Uniformly sampling independent Cartesian variables yields uniform sampling in area, unlike polar where a uniform sampling of the…
Comment linking /blog/monte-carlo/
on “Dark Alley Mathematics”Submitted Logic Puzzles: Why the Liar Is the Helpful One as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI also enjoyed: https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/los-alamos-primer/ Although there is small error regarding the neutron number calculation. I assume 3/4 of the neutrons are lost and then the author can multiply by 1/4 to get the result that the naturally occurring uranium is safe (as its neutron number is less then 1)
Comment linking /blog/los-alamos-primer/
on “Dark Alley Mathematics”Submitted Dark Alley Mathematics as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThere's actually a second post on exactly that [0] https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/monte-carlo/
Comment linking /blog/monte-carlo/
on “Dark Alley Mathematics”