Top all-time · #11382
Tim Vieira
Personal blog · timvieira.github.io/blogprogrammingmathdata
Tim Vieira writes Graduate Descent, a personal blog at timvieira.github.io about programming, math and data. Since 2017, 7 different Hacker News readers have linked it 7 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Tim Vieira's technical posts on sampling and data structures: alias tables and discrete distributions, heaps for incrementally computed values, and how computers roll loaded dice.
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.
Personal homepage of Tim Vieira.
Most-linked posts?
- /blog/post/2016/11/21/heaps-for-incremental-computation/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-03-13
What Hacker News says?
Similar to a SumTree, if all you need is incrementally computed values without data persistence, a heap makes for a more efficient data structure. I remember learning about this from the following blog: https://timvieira.github.io/blog/post/2016/11/21/heaps-for-i...
Comment linking /blog/post/2016/11/21/heaps-for-incremental-computation/
on “Zed Decoded: Rope and SumTree”Submitted Backprop is not just the chain rule as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAlias tables are pretty cool, I wrote an interactive visualization of how they get built as part of this post a while ago: http://engineering.flipboard.com/2017/02/storyclustering . We used alias tables with MCMC and the hastings metropolis test to build a super fast LDA. Also worth reading up on are sum-heaps. Alias tables are O(1) to sample from but O(n) to build/modify. Sum-heaps let you modify in O(log(n)) at th…
Comment linking /blog/post/2016/11/21/heaps-for-incremental-computation/
on “Darts, Dice, and Coins: Sampling from a Discrete Distribution (2011)”- cf · 2017-05-25
Submitted How to test Gradient Descent implementations as a story · 3 points
HN discussion This article is a bit rough around the edges, and they really should make it clear when they mean "pseudorandom" vs "random", especially when one goal of the article is ostensibly to explain pseudorandomness to laymen! As an aside, using a source of random numbers to generate other random objects is quite an interesting problem! For converting from one probability distribution to another, we have classical methods l…
Comment linking /blog/post/2014/07/31/gumbel-max-trick/
on “How and Why Computers Roll Loaded Dice”Submitted Visualizing high-dimensional functions with cross-sections as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Exp-normalize trick as a story · 1 points
HN discussion