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    Sam Hocevar

    thenumb.at · Personal blog · on HN since 2022

    The blog of a graphics programmer with math-heavy articles on differentiable programming, Monte Carlo rendering, rotations and hash tables.

    Visit blogRSSHN submissions
    MathProgrammingSystems & Performance
    What HN says

    HN commenters link it as a clear explanation of functions as vectors, with proofs, and discuss its open addressing article in terms of hashing.

    Stats for nerds
    15HN people shared it
    19linked in comments
    1.1Kstory points
    Jan 2026last shared
    2024people per year2026

    Top posts on HN

    1. 1
      Differentiable programming from scratch
      4 people · 309 points · first shared 2022 · 107 comments on HN
    2. 2
      Exponentially Better Rotations (2022)
      3 people · 285 points · first shared 2024 · 63 comments on HN
    3. 3
      Functions Are Vectors (2023)
      4 people · 235 points · first shared 2023 · 127 comments on HN
    4. 4
      Monte Carlo Crash Course: Quasi-Monte Carlo
      2 people · 147 points · first shared 2025 · 14 comments on HN
    5. 5
      Monte Carlo Crash Course: Sampling
      1 person · 108 points · first shared 2025 · 20 comments on HN
    6. 6
      Monte Carlo Crash Course: Rendering
      1 person · 12 points · first shared 2025 · Discussion on HN
    7. 7
      Oxidizing C++
      1 person · 5 points · first shared 2024 · 1 comments on HN
    8. 8
      Optimizing Open Addressing
      2 people · 4 points · first shared 2023 · Discussion on HN
    9. 9
      Exponentially Better Integration
      1 person · 4 points · first shared 2025 · Discussion on HN
    10. 10
      Exploring Neural Graphics Primitives
      1 person · 3 points · first shared 2022 · Discussion on HN

    What HN people wrote when they linked it

    • vlmutoloMar 2024

      This may be more about the indexing strategy than the hash function. Meaning: once we have the hash(es), how do we decide what index to use for the key?

      Open-addressing schemes like linear probing, quadratic probing, certain variants of Robinhood hashing (which is kind of on a different axis anyway) commonly have 50–70% expected space efficiency. Performance is bad above 90%.

      But Cuckoo hash tables can get above 90% with great lookup performance (non-amortized constant time) and decent insert performance. Insert performance tends to suffer closer to 100%.

      Whether or not cuckoo hash tables qualify as “open addressing” will depend on the implementation, but the main point is that the addressing/indexing strategy mainly determines the operable “load factor” of the hash table.

      This is a great article on open addressing schemes (including cuckoo):

      https://thenumb.at/Hashtables/

    • lynaghkMay 2025

      For my application I need just the translations and Euler angles. The range of poses is mechanically constrained so I don't have to worry about gimbal lock. But yeah, my limited understanding matches yours that other parameterizations are more useful in general contexts.

      This post and interactive explanations have been on my backlog to read and internalize: https://thenumb.at/Exponential-Rotations/

      (Also: Thanks for pointing out the typo, I just deployed a fix.)

    • TainnorJul 2025

      I think you are confused about the analogies at the beginning at the article (although there is nothing technically wrong about them).

      Here's the definition of a vector space which agrees with the one everyone in mathematics use: https://thenumb.at/Functions-are-Vectors/#vector-spaces

      From this it's fairly easy to prove (and done in the article) that the set of all functions R->R is a vector space.

    • gizmo686Jul 2025

      https://thenumb.at/Functions-are-Vectors/#proofs

      It's not a particularly interesting proof, but the author does prove that real valued functions are vectors. The bulk of the article is less about proofs, and more about showing how the above result is useful.

    • myhfSep 2024

      Differentiable Programming from Scratch

      https://thenumb.at/Autodiff/

    • TheNumbatJan 2026

      https://thenumb.at/

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