Skerritt.blog

grind75

Grind75-2 - Valid Parathesis

Problem Given a string s containing just the characters '(', ')', '{', '}', '[' and ']', determine if the input string is valid. An input string is valid if: 1. Open brackets must be closed by the same type of brackets. 2. Open brackets

Is the Real Mona Lisa in the Louvre?

The most famous painting in the world, more people know her face than perhaps any other face on earth. Presidents, dictators, musicans come and go but her.... she stays put. Her sfumato style elicits many secrets. Is she really a self-portrait of Da Vinci? Is she a play on gender,

Algorithms Featured

🤔 What Is Dynamic Programming With Python Examples

Dynamic programming is breaking down a problem into smaller sub-problems, solving each sub-problem and storing the solutions to each of these sub-problems in an array (or similar data structure) so each sub-problem is only calculated once. It is both a mathematical optimisation method and a computer programming method. Optimisation problems

rust

Tip: Use match statements instead of hash maps

Hashmaps are often touted as the fastest way to store & lookup data. They have O(1) constant time lookup, which means no matter what you look up it will always take the same amount of time. Whereas other search algorithms (Binary Search, for instance) take O(log n) time,

Zero Power Computing — How to Perform Calculations Using Zero Power

Moore’s law is dying. There have been countless articles on this. We cannot keep on packing transistors into a given unit of space, expecting each time that the power of the CPU doubles every year. The smaller and smaller the chips are made, the more problems that are produced.

web3 Featured

In Response to My first impressions of web3

This a response to Moxie Marlinspike’s “My First Impression of Web3” Both gave me a feeling for how the space works. To be clear, there is nothing particularly “distributed” about the apps themselves: they’re just normal react websites. The “distributedness” refers to where the state and the logic/

programming

An Algorithm for Finding Anagrams

Finding anagrams of words does not look like a difficult problem but has an interesting solution. An anagram is a word or sentence that can be transformed into another word or sentence. Elvis has all the same letters as Lives, so Elvis is an anagram of Lives. The way most

Who needs painkillers when you have virtual reality?

Introduction Image of Blain Baxter from here 10-year-old Blaine Baxter injured his arm in a go-karting accident last year. Painful daily dressing changes at the hospital made him so anxious he had to be sedated. Not only was the sedation costing money, but Blaine was still anxious before the sedation.

Finding The Most Important Sentences Using NLP and TF-IDF

We’re going to create a summary of BBC News Articles and place them at the top using a Firefox extension. This article is about the gnarly algorithm Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF). We’re going to create a real-world usage in the form of a Firefox extension. I know

AVL Trees - Trees that can keep balanced by rotating

An AVL tree (named after inventors Adelson-Velsky and Landis) is a self-balancing binary search tree. Before we delve into AVL trees, we need to learn a few things. Height of a tree The height of a tree is the length of the longest path from the root node (the top

This Simple Trick will Save you Hours of Expanding Binomials

Ever wanted to know how to expand (a+b)¹⁸⁷? Well now you can! What is a Binomial Coefficient? First, let’s start with a binomial. A binomial is a polynomial with two terms typically in the format (a+b)² A binomial coefficient is raising a binomial to the power of

programming

Graph Theory

If you want to learn a lot about Graph Theory, check out this article The seven bridges of Koenigsberg is the foundation and birth of graph theory. There was a puzzle that stated: Can you cross all seven bridges exactly once? There are 2 rules for this problem: 1. Do

hacking

Making Hacking Accessible

I hate the current state of hacking education, or of hacking tools. None of it is accessible to any minority. In this post, I aim to distil some guidelines for making hacking accessible. I am by no means an expert. I don’t even work in A11Y. However, I do

programming

Public Key Cryptography Simply Explained

Public key cryptography seems magical to everyone, even those who understand it. In this post, I'm going to explain public key cryptography. Public Key Cryptography is based on asymmetric cryptography, so first let us talk about symmetric cryptography.

Hash functions explained for non cryptographers

A hash function takes a message, m, and returns a pseudo-random string of letters/numbers which should be unique to that message. Let’s say the hash function returns “aBc67D” for the message “I love dogs”. This function should not return the same “aBc67D” for “Donuts are cool”. Hashing algorithms

How linked lists work with an application to Blockchain

The blockchain is an immutable, ordered, back-linked list of blocks of transactions. If you want to truly understand blockchain you need to understand linked lists. Linked Lists are a linear collection of data elements. Linearty in a linked list is not defined by each element’s physical placement. Instead each

books

Book Review: Atomic habits

5/5 ⭐ Buy the book here (this is an affiliate link. I’ll get some of the money you pay for the book at no extra cost to you.) Atomic habits builds on the sensational work of Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit by applying more new & groundbreaking

How To Get Any Job You Want - The Definitive Guide To Employability Skills (2019)

This is a book I wrote on job applications. It’s now available for free right here, with no catches. Seriously. You do not have to buy anything or sign up for anything. This is the entire book, for free, with 0 content taken away and 0 added. It’s

Creating a Framework to Teach Key Stage 3 Students Reinforcement Learning with Autonomous (Simulated) Robots

Abstract Reinforcement learning has traditionally been a dull topic to learn, especially for students who may not understand programming. With this dissertation, it is shown that reinforcement learning can be joyous to learn, and easier than some might have suspected. This dissertation shows a framework for teaching reinforcement learning to

Edition 1

Hello 👋 Bee here. Welcome to edition 1 of my weekly newsletter 🔮 Technologically Clairvoyant. Every week, we’ll explore what the future can hold for us. This is a beta-test before I send it out to my whole list. Let me know (via email, or however else you can contact me)

Brazil Open Sources Legislative Texts

Brazil has developed what is being called an “e-democracy” tool which allows anyone in the public to edit legislative texts and add suggestions. The tool, called WikiLegis is an initiative by the House of Representatives and the creator is LabHacker which states “to articulate a network among parliamentarians, hackers and

Neodeath

This article was written in collaboration with Emily. Emily is an artist specialising in Digital Culture and is currently writing for Daily Art Magazine, she also didn’t ask me to write this about her. She is looking for a job. If you are interested in an amazing artist who

Quotes

“An arists job is to make master pieces. Period” https://medium.com/s/story/your-work-is-the-only-thing-that-matters-26a47ccf778c “people who are thinking about things other than making the best product, never make the best product.” “The two greatest days of your life are the day you were born and the day you found

What rooms should you do? A free guide for beginners

You want to do TryHackMe, but perhaps you do not want to pay for a subscription. This means you will not get access to paths, which are a guided series of rooms to take you from not knowing something to knowing something. This blog post will detail a free path

web3

Designing Effective Peer to Peer Networks

This is an informed opinion piece on designing effective peer to peer (P2P) networks. I’ve written extensively about peer to peer networks, and have even designed my own (albeit, bad) cryptocurrency. By the end of the article, we should have a good understanding of the important questions to answer