Yeah, the Gaussian trick is like programming in a high-level language: using exi... | Hacker News

Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit

		davmre on April 27, 2015 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: Random Points on a Sphere Yeah, the Gaussian trick is like programming in a high-level language: using existing abstractions lets you write clean and concise code, at the price of some efficiency versus the optimal engineered-from-scratch solution.

carlob on April 28, 2015 [–]

I'm not sure I agree, I think the really high-level option is to use a library and not roll your own.

For example:

https://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/manual/html_node/Spherical-...

davmre on April 28, 2015 | [–]

Fair enough. Though it looks like gsl_ran_dir_nd is implemented using normalized Gaussians, so in this case we're back where we started. :-)

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact