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Comment by karmakaze | Hacker News Reader

I can't tell who this article is for. It describes points, lines, nodes, edges, and Bezier curves, so I thought it might be not so in depth. But it's long, and skimming down I see talk of determinants and think there might be something there. Even thinking that a "Vector Network" is some great discovery when it's allowing more than a single cycle in a graph needs earlier substantiation--I don't have time to read all the background intro throughout the piece to the end. I'll guess that the 'engineering' here is a review of some graph and/or 2D graphics algorithms.

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This post was intended as a source of information for developers who might want to implement vector networks in their own projects.

Back in 2018 I wanted to support vector networks in my animation editor project, but had a really hard time finding information. I didn't have a math or CS background, so just knowing what concepts to Google was somewhat of a brick wall. Googling "vector networks" didn't yield any useful results, because there weren't any resources discussing them (aside from marketing content from Figma). So in writing this post, I wanted to create the resource I needed back then.

This is a nice writeup, but the definition and usage of determinant makes my nails curl.

A determinant is defined for matrices, not for vectors and from the purpse of your article I think you skipped over that part for simplicty/brevity. But really, introducing it once properly, then going to the more pragmatic definition of yours aknowledging that it is skipping some parts would be so much better for someone not knowing this field in depth. Or just not calling it determinant. And mentioning that determinants show a sort of scale factor of transformation, also for 3D, would be nice to connect to 3D rendering and such.

Since it is meant as intro/tutorial on implementation I would really point into all the right math-relates directions as a reference. Whoever wants, can read or skip those parts.

It's for the interested person who doesn't have much background but wants to go super in depth on the feature.

I've taken some computational geometry classes, and loved the interesting theorems and which seemingly trivial problems were actually extremely difficult to prove, and which seemingly complex things were easy to prove, it's a very fun field. Still, I had never actually written the code or seen the algorithms for drawing Bézier curves, so this was great for me.

I love drawing with vector graphics, but haven't used Figma much, so seeing their vector graphs was very enlightening for me. I'll be using Figma in the future.

It feels like this article was tailor made for me, I loved it.

Paragraph five:

> This post can be thought of as an introduction to a really interesting problem space, and as a resource for people interesting in making use of some aspects of Vector Networks for future applications. I hope it succeeds in providing value to both developers being introduced to new concepts and ideas, and to designers interesting in learning more about the tool they know and love.

Seems like that was too far into the article for them to reach. But there’s always enough time for a lengthy rant about their own inability to focus for a few minutes (and how the article itself is somehow at fault!).

Id rather it exist in its current form than not exist.

Sometimes it's just hard to write blog posts. How much is too little info, how much is too detailed. It's actually really hard stuff that we all wrestle with when writing.

So to the authors, thanks!

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