egonschiele

Hey everyone, I'm the author. I'm seeing a lot of the same comments here, so I want to address them.

I teach math by leading with examples. I try to show the intuition behind an idea, and why it is interesting. For this series, my reader is someone who knows algebra, and likes learning new things, especially when a teacher shows what is interesting about a topic.

## You didn't cover x about the dot product.

I try to only teach as much as is necessary to get the student to the next point, which is matrix multiplication. I usually end up cutting a lot of material out of my chapters to keep them simple. In this case, I cut out a whole section on the properties of a dot product, as well as a discussion about inner and outer products, because those weren't necessary to get to matrix multiplication. I think this context was lost while posting to HN.

## 3B1B already has a series on this.

I love 3B1B, but his style of teaching and mine are quite different. Even though we both teach visually, his videos are densely packed with information and his expectation is that you will watch the video a few times till you understand the topic. He also leads with math more than I do. My posts are written more like stories. My goal is they should be easy to get into, and by the time you have finished reading, you should understand more about the topic. I don't expect readers to read through multiple times. I personally learned linear algebra through Strang's videos and textbook, and those videos are awesome, but can be confusing. If you found the Strang or 3b1b videos confusing, hopefully my posts will make it easier for you to follow them. I think comment is spot on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45800657

If these ideas resonate with you, I think you'll like this post, and if not, there are plenty of guides that go the more traditional route. You can also read the first post in the series and see if you like it: https://www.ducktyped.org/p/an-illustrated-introduction-to-l...

For another example of my writing, see my series on AWS: https://www.ducktyped.org/p/a-mini-book-on-aws-networking-in...

Yes, but if you decide to leave your job during the shutdown (say to find more stable work), you do not get paid for the unpaid hours you worked.

And as others are saying, plenty of people can't afford to work for no pay indefinitely.

Everyone is different! I personally find examples and visuals a very important part of teaching.

> But in recent years

Just to expand on this a bit: I have been teaching this way since at least 2016, when I published a book on algorithms called Grokking Algorithms. It is an illustrated guide to algorithms. If you didn't like this post, I imagine you won't like the book either :)

Here is an interview I did with Corey Quinn where I talk more about my teaching philosophy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZFvTTgR-V4

That's quite the list! How does this one compare? Anything you think is missing?

Lol. Maybe! I did enjoy writing Grokking Algorithms, but writing a full book is a real commitment. That one took me 3 years.

Agreed, I need to make this part less confusing

Good idea! I'll probably do one on calc shortly, since I want to build up to ML.

Coming soon! I about a month or so

Noted! I may make a totally separate post on gaussian elimination. Could you talk me through what parts were confusing, and would you be willing to review a post on gaussian elimination to see if it works for you?

3B1B's videos are incredible. His LA videos go a bit too quick for me though, which is why I started writing this series.

I'll definitely publish more chapters on substack! I'd love to do a full book on LA, but it depends on if I'll have time.

As an aside, Avro.im looks awesome!

Thanks! Obviously one of my favorite artists too :)

Agreed, something about the variables is confusing, I need to think about what to change there!

Are you on a Mac? System Preferences > Appearances > Show scroll bars > Always

> My goal is to develop a practical, working understanding I can apply directly

Same, and I think ML is a perfect use case for this. I also have a series for that coming.

Do you block images? Works for me on iOS Safari in dark mode. Every image also includes alt text (though I think the images add a lot).

Yep, that's going to be the next chapter!

Thank you! I loved writing that book.

Author here – I think you're probably right. I wrote the Gaussian elimination section more as a recap, because I figured most readers have seen Gaussian elimination before, and I was keen to get to the rest of it. I'd love to hear if other folks had trouble with this section. Maybe I need to slow it down and explain it better.

Parents want to sit next to their kids Let's assume this for sake of argument that people don't want to sit next to other people's kids. So here's a situation no one wants. But parents will be the ones who have to pay. New legislation is saying that parents are the one who should pay for this. You make a fair point that making everyone pay to select the exact seat they want, would just be treating everyone the same way.

What I'm saying is, if you do it this way, you're now leaving the decision up to the parents. And some parents will choose not to pay. When that happens – because it will happen – I don't want to hear people complaining about having to sit next to other people's kids. Everyone was treated equally, a choice was given, a choice was made.

The other option is, we say as a society that here is a situation nobody wants, we all see that, so we're all going to collectively agree to set things up in the parents' favor a little bit, thus doing something nice, creating an outcome that is better for everyone, but at the cost that some parent seating gets subsidised by others on the plane.

Just laying out the options. Classic individualist thinking will say, I don't want the government to decide for me that I should subsidize. And thus some people will end up sitting next to somebody's crying 2 year old.

> Family Seating Guarantees: Under current regulations, airlines must ensure that families with young children are seated together without additional charges. This would no longer be guaranteed under the new proposal, meaning families could face extra costs just to sit next to one another.

This one is wild. You want to sit next to somebody's crying 2 year old? Go nuts. Change their diaper while you're at it.

Build your own! It's a great way to learn, keeps you interested in the latest developments. Plus you get to try out cool UX experiments and see what works. I built my own interface back in 2023 and have been slowly adding to it since. I added local models via MLX last month. I'm surprised more devs aren't rolling their own interface, they are easy to make and you learn a lot.

I just wrote a post about an interesting color debate in the art community:

https://www.ducktyped.org/p/a-colorful-controversy

This is awesome. Exactly the sort of thing I like to see on HN: someone going deep on a niche they really care about. The app is more polished than I expected.

The design is nice and clean. I really appreciate dark mode as well, though some of the text on this page, for example https://app.librari.io/subscription looks like it needs to be tweaked for dark mode.

I would genuinely use this, as I don't always like the public aspect of Goodreads, but it would depend on your pricing structure and privacy policy.

Feature request: bulk import of books.

uv has become essential for me. conda and virtualenv never worked smoothly for me, but uv was easy and "just worked" from day 1.

I wrote a parser combinator library for TypeScript that I have been having a lot of fun with [1]. It has limitations, I wouldn't use it to write a full language programming language like Gleam, but for "language-ish projects", parser combinators can be lovely to use. I used it to build a typed version of Mustache [2].

> Rather, I’m after a particular kind of software hygge: Loads instantly, doesn’t crash, and fits nicely in the hand.

The author is talking about the language, but this is what parser combinators feel like to me, and could be another option. Tarsec is probably the most fun side project I have built in a while.

[1] https://github.com/egonSchiele/tarsec

[2] https://github.com/egonSchiele/typestache

I've been thinking about it! Maybe a book that covers the basics of putting an app up on AWS... networking, covering the different options such as EC2, ECS, and fargate, plus a bit about load balancers and IAM.

Hey everyone, I'm the author. Let me know if you have any questions!

Thank you, I'm glad you liked the book!! That was a fun project, and I learned a lot while writing it.

http://github.com/egonSchiele/typestache - Mustache with static typing