Hacker News: RedCinnabar

New comment by RedCinnabar in "Immersive Linear Algebra Book with Interactive Figures (2015)"

RedCinnabar — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 21:18:19 +0000

Bold of you to talk about arrogance…

Besides, I've never met a physicist or a (real) engineer who would go to such lengths to oversimplify the math part, even if it was only “tangential” to them.

New comment by RedCinnabar in "Immersive Linear Algebra Book with Interactive Figures (2015)"

RedCinnabar — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 21:10:06 +0000

Maybe I should’ve been more clear: what I meant is that these programmers-oriented resources are all about applications…maybe a bit too much. For instance, In this book I cannot find the algebraic structure of vector spaces, theorems about how certain linear operators such as the kernel or the image led to subspaces (which is a very important result) or a proper introduction to the spectral theorem, for both Euclidean and Hermitian spaces (which also allows you to introduce some nice functional analysis).

New comment by RedCinnabar in "Immersive Linear Algebra Book with Interactive Figures (2015)"

RedCinnabar — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 19:27:21 +0000

Why are programmers always so attracted by these interactive/over-simplified/lightweight versions of linear algebra? They all focus on the visual aspects while ignoring the real stuff (theorems, proofs, etc.).

New comment by RedCinnabar in "Why developers are ditching GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives"

RedCinnabar — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 12:58:06 +0000

What do you mean by that? Are you referring to Codeberg? Out the frying pan straight to the fire...

New comment by RedCinnabar in "Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development"

RedCinnabar — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 17:38:31 +0000

Call me back when you can run these models on 16GB of RAM and any recent i5/i7. Until then, there’s no point on using these toy models.

New comment by RedCinnabar in "(How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (In Python)) (2010)"

RedCinnabar — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 17:38:40 +0000

> I don’t think a good learning resource gets worse[...]

Probably not, but they become irrelevant. The other day I found an old programming book at my parents’ and while it was still a terrific resource, I couldn’t image anyone learning a language from a book nowadays.

AI is doing the same thing but 100 times effectively than anything else.

New comment by RedCinnabar in "(How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (In Python)) (2010)"

RedCinnabar — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 17:31:54 +0000

Blog tutorials, guides, programming books and youtube tutorials. They are completely irrelevant in a time where you have a personal tutor willing to explain every single detail of a subject.

New comment by RedCinnabar in "(How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (In Python)) (2010)"

RedCinnabar — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 17:07:02 +0000

Man these kind of resources have aged really bad in the age of AI.

New comment by RedCinnabar in "Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving"

RedCinnabar — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 16:59:16 +0000

What’s the appeal of an editor like Emacs in 2026? Why’d anyone still use when most jobs nowadays require you to work inside a container (and therefore use VSCode container extension)?

New comment by RedCinnabar in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

RedCinnabar — Thu, 21 May 2026 12:24:45 +0000

What I don’t understand is why people dismiss this kind of progress with false claims. Especially when discussing programming, people start to act irrational using arguments from back in 2022.

I think that you can easily address your concerns about this new technology (since we all are concerned about the future) but at the same time acknowledge how revolutionary it is.

New comment by RedCinnabar in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

RedCinnabar — Thu, 21 May 2026 12:13:12 +0000

Not true anymore since like early 2025 and especially since last December.

New comment by RedCinnabar in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

RedCinnabar — Thu, 21 May 2026 12:09:05 +0000

It’s basically up to the domain experts. What I found interesting in mathematical optimization/combinatorics (my fields of interest) when an AI proved some major results some time ago was probably dismissed as a boring fact by someone else. What OP is mentioning is just their personal preference and doesn’t reflect the actual opinion of the mathematical world.

New comment by RedCinnabar in "The Unix timestamp will begin with 17 this Tuesday"

RedCinnabar — Sat, 11 Nov 2023 20:26:51 +0000

I used to follow your blog about 15 years ago, what a blast of nostalgia! I’ll add it to my RSS feed. Keep it up.

New comment by RedCinnabar in "Linear Algebra Done Right – 4th Edition"

RedCinnabar — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 08:08:59 +0000

I know this book is not intended to be used as a first reading on Linear Algebra but, to me, this text isn’t good even for a second(or a third) read. The author hurries up too much on certain parts. I think that Serge Lang’s Linear Algebra does a better job in explaining pretty much every topic of the subject.

New comment by RedCinnabar in "Introduction to Immutable Linux Systems"

RedCinnabar — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 18:58:37 +0000

The day Debian will make this immutable stuff mandatory will be the day I will ditch Linux from my computer.

New comment by RedCinnabar in "Debian celebrates 30 years"

RedCinnabar — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 19:20:02 +0000

Tried it for the first time 15 years ago and never looked back since then. Coming from Slackware, I remember feeling relieved due to the automatic dependency management.

I just wonder how they will name the release versions when they will run out of Toy Story characters.