Hacker News: eapriv

New comment by eapriv in "Various LLM Smells"

eapriv — Fri, 29 May 2026 08:11:43 +0000

> Late last year I started writing a math blog and decided to use LLMs to polish/enhance my writing.

Why would you do that in the first place? If you are just starting writing about math, I assume your goal would be to get better at it, and using LLMs is not how you get better at writing.

New comment by eapriv in "DOS Zone"

eapriv — Thu, 21 May 2026 04:08:17 +0000

Looks like AI slop in (some of) the thumbnail images. Why would anyone do that?

New comment by eapriv in "I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up"

eapriv — Sun, 10 May 2026 08:35:06 +0000

The problem is the use of AI. It’s a reliable indicator that the author doesn’t actually care about the quality of the work, so I shouldn’t bother to read the text.

New comment by eapriv in "Rolling your own serverless OCR in 40 lines of code"

eapriv — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 15:08:39 +0000

Not sure what “your own” in the title is supposed to mean if you are running a model that you didn’t train using a framework that you didn’t write on a server that you don’t own.

New comment by eapriv in "Advent of Compiler Optimisations 2025"

eapriv — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 14:11:16 +0000

The problem is “to add two numbers”. The meta-problem is “to learn how computers work”.

New comment by eapriv in "CUDA Ontology"

eapriv — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 17:20:37 +0000

Removing layers usually improves stability.

New comment by eapriv in "CUDA Ontology"

eapriv — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 12:03:19 +0000

Sounds like most of these problems come from using Python.

New comment by eapriv in "[dead]"

eapriv — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 13:40:05 +0000

Spoiler: it’s about AI.

New comment by eapriv in "Language models are injective and hence invertible"

eapriv — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 12:21:22 +0000

No, it says nothing about LLM output being invertible.

New comment by eapriv in "Mathematicians discover prime number pattern in fractal chaos"

eapriv — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 17:16:06 +0000

You are wrong. Prime numbers are fundamental to mathematics.

New comment by eapriv in "Basic Math Textbook: The Napkin Project"

eapriv — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 17:11:54 +0000

If I were to write such a text, it would have a lot more about building intuition for advanced mathematical concepts. This intuition is extremely valuable, but missing from almost all advanced-level texts. On the other hand, it’s very difficult to put into words, and probably quite personal.

New comment by eapriv in "Basic Math Textbook: The Napkin Project"

eapriv — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 17:03:21 +0000

I submitted it, and the word “basic” is mine, because the author doesn’t really go deep into what I would consider “advanced” mathematics. It can be a good prerequisite for advanced things, though.

Basic Math Textbook: The Napkin Project

eapriv — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 23:46:40 +0000

Article URL: https://web.evanchen.cc/napkin.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45456965

Points: 245

# Comments: 73

New comment by eapriv in "NIH is cheaper than the wrong dependency"

eapriv — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 11:57:46 +0000

If you have a third-party dependency that survived for 20 years. But what if you are trying to choose what to rely on today, and to decide if it will even exist in 20 years? Certainly none of the fashionable JavaScript frameworks will.

New comment by eapriv in "Gaslight-driven development"

eapriv — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 04:35:24 +0000

Isn’t this the whole shtick of Mr Martin, author of “Clean Code”?

Jonathan Blow – Jai Demo and Design Explanation

eapriv — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 15:00:45 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdpD5QIVOKQ

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44510849

Points: 12

# Comments: 1

New comment by eapriv in "Functions Are Vectors (2023)"

eapriv — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 06:32:25 +0000

You can’t, because a Fourier series is not a linear combination.

New comment by eapriv in "BusyBeaver(6) Is Quite Large"

eapriv — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 19:28:15 +0000

It’s not “an uncomputable number”.

New comment by eapriv in "Basic Facts about GPUs"

eapriv — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 15:09:28 +0000

Spoiler: it’s not about how GPUs work, it’s about how to use them for machine learning computations.

New comment by eapriv in "Oklo, the Earth's Two-billion-year-old only Known Natural Nuclear Reactor (2018)"

eapriv — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 06:02:53 +0000

um, “Earth’s”?