Hacker News: mkl

New comment by mkl in "Linear algebra done right"

mkl — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 13:28:46 +0000

Wikipedia says "The book has a pure, proof-heavy focus and is aimed at upper-division undergraduates who have been exposed to linear algebra in a prior course." [1], so it seems to be a different category of book?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Algebra_(book)

New comment by mkl in "GIMP Development Update"

mkl — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 11:44:20 +0000

Krita is good at editing images, so it is an image editor. It is also good at digital painting, and that's where much of its development focus lies.

New comment by mkl in "Asus Bike Booster"

mkl — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 05:09:34 +0000

A lot of extra force when slowing down from faster speeds though, no matter where the motor is added.

New comment by mkl in "The Ploopy A+ Trackball Is Here"

mkl — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 12:12:15 +0000

With only one you can't detect rotation around the axis that goes through the sensor, and for rotation close to that axis the resolution will be very poor.

New comment by mkl in "Simplifying and Refactoring Introductory Calculus (2018)"

mkl — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 03:27:30 +0000

They are differentials. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_(mathematics) has some info but is not great as a beginning introduction. dx is an infinitesimal bit of x, and dy is an infinitesimal bit of y. dx here is the same dx as in an integral, which you can think of as the width of one of the infinite infinitesimally thin rectangles whose areas are being added up to find the area under the curve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_integral

New comment by mkl in "The Ploopy A+ Trackball Is Here"

mkl — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 03:02:55 +0000

Looks like it has just one mouse sensor, so no.

New comment by mkl in "The Ploopy A+ Trackball Is Here"

mkl — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 02:50:47 +0000

Okay, so assembly and soldering required, but all parts included and I don't need a 3D printer. Can do. Weird that they don't mention any of that. The finished item looks like a good trackball.

New comment by mkl in "The Ploopy A+ Trackball Is Here"

mkl — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 02:35:25 +0000

> preorder a kit for $99CAD

What is a kit here? A trackball? All the parts needed to assemble a trackball? A populated circuit board, where the rest needs 3D printing? A pile of electronic components that need to be soldered together and the rest needs 3D printing?

New comment by mkl in "A shell exclamation mark is not for yelling. Be lazy"

mkl — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 12:38:09 +0000

Or alt-^ to do it without any configuration.

New comment by mkl in "A shell exclamation mark is not for yelling. Be lazy"

mkl — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 12:31:38 +0000

> For the same reason I'll often Ctrl+C and start again instead of trying to backspace and correct.

Try ctrl-x ctrl-e to edit the command in your choice of editor ($EDITOR).

Editing commands is not hard with a few keys. At least learn alt-b and alt-f to go a word back or forward. Often ctrl-left and ctrl-right will do the same thing easier (depends on your terminal). Ctrl-w deletes back to the previous space, alt-backspace and alt-d delete the previous and next word respectively. There are many more keys in the manual, but those cover most things.

New comment by mkl in "A shell exclamation mark is not for yelling. Be lazy"

mkl — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 12:18:04 +0000

> alt-. is great for what it is designed to do, iterating over the previous "last arguments" of your shell history. It's great at doing that, but it is also limited to doing just that one thing.

No, it isn't limited to just that. Alt-0 alt-. will give you the zeroth "argument" (the program), alt-1 alt-. will get you the next (the program's first argument), etc. Negative arguments count back from the end: alt-- 1 alt-. will get you the argument before the last one (note that alt is held for the "-" but not the digit).

When you do use event designators, ctrl-alt-e (or alt-^) is critical. It expands all the ! codes inline to what they refer to, so you can see what you're doing before you hit enter, and as you're constructing the command too.

New comment by mkl in "Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities"

mkl — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:28:51 +0000

Definitely not. Brute forcing this would be exhaustively searching the space of possible proofs until succeeding. This is heuristically remixing and extending existing work.

New comment by mkl in "Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities"

mkl — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:15:40 +0000

It still isn't an option for most problems, either because it would take far more computing power than is available or because the number of things to compute is infinite. In both cases, new theory is what can succeed instead. Developing new theory by brute force can be attempted, but will almost always run into the same problems. Using AI to develop new theory is using heuristics rather than brute force.

New comment by mkl in "Squeak 6.1"

mkl — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:49:13 +0000

For me, that was my "I'm getting out of here before I break it irreversibly" moment while working through some introductory tutorial ~20 years ago; I've never touched Smalltalk again. I can't understand why being bespoke and unreproducible would be a desirable thing for software.

(Yes, clearly I don't "get it". Happy to hear explanations.)

New comment by mkl in "2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026"

mkl — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 08:09:41 +0000

> by "legitimate stand-out products", I meant exactly that, with no connotation of commercialization

The word "product" implies commercial.

New comment by mkl in "Agent-Manager: A Tmux TUI for Running Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode"

mkl — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 13:05:48 +0000

This is great! It would be really helpful if it had some measure of the number of users (stars?) and a contributor count. It's pretty hard to determine which of these projects are going to stick around. Total length of time under active development and percentage of code committed by agents would also be informative.

New comment by mkl in "Show HN: Manim (3Blue1Brown's animation engine) in the browser via WebGPU"

mkl — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 05:23:39 +0000

In that case you shouldn't call it Manim or "3Blue1Brown's animation engine". At best this has a partly Manim-compatible API, similar to how XY [1] has a partly Matplotlib-compatible API.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49085798

New comment by mkl in "Show HN: tale.fyi, we deserve a home for fiction"

mkl — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 13:59:49 +0000

We have many homes for fiction already. Mine is my ebook reader. For many it's their bookshelf or local library.

First impression: autoplay of noisy audio when you go to a book is awful. Please don't do this.

> Humanity has a massive corpus of fiction, thanks to copyright law...

Seems a strange thing to credit first.

https://tale.fyi/tell says you need to sign in to tell your own story, but there doesn't seem to be a way to do that (I'm on Firefox Android).

New comment by mkl in "Kimi K3 Now Available via Telnyx Inference API"

mkl — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 13:33:07 +0000

Atlanta, Denver, Paris, Sydney: https://developers.telnyx.com/docs/inference/models/regions

The top text says MENA as well, but the regions page doesn't mention it.

New comment by mkl in "Writing by hand is good for your brain"

mkl — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 23:03:46 +0000

No: https://faq.brandonsanderson.com/knowledge-base/what-program...