Hacker News: nivter

New comment by nivter in "Show HN: Geomatic – a command-driven geometry studio enabled with autodiff"

nivter — Mon, 25 May 2026 15:05:01 +0000

Not a fan of subscription hell myself, I plan to use one-time payment for all my products. Implementation wise one time payment is much simpler than setting up smaller payments that cap at a fixed amount.

New comment by nivter in "Show HN: Geomatic – a command-driven geometry studio enabled with autodiff"

nivter — Mon, 25 May 2026 08:29:13 +0000

Automatic differentiation. For any DAG with a scalar output, it allows calculating its partial derivative wrt the input parameters.

Show HN: Geomatic – a command-driven geometry studio enabled with autodiff

nivter — Mon, 25 May 2026 08:25:00 +0000

All commands have the format `output = \func inputs` or just `\function inputs`. Points and scalars are built on the fly. Eg `\line a b` to an empty canvas creates points `a` and `b`, and joins them with a line.

One can use broadcasting semantics similar to NumPy and PyTorch in a visual setting (imagine creating a list of circles where one dim corresponds to radius and another to the center). One can also use backpropagation, run gradient descent or visualize vector fields. Almost everything is reactive so changing a variable updates all of the downstream geometry. It also allows anyone to write and load their own visualization, which can be broadcasted and differentiated through.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48264635

Points: 54

# Comments: 13

New comment by nivter in "Edge AI for Beginners"

nivter — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 04:15:55 +0000

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MITHANLab Course: https://hanlab.mit.edu/courses/2024-fall-65940

New comment by nivter in "Edge AI for Beginners"

nivter — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 01:08:08 +0000

This is far from what I expected. There is not much related to quantization, pruning, common architectures, precision or benchmarking. For those interested in this topic, I would recommend content from MIT HAN Lab.

New comment by nivter in "How has mathematics gotten so abstract?"

nivter — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 14:38:51 +0000

I believe that abstraction is recursive in nature which creates multiple layers of abstract ideas leading to new areas or insights. For instance our understanding of continuity and limit led to calculus, which when tied to the (abstract) idea of linearity led to the idea of linear operator which explains various phenomena in the real world surprisingly well.

New comment by nivter in "Is Fortran better than Python for teaching basics of numerical linear algebra?"

nivter — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 07:29:16 +0000

If it's about teaching and not about efficiency, why not just use plain Python? One could argue it is actually better since students don't have to worry about typing and syntax, and it allows a gentler introduction to commonly used tools like jax and numpy while getting comfortable with the language.

New comment by nivter in "[dead]"

nivter — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 11:03:03 +0000

A journey from rotation matrices to Lie algebra

Multimodal Image Patch Embeddings

nivter — Sun, 28 Apr 2024 16:02:04 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/TinyVolt/multimodal-patch-embeddings

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40189547

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by nivter in "Three interpretations of matrix products"

nivter — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 00:22:51 +0000

Thanks, this is a very helpful feedback.

New comment by nivter in "Three interpretations of matrix products"

nivter — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 11:16:25 +0000

This was a joyful epiphany for me when I encountered continuous linear systems for the first time. Another corollary of this is when the kernel is δ(x-y), the resulting integral has the value f(x). I like to see it as a continuous version of expressing a vector as a sum of its components.

New comment by nivter in "Three interpretations of matrix products"

nivter — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 11:03:37 +0000

Yup, I consider this interpretation as a matrix being a function that takes in objects like a line, a circle or a convex shape and spits out objects like some other line, an ellipse or another convex shape. It is a level of abstraction where you no longer care _how_ matrix multiplication works - you mostly care about what a matrix does to geometric objects. I covered this aspect not in the above article but in a separate one: https://www.linearalgebraforprogrammers.com/la/3_mat_vec_mul

New comment by nivter in "Three interpretations of matrix products"

nivter — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 10:59:26 +0000

Originally I had planned to add a line or two explaining how a matrix-matrix product is just a _list_ of matrix-vector products but then dropped the idea to keep it solely focused on the interpretations. I will probably add it to make it all about matrix-matrix products.

Three interpretations of matrix products

nivter — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 11:12:13 +0000

Article URL: https://www.linearalgebraforprogrammers.com/blog/matmul_animations

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39479234

Points: 70

# Comments: 25

Inverse of a matrix after a row-and-column removal

nivter — Mon, 25 Dec 2023 12:01:44 +0000

Article URL: https://www.linearalgebraforprogrammers.com/blog/inverse_row_col_removed

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38761918

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Show HN: Visualize 2D matrix transformations with simple text

nivter — Sun, 15 Oct 2023 15:02:17 +0000

You can add vectors, polygons or points on a circle - these are elements to be transformed - by typing something like `add a square with side 4 and top left point -2,2`. You can modify the transformation matrix `M`. You can rotate the vectors (`x`) or the transformation matrix (`M`).

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37890319

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by nivter in "Linear Algebra for Programmers – a e-book of visual essays"

nivter — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 13:17:38 +0000

Excited to share something I have been working for over a year in my spare time - an e-book of visual essays titled "Linear Algebra for Programmers" - https://www.linearalgebraforprogrammers.com/ (not optimized for mobile devices yet)

It starts with taking a weighted sum of numbers (and then vectors/arrays). Everything else builds up by just observing and interacting with weighted sums of arrays.

Hope you enjoy it.

Linear Algebra for Programmers – a e-book of visual essays

nivter — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 13:17:38 +0000

Article URL: https://www.linearalgebraforprogrammers.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35453643

Points: 3

# Comments: 1