Top all-time · #5929
Avik Das
Personal blog · avikdas.com · on HN as akdasprogrammingmath
Avik Das's personal blog at avikdas.com covers programming and math. Since 2019, 13 different Hacker News readers have linked it 50 times, most often “Improved seam carving with forward energy”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-08-04, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Avik Das's posts on seam carving image resizing, dynamic programming and forward energy, plus one on read-after-write consistency for scalable systems.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Improved seam carving with forward energy4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-07-29
- Real-world dynamic programming: seam carving4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-05-30
- Graphical Introduction to Dynamic Programming2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-04-16
- Dynamic Programming for Machine Learning: Hidden Markov Models2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-06-26
- Vulnerability, Leadership and Paternity Leave2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-11-16
- Makefiles from the Ground Up2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-12-16
- Scalability concepts: read-after-write consistency2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-04-12
What Hacker News says?
I wrote it all by hand :) Lately, I've been using Svelte for interactive visualizations (see my post on using a tool called Astro with Svelte: https://avikdas.com/2023/12/30/interactive-demos-using-astro... ). But this one is all hand-written JS!
Comment linking /2023/12/30/interactive-demos-using-astro.html
on “How is a binary executable organized? Let's explore it (2014)”Submitted Real-world dynamic programming: seam carving as a story · 412 points
HN discussionThere's an improvement to seam carving using something termed "forward energy", see: https://avikdas.com/2019/07/29/improved-seam-carving-with-fo...
Comment linking /2019/07/29/improved-seam-carving-with-forward-energy.html
on “Content-aware image resizing in JavaScript”Submitted Graphical Introduction to Dynamic Programming as a story · 210 points
HN discussionI just literally published an article on that yesterday :) https://avikdas.com/2019/06/24/dynamic-programming-for-machi... Agreed, it's basically the same algorithm.
Comment linking /2019/06/24/dynamic-programming-for-machine-learning-hidden-markov-models.html
on “Real-world dynamic programming: seam carving”Submitted Writing GUI applications on the Raspberry Pi without a desktop environment (2019) as a story · 206 points
HN discussionNon-medium version: https://avikdas.com/2019/05/14/real-world-dynamic-programmin...
Comment linking /2019/05/14/real-world-dynamic-programming-seam-carving.html
on “Real-world dynamic programming: seam carving”Submitted “It's not peaches and cream either for men” as a story · 120 points
HN discussionShameless plug, but I wrote some blog posts because I had a lot of the same questions. In my case, I wanted to learn the WebGL APIs, so I wrote two posts: * https://avikdas.com/2020/07/08/barebones-webgl-in-75-lines-o... * https://avikdas.com/2020/07/21/barebones-3d-rendering-with-w... I still go back to them myself to refresh my memory. It's funny that I called this a lot of boilerplate, but Vulkan is known to have…
Comment linking /2020/07/21/barebones-3d-rendering-with-webgl.html
on “Shaders: How to draw high fidelity graphics with just x and y coordinates”Submitted Barebones WebGL in 75 lines of code as a story · 116 points
HN discussionLink from yesterday shows some good examples of the "algo" (seam carving): https://avikdas.com/2019/07/29/improved-seam-carving-with-fo...
Comment linking /2019/07/29/improved-seam-carving-with-forward-energy.html
on “Tracking Sex: Implications of widespread data leakage and tracking on porn sites”Submitted Improved seam carving with forward energy as a story · 93 points
HN discussionThanks! I'm glad the drawings were helpful. Most of my writing can be found at my blog ( https://avikdas.com/ ), but here are some from the same dynamic programming series: - Deep-dive into the Chain Matrix Multiplication Problem - https://avikdas.com/2019/04/25/dynamic-programming-deep-dive... - Real-world applications of DP: https://avikdas.com/2019/05/14/real-world-dynamic-programmin... and https://avikdas.com/20…
Comment linking /2019/06/24/dynamic-programming-for-machine-learning-hidden-markov-models.html
on “Speeding up function calls with lru_cache in Python”Submitted It's okay to not be okay as a story · 4 points
HN discussionPlugging my own writing, but I did a deep dive on top-down vs. bottom-up dynamic programming on my blog: https://avikdas.com/2019/04/15/a-graphical-introduction-to-d... The follow-up posts go into even more detail on individual problems that can be solved using either form of dynamic programming, including some real-world problems like content-aware image resizing.
Comment linking /2019/04/15/a-graphical-introduction-to-dynamic-programming.html
on “Speeding up function calls with lru_cache in Python”Submitted Why men's health depends on feminism as a story · 4 points
HN discussionYes! This was a central point in my previous article "Why men's health depends on feminism" ( https://avikdas.com/2020/11/01/why-mens-health-depends-on-fe... ). You might imagine the type of misogynistic responses that one got, so I wanted to directly connect observations to recommendations this time around.
Comment linking /2020/11/01/why-mens-health-depends-on-feminism.html
on ““It's not peaches and cream either for men””Submitted Reflecting on Twelve Months of Writing as a story · 4 points
HN discussionIt's called "read-after-write consistency". Write-through cache is one way, or just use a strongly consistent database, haha. https://avikdas.com/2020/04/13/scalability-concepts-read-aft... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_%28computing%29#Writing_... https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/why-you-sho...
Comment linking /2020/04/13/scalability-concepts-read-after-write-consistency.html
on “We reduced the cost of building Mastadon at Twitter-scale by 100x”Submitted Makefiles from the Ground Up as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAfter reading the first article [1], I was inspired to implement the algo myself. Great to see a follow up! Would be cool if there was a third that explained what's going on in this [2]... :D (was mentioned in the comments here [3]) [1] https://avikdas.com/2019/05/14/real-world-dynamic-programmin... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20110707030836/http://vmcl.xjtu.... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16269998
Comment linking /2019/05/14/real-world-dynamic-programming-seam-carving.html
on “Improved seam carving with forward energy”Submitted What I learned as a software engineer at a data science conference as a story · 4 points
HN discussionhttps://avikdas.com A few of my posts on dynamic programming got a fair bit of traction here on HN. I haven't posted in a while, but after a busy few years, I have some posts lined up. I want to reflect on some teaching I did (one big reason I didn't have time to blog), as well as document me getting a new home server set up (this time with containers, finally).
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?”Submitted Build your own 3D renderer as a story · 4 points
HN discussionYou can read about the algorithm here: https://avikdas.com/2019/07/29/improved-seam-carving-with-fo...
Comment linking /2019/07/29/improved-seam-carving-with-forward-energy.html
on “Seam Carving with Forward Energy”Submitted Scalability concepts: read-after-write consistency as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Scalability concepts: distributed ID generation as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted A tree-based introduction to backtracking as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Practical computer science: connected components in a graph as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Dynamic Programming Deep-Dive: Chain Matrix Multiplication as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
