Top all-time · #9289
Heinrich Hartmann
Personal blog · heinrichhartmann.com · on HN as heinrichhartmandataprogramming
Heinrich Hartmann's personal blog at heinrichhartmann.com covers data and programming. Since 2016, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 31 times, most often “Writing for Engineers”. The last post was in 2021, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link his post on technical writing as a guide to improving that skill. One commenter calls it a pretty neat post. Another commenter cites it as inspiration for their own article.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Writing for Engineers6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2022-04-17
- First Steps with Nix – Building Emacs2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-10-16
What Hacker News says?
I had a somewhat similar encounter with a 4 year old (!), who blew me away with his ability to solve arithmetic puzzles: http://heinrichhartmann.com/blog/2016/06/12/Box-Counting-Ari... It's a great joy to work with such gifted young minds.
Comment linking /blog/2016/06/12/Box-Counting-Arithmetic.html
on “Conversations with a six-year-old on functional programming”Submitted Writing for Engineers as a story · 245 points
HN discussionForgive me for bringing up my own material here, but I wrote a piece that is highly relevant in this context only two days ago: Writing for Engineers - https://www.heinrichhartmann.com/posts/writing/ This text is particularly geared towards Software Engineers and focuses more on the psychology of getting started with writing. Lot's of overlap with the content in this post (which has much more depth on the "how to wr…
Comment linking /posts/writing/
on “How to write more clearly, think more clearly, and learn complex material [pdf]”Submitted Dijkstra's Prime Number Algorithm as a story · 134 points
HN discussionPlug: Just wrote a piece on this topic that you might enjoy reading: https://www.heinrichhartmann.com/posts/2021-03-08-rank-decom...
Comment linking /posts/2021-03-08-rank-decomposition/
on “Reprojecting the Perseverance landing footage onto satellite imagery”Submitted Writing for Engineers as a story · 13 points
HN discussion> we tried to show her a visual representation of the multiplication I find that visual methods, open up many ways to deeper understanding of arithmetic. Even advanced topics like binomial coefficients pop up quite naturally when folling through. Here is my take on it: http://heinrichhartmann.com/blog/2016/06/12/Box-Counting-Ari...
Comment linking /blog/2016/06/12/Box-Counting-Arithmetic.html
on “Stepping into math: Open-sourcing our step-by-step solver”Submitted Monitoring Dropbox with StatsD/Circonus as a story · 8 points
HN discussionI started my blog in 2012, when I shifted my academic career from Mathematics to Computer Science. This topic was literally the first thing that I studied: https://heinrichhartmann.com/archive/Dissecting-Hello-World.... Never regretted going down this deep rabbit hole. IIRC, Julia also has a math background. Maybe it's the desire for bottom-up reasoning that leads math folks towards experiments like this. Great to s…
Comment linking /archive/Dissecting-Hello-World.html
on “How is a binary executable organized? Let's explore it (2014)”Submitted The Problem with Lisp as a story · 6 points
HN discussion> It's not easy by many miles. Depends on the perspective of-course. I mean, LISP is a real barrier, but once you got over the parenthesis and suck-up some quirks [1], you can get productive quite easily. Here are two example extensions from my `init.el`. (defun hh-curl (url) "Create tmp buffer with curl output" (interactive "sURL: ") (let ((buffer url)) (with-output-to-temp-buffer buffer (shell-command (format "cur…
Comment linking /blog/problem-lisp.html
on “Emacs: The most successful malleable system”Submitted First Steps with Nix – Building Emacs as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI wrote about this a while ago: http://heinrichhartmann.com/blog/2017/12/31/Quitting-Faceboo... """ Problem with the facebook exporter are: - All comments are missing. Even the ones you wrote yourself! - There are no images in the timeline. - The number of likes and shares is missing on the posts. Before I delete my account, I wanted to have a more decent backup of my timeline. I looked into printing out the timelin…
Comment linking /blog/2017/12/31/Quitting-Facebook.html
on “How to delete Facebook and not lose your friends and photos”Submitted Quitting Facebook as a story · 3 points
HN discussionLoading this page took a good 62 seconds to complete. That's 62seconds for a 78.7kb payload. ( https://ibb.co/gqoUWe ). At least at the present point, this is not a viable option for serving web-pages. What I do like about IPFS is that you get links to CONTENT as opposed to LOCATIONS. This is completely independent of the hosting aspects. It would be interesting to offer content links to blog posts. I provide at lea…
Comment linking /blog/Latency-SLOs.html
on “Putting This Blog on IPFS”Submitted Effective Rank Decomposition for Linear Maps as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHere's a (imho) pretty neat post on technical writing that was recently linked on HN: https://www.heinrichhartmann.com/posts/writing/
Comment linking /posts/writing/
on “Ask HN: How to level up your technical writing?”Submitted From Academia to Data Science as a story · 2 points
HN discussionFrom a theoretical perspective the most fundamental decomposition is the rank-decomposition: A = X D Y with X,Y invertible and D diagonal. It's called rank decomposition, because you can read off the rank from A by counting the non-zero entries in D. It's also useful to determining bases for the image and the kernel of A. Every math student learns a version of that in their first lecture series of Linear Algebra. Cu…
Comment linking /posts/2021-03-08-rank-decomposition/
on “The big six matrix factorizations”Submitted A Ditigal Passport for Digital Citizens as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI have compile times of >30 seconds with Jekyll blog [1,2]. This is an issue. It adds a lot of friction to the edit/preview loop. BTW: I just moved it to Netlify since reading this thread. Took me ~5 minutes. [1] https://github.com/HeinrichHartmann/HeinrichHartmann.github.... [2] https://www.heinrichhartmann.com/
Comment linking /
on “Building a static serverless website using S3 and CloudFront”Submitted Home-Lab Observability with OpenTelemetry as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThis does not seem to depend on BLAS/LAPACK. Good to see LU decomposition with full pivoting being implemented here (which is missing from BLAS/LAPACK). This gives a fast, numerically stable way to compute the rank of a matrix (with a basis of the kernel and image spaces). Details: https://www.heinrichhartmann.com/posts/2021-03-08-rank-decom... .
Comment linking /posts/2021-03-08-rank-decomposition/
on “Faer-rs: Linear algebra foundation for Rust”Submitted Writing for Engineers as a story · 1 points
HN discussion#MeToo. I am using two OSX machines and two remote Linux machines for my day-2-day private/work related stuff. Nix+home-manager allows me to have all productivity tools consistently available across all platforms with minimal effort [1]. Dotfiles/shell config lives in a separate folder [2] and is not managed in nix. Tangent: Secrets are are encrypted with git-crypt ( https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt ) and live in t…
Comment linking /posts/2021-08-08-nix-emacs/
on “NixOS and the Art of OS Configuration (2018)”Submitted Circonus monitoring on a Raspberry pi as a story · 1 points
HN discussionBlogged about the idea of a "digital passport" as SSO service in 2016 -- https://www.heinrichhartmann.com/archive/a-digital-passport-...
Comment linking /archive/a-digital-passport-for-digital-citizens
on “EU set to unveil plans for bloc-wide digital wallet for various services”If you enjoyed this, you might also like this article from my blog: http://heinrichhartmann.com/blog/2014/12/11/Generative-Model... This is a study of generating time series/stochastic processes. The estimators for the parameters lead straight up to Kalman filters. The state space models are taken from the Kalman setup. This was the first time I understood how Kalman filters come about. Its really a three step proce…
Comment linking /blog/2014/12/11/Generative-Models-for-Time-Series.html
on “Derive Yourself a Kalman Filter”Nice work! Averaging percentiles is well-known to give terrible results. Glad to see more people, taking this problem serious, and providing viable alternatives! A note on Accuracy: At Circonus, we have been using a version of HDR-Histograms [1] for many years to aggregate latency distributions, and calculate accurate aggregated percentiles. Accuracy was never a problem (worst-case error <5%, usually _much_ better).…
Comment linking /pdf/Heinrich%20Hartmann%20-%20Latency%20SLOs%20Done%20Right%20(FOSDEM,%202019).pdf
on “DDSketch: A fast, fully-mergeable quantile sketch with relative-error guarantees”This is a very nice Journal! https://programming-journal.org/ > Diamond open access, free-of-charge to authors. The articles are accessible to everyone, forever, and the authors don’t need to pay any fee. > All articles are published under a Creative Commons license. > The journal is an overlay on arXiv, meaning that we upload all articles to arXiv as a long-term storage system. Just as it should be. If I write a re…
Comment linking /blog/2013/01/17/Why-Openness-benefitts-research.html
on “Reference Capabilities for Safe Parallel Array Programming”