Top all-time · #4426
Max Slater
Personal blog · thenumb.at · on HN as TheNumbatmathprogramming
Max Slater's personal blog at thenumb.at covers math and programming. Since 2022, 17 different Hacker News readers have linked it 29 times, most often “Compile-Time Dependent Types”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-25, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Max Slater's site as background reading on math and programming topics such as differentiable programming, functions as vectors, and rotation parameterizations, mostly as bare links or citations.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Compile-Time Dependent Types4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-10-26
- Differentiable programming from scratch4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-08-01
- Optimizing Open Addressing2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-03-19
- Exponentially Better Rotations (2022)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-04-06
- Monte Carlo Crash Course: Quasi-Monte Carlo2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-08-03
- Functions Are Vectors (2023)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-07-29
What Hacker News says?
Differentiable Programming from Scratch https://thenumb.at/Autodiff/
Comment linking /Autodiff/
on “Free-form floor plan design using differentiable Voronoi diagram”Submitted Exponentially Better Rotations (2022) as a story · 282 points
HN discussionI think you are confused about the analogies at the beginning at the article (although there is nothing technically wrong about them). Here's the definition of a vector space which agrees with the one everyone in mathematics use: https://thenumb.at/Functions-are-Vectors/#vector-spaces From this it's fairly easy to prove (and done in the article) that the set of all functions R->R is a vector space.
Comment linking /Functions-are-Vectors/
on “Functions Are Vectors (2023)”Submitted Functions Are Vectors (2023) as a story · 233 points
HN discussionhttps://thenumb.at/Functions-are-Vectors/#proofs It's not a particularly interesting proof, but the author does prove that real valued functions are vectors. The bulk of the article is less about proofs, and more about showing how the above result is useful.
Comment linking /Functions-are-Vectors/
on “Functions Are Vectors (2023)”Submitted Differentiable programming from scratch as a story · 196 points
HN discussionFor my application I need just the translations and Euler angles. The range of poses is mechanically constrained so I don't have to worry about gimbal lock. But yeah, my limited understanding matches yours that other parameterizations are more useful in general contexts. This post and interactive explanations have been on my backlog to read and internalize: https://thenumb.at/Exponential-Rotations/ (Also: Thanks for…
Comment linking /Exponential-Rotations/
on “Towards the Cutest Neural Network”Submitted Monte Carlo Crash Course: Quasi-Monte Carlo as a story · 143 points
HN discussionThis may be more about the indexing strategy than the hash function. Meaning: once we have the hash(es), how do we decide what index to use for the key? Open-addressing schemes like linear probing, quadratic probing, certain variants of Robinhood hashing (which is kind of on a different axis anyway) commonly have 50–70% expected space efficiency. Performance is bad above 90%. But Cuckoo hash tables can get above 90%…
Comment linking /Hashtables/
on “Hash functions: An empirical comparison (2008)”Submitted Differentiable Programming from Scratch as a story · 108 points
HN discussionhttps://thenumb.at/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal website here?”Submitted Monte Carlo Crash Course: Sampling as a story · 108 points
HN discussionSubmitted Compile-Time Dependent Types as a story · 77 points
HN discussionSubmitted Monte Carlo Crash Course: Rendering as a story · 12 points
HN discussionSubmitted Compile-Time Dependent Types as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Differentiable Programming from Scratch as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Oxidizing C++ as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Quasi-Monte Carlo as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Exponentially Better Integration as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Exponentially Better Rotations as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Optimizing Open Addressing as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Graphics Blogroll as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Functions are Vectors as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Exploring Neural Graphics Primitives as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Compile-time dependent types in the Syl programming language as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Syl: Compile-Time Dependent Types as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Optimizing Open Addressing as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Spherical Integration. Or, where does that come from? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Exploring Neural Graphics Primitives as a story · 1 points
HN discussion