Top all-time · #4196
Tyler Neylon
Personal blog · tylerneylon.com · on HN as tylerneylonsciencephilosophyprogramming
Tyler Neylon's personal blog at tylerneylon.com covers science, philosophy and programming. Since 2010, 18 different Hacker News readers have linked it 30 times, most often “Learn Lua in 15 Minutes”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-01-11, 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 Tyler Neylon's programming posts, mainly his short introduction 'Learn Lua in 15 Minutes' and a visual explainer of RNNs. Other linked posts cover locality-sensitive hashing and Lua resources.
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?
- Learn Lua in 15 Minutes6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2013-06-24
- Learn Lua in 15 Minutes (2013)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-05-28
- Introduction to Locality-Sensitive Hashing2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-09-19
What Hacker News says?
The general any-number-base-b rule here (as others have noticed in base 10^k) is that 1/(b-1)^2 = 0.0123456... (where '1', '2'.. are base b digits). The original post is this fact in base 1000. Proof for any base: 1/(b-1) = 1/b + 1/b^2 + 1/b^3 + .. = 0.11111.. (base b). So 1/(b-1)^2 = 0.11111.. * (1/b + 1/b^2 + 1/b^3 + ...) = 0.012345... QED. Richard Feynman beat us all to the punch here by noticing that 1/243 = 0.0…
Comment linking /b/archives/51
on “Fun with math: Dividing one by 998001 yields a surprising result”Submitted Learn Lua in 15 Minutes as a story · 357 points
HN discussionFor a couple of quick intros, try Learn Lua in 15 Minutes[1] and Learning Lua from JS[2]. For a bit more depth, try the Lua-users Tutorial Directory[3]. For serious depth, the two recommended by Gracana, PIL[4] and the reference manual[5], are fantastic. For an overview of the ecosystem, including some useful gamedev libraries and LÖVE-specific resources, take a look at awesome-lua[6] (my own, shameless plug). http:…
Comment linking /a/learn-lua/
on “LÖVE 0.10 released with iOS and Android support”Submitted Introduction to Locality-Sensitive Hashing as a story · 255 points
HN discussionI've been using an independent calendar for my own records for over a decade now - it's the day-of-year, written base 7. It fits in with weeks; if we reset weeks every year (why not? we do worse things already with leap days and seconds) then dates become equivalent with weekdays. One number expresses the day-of-year, day-of-week, week-of-year, and month-of-year, using a 49-day month. http://tylerneylon.com/b/archiv…
Comment linking /b/archives/122
on “Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days”Submitted Learn Lua in 15 Minutes (2013) as a story · 226 points
HN discussionI'm guessing this is a solved-many-times problem :) Here is my own version of the same thing: http://tylerneylon.com/a/imghist/ (and source) https://github.com/tylerneylon/imghist/blob/master/imghist.p... That also includes color histograms. Thoughts on actually using this: * If a human is using the color output, it's fun to weigh the colors by cluster sizes. * To find human-perspective dominant colors, it helps to…
Comment linking /a/imghist/
on “Using python and k-means to find dominant colors in images”Submitted A Model of a Mind as a story · 147 points
HN discussionPaper and pen(cil) notes are the ultimate in low-overhead for a temporary close-to-mind data store. I would disagree about the author's advice to use page numbers and table of contents, though; these add overhead, and for me the main advantage is ease-of-use, including close to zero extra work when writing something down. (Dates are useful, I admit.) I keep a paper coding notebook of anything I might possibly refer…
Comment linking /a/wj/
on “Keep a programming journal”Submitted Self-Replicating Functions as a story · 117 points
HN discussionI'm a big fan of self-analytics. I also like small-but-useful command-line tools of this nature. This is pleasantly documented and purpose-driven. If you're looking for something more focused on short daily summaries of what you've done, I wrote a similar tool called wj: http://tylerneylon.com/a/wj/ It's more about organization and presentation than privacy. For example, it can generate a tex file that converts your…
Comment linking /a/wj/
on “Jrnl – A simple command line journal application”Submitted How to Fix Google as a story · 29 points
HN discussionhttp://tylerneylon.com/a/learn-lua/ as simple as it can get. Lua is a very small (in term a amount of syntax) language.
Comment linking /a/learn-lua/
on “What makes Lua tick?”Submitted A Simple 3D Puzzle as a story · 4 points
HN discussionYou could have linked directly to the file containing the tutorial[1], it's quite readable. I quite like this sort of 'code prose' style, which reminds me of Learn Lua in 15 Minutes [2]. Light Table particularly lends itself to this style, however, as you can go through and selectively evaluate each block of code with CMD+Enter as you read. That said, one could argue that having to manually type into a console would…
Comment linking /a/learn-lua/
on “Light Table ClojureScript Tutorial”Submitted Learn Lua in 15 Minutes (2013) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAnother mathematically elegant calendar is the 7date: http://tylerneylon.com/a/7date_spec/
Comment linking /a/7date_spec/
on “Posical, the Positivist Calendar for Python”Submitted A Theory of Consciousness as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSome commenters are defending modern philosophy, but I think there is something legitimately wonky in the discipline. I can't figure out the best way to describe it, but, to state it poorly, studying philosophy often feels like filtering out a ton of BS. I'm saying it's all BS (it's not) but that there's too much. I don't think it has to be that way. Example ideas: * Writing in philosophy could be improved ( http://…
Comment linking /a/writing-about-philosophy/
on “How To Do Philosophy (2007)”- jf · 2018-09-19
Submitted Introduction to Locality-Sensitive Hashing as a story · 3 points
HN discussion https://tylerneylon.com/ The most popular article is "Learn Lua in 15 Minutes." I write about code, math, and philosophy; eg, neural networks, permutations, or consciousness. I also run a weekly machine learning / AI newsletter: https://learnandburn.ai/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?”Submitted Post Mortem of a Sneaky Bug Whilst Using Python Multiprocessing as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThank you for sharing! Very interesting. I love visual explanations [1]. If I remember correctly, LSH can be used in computer graphics, by instance when computing fluids simulations (where _a lot_ of particles are involved). The author also wrote an article in which he illustrates RNN in an original and stunning way: https://tylerneylon.com/a/randnn/ [1]: Not related, but you might also enjoy the work of Bartosz Cie…
Comment linking /a/randnn/
on “Introduction to Locality-Sensitive Hashing”Submitted Introduction to Locality-Sensitive Hashing as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHow about in 15 minutes lol ? https://tylerneylon.com/a/learn-lua/
Comment linking /a/learn-lua/
on “Lua: The Little Language That Could”Submitted Learn Lua in 15 Minutes as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Avoid Hidden Complexity as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted 97% of US schools cannot afford Elsevier journals as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted What I Learned from K&R as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The pirate catching puzzle (and solution) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
