Hacker News Reader

ngmcon Shopify acquires Tailwind

Glad to hear the team found a successful exit. Adam bought the tailwindlabs.com domain from me when they started out and he seemed genuinely cool. Hope they keep building tools so many people enjoy using.

ngmcon Learning Creative Learning

This course was wonderful when I took it a few years ago. Just heard the next offering starts in April, so I'm curious to see how it's evolved. From the creators:

Learning Creative Learning (LCL) is a free course and open community for educators and for anyone who cares about learning and creativity.

Over six weeks, you'll explore the ideas behind the creative learning educational approach, work on projects you actually care about, and connect with people from around the world who share your curiosity.

It's part course, part community, part creative playground.

LCL is developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at MIT, the research team behind Scratch and Octostudio, the creative coding platforms used by millions of young learners worldwide.

It is also made possible by a global network of volunteer facilitators who help organize, translate, and support the community in multiple languages.

ngmcon Welcome to the Block Universe

Fun read. Haha I also love the idea of being a mathematical braid. Arrival is a great film, but my favorite fictional take on this kind of thinking is still Slaughterhouse-Five.

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

ngmcon BLIS: A BLAS-like framework for basic linear algebra routines

I took one of the group's courses, Linear Algebra: Foundations to Frontiers, for fun at the beginning of COVID lockdown and loved it. Here's the course that teaches their basic approach to creating BLIS:

https://www.edx.org/learn/computer-programming/the-universit...

Neat stuff. The instructors are great, so I'll try to make room in my schedule for this later in the year.

ngmcon 3D Map of Shinjuku Station in Three.js

This is the first time I've "seen" Shinjuku Station. What a beautiful introduction. I first read about the station in Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage and always wondered what it looked like. Neat.

ngmcon Sandstorm, Tempest, and the Future

And here I was feeling cheeky.

In all seriousness, I just learned about Sandstorm and think it could be a great fit for a local co-op I’m building. It’s a shame about the startup, but I hope we’ll get a chance to support the open collective.

ngmcon Sandstorm, Tempest, and the Future

I found this helpful in getting started with Sandstorm:

https://youtu.be/y6120QOlsfU

ngmcon Earth’s average 2023 temperature is now likely to reach 1.5 °C of warming

Yep. For a bit more context, here’s the Wikipedia article on climate justice:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_justice

The “Disproportionality between causality and burden” section makes me sad.

ngmcon JupyterLite: a JupyterLab distribution that runs in the browser

Thanks! And big thanks to martinRenou1 for his work on ipycanvas!! He did most of the heavy lifting.

ngmcon JupyterLite: a JupyterLab distribution that runs in the browser

JupyterLite is great! I use it heavily with my middle school math students — wonderful to have NumPy, matplotlib, and friends available without needing to set up accounts. I created a package called jupy5 that provides Turtle graphics and a p5.js-inspired sketchbook for JupyterLite as well.

ngmcon US can reach 100% clean power by 2035, DOE finds

Agreed except for the dig at Mark Jacobson. He was my undergrad and grad advisor, and I only knew him to be driven by data and a deep concern for the welfare of people and the planet. There are bad scientists out there but Mark isn't one of them. lol I recall him declining my request to put something about Al Gore in our common area because he didn't want to politicize the space.

ngmcon Researchers: World can reach 100% renewable energy system by/before 2050

Great question! The studies do consider the spatio-temporal distribution of generation and demand. Here's a recent paper [1] that develops roadmaps for 145 countries and has infographics with links to additional resources.

I found the source code for the LOADMATCH model [2] used in the studies which can run on a laptop. You can email Mark about data, source code for the GATOR-GCMOM model [3], and advice on running it.

And here's a talk [4] he gave on the topic at NASA Ames Research Center a few years back.

[1] https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/WWS-...

[2] https://github.com/mzjacobson/Public/blob/main/powerworld.f

[3] https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/GATOR/GATOR-GCM...

[4] https://youtu.be/espLfnvuYps

ngmcon Researchers: World can reach 100% renewable energy system by/before 2050

Really glad to see this discussion! My former advisor, Mark Jacobson, is one of the authors of the paper cited in the article. His book "100% Clean, Renewable Energy and Storage for Everything" [1] is a good starting point for folks with a more technical background. I recently started working on my own version [2] for young people and beginners that uses code as a medium to explore these ideas.

Perhaps more directly relevant for the HN crowd, Tom Greenwood's book "Sustainable Web Design" [3] provides simple strategies for reducing the climate impacts of the software systems we build.

[1] https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/WWSBook/WWSBook...

[2] https://goodenergy.cc

[3] https://abookapart.com/products/sustainable-web-design/

ngmcon The birth of random-access memory

Some robots made a cool musical about this:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nZZjkBu_E4olFSb5Ey...

ngmcon A Tiny Grammar of Graphics

Love that paper. Wickham also made his ggplot2 book freely available:

https://ggplot2-book.org/

ngmcon The big six matrix factorizations

You could take Strang’s follow-up course on learning from data.

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-065-matrix-methods-in-data-an...

ngmcon Manim – Python library for creating mathematical animations

Shameless plug for my mentee: p5.teach aims to be a beginner-friendly version of manim that runs in the browser.

https://github.com/two-ticks/p5.teach.js

https://medium.com/processing-foundation/p5-teach-teaching-m...

ngmcon JSXGraph: Dynamic Mathematics with JavaScript

Shameless plug: I recently mentored a GSoC student who built a beginner-friendly graphing library on top of p5.js. His aim is to make it easier for educators to create manim-quality math visualizations that are interactive. Check it out!

https://medium.com/processing-foundation/p5-teach-teaching-m...

https://github.com/two-ticks/p5.teach.js

https://p5js.org/

ngmcon Manim: An animation engine for explanatory math videos

Shameless plug: I’m mentoring a student who is building a beginner-friendly version of manim on top of p5.js for his Google Summer of Code Project - check it out!

https://two-ticks.github.io/p5.teach.js/

https://discourse.processing.org/t/animating-maths-in-p5-js

ngmcon Monopoly Technology Platforms Are Colonizing Education

OpenStax books are a great resource! I reference them in the high school math classes I teach.

ngmcon Numerical Linear Algebra for Programmers

I'm taking a refresher course on linear algebra from UT Austin and love their approach - good mix of algorithms, proofs, exercises, and coding assignments.

http://ulaff.net/

ngmcon Wekan: Open-source, trello-like kanban

Taiga is another option that you can host yourself.

https://taiga.io

ngmcon Snap: Build Your Own Blocks

It's definitely possible but the Scratch Blocks [1] wiki [2] is indeed a little sparse. VEXcode Blocks [3] seem to be a successful product, so somebody must have figured it out.

[1] https://github.com/llk

[2] https://github.com/LLK/scratch-blocks/wiki

[3] https://www.vexrobotics.com/vexcode-blocks

ngmcon Show HN: Blocklike.js Educational Library – So kids can level up from Scratch

This is great work! I’m a fan of blockp5.js’ approach to the problem: take a beginner-friendly JavaScript environment (p5.js) and add a blocks.

https://github.com/ycatch/blockp5.js

ngmcon A Mosaic of “2001: A Space Odyssey” Made with Processing

Originally shared by the creator in the Processing forum:

https://discourse.processing.org/t/2001-a-space-odyssey-reto...

ngmcon Snap! 5 is here

Scratch lists seem relatively first-class to me. Your son could probably have fun building simple data structures with them by making blocks that take an input. He can also update a "return" variable if the situation calls for it.

https://en.scratch-wiki.info/wiki/List

ngmcon Snap! 5 is here

Scratch does allow you to make your own blocks with optional input. My math students use them to learn about abstraction. The most recent implementation was released last winter and is written in JavaScript.

https://en.scratch-wiki.info/wiki/Scratch_3.0

ngmcon Lattice Boltzmann

Love this. Dan Schroeder also has a great LBM lab with implementations in a few languages.

https://physics.weber.edu/schroeder/fluids/

I ported his JavaScript implementation to TensorFlow.js and screwed something up – still fun if you have a nice GPU.

https://mcintyre.io/sketches/ghosts/

ngmcon Fantastic Mr. Fox (2005)

https://youtu.be/Jjbu0kSEuQQ

I did this the moment I read the article's title.

ngmcon Strang's “Linear Algebra and Learning from Data” is printed and available

Ordered my copy a few days ago after learning about it from a talk at JuliaCon[0]. It's been a decade since I took linear algebra, so I'm also reviewing Prof. Strang's basic course[1]. What an amazing teacher.

[0] https://youtu.be/gGYcSjrqbjc

[1] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06sc-linear-algeb...