Hacker News Reader

tamndon Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)

Thanks! I completely agree. For more than ten years consulting, training and architecting systems for clients across government and enterprise, I have seen the same pattern. Long before "big data", "cloud" and now with "AI" and "GenAI" these buzzwords have often been misunderstood by most of the C-suite. In my entire career, explaining the basics and setting the right expectations has always been the hardest part.

I really like your idea of targeting executives and connecting it to real business outcomes. Getting decision makers to truly understand the fundamentals behind the technology would make a huge difference.

tamndon Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)

For clarification, I meant the Algorithms, 4th Edition book at https://algs4.cs.princeton.edu/home/ which is entirely in Java. All the example code, libraries, and exercises there use Java, and the authors explicitly note that the book is written for that language.

However, you are right, Prof. Sedgewick has long maintained versions of his material across multiple languages. I remember that the third edition has C, C++ and Java versions.

tamndon Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)

I have been following Mint for a while and it feels like a project that truly focuses on making developers happy. The mix of Elm style structure, strong typing, and builtin tools like testing and formatting makes it really enjoyable to use. Keep up your great works!

tamndon Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)

My biggest inspiration for this project, though, is The Art of Computer Programming (TAOCP), that level of depth and precision is the ultimate goal. I'm also planning to include formal proofs of all algorithms in Lean, though that could easily turn into a 10-year project.

tamndon Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)

Sedgewick's Algorithms book is great for practical learning but too tied to Java and implementation details. It is a bit shallow on theory, though the community and resources for other languages help.

That said, I personally prefer Introduction to Algorithms (CLRS) for its formal rigor and clear proofs, and Grokking Algorithms for building intuition.

The broader goal of this project is to build a well tested, reference quality set of implementations in C, Python, and Go. That is the next milestone.

tamndon Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)

For visualization, I'm considering using the awesome Manim library by 3Blue1Brown (https://3b1b.github.io/manim/getting_started/quickstart.html). I'm not very good at visual design, but let see what I can come up with.

tamndon Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)

To reduce the current monomorphism, I might add a generic version using void* and a comparator, or generate code for a few key types, while keeping the simple monomorphic listings for readability. (Though this would make the code a bit more complex)

tamndon Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)

I am working on the little book of algorithms: https://github.com/little-book-of/algorithms

A project to implement 1000 algorithms. I have finished around 400 so far and I am now focusing on adding test cases, writing implementations in Python and C, and creating formal proofs in Lean.

It has been a fun way to dive deeper into how algorithms work and to see the differences between practical coding and formal reasoning. The long-term goal is to make it a solid reference and learning resource that covers correctness, performance, and theory in one place.

The project is still in its draft phase and will be heavily edited over the next few months and years as it grows and improves.

If anyone has thoughts on how to structure the proofs or improve the testing setup, I would love to hear ideas or feedback.

tamndon The Architecture of Learning: From Statistics to Intelligence

This book is open source and welcomes contributions. Would you like to join forces to create a truly brilliant version?

https://github.com/little-book-of/maths

tamndon Show HN: The Little Book of C

I use Go for my professional work, but it feels great to "C" again!

tamndon Show HN: The Little Book of C

My next step is to extract all the code into the "src/" folder and set up proper CI/CD to test everything.

Could you help create some GitHub issues? I will fix them in my free time next weekend.

tamndon Show HN: The Little Book of C

It's just me and my operating system called Emacs, with no editor and no publisher. With the help of LLMs, I can finally share some of my notes and ideas with the world.

tamndon Show HN: The Little Book of C

So you assume that writing those books takes little time? Just some "prompt magic," and boom, a book appears?

tamndon Show HN: The Little Book of C

Because all the content is taken from my personal notes (with more to come on building a search engine, vector database, and graph database in C and Go), in the last step I used an LLM for editing and fixing grammar and formulas (typing LaTeX by hand takes a lot of time). If you find the content to be just AI slop, I'm sorry for taking your time.

tamndon Show HN: The Little Book of C

Because of some LLM editing and the help of "AI policies," some people call this book "AI slop." I admit that I used an LLM for editing, and this book still needs heavy editing and a thorough review to fix all the bugs in the code. But I wanted to share it early to see if anyone is still interested in C before I move on to reviewing the list of exercises and preparing for several upcoming projects: building a search engine, a vector database, and a columnar database from scratch in C.

This book is open source, open for contributions, and completely free of charge, and anyone with a GitHub account can contribute.

tamndon Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2025)

Thanks! Feel free to DM me if you'd like to collaborate, I would really love to hear more from you. People often ignore this kind of work, but at least I had the courage to share it.

tamndon Show HN: The Little Book of Maths for LLMs-The maths you need to understand LLMs

@jrussino Would you like EPUB or PDF versions of just the tale? I can prepare them for you.

tamndon Show HN: The Little Book of Maths for LLMs-The maths you need to understand LLMs

Behind each "tale" lies a mathematical idea: from counting numbers and odd and even numbers, to geometry with lines and circles, to group theory, waves, frequencies, etc.

Behind the story words, here are the branches of mathematics explored in each chapter: 1/ Numbers, 2/ Geometry, 3/ Pre-Algebra, 4/ Calculus and Analysis, 5/ Algebra, 6/ Probability, 7/ Logic, 8/ Complex Numbers and Higher Dimensions 9/ Mathematical Applications to Physics, 10/ Further Applications, including AI/Machine Learning, Music, and more.

Along with the tales, I am planning to write about the underlying ideas for each one in much greater detail.

tamndon Show HN: The Little Book of C

I'm planning to create a 10-page cheatsheet for fast learners, and I'd like to shorten the book to around 150–200 pages.

tamndon Show HN: The Little Book of C

Thanks for your kind words! They really encourage me to share more. Please be aware that there might still be some bugs, so feel free to create issues or pull requests!

tamndon Show HN: The Little Book of C

I have fixed some bugs here: https://github.com/little-book-of/c/pull/4

Let me carefully review all the code snippets, create tests, and integrate them into the CI/CD pipeline to make sure everything is correct.

tamndon Show HN: The Little Book of C

I've been preparing these notes for 20 years, and now it's finally time to put them online. Please judge them by their content, not by whether they were "LLM-assisted" or not. All the books are licensed under CC-BY-SA, and I intend to keep sharing more with the community free of charge. If you find any errors, please open an issue or submit a pull request, and I'm happy to fix them. https://github.com/little-book-of/c/pull/4 (for examples, this one) I know many of these books still need polishing (fixing bugs, improving wording, etc.), but I'm glad that some people already find them helpful. It really saddens me when people dismiss the project as just "AI slop." I've poured a lot of time and care into it.

tamndon Show HN: The Little Book of Maths for LLMs-The maths you need to understand LLMs

This is a book about how numbers learn to speak. Inside, you'll find the gentle mathematics that powers every large language model, from simple counting and geometry to probability, calculus, and information theory. No dense proofs. No jargon. Just intuition, clarity, and connection. If you've ever wondered how equations become understanding, how vectors turn into words, and how meaning takes shape in a sea of numbers, this book will show you, one small idea at a time.

tamndon The Little Book of Linear Algebra

Let me add the links to the EPUB and PDF versions on the webpage so it’s easier for anyone visiting to find them.

tamndon Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2025)

https://github.com/little-book-of/maths/blob/main/books/en-U...

I've been working on a book called "The Little Chronicles of Mathematics, Data, and the Mind of Machines", this is a 100 sections journey from counting stones to thinking silicon. This book is more like a storybook for curious builders. I wrote it for people who love see how things connect, how math become language, how data become memory, and how machines learned to reason. If you enjoy clear ideas, and big arcs of history, this book is for you.

tamndon Show HN: A little notebook for learning linear algebra with Python

Every contribution is welcome: whether it's criticism, fixing typos, or even completely rewriting a section!

Writing this book has been a real challenge for me, since all the books I enjoy reading are very formal ones :))

Anyone here into Grothendieck's SGA or EGA? (Sorry, a bit off topic!)

tamndon Show HN: A little notebook for learning linear algebra with Python

I tried to build intuition before going into the formal definitions.

Personally, I've always liked Bourbaki's books, but they're too formal for learning - especially in linear algebra, which I see as something meant for applications rather than pure math research.

Maybe I just oversimplified things or made them feel less "math".

tamndon Show HN: A little notebook for learning linear algebra with Python

So sad that you didn't like the book : (

I'm not really a visual guy, so let me rewatch the awesome 3Blue1Brown series and try to visualize it again:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2x...

tamndon Show HN: A little notebook for learning linear algebra with Python

By pairing, I mean that you can read the book alongside the notebook. Sometimes, in the notebook, I don't explain the concepts, only some Python code.

tamndon Show HN: A little notebook for learning linear algebra with Python

Of course, this is about Python and NumPy.

In practice, you'll often encounter the code before the underlying math (especially in Machine Learning), so developing intuition from both directions is always helpful.

Btw, if you enjoy pure mathematics, starting from Chapter 4 in the book, I begin defining vectors and the axioms of vector spaces:

https://little-book-of.github.io/linear-algebra/books/en-US/...