'AI by Hand' — a 73,000-subscriber newsletter teaching transformer math with pen and paper — hits 359 points on HN
AI by Hand (Hacker News)·low signal
Prof. Tom Yeh's AI by Hand, a Substack covering 'Math, Algorithms, Architectures, by hand,' surfaced on Hacker News on 2026-08-15 with 359 points and 30 comments and has crossed 73,000 subscribers. The pitch is deliberately anti-abstraction: work the matrix multiplications and attention computations manually rather than treating architectures as black boxes. The HN reception is itself the signal — an audience that lives in agent harnesses upvoting a back-to-first-principles resource.