Maths, CS and AI Compendium
Hey HN, I don’t know who else has the same issue, but: Textbooks often bury good ideas in dense notation, skip the intuition, assume you already know half the material, and get outdated in fast-moving fields like AI. Over the past 7 years of my AI/ML experience, I filled notebooks with intuition-first, real-world context, no hand-waving explanations of maths, computing and AI concepts. In 2024, a few friends used these notes to prep for interviews at DeepMind, OpenAI, Nvidia etc. They all got in and currently perform well in their roles. So I'm sharing. This is an open & unconventional…
In plain words
Maths, CS and AI Compendium is an open-source textbook covering mathematics, computing, and artificial intelligence with an emphasis on intuition and real-world context. Designed for practitioners and students preparing for careers in AI research and engineering, it explains concepts without dense notation or hand-waving. The material was developed over seven years of professional AI and machine learning experience and structured to fill gaps left by traditional textbooks in fast-moving fields.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hey HN, I don’t know who else has the same issue, but: Textbooks often bury good ideas in dense notation, skip the intuition, assume you already know half the material, and get outdated in fast-moving fields like AI. Over the past 7 years of my AI/ML experience, I filled notebooks with intuition-first, real-world context, no hand-waving explanations of maths, computing and AI concepts. In 2024, a few friends used these notes to prep for interviews at DeepMind, OpenAI, Nvidia etc. They all got in and currently perform well in their roles. So I'm sharing. This is an open & unconventional textbook covering maths, computing, and artificial intelligence from the ground up. For curious practitioners seeking deeper understanding, not just survive an exam/interview. To ambitious students, an early careers or experts in adjacent fields looking to become cracked AI research engineers or progress to PhD, dig in and let me know your thoughts.
More ai this month
the category →
I trained a 125M-parameter transformer to autocomplete piano performances in real time (~108 notes/sec on an iPhone 15). The idea is basically GitHub Copilot or Tabnine, except instead of prompting it with code, you prompt it by playing a few notes on a MIDI piano. The model then continues what you played, entirely on-device. The app is free if anyone wants to try it. Happy to answer questions about the model, training, Core ML, or the many things that didn't work.
AI · 17d ago · simedw.com
Astute▲585Automate your B2B brand going viral, with new media creators
AI · 18d ago · company-app.joinastute.com
Hey HN, Henry from Cactus here! We previously released Cactus Needle, a 14MB agentic LLM for tool call, device use, and structured extraction for phones, wearables, smart homes, small robots and microcontrollers. We got really great feedback here, and have now incorporated the suggestions to release Needle 2. The whole model is a single 14MB binary that runs a full session in 28MB of RAM; 45m parameters at 2bit compression. Needle hits 500 tokens/sec decode speed on a Raspberry Pi 5, sits between 400-1,500 tokens/sec on VR devices like Meta Quest 3S and Apple Vision Pro, and ranges…
AI · 26d ago · cactuscompute.com
