I started something similar in 2021 while on paternity leave with my first kid.
I got about half way through, then I had 2 more kids. Then AI happened, and I started questioning the whether there was too much slop out there to bother writing a book.
I’ll still probably finish it when the new baby is a little older.
Being dismissive is an easy way to be "better" than others. But on HN negative reactions are almost always hastier with long articles, as eyeballs actually evaluating the content will take some time before providing constructive criticism.
Thanks. I am glad you liked it. I just wanted to help everyone understand the concepts in detail. I felt the existing materials were either way too textbook like or very high level. This is just my attempt at explaining things in a more interesting way.
Hi, author here. I didn't vibe code this and have put considerable amount of effort in explaining the ideas. I have used Claude for review and help with visuals. My aim was just to help others understand these concepts easily. Thanks for your feedback, i'll improve the design and reading experience.
My thoughts on reading it (and looking around your site) was that you were building these explanations to help cement your own understanding of the topics and that you were just sharing the results because you thought it might be helpful to others as well. Knowing that you actually built it with the intent to teach just makes me think that it's nice of you to try to be a teacher even if there's a few folks who want to be jerks about your efforts. The world needs more teachers (and learners, too). Gaining, improving, and sharing knowledge is one of humanity's true super-powers. Without it, we'd all still be living like animals in the wild. Thank you for your efforts to contribute in a positive way. At least you're actually making stuff, unlike many of them what gotta always just complain about the things other people make and never actually make anything themselves.
The text is also pretty clearly AI-generated. I guess there's now a market for "I asked an LLM so that you don't have to", but the funny thing is that it's such a wall of text that no one upvoting it will have actually read it. So it's vibe-writing, vibe-coding, and vibe-reading. Full end-to-end synergy.
Hi, author here. Sorry, you felt that way. I did put lot of effort in communicating my understanding, and used Claude only for review and visualizations.
How were you able to pick this up? Not challenging your assertion. Just really curious. Can you point to some clues? I read it (with my own eyes). I can't see actual evidence the text itself is artificial or at least, that it is not human-curated.
Hi, author here. I have put a considerable amount of effort in explaining the ideas as clearly as possible, and I used Claude only for helping me with the animations. My aim is just to explain the concept. I'm mainly a backend engineer, i'll take your feedback and put more effort on the design and presentation.
To me it just suggests that the blog is going to explore the topic at a low level, ie, discuss the transmission of bits of data via cables or radio waves, rather than discussing HTTP or TLS or whatever. Which in general is something I find quite interesting. (I haven't read this article yet so don't know if it's actually good, and the other comments don't give me much hope.)
My own personal "pet peeve" cliche phrase is anything that is "literally" (except it's really figurative) something. So many people for so very long have used "literally" to mean the literal opposite of it's actual meaning. Even when they don't use it to mean it's actual opposite meaning, they'll still often use "literal" to describe a thing that is in no way actually literal. It just "grinds my gears" to hear it.
I skimmed the article after I realized that I was being negative. It has some nice explanations so my comment wasn't about the content but just about the wording of the title. :D
Which is really sad, because actually working from first principles is a valid methodology to build efficient products that bypass layers of unnecessary abstraction.
The term itself seems to have lost its real meaning however.
I got about half way through, then I had 2 more kids. Then AI happened, and I started questioning the whether there was too much slop out there to bother writing a book.
I’ll still probably finish it when the new baby is a little older.
https://www.networksfromscratch.com/
I skimmed various sections. I found the animations pleasant, the text readable, and the content clearly not slop.
The historical context of the telegraph was interesting, and the treatment of bandwidth vs. latency was thoughtful.
I think it’s too long; I don’t think many people who don’t already know most of this material will read it, but I enjoyed the parts I read. Nice work!
Put the visualization and a short explainer, then have additional content show up if the reader drills in.
I don't think there is anything wrong with the content being run through an LLM. Networking is crazy complicated.
At HN, there should be some tag explaining the project is vibe coded.
If the author can't be bothered to even clean up behind their AI its not worth reading even the first paragraph.
The term itself seems to have lost its real meaning however.