Sound (2022)(ciechanow.ski)
260 points by dverlaeckt80 | 32 comments
Bartosz Ciechanowski's interactive article explaining what sound is, how it is created, and how it propagates, with playable audio demos.
#interactive-explainer on Hacker News
20 stories tagged interactive-explainer, newest first.
Demystifying Tufte's data-ink ratio(tuftesrazor.scienceux.org)
66 points by s4074433 | 30 comments
An interactive scrolling guide explaining Edward Tufte's data-ink ratio by stripping elements from a cluttered chart one piece at a time.
Show HN: A working 3D model of an Enigma machine(enigma.design)
87 points by primitivesuave | 32 comments
An interactive 3D model of the WWII Enigma cipher machine that lets visitors explore how its internal mechanics encrypt messages.
Transformers Explained Visually(poloclub.github.io)
576 points by aray07 | 85 comments
Transformer Explainer is an interactive in-browser visualization that runs GPT-2 and shows how embeddings, multi-head self-attention, and MLP layers process text.
Elevators(john.fun)
1556 points by Jrh0203 | 383 comments
An interactive article on john.fun explaining how elevators work and the algorithms that decide which car answers a call.
The Beam Engine(glinscott.github.io)
438 points by glinscott | 87 comments
An illustrated interactive explainer by Gary Linscott on how the steam beam engine worked and powered the Industrial Revolution.
Mechanical Watch (2022)(ciechanow.ski)
700 points by razin | 118 comments
Bartosz Ciechanowski's interactive blog article explaining how a mechanical watch mechanism works, with draggable 3D demonstrations.
Decision trees – the unreasonable power of nested decision rules(mlu-explain.github.io)
515 points by mschnell | 78 comments
An interactive visual explainer from MLU-Explain by Jared Wilber and Lucía Santamaría introducing decision trees for supervised machine learning.
Airfoil (2024)(ciechanow.ski)
508 points by brk | 59 comments
Bartosz Ciechanowski's interactive article explaining how airfoils generate lift by examining the forces created by airflow around aircraft wings.
Cameras and Lenses (2020)(ciechanow.ski)
515 points by sebg | 56 comments
Bartosz Ciechanowski's interactive blog post explaining how cameras and lenses work and how adjustable parameters affect the resulting images.
Dithering – Part 1(visualrambling.space)
413 points by Bogdanp | 86 comments
An interactive visual explainer introducing dithering, the first part of a series on visualrambling.space, navigated by tapping through slides.
Game theory illustrated by an animated cartoon game(ncase.me)
376 points by felineflock | 59 comments
The Evolution of Trust, an interactive animated game by Nicky Case explaining game theory and the iterated prisoner's dilemma.
Reservoir Sampling(samwho.dev)
475 points by chrisdemarco | 88 comments
An interactive essay by Sam Rose explaining reservoir sampling, a technique for selecting a fair random sample from a set of unknown size.
Moon(ciechanow.ski)
2976 points by todsacerdoti | 248 comments
Bartosz Ciechanowski's interactive article explaining the Moon, its phases, and its orbital path around Earth.
Sort, sweep, and prune: Collision detection algorithms (2023)(leanrada.com)
319 points by wonger_ | 56 comments
A blog post explaining the sort, sweep, and prune approach to broad-phase collision detection, from naive pairwise checks to optimized sweeping.
Reading QR codes without a computer(qr.blinry.org)
593 points by input_sh | 82 comments
An interactive explainer, written for a 37C3 workshop, teaching the anatomy of QR codes and how to decode them by hand using a cheat sheet.
Mechanical Watch (2022)(ciechanow.ski)
900 points by Akcium | 153 comments
Bartosz Ciechanowski's interactive article explaining how a mechanical watch works, with draggable 3D demonstrations of its mechanism.
Do Machine Learning Models Memorize or Generalize?(pair.withgoogle.com)
395 points by 1wheel | 176 comments
Google PAIR interactive explorable from August 2023 explaining grokking, where models suddenly shift from memorizing training data to generalizing.
GPS (2022)(ciechanow.ski)
365 points by tkiolp4 | 32 comments
Bartosz Ciechanowski's interactive blog essay explaining how the Global Positioning System works, including its satellite constellation and positioning math.
Bicycle(ciechanow.ski)
2962 points by todsacerdoti | 336 comments
Bartosz Ciechanowski's interactive explainer article on how bicycles work, covering the physics of riding, steering, and balance with 3D demonstrations.