I disagree. There are math concepts that I've found impossible to pick up from wikipedia but can easily be learned in 5 minutes by having a conversation with someone who already understands them.
Honestly this article in question is a perfect example. I'd wager than almost everyone who reads Hacker News can read the blog post and understand every single step from start to finish. The same can not be said for the Wikipedia article.
For questions about mathematical correctness I highly prefer wikipedia. To me it's far more specific and clear, while the original article makes rather short work of proofs.
When it comes down to questions that involve first principles, I would much rather have rigor over a less time consuming but potentially wrong understanding of the material, and wikipedia does quite well in providing that rigor.
I have also found Wikipedia to be a convenient math reference, but it is not always the "best" that is easily available on the internet. If I'm looking at a topic, it's usually fruitful to Google "introduction to X theory" and go through a few possibilities to find a literature review. Often there is a review which is a good "companion" to the Wikipedia article in terms of explanation, since the style will be different and you get some breadth of perspective.
>that that's attributable to math being hard
(an easily underestimated property of mathematics)
