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Issue #56 - March 29, 2020
Here are the top threads of the week, happy reading!
1. Ask HN: Who is hiring right now?
Top comment by kfx
PBS | Various Engineers | Full-Time | ONSITE (Flexible WFH) | Alexandria, VA
PBS serves the American public with programming and services of the highest quality, using media to educate, inspire, entertain, and express a diversity of perspectives. We're hiring engineers for multiple platforms to build the PBS Kids and General Audience video products:
• Senior Backend Engineer - https://tinyurl.com/v7c8nb2
• Senior Frontend Engineer - https://tinyurl.com/stab99u
• Full Stack Web Engineer - https://tinyurl.com/sufbv47
• Senior iOS Engineer - https://tinyurl.com/tcxfmqm
2. Ask HN: Who wants to be hired right now?
Top comment by sandhundred
Location: Eastern Time
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Java
Resume/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JrWVV_nTfXyQPdqdjxyJv7rY...
Email: sandy.vanderbleek@gmail.com
I'm available for $10/hr currently. I have over a decade of experience, it's a good deal.
3. Ask HN: How to self-study physics?
Top comment by scottlocklin
For the love of God, don't use Feynman lectures to learn physics. That's something you read after you know physics, for relaxation and conceptual stuff. Resnick & Halliday is a much better freshman/sophomore book.
Susskind's "theoretical minimum" is actually pretty good.
http://theoreticalminimum.com/courses
Fowler gives a pretty conventional undergraduate physics curriculum (adding Feynman in there somehow). If it were me: learn the math tools first. I assume you know linear algebra; learn differential equations. From there, go straight to higher level books. There's very little difference in undergraduate vs graduate quantum mechanics and E&M other than the math is slightly more sophisticated in grad school. Might as well do it right. Messiah for QM and Jackson for E&M. Classical mechanics, the tradition is to learn Lagrangian mechanics in high level undergrad and Hamiltonian in grad school. There's no real reason to do it in this order, and a decent reason (understanding Quantum) to do it in reverse order. Amusingly, the math is cleaner in Hamiltonian mechanics, but you may find yourself unable to do some simple problems you can do with Newtonian physics; so this will be a weird working backward thing. Stat Mech, I think you should just read Reif; skip Ma or whatever they use in grad school now.
FWIIW I know/knew people who did this: started grad school without having done any undergrad courses in physics. I think skipping a lot of the introductory stuff, and visiting it later is actually better.
The rest of it can be done with the same machinery you learned in QM, E&M, Mechanics and Stat Mech. Max leverage if you had to pick one: probably classical mechanics for a DL guy, E&M for general knowledge of tools.
I'd suggest not actually trying to simulate physical systems on a computer: you probably stare at computers too much anyway.
4. Ask HN: Is HN a ‘healthy online community’? I’m doing a case study for a class
Top comment by paxys
Yes and no.
I think it's better in terms of overall "health" (content, toxicity, moderation, privacy, spam) than other, more popular forums (e.g. Reddit), but that could just be directly because of its small size and relatively niche appeal.
My biggest problem is that it stopped being a community for tech entrepreneurs a long time ago. Everyone is now bearish on everything by default. Every idea is pointless. Every new product is useless. Every company is evil. There's no point building or launching anything. It's just people complaining about everything rather than improving things and building the future.
5. Ask HN: Computer Science/History Books?
Top comment by khaledh
The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal
It's an extremely well written book, starting from the very beginning at the time of WWII, tracing people, ideas, struggles, and achievements of great milestones in computer history. It's not your typical dry historical material, but somehow the author made it personal through the eyes of key people that influenced important computer science progresses, and in particular J.C.R. Licklider (Lick), who galvanized a lot efforts across the U.S. in the sixties that resulted in making computing interactive and ultimately personal, rather than batch and business-focused. Many important milestones are discussed, starting with the early days of mechanical computers, vacuum tubes, relays, ENIAC, UNIVAC, through MIT's various efforts during the cold war to help with real-time computing with Whirlwind and the SAGE project; IBM's mainframes dominance in the fifties, and the hacker culture that arose against it at MIT to build interactive computers like the TX-0 and TX-2, to the spin-off of DEC and its minicomputers that changed the game; to building time-sharing systems, and the groundbreaking inventions of Douglas Engelbart and his team at SRI; the rise of the ARPA network; the many great ideas developed at Xerox PARC; and ultimately the personal computer revolution and the Internet.
6. Ask HN: How bad will the 2020 economic crisis be?
Top comment by alexpetralia
Hopefully everyone will keep in mind that bailouts should go to the citizenry at large to resurrect demand, not to large multinationals which need to pay off debt they should have never incurred in the first place (and which was spent on high-risk growth projects or shareholder buybacks).
"Take Boeing. The aerospace giant of course wants a $60 billion bailout. Financial problems for this corporation predated the crisis, with the mismanagement that led to the 737 Max as well as defense and space products that don't work (I noted last July a bailout was coming). The corporation paid out $65 billion in stock buybacks and dividends over the last ten years, and it was drawing down credit lines before this crisis hit. It is highly politically connected; the board of the corporation includes Caroline Kennedy, Ronald Reagan’s Chief of Staff Ken Duberstein, three Fortune 100 CEOs, a former US Trade Representative, and two Admirals, one of whom is the board’s only engineer. Using the excuse of the coronavirus, Boeing is trying to get the taxpayer to foot the bill for its errors, so it can go back to making more of them."
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/stop-the-coronavirus-corp...
7. Ask HN: Best sleep trackers?
Top comment by elric
Anecdata: Have sleep apnea, so am interested in better sleep, and I'm hooked up to a CPAP machine which registers every breath I take. I've tried several devices (withings, 2 garmin smart watches and a fitbit), and quite frankly, the results have been appalling.
Some random observations:
* My latest garmin has an "SpO2" sensor. Which is basically a random number generator with red LED. When I compare the results with an actual on-finger SpO2 monitor, there is zero correlation.
* Both the fitbit and the garmins have mistaken masturbation for deep sleep. You would think that the wrist movement would be a clue to not being asleep, but no. Deep sleep.
* The deep sleep vs REM classification seems to be based more on time-of-day than on anything else. Apparently I always start my nights with a block of deep sleep, followed by an alternating pattern of light & REM. This is true even when I'm awake during this "deep sleep" malarky.
* My CPAP, on the other hand, is very useful for telling apart sleep & waking. Breathing rate becomes much more steady when asleep. I can see when I woke up, even if it's just for a few seconds while I change position.
8. Ask HN: What skills will be useful during an upcoming recession/depression?
Top comment by madhadron
People are acting as though we're going back to a pre-industrial economy with this. It's not true. The power isn't going out. The water will continue to come out of the tap.
So my suggestion short term is: learn to cook if you don't know how to. Not fancy, haute cuisine, but how to take whatever's in the pantry and make something tasty out of it. Learn how to grow some produce in small spaces, even if it's just herbs.
Learn how to not spend money. How to reduce your energy and water usage. How to do basic repairs and projects yourself. What you have to buy in a time of logistical disruption is time. If you can increase the time you can be without income from a month to four months or from six months to two years, that is a remarkable difference in your resilience.
9. Ask HN: Books giving practical advice on starting a solo SaaS business?
Top comment by goatherders
What do you need to learn? Product? Design? Sales? There is a lot that can be found in books, sure. But no one book or even series of books will give you a map that's even remotely on point for the journey you want to understake.
My advice would be to build something and get a customer. Then get another. By the time you have 10 customers you'll know as much as the books could teach you...and you'll have 10 customers.
10. Ask HN: How can a intermediate-beginner learn Unix/Linux and programming?
Top comment by mooneater
I disagree with lots of advice here.
My strategy to solidify my linux skills was simple: commit to linux desktop. We spend most of our time on our desktop, may as well let that time earn you skill points. I picked ubuntu and use the same on servers. You naturally learn a bit every day through daily use. This really adds up over time without extra effort of using a side system. Getting good at windows or osx is a waste of your time unless you are specifically into those platforms.
As for a language, pick one that is (1) easy to start with (2) covers advanced use cases, (3) sound in its design, (4) general purpose, (5) concise. That rules out C (due to 1), JS (due to 3 and 4), php (2,3,4) and most things really.
For me that left me with ubuntu and python, I never looked back. (Yes I know many other things but that is my home base.)