AskHN Digest

1. Ask HN: Top Coursera Courses?

Top comment by repsilat

I took a bunch back in the day, and I liked Economics of Money and Banking[1] (by Perry Mehrling) more than most other courses. It's partly a history of the American financial system, and partly a tour of some modern financial instruments and institutions. The focus is on how things work and why they're designed as they are, and not so much on how things are priced. Deposits, bonds, commodity futures, central banks, how it all fits together, what purpose it all serves -- how it's not just gambling or an abstract game used to extract money from the productive economy.

One of the stated aims of the course is to get you in a position where you can read the Financial Times without going cross-eyed, and it works really well to give a clarifying framework for understanding market concepts outside the course's scope.

Another I really liked was "The Modern and the Postmodern" by Michael Roth. I don't know if that course would work well "at your own pace" though, the reading and peer essay feedback was a big part of it.

1: https://www.coursera.org/learn/money-banking

2. Ask HN: What are the best advanced computer science courses online?

Top comment by ipnon

Stanford's experimental operating systems course[0], where you buy a Raspberry Pi and write your operating system on the bare metal by using the reference specifications.

"You should take this class if: 1. You write code well OR (you don't yet write code well AND have a lot of time to devote to the class); 2. AND you find these systems topics interesting.

The people that found the class valuable in the past were entirely drawn from this demographic. (In particular: I would not take this course if you were looking for an easier way to satisfy a cs140 requirement.) We are trying to go as far as possible as quickly as possible with a group interested in doing so." [emphasis mine]

[0] https://github.com/dddrrreee/cs140e-20win/

3. Ask HN: Learning about Philosophy

Top comment by pmoriarty

The best way to learn about philosophy is to take a good introductory course.

Books aren't nearly as good because you won't get to discuss the ideas with other students who are also learning the subject, which is half the fun and half the point of philosophy. You'll also miss out on the insights and explanations of the professor, which will be very valuable, if the professor is any good.

As for books, the Socratic dialogues are probably the best place to start, since the ideas pretty easy to grasp compared to later philosophy, they're written in an engaging way, and give you plenty of food for thought. Also, much of later Western philosophy is a reaction to, comment on, or has been influenced by Socrates and Plato. You'll be much more "in the loop" after getting some familiarity with ancient Greek philosophy than if you just dived straight in to later work.

Something else you'll want to be aware of is that in contemporary philosophy there are two major approaches: Analytic and Continental. Adherents of these approaches generally despise one another, denigrate, or ignore one another's work, though at least more recently the Analytics have been starting to read, re--envision, and appropriate Continental thinkers.

The Analytic approach dominates philosophy in the English-speaking world (and is coming to dominate the rest too), and when you take philosophy courses that's the view you'll most likely be exposed to, and it's Analytic philosophers you're most likely to be recommended when you ask about philosophy, especially on sites like HN, which are more likely to be peopled by fans of logic, rigor, and science, which Analytics themselves are huge fans of.

But your exposure to philosophy would be incomplete and probably really biased if you were mostly exposed to Analytic thought or viewed philosophy primarily through an Analytic lens.

4. Ask HN: I have $1M cash in my bank. How can I stretch it so I can retire?

Top comment by tdalaa

The amount of terrible advice on here is amazing.

First crucial advice: don’t take financial advice off the internet from a group mostly made up of people who have never had a million dollars or more to invest. Ask people who can show you they’ve got millions more than you and have had them for years through ups and downs..

Second: there are a gazillion factors that goes into making solid investing advice; what’s your current living situation, what’s your 5 year outlook, 10 year outlook, ambitions in life (wanna retire soon or you’re planning to work and just have this as a long term nest egg), what’s your appetite for risk, do you need the money in the next 10 years (at all!), if you invested in something and markets suddenly crashes and your invest was suddenly worth 500k, what would you do, hang on and ride it out or sell? .. and on and on.

What matters is simple long term low cost investments, and then not touching shit no matter what happens. Hell, just buy cheapest sp500 index etf (vanguard or ishares or similar) and hang on for 20 years and you’ll be in extremely good shape.

5. Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2020?

Top comment by yboris

I released Video Hub App almost 3 years ago and have been adding features over time. It's a project of love, and I give $3.50 of every purchase ($5) to charity, so the income isn't the main point. This year I averaged about 100 sales per month.

https://videohubapp.com/ - browse, search, and organize your videos (PC, Mac, Linux)

GitHub: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

6. Ask HN: How to learn writing blog posts?

Top comment by mtlynch

One of the difficult parts of learning by blogging is that you rarely receive thoughtful feedback from your readers on the craft of your writing. You can look at analytics and comments to see which of your posts are popular, but nobody ever says, "Oh, this post would have worked better had your sentence structure been less repetitive."

I solved this problem by hiring a freelance editor from Upwork.[0] It was a few hundred dollars to have her read a few of my articles. The high-level feedback was extremely helpful and had a huge impact on my readership almost instantly.

Obviously, it's not a magic bullet. I still had to do the work of integrating her feedback and continuing to find ways to improve my writing. But like anything else, expert feedback helps you grow faster than just learning on your own through trial and error.

[0] https://mtlynch.io/editor/

7. Ask HN: Has anyone seen smart TVs connect to unsecured WiFi without permission?

Top comment by matthewmacleod

I am pretty sceptical of this specific rumour and I suspect it's an urban legend.

But regardless of that… it's totally plausible that a manufacturer could end up doing this, and as such it presents a risk vector. I can even see how it might be done semi-accidentally by a bad engineering team.

An even bigger risk is corporate-owned mesh networks, like Amazon Sidewalk. It's quite possible that TVs with Alexa support will end up also having access to this network, and will use your neighbour's Echo to ship data back even without you knowing. Or even a built-in LTE/5G transceiver.

Without strong regulation of privacy and consent, this will be a persistent and dangerous issue.

8. Ask HN: I am interviewing product managers – questions to ask?

Top comment by codingdave

"Product Manager" is a title that means different things to different companies, ranging from mini-CEO to Jira-monkey, and everywhere in between. You are absolutely correct to be talking to many different people to understand this slice of the industry.

I'd ask them what PMs do in their organization, what POs do, and what the difference is in their mind. Ask what level of detail they operate at, what they delegate to others, and what types of things are expected to be passed up to their boss.

You also might get interesting perspectives if you explore outside the software industry. Product managers exist in all kinds of companies, with the same overall goal to understand the market and produce the correct product under the correct business model. But the day-to-day of a software PM is vastly different than the day-to-day of a PM that produces retail goods, for example.

9. Ask HN: Crashed founders, what was the point of failure?

Top comment by mmcconnell1618

Built a e-commerce platform company in 2002. Packaged software sales model with designers and web hosting companies as the sales channel. Reasonably successful for more than 10 years but I call it a "vampire start up." I had enough income to eat and hire a few people but never hit the right growth numbers. Also, small business is just as demanding as Enterprise customers for features and support but doesn't have the budget to pay for it.

I tried a pivot to a SaaS model but missed my window of opportunity as Shopify and a few others started out as SaaS only and had more traction. Also, Magento commerce popped out of nowhere as a really good free, open source cart that made it difficult to continue to sell higher priced stand alone licenses.

Two actual points of failure: 1) had to start letting employees go because not enough income and 2) had to fire myself because not enough income.

In the end, I was able to license the technology to a few companies in a royalty deal and sell some other parts. Not a complete failure and I learned tons from the experience.

Business lessons learned:

* My sales/revenue strategy was weak, i was depending on my channel to sell but they were only getting me a one time license purchase while they got the recurring hosting revenue. * Selling to small and medium sized businesses is almost as much work as selling into Enterprises and the pay off is much smaller. I'd recommend targeting enterprises or consumes rather than mid-market. Consumer has scale, Enterprises have cash. * The better mousetrap doesn't always win. I had much better quality software than some competitors but they had momentum and staff that was already familiar with their product. If you're going to be the "better" option, be 10x better. * Timing is critical. Some opportunities are about being in the right place at the right time. A few years too early or too late can sink an idea. Be prepared to scale as fast as possible when you see things working.

10. Tell HN: Levono won't process orders from ProtonMail addresses

Top comment by avmich

It increasingly looks like modern email is not really usable. But when looking for an alternative, it's not really there - even with some capabilities missing. It's interesting why.

Surely we can supply HTTP(S) URL-based addresses instead of emails when communicating with people or with flexible enough software. Some inflexible contacts can be coerced. What we need however is a system, preferably known enough to present an alternative.