mazeway

Born on August 10, 2013•31 Karma

on April 6, 2018

•on: Ask HN: How to self-learn electronics?

YouTube University. Seriously: watch 30, 50, or a 100 videos. You will develop an intuition for what is happening. THEN read books (some good ones already suggested in other comments) and you will learn the concrete theory.

I want to emphasize the importance of developing the intuition behind the theory. It's vital, and the lack of intuition is why so many people find a complex, theoretical topic difficult. If they had spent time developing their intuition, then they would not struggle so much to understand and remember the theory.

Last, you have to build stuff (this also helps with the intuition). Decide that you are going to spend $300, and start buying parts. Don't go to Radio Shack, because you will (in my experience) pay an order of magnitude more for the same part. Shop on Aliexpress (or sometimes Amazon or Ebay). Who cares if you have to wait 6 weeks for the part to come in... do it today and it will be here about the time that you are ready for it. Never buy just one of anything. You can usually buy 10 or 20 for the same price that you can buy 2 or 3.

Most importantly: DO SOMETHING! Anything. Watch videos. Buy parts. Put things together, and then try to figure out why it's not working! Whatever you do, just don't stop. You will learn if you keep at it. At this stage for you, though, the most important thing is that you actually start.

globuous•

on April 6, 2018

•on: Berkeley offers its data science course online for...

Their computer security class is amazing. All lectures, notes, labs, quizzes etc: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu...

ouid•

on March 24, 2018

•on: Ask HN: Resources to learn real analysis?

I'm probably in a very slim minority of people who took their first topology course before they took their first real analysis course, and I think my understanding of both topics improved as a result of taking them in this order.

there's no way to actually avoid epsilon delta arguments in real analysis, but it's helpful to know that there is a more "intuitive" way of thinking about continuity (although admittedly it's a little weird when you first encounter it), that requires a lot less algebraic magic.

Anyway, there's more to real analysis than the topology of the real numbers, but I think it's a great starting place.

yshklarov•

on March 24, 2018

•on: Ask HN: Resources to learn real analysis?

I don't understand why so many people recommend baby Rudin (Principles of Mathematical Analysis). The presentation in Rudin is not merely terse, but also quite dry and unmotivated. I suggest you avoid it--regardless of how much talent or maturity you have. There are plenty of more interesting texts which will teach you just as much: Spivak and Pugh are nice, I also recommend the recent two-volume work by Zorich.

By the way, as you aquire experience you'll gain confidence and get over the urge to always check your answers. Here's a good exercise with a built-in answer key: When reading a text, every time you get to a result (claim, theorem, etc) try to prove it on your own before you continue. You probably should be doing that more often than not.

In any case, don't stick to just one text/source. Shop around, read a few pages here and there before you settle on something. There's no way a stranger on the internet can make a good recommendation: Find what works for you. The most important thing is that you're fully engrossed!

agumonkey•

on March 24, 2018

•on: Ask HN: Resources to learn real analysis?

One personal advice: if you want to learn a subject, don't focus on one book, one author or one set of suggestion. Only care about what makes your mind walk the domain.

I spent a decade with a terse text book on abstract algebra and went nowhere. It's for people who are either already enjoying concise math theorems or have the nack for it. I was missing a few bricks. A few years later some guy here or on reddit suggested a book that is vastly simpler, so simple it felt like HS but it cleared a few misunderstandings I had about notation and meaning. All of a sudden that 5$ ebay book had more value that my 100$ old paperbrick.

harshbhasin•

on Dec 8, 2014

•on: Ask HN: What book changed your life in 2014?

These three works have influenced me. These are writings of very creative people and I read them to understand their creative process.

1. Nikola Tesla's autobiography:

http://www.mystacki.com/#!/binder/35/nikola-tesla%27s-autobi...

2. Swami Vivekananda's complete works: http://www.mystacki.com/#!/binder/45/swami-vivakananda

3. David Bohm on creativity: http://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Routledge-Classics-David-Bo...

I have been reading these three authors for many years, over and over again. In his autobiography, Tesla brings forth many exciting things about his creative process. He could prototype complete machines in his mind before building them. In his mind he could run tests, even see scars and blemishes on his machines. In my coding, I (feebly) try to emulate his method by trying to visualize my coding prototype in my mind. His short autobiography reads like that of a mystic. In there he describes how the idea of AC current came to him, while taking a walk and looking into the Sun. Philosophically, everything in life alternates: the pairs of opposites, ebb and flow-- its seems to be the code of life; and AC current does the same, it alternates. His writings on Electricity are against the established grain: for him electricity (his only love) is the current of life. There cannot be two electricities(positive and negative,) he says, these are only terms for the state of having more or less of the same thing.

David Bohm has important things to say about the creative process. He talks about completeness (wholeness) of thought. He talks about "mental models" that we create to understand reality and how we keep growing out of older models... newtonian physics gives way to relativity etc.

Swami Vivekananda was a contemporary of Tesla and they did actually meet. He was a scholar of the Indian philosophy system called Advaita and Sankhya. As Jung has said about archetypes -- same thoughts occur to people of all ages, the Sankhya philosophy system believed in the equivalence of matter and energy. Vivekananda introduced these ideas to Tesla and expected him to prove them. But the proof came ten years later with Einstein. I have written about this here: http://www.mystacki.com/#!/post/132/vivakanand's-meeting-wit...

graeme•

on March 20, 2015

•on: Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure

The first and the third work though. The first is from Brennan Dunn. Haven't seen him on here in a bit, but I used his program. Really helped improve my tutoring business.

I've actually had to tell some freelancers I use to RAISE their rates, because they were too busy and frazzled. The kind of advice in Brennan's book is something a lot of freelancers need.

The third is probably Patrick Mckenzie. He advice helped me create an email course that is very popular on my site. It's not spam if you write good stuff and people ask for it.

Everyone on my list explicitly signs up to get an email course, and I get tons of excited emails from happy users.

That stuff is popular on Hacker News because a big percent of the audience here genuinely needs help with those problems.

(I agree that the second one can be an issue, if they actually lack expertise. On the other hand, lots of startups are good even though I've never heard of them. It all depends at what level you're giving advice. If you're giving advice about a solo business, you don't need to have founded Facebook)

FilterJoe•

on March 20, 2015

•on: Make Money Online: Documenting 10 Years of Failure

Out of curiosity I poked around on your site and did some test searches using words similar but not identical to some of your titles. I did this just on articles I thought people might actually be looking for and that are over 1500 words. For example:

heartbleed bug what you need to know

Your post (http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2014/04/the-heartbleed-bug-what-no...) was buried. I gave up looking for it after the first 6 pages of google results.

I'm not sure why you're ranking so badly for this article. The only idea I have off the top of my head is that you have a very wide variety of content. Google tends to prefer sites focused on one topic, or perhaps just a few.

I never wrote about youth baseball on my blog until last year. The first 2 articles I wrote got virtually no traffic from Google for 8 months. A couple months ago I started writing more in depth articles about baseball. I'm now getting a significant amount of Google traffic for those same two articles - one of them is over 10 visits a day. That's still pretty small compared to my blockbuster posts (my top post on best browsers gets hundreds of visits per day). But baseball is growing, because Google is (algorithmically) beginning to believe that I'm some kind of authority on youth baseball, based on a growing concentration of quality content.

So - my guess is that you would get more traffic if you wrote about fewer topics - or perhaps split into several blogs, each with different topics. I should probably do that as my various tech topics have nothing to do with baseball.

gavanwoolery•

on Jan 12, 2016

•on: Voxel Quest January 2016 Update

Good question! The entire scene you are seeing is being procedurally generated in realtime over 60 times per second (nothing is cached or pregenerated). It does not necessarily compete with polygons in terms of visuals, but it is great for interactivity and procedural generation and so forth. Everything you see is solid (vs being "paper thin" as most polygon games are). The entire application is only a few megabytes large, so this make its easy for users to share their creations with each other (which could be just a few kilobytes in size). It is able to represent an area of several square kilometers with virtually no memory footprint (something of this detail would require several gigabytes of memory to store all the vertices for polygon data, not to mention the texture data). This entire scene can change instantly based on user parameters. I don't do a great job of demoing all of this but I should in the future. :)

lunixbochs•

on Oct 3, 2016

•on: Ask HN: Who needs contributors? (October 2016)

I have a few semi-active projects that could use some love. I'm struggling with RSI right now and have way more creative energy than I can channel, so I'd also be interested in pair programming on my projects via video or in person (Bay Area).

All of these projects are MIT-licensed, and I'm pretty good about filing GitHub issues for things that need to happen.

Email/Twitter in profile.

- - -

Usercorn - https://github.com/lunixbochs/usercorn

Skills: Go, C, Syscall ABI

Usercorn is a sort of debugging tool, kernel API emulator, and CPU emulator (powered by Unicorn Engine) rolled into one. It's hard to simply explain the vision but it can do things like run a MIPS Linux binary on x86_64 OS X (kinda like a more powerful qemu-user).

Plenty of GitHub issues here, but the main work needed right now:

Fixing up bugs related to glibc, dyld, and other runtimes. x86_64 Linux is the best supported loader right now, so the rest could use some love. There's progress being made on OS X / iOS + dyld startup right now.

Support for issuing signals to the guest CPU (need a signal handler table on a process's kernel structure, a syscall handler for `signal` and `sigaction`, and code that can jump the guest CPU into a signal handler and do a `sigreturn`)

More syscall emulation (~50/350 syscalls are implemented for Linux and OS X), but it's pretty easy to add new ones.

Support for guest threading and fork/clone (these will likely need a virtual process/thread table, then each thread/process can run on a Goroutine and take advantage of Go's existing scheduler).

Virtual filesystem layer, so syscalls like open/read/write don't go directly to the host OS and can be intercepted/overlaid in a more general sense.

- - -

lib43 - https://github.com/lunixbochs/lib43

Skills: C, ASM, Syscall ABI

Yet another libc, created as a result of this blog post: http://ryanhileman.info/posts/lib43 - mostly just has string, memory, number, and basic IO functions right now.

Ways to contribute: Pick a man page for any missing libc function and implement it in a simple/readable manner, or dive into an architecture syscall ABI (like ARM/NetBSD) and write the assembly backend for it.

https://github.com/lunixbochs/lib43

- - -

glshim - https://github.com/lunixbochs/glshim

Skills: C, OpenGL

This provides desktop OpenGL ~1.5 sans shaders to any mobile device implementing OpenGL ES 1.0. It has been used to port dozens of open and closed-source games to the Pandora and other mobile platforms. It was also used for the Android real-Minecraft launcher (called Boardwalk I think).

Current goals include testing/improving the remote rendering (which allows software like emulators to easily serialize and remotely render OpenGL), increasing compatibility (testing games + filing/fixing issues on GitHub), adding WINE support (will be a trial/error process of running WINE, debugging/fixing the thing that prevents initialization, repeat), and writing more feature tests (which are actually pretty easy. You write a simple program to make OpenGL calls and assert which OpenGL ES calls should be emitted from the other end).

- - -

patchkit - https://github.com/lunixbochs/patchkit

Skills: Python, C, ASM

This project allows you to reproducibly patch compiled binaries with one or more short Python scripts. It includes an assembler (Keystone), disassembler (Capstone), basic linker, basic static recompilation/code transformation engine, control flow graph, and C compiler integrations... all in about 700 lines of Python. It was mostly created for use in attack-defense Capture The Flag competitions.

These are both working patches:

    def patch(pt): pt.patch(0x800400a, asm='mov eax, 1')
    def patch(pt): pt.patch(pt.entry, c='void f() { printf("hi\n"); }')

It mainly needs glue code written for more architectures, support for PE/MachO formats, and improvements to the C compiler/linker. The provided symbols are mostly specific to Darpa's DECREE environment, so support should be added for yanking/calling symbols from the binary itself as well as integrating something like lib43 to provide a basic libc and syscall support on many platforms.

- - -

ActualVim - https://github.com/lunixbochs/actualvim

Skills: Python

This project is a massive hack to sneakily jam a Vim instance into a Sublime Text buffer. This gives you surprisingly good Vim keybinding support, and even works with your Vim plugins, but it totally breaks Sublime Text plugins and commands (as text changes won't be propagated back to Vim). As a result, the project is mostly a joke right now (just a pretty UI around Vim that breaks most interactive Vim plugins).

I do think NeoVim is mature enough to take this the rest of the way into being a serious project, and there's a fair bit of interest. The Sublime Text side of the interface works very well, so the main tasks here would be (1) swapping out Vim for NeoVim (which I seem to remember having a very simple remote control API), and a (2) handler to propagate text changes back from Sublime plugins into the NeoVim buffer.

knodi123•

on Sept 17, 2016

•on: The going rate for self-driving talent is $10M per...

That seems to be an article about how David Silver intends to write some articles on the subject.

Do you know how to find the actual article on the subject?

*edit:

Found it! Google is a much better way to search medium than medium's worthless navigation/search.

Here are the three articles:

https://medium.com/self-driving-cars/how-to-land-an-autonomo...

swombat•

on April 26, 2009

•on: Ask Entrepreneurs: Productivity tips for a chronic...

Instead of aiming to do 1 thing and failing to do it, aim to do 20 things and accept that 5 of them will slip.

Do that and basically shift to whatever you feel like doing at the time (with the only caveat that it should be relatively productive stuff - ie. not "play WoW", more like "write a blog post" or "design a new homepage").

You probably will still get stuff done just before the deadline when it has a hard deadline, but the result is that you'll do a LOT of other stuff along the way.