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Meegul

510 karma · joined June 12, 2016

https://michaelbilstein.com
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Meegul··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2020)
LineLibrary | Software Engineer Intern | Chicago, IL | Onsite | Internship | Summer 2020

LineLibrary is an early-stage startup whose mission is to create advanced sports betting trading applications. We're on our way to disrupting the sports betting market globally with our web-based tooling, and have recently closed a seed round. We're using: React/Redux, Typescript, Node.js, SQL, REST APIs, Kafka, and AWS. Experience in any of the listed technologies is a plus, but not required. A love for sports, sports betting, and startups is also a plus.

US Citizens only. Relocation assistance available.

If you're ready to get in on the ground floor of a promising startup, email us at info @ linelibrary.com

Meegul··on Second Travel-Related Case of 2019 Novel Coronavirus Detected in United States
I've read rush. It was also the designated hospital for Ebola.
Meegul··on India will soon overtake China to become the most populous country in the world
Looks like they meant 299M rather than 199M.
Meegul··on 40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency expense
Yeah that's not too big of a change. Medical expenses, at least measured by national health expenditure per capita, have grown about 17% since then [1]. An additional 17% on $400 would be ~ $468. That number could be enough to account for some of the difference. Of course, medical expenses are by no means the only type of emergency expense, and what you've said about inflation as a whole is still true.

1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/184955/us-national-healt...

Meegul··on 40% of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency expense
I wonder if that's tracked to inflation. A $400 medical expense from 2013 is likely closer to $500 today, which might account for the difference from 50% to 40%.
Meegul··on GTA V – Graphics Study (2015)
I love how HN doesn't cry repost, and instead just treats the previous thread as background to the current one. It's refreshing, because the reality is that most of us don't see every single post. Barring a topic from being discussed ever again, simply because it's been here before is ridiculous.
Meegul··on Learning Web Development? Skills to Make You Stand Out
I got the same impression. I'm still a student and have a decent grasp of all of these things from my prior internships. I thought that some of these skills were not standout, but rather mandatory in order to work full time as a web developer. I guess I have nothing to worry about.
Meegul··on Bulldoze the business school
I agree - 5 hours really isn't that much. I've spent much more time than that on single issues in the past, and it's by no means something that's scaring me out of the field. I should've spent more time in a single session hunting down the issue, but I didn't quite have the time (or motivation after seemingly making no progress) when it was only one of a few things I had to work on that week. One of my issues with that class in general was the complete lack of guidance on how we should go about debugging our operating systems' issues. The only method mentioned by my TA was to print more variables, which isn't incredibly useful if the kernel won't boot or if the print function isn't working. And the issues would compound as the projects were often dependent on previous projects. One of the tasks was to implement asynchronous signal handling through registered callback functions, which is quite difficult to do if you didn't get the scheduling algorithm working properly in the previous project. It felt like the class was designed to be difficult and not designed for me to learn. I was pretty excited to take an Operating Systems class, despite what I'd heard, and it was the class that left me feeling let down, not the content.

I would personally love a debugging class to get some more varied ideas on how to approach difficult problems. Seeing someone's thought process when debugging something like a kernel would've been really useful.

Meegul··on Bulldoze the business school
5 hours on a single issue. I had spent north of 20 hours on my implementation before that. This was for a semi-weekly lab project.
Meegul··on Bulldoze the business school
I recently had to write a scheduling algorithm for our home-grown operating system. I was running into some very difficult to debug issues, so I asked my TA for help. They had no clue and told me to consult the professor. The professor wouldn't help. Our textbook offered no guidance. We're not allowed to discuss projects whatsoever with other students. So after north of 5 hours spread over a few days of trying to figure out my issue, I gave up. How was this a beneficial experience?
Meegul··on Bulldoze the business school
There's a lot of similarity between the Computer Science program at Purdue University and the Engineering program. The professors are quite swamped with work outside of their teaching responsibilities and that leaves most of the teaching left to TAs who are, more often than not, terrible teachers. But the curriculum is still decided by the professors with ample experience. Actually graduating with a Computer Science degree shows an ability to self-teach, not an ability to be taught. The first two years are a constant sprint to stay on top of the coursework with little outside help. It's made most of my peers who've managed to stay in the program quite adept when working, but I'm not sure if this is the right way to go about building those skills. Surely you shouldn't need to struggle in the dark so much to learn.
Meegul··on A Well-Known Expert on Student Loans Is Not Real
Even as a current computer science student, nowhere near 1/5th of my peers do this. I can't imagine a non-computer science student would be more likely, as well. That's anecdotal, but 1/5 of students using _student loans_ to buy digital currencies strikes me as completely absurd.
Meegul··on North and South Korea reportedly set to announce official end to war
A few reasons. The liberals are in power in South Korea, and they have a much more friendly North Korea strategy. Couple that with the North Koreans' recent development of ICBMs and a hostile strategy seems less desirable. The US certainly doesn't want a good relationship with North Korea, but without a South Korean government supporting their policy, and with an increased threat from the North, there's not much we can do.
Meegul··on From Express.js to AWS Lambda: Migrating Existing Node Apps to Serverless
How's the latency when using this method? I'd imagine if you foresee your site being low usage, startup times would be quite bad. At least, on the order of seconds rather than milliseconds.
Meegul··on Money creation in the modern economy (2014) [pdf]
Only provided we leave earth and we harvest energy in a more efficient way. One of the reasons I'm supportive of renewable energy is not for environmental reasons; rather, that it's energy that would otherwise have been lost. Extracting hydrocarbons removes the total amount left, but extracting energy from sunlight doesn't lower the amount of sunlight that'll be emitted. Renewables are a responsible long-term energy play, and not just for the planet's health.
Meegul··on We looked at how a thousand college students performed in technical interviews
Also, those numbers are absurdly low in my experience. It claims that Purdue's starting is $64,000, but I don't know a single person who's graduated and started at less than $75k, and I know plenty more that have started well into six figures.
Meegul··on What are the complex numbers, really?
Thanks! I'm still in the process of really grokking linear algebra as I only just took a class on it, so this is helpful.
Meegul··on What are the complex numbers, really?
You speak of a multiplication operation that "works", also stating that it's not always possible for a finite dimensional real vector space. Doesn't the definition of a real vector space require multiplication that "works" (through the scalar multiplication requirement) or are you referring to the multiplication between vectors within that space "working"?
Meegul··on Show HN: Airmash – Multiplayer Missile Warfare HTML5 Game
You've done a great job! It's stayed very responsive for the time I've played. I haven't even noticed any dropped packets, so your method for dealing with them seems to be working very well despite the high load.
Meegul··on The purpose of Tesla is not to make money
Unfortunately I believe the numbers you're citing are actually in relation to their Solar City acquisition. The roughly $1B figure you're citing is the valuation of Solar City, not Tesla.
Meegul··on The Crash of ’87, from the Wall Street Players Who Lived It
True in the larger economic sense. But on an individual level, even the best savings accounts which typically get a bit above 1% interest will not keep up with the 2-3% inflation that we see (and the fed targets).
Meegul··on The Crash of ’87, from the Wall Street Players Who Lived It
This is only partially true. It ignores the job losses that result from the fall in capital available to firms. Additionally, anyone owning equities, which should be most of the middle class although I'm aware this isn't the case, will see their wealth decrease. I'd argue that the only people who benefit from crashes are those with large amounts of cash assets, which is generally not how you should be holding your wealth. Holding cash, after all, is just withholding wealth from being productive.
Meegul··on First detection of the missing half of normal matter in our universe
A baryon is a subatomic particle that is composed of three quarks, such as a proton or a neutron. An electron would be categorized as a lepton, rather than a baryon as it is not made of multiple quarks and is rather an elementary particle, for reference.

Here's a good reference for subatomic elementary particles, where you can see some familiar names like electron and photon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryon#/media/File:Standard_Mo...

Meegul··on First detection of the missing half of normal matter in our universe
Like many of us, I'm no astrophysicist, but one of the linked papers [1] references that we've thus far been able to locate 10% of baryon content, with this discovery bringing this number up to 30%.

Assuming I'm interpreting this correctly, this means that there's still around 70% of expected baryonic matter unaccounted for.

1: https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.10378v1

Meegul··on Linux desktop market share over 3%
Private browsing wouldn't save any browsing information, which is something I want. Also, using another profile would reveal that the profile exists in the first place. Using the WSL is much more hidden.
Meegul··on Linux desktop market share over 3%
Seems so. But I meant more privacy on a local machine basis. That is, someone would really need to dig through the filesystem to find browsing information, rather than just looking at the standard locations.

I recognize it's a weak privacy measure, but in my situation it gives me a mostly private browser on a shared user account.

Meegul··on Linux desktop market share over 3%
I somewhat regularly use Firefox from within the WSL. It's a privacy by obscurity thing for me though.
Meegul··on Tesla Model S battery degradation data
A Tesla focused Youtuber recently did a video [1] where he accessed some of the data on the CAN bus, and it showed excellent balancing between the cells. The highest voltage cell reported 3.87V, with the lowest voltage cell reporting 3.864V. So the highest voltage cell has only a 0.1% higher voltage than the lowest. That's in the middle of a discharge cycle, so this may not be representative of the real capacity difference of each cell, but they're being discharging in a very balanced manner. I don't work with batteries often, so take my analysis with a grain of salt, but it seems to me that (the lack of) battery degradation is one of Tesla's biggest strengths when it comes to their battery technology.

1 - https://youtu.be/F3tF0i98MpI

Meegul··on Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF
Do you know if Cruise will be looking for interns next Summer? It's a hugely interesting field to me and I'd love to get my feet wet prior to graduating.
Meegul··on The war between Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple
YouTube was also _significantly_ smaller when Google purchased it. Perhaps they weren't able to create a properly competing platform, but they've certainly been wildly successful in growing it.
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