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If your kids are about to starve, fine, do it.
But otherwise, Ciro Santilli will not, ever, spend his time drilling programmer competition problems to join a company, life is too short for that.
Life is too short for that. Companies must either notice that you can make amazing open source software projects or contributions, and hire you for that, or they must fuck off.
- why the square: physics.stackexchange.com/questions/535/why-does-kinetic-energy-increase-quadratically-not-linearly-with-speed on Physics Stack Exchange. Ron Maimon's answer is great, as it relies only on the following staring points:He also offers a symmetry argument considering the case of potential energy.
- why the half: physics.stackexchange.com/questions/27847/why-is-there-a-frac-1-2-in-frac-1-2-mv2 on Physics Stack Exchange
Like Jimmy Wales, he used to work in finance and then quit. What is it with those successful e-learning people??
Good ones:
- In the Court of the Crimson King by King Crimson (1969)
This is a good book. It is rather short, very direct, which is a good thing. At some points it is slightly too direct, but to a large extent it gets it right.
The main goal of the book is to basically to build the Standard Model Lagrangian from only initial symmetry considerations, notably the Poincaré group + internal symmetries.
The book doesn't really show how to extract numbers from that Lagrangian, but perhaps that can be pardoned, do one thing and do it well.
DokuWiki about physics, mostly/fully written by Jakob Schwichtenberg and therefore focusing on particle physics, although registration might be open to all.
Wikipedia mentions quoting his Nobel Prize biography:
Setting: you are sending bits through a communication channel, each bit has a random probability of getting flipped, and so you use some error correction code to achieve some minimal error, at the expense of longer messages.
This theorem sets an upper bound on how efficient you can be in your encoding, for any encoding.
The next big question, which the theorem does not cover is how to construct codes that reach or approach the limit. Important such codes include:
But besides this, there is also the practical consideration of if you can encode/decode fast enough to keep up with the coded bandwidth given your hardware capabilities.
news.mit.edu/2010/gallager-codes-0121 explains how turbo codes were first reached without a very good mathematical proof behind them, but were still revolutionary in experimental performance, e.g. turbo codes were used in 3G/4G.
But this motivated researchers to find other such algorithms that they would be able to prove things about, and so they rediscovered the much earlier low-density parity-check code, which had been published in the 60's but was forgotten, partially because it was computationally expensive.
Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculusArticles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 2. You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either OurBigBook.com or as a static website.
Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.
Figure 5. . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally. Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension. 
- Infinitely deep tables of contents:
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact