Once you start going down the rabbit hole you start asking questions like "does the photon oscillate?", "what exactly is resonant frequency?", "how different is the electron cloud around a molecule from that around its constituent atoms?", "how does a photon passing by/through a molecule cause its electron cloud to oscillate?" etc. The act of clarifying each to oneself in however simple a form is the insight we all crave. Good teachers like Feynman do a great job of it which is why their books are so highly valued.
PS: People might find the recent free book Atomic Physics for Everyone: An Introduction to Atomic Physics, Quantum Mechanics, and Precision Spectroscopy with No College-Level Prerequisites (2025) good for an initial understanding of atomic physics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46961595
I wrote a raft implementation that is used by quite a few well known systems (etcd, cockroachdb, docker swarmkit, tikv and quite a few closed source systems). Probably it qualifies the "production ready" standard :P.
With that experience, I can say that a real world raft implementation is not easy and VERY time consuming.
However, preparing the coding interview is definitely a order of magnitude more difficult for me. It requires me to waste all my time on something meaningless, and makes me feel sick.
Hipster-hate strikes me as just another thinly veiled form of bullying, and it's interesting to see how readily internet nerds - the people who are disproportionately to have been bullied in the past - engage in it.
Look! He's different! Let's make assumptions about his motivations and get him!
It's also interesting to see how many times Reddit (and other communities) fly into a rage-fest because of lack of context, only to make an about-face when the full picture comes out. It's also interesting how no matter how many times this exact situation happens, there is no stopping the next rage-fest.
Above all other things, internet communities is what makes me cynical about humanity.
The recent HN thread Why is the sky blue? is a good example of this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46946401
Once you start going down the rabbit hole you start asking questions like "does the photon oscillate?", "what exactly is resonant frequency?", "how different is the electron cloud around a molecule from that around its constituent atoms?", "how does a photon passing by/through a molecule cause its electron cloud to oscillate?" etc. The act of clarifying each to oneself in however simple a form is the insight we all crave. Good teachers like Feynman do a great job of it which is why their books are so highly valued.
PS: People might find the recent free book Atomic Physics for Everyone: An Introduction to Atomic Physics, Quantum Mechanics, and Precision Spectroscopy with No College-Level Prerequisites (2025) good for an initial understanding of atomic physics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46961595