Ask HN: What Are You Learning?
361 comments
I've been a private pilot for about 5 years and a couple of weeks ago I was out in crappy weather. I knew the weather would be awful and had the foresight to bring my instructor friend with me.
We ended up in cloud, I handed over control to my instructor and spent the next 10 minutes wondering what I would have done if he wasn't with me (hint: not good).
So I slept on it, text my instructor a couple of days later and told him I want to be able to do what he did. He told me I need an Instrument Rating (Restricted) rating, which allows me to fly in and above cloud.
So that's my learning for the next 10 weeks or so. I've got to take one written exam, one flying exam, and then I'm cleared for flying cloudy days.
We ended up in cloud, I handed over control to my instructor and spent the next 10 minutes wondering what I would have done if he wasn't with me (hint: not good).
So I slept on it, text my instructor a couple of days later and told him I want to be able to do what he did. He told me I need an Instrument Rating (Restricted) rating, which allows me to fly in and above cloud.
So that's my learning for the next 10 weeks or so. I've got to take one written exam, one flying exam, and then I'm cleared for flying cloudy days.
The FAA written plus the flying exam are just the bare minimum to make you legal, but not safe.
Buying XPlane plus some yoke and throttle quadrant is the best investment you can make when it comes to IFR. Make sure you invest in it.
Yep, totally agree. XPlane is a fantastic idea I'll look in to it. Better than Microsoft Flight Sim?
Yes, it doesn’t look as nice but is much better for IFR. The G1000/GNS 530 are accurate enough that you can actually practice with them.
My father was a flight engineer in the Navy on P3s. While in-flight his job was to monitor the instruments. If you've never seen the cockpit of a P3, its basically wall to wall instruments.
Low visibility flight is frequently dangerous even when you have proper training. A lot of people that fly are surprised how easy it is to get disoriented in low visibility conditions.
Learning to use only instrumentation is a great and valuable skill, but don't forget that even if you know what you're doing the best option is to avoid bad weather if you can help it.
Low visibility flight is frequently dangerous even when you have proper training. A lot of people that fly are surprised how easy it is to get disoriented in low visibility conditions.
Learning to use only instrumentation is a great and valuable skill, but don't forget that even if you know what you're doing the best option is to avoid bad weather if you can help it.
Totally agree, 100%. This is a "get out of jail free card" rating not a "let's fly in cloud because we can" rating.
Thanks for your input, I'll bet your father is a cool dude!
Thanks for your input, I'll bet your father is a cool dude!
He's a great father and I couldn't imagine a better one. Its kind of funny though because as a member of flight crew he jumped out of airplanes on a semi-regular basis and I am terrified of heights. It doesn't bother me to ride in a plane with someone else flying it but I'd probably have to get someone to push me out of one if I needed to parachute.
And at night? Or is that another certification?
It seems like an IFR cert would be really good to have if you were up longer than intended and had to land at night.
It seems like an IFR cert would be really good to have if you were up longer than intended and had to land at night.
Can't speak for FAA as I am in the UK and night flight is most certainly a separate rating. It's an additional 5 hours of training. Not much but essential given how many differences there are at night. It's night and day! #dadjoke.
Edit: More info about night rating: https://www.caa.co.uk/General-aviation/Pilot-licences/Applic...
Edit: More info about night rating: https://www.caa.co.uk/General-aviation/Pilot-licences/Applic...
[deleted]
The FAA doesn't require a separate night rating for the PPL. Which is kind of crazy, as it's too easy to fly into clouds at night.
You make it sound like you flew VFR into IMC with an instructor. Is that what really happened? If so, I would suggest a different instructor!
Not at all, he's an excellent instructor (and trust me I've met a few bad ones!)
The chain of events were we were circa 2000ft VFR. Instructor took control to climb in to cloud to get on top of it. Got in, instructor realised we were not going to be able to get on top of it and so IFR'd us back to the aerodrome with an ILS landing just for show.
The chain of events were we were circa 2000ft VFR. Instructor took control to climb in to cloud to get on top of it. Got in, instructor realised we were not going to be able to get on top of it and so IFR'd us back to the aerodrome with an ILS landing just for show.
Maybe it's a terminology issue. VFR means visual flight rules where you just remain clear of clouds (unless things are radically different where you are). Were you on an IFR flight plan the whole time but in VMC (visual meteorological conditions) until you entered the clouds?
Or the instructor requested IFR from the ATC when they encountered bad conditions (IMC).
But I'm not sure why you are downvoted, you are right, being IFR qualified does not mean you can switch at will between VFR/IFR. You need to file a flight plan with ATC first in any case.
But I'm not sure why you are downvoted, you are right, being IFR qualified does not mean you can switch at will between VFR/IFR. You need to file a flight plan with ATC first in any case.
I'm a marketer tinkering with Python. Since Python is so versatile, lots of uses for a marketer like me. I started off with a few Coursera courses going over the basics (Programming 4 Everybody) and read the book with it.
Then I tinkered with some basic functions: how to strip a list of URLs for a specific Product ASIN, automating some Photoshop image creation, and searching a 10k row Excel doc for specific phrases. All were bad at first, but they worked eventually.
I then did the Automate the Boring Stuff course on Udemy, super fun and deepened my knowledge. Helped me improve some of the programs and start working on others. I started to work with the Facebook Ads API and Pandas to automate reporting. So fun. That program is just getting to the Excel/Sheets automation part which will save me a ton of time every week. I spend a solid amount of time manually analyzing data each week. If I can cut that down, it'll get me quicker insights so better for my clients.
Again, nothing works incredibly well but it all works. And all of them save me time going forward. Automating image files will save a team member 3-6 hours/month and reduced errors by probably 90% (And their stress. We've already used it for 2 months so that's reduced their stress level from the errors they made manually doing it).
I'm basically just carving out an hour a week at this point after shooting for 5+/week for the first 6 months. I might increase it if I slow down on client work or hit a blocker that needs more time.
I subscribe to Always Be Learning, since that is a cornerstone of my own well being, so there is no real goal. I figure if I have a system for it then I'll make progress. And everything I learn is really a bonus for myself, my clients, or any developers I work with.
There's no shortage of interesting ideas to pursue with it so that won't be a problem anytime soon.
Then I tinkered with some basic functions: how to strip a list of URLs for a specific Product ASIN, automating some Photoshop image creation, and searching a 10k row Excel doc for specific phrases. All were bad at first, but they worked eventually.
I then did the Automate the Boring Stuff course on Udemy, super fun and deepened my knowledge. Helped me improve some of the programs and start working on others. I started to work with the Facebook Ads API and Pandas to automate reporting. So fun. That program is just getting to the Excel/Sheets automation part which will save me a ton of time every week. I spend a solid amount of time manually analyzing data each week. If I can cut that down, it'll get me quicker insights so better for my clients.
Again, nothing works incredibly well but it all works. And all of them save me time going forward. Automating image files will save a team member 3-6 hours/month and reduced errors by probably 90% (And their stress. We've already used it for 2 months so that's reduced their stress level from the errors they made manually doing it).
I'm basically just carving out an hour a week at this point after shooting for 5+/week for the first 6 months. I might increase it if I slow down on client work or hit a blocker that needs more time.
I subscribe to Always Be Learning, since that is a cornerstone of my own well being, so there is no real goal. I figure if I have a system for it then I'll make progress. And everything I learn is really a bonus for myself, my clients, or any developers I work with.
There's no shortage of interesting ideas to pursue with it so that won't be a problem anytime soon.
You’re probably in a good position to figure out a business idea.
Have you run into any challenges in learning Python?
I've had to relearn concepts 2-3x and deal with silly mistakes I made, rewriting some programs.
I know a little bit about databases so that gave me a good foundation to work with. If I was 18 and starting from scratch, some of those concepts may have taken longer to learn.
Other than that, pretty awesome. I went in thinking that I would need a few hundred hours of work before I would feel comfortable and I think that was about right. So I just enjoyed it along the way!
I know a little bit about databases so that gave me a good foundation to work with. If I was 18 and starting from scratch, some of those concepts may have taken longer to learn.
Other than that, pretty awesome. I went in thinking that I would need a few hundred hours of work before I would feel comfortable and I think that was about right. So I just enjoyed it along the way!
Complexity Economics
I've been binging books on the topic as well as exchanging dialogs with a colleague over email. Books list:
_Completed_
The Origin of Wealth: The Radical Remaking of Economics and What it Means for Business and Society - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1422121038/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy (Economics, Cognition, And Society) - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0472064967/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
COMPLEXITY: THE EMERGING SCIENCE AT THE EDGE OF ORDER AND CHAOS - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0671872346/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
Complexity Economics: Proceedings of the Santa Fe Institute's 2019 Fall Symposium - https://www.amazon.com/dp/1947864351?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2_dt_b_...
_To Be Completed_
Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy - https://www.amazon.com/dp/087584863X?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2_dt_b_...
I've been binging books on the topic as well as exchanging dialogs with a colleague over email. Books list:
_Completed_
The Origin of Wealth: The Radical Remaking of Economics and What it Means for Business and Society - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1422121038/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy (Economics, Cognition, And Society) - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0472064967/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
COMPLEXITY: THE EMERGING SCIENCE AT THE EDGE OF ORDER AND CHAOS - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0671872346/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
Complexity Economics: Proceedings of the Santa Fe Institute's 2019 Fall Symposium - https://www.amazon.com/dp/1947864351?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2_dt_b_...
_To Be Completed_
Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy - https://www.amazon.com/dp/087584863X?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2_dt_b_...
You may like Why Information Grows by Cesar Hidalgo. The principal behind it is called Economic Complexity. It is based on the applications of network and graph theory using export data of a country, region or city as a proxy to its productivity and innovation. I find it pretty interesting.
Interesting! Sounds like it's potentially come from the public policy / macro economic modeling side. I'll check it out.
Great list, another one I would add is "The Misbehavior of Markets" by Benoit Mandelbrot:
https://www.amazon.com/Misbehavior-Markets-Fractal-Financial...
https://www.amazon.com/Misbehavior-Markets-Fractal-Financial...
Thank you! I've added it to the list. I'm more interested in the business strategy side than the market trading side, but I find having perspectives from multiple disciplines can often be helpful.
I started reading The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith and I think I'll continue with Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber. Not really compexity economics, but classical economics and anthropology.
Great to see this list. I started reading Origin of Wealth last week and wish I had encountered the book earlier.
What interests you about this?
Analytic number theory.
I began reading a book on analytic number theory on my own sometime last year. While re-reading some chapters of the book again, I decided I might as well do the re-reading with a group of other folks who are interested in this subject. So I began hosting book club meetings for analytic number theory since March this year. I had made a Tell HN post about it back then.
Those meetings are still going on consistently. We have a tiny but regular group of participants who meet daily for 40 minutes to read the book together. In fact, we now have a small community around it. We call it the Offbeat Computation Club. See https://offbeat.cc/ for more details about it. We plan to add more topics of discussion, such as Common Lisp, SICP, etc., soon.
We will begin reading a new chapter (Quadratic Residues and the Quadratic Reciprocity Law) on Monday. This is a pretty self-contained chapter and quite accessible to someone who has not read the previous chapters but has some basic knowledge of modular arithmetic. If this sounds like fun, you are very welcome to join us. See the link in the previous paragraph to find our IRC channel location, meeting link, and other details.
I began reading a book on analytic number theory on my own sometime last year. While re-reading some chapters of the book again, I decided I might as well do the re-reading with a group of other folks who are interested in this subject. So I began hosting book club meetings for analytic number theory since March this year. I had made a Tell HN post about it back then.
Those meetings are still going on consistently. We have a tiny but regular group of participants who meet daily for 40 minutes to read the book together. In fact, we now have a small community around it. We call it the Offbeat Computation Club. See https://offbeat.cc/ for more details about it. We plan to add more topics of discussion, such as Common Lisp, SICP, etc., soon.
We will begin reading a new chapter (Quadratic Residues and the Quadratic Reciprocity Law) on Monday. This is a pretty self-contained chapter and quite accessible to someone who has not read the previous chapters but has some basic knowledge of modular arithmetic. If this sounds like fun, you are very welcome to join us. See the link in the previous paragraph to find our IRC channel location, meeting link, and other details.
Having a group to go through math books and check each other is always the best. Glad you were able to find one.
Brazilian music. Gilberto Gil, Chico Buarque, Milton Nascimento, João Donato, Toninho Horta, Yamandu Costa, João Gilberto etc etc.
There's a great youtube channel with hundreds of videos of guitarist Nelson Faria chatting and playing music at home with a different Brazilian musician each time, a lot with English captions. https://www.youtube.com/c/umcafelaemcasa/videos
There's a great youtube channel with hundreds of videos of guitarist Nelson Faria chatting and playing music at home with a different Brazilian musician each time, a lot with English captions. https://www.youtube.com/c/umcafelaemcasa/videos
Check out the lesser known Márcio Farraco's album Ciranda [1]. The title song features Chico. If you like him, you might like another singer-songwriter, Pierre Aderne, too [2]. Both Márcio and Pierre have a French connection, with the former living there and the latter being born there.
And if you want to virtually travel to Portugal, check out Antonio Zambujo. Here he is singing a song [3] written by both Márcio and Pierre, as luck would have it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QRdaL3GEiQ&list=OLAK5uy_lCU...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vr2qTlFkytk&list=OLAK5uy_n3k...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlZcTFBxWVY
And if you want to virtually travel to Portugal, check out Antonio Zambujo. Here he is singing a song [3] written by both Márcio and Pierre, as luck would have it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QRdaL3GEiQ&list=OLAK5uy_lCU...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vr2qTlFkytk&list=OLAK5uy_n3k...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlZcTFBxWVY
If you like Funk, and Soul music you should check out Tim Maia. He did a creative job mixing up Brazilian music (samba and bossa nova) with American black music. He is one of my favorites Brazilian musicians. His voice is also outstanding. Check it out
[1] "Sossego": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=St7ID7vHHs4 .
[2] "Azul da cor do mar": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9kTV-wpiWk
"E boa sorte nessa aventura, meu amigo!"
"E boa sorte nessa aventura, meu amigo!"
From your website [0] I see you like jazz a lot.
So I'd suggest you Egberto Gismonti, a Brazilian musician that released some very good work on the excellent ECM label (same as Jack De Johnette and Keith Jarret). My favorite of his albums are "Sol do Meio Dia" and "Carmo".
I'd also recommend the Argentinian Astor Piazzolla, I love the album "Cumbre-Reunion" that he made with Gerry Mulligan.
[0] http://www.adamponting.com
So I'd suggest you Egberto Gismonti, a Brazilian musician that released some very good work on the excellent ECM label (same as Jack De Johnette and Keith Jarret). My favorite of his albums are "Sol do Meio Dia" and "Carmo".
I'd also recommend the Argentinian Astor Piazzolla, I love the album "Cumbre-Reunion" that he made with Gerry Mulligan.
[0] http://www.adamponting.com
Have you heard of Hermeto Pascoal? I started listening to him the other day based on this article...
https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/the-most-musical-man-in-the-...
He's pretty incredible!
https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/the-most-musical-man-in-the-...
He's pretty incredible!
Be sure to check out Hermeto Pascoal. Especially his Som da Aura technique: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RUlbU6CMx0
Going to add Egberto Gismonti to the list as well, my favorite Brazilian musician to listen to, even if not necessarily the most well known.
[deleted]
Piano. I've decided that more programming languages or web stacks are a complete waste of time. Piano is for life and I wished I had started doing this in earnest long ago.
A fun tech-related project is hooking up an addressable LED strip to a digital piano and making the strip respond to your key presses - via a Raspberry Pi.
My repository for this (code finished, just need to add photos and add a write up about how to use):
https://github.com/whyboris/Digital-Piano-LED
I added a feature that the left and middle pedal buttons navigate through sheet music (PDF left/right button). And I'm also running Pianoteq which makes any (even dinky) digital piano sound like a $100k grand piano (or any piano you pick for that matter) https://www.modartt.com/pianoteq
My repository for this (code finished, just need to add photos and add a write up about how to use):
https://github.com/whyboris/Digital-Piano-LED
I added a feature that the left and middle pedal buttons navigate through sheet music (PDF left/right button). And I'm also running Pianoteq which makes any (even dinky) digital piano sound like a $100k grand piano (or any piano you pick for that matter) https://www.modartt.com/pianoteq
Very nice, looking forward to seeing this working. While you're at it ;) How about a modern day version of the Moog PianoBar? That would be a real game changer for people studying using acoustic pianos. They now have to install a very expensive silent piano system in order to get midi-out. If you could just stack a bar against the fingerboard to get midi-out that would be amazing.
Update: I coded-up a full-screen visualization to display on the screen. My setup has a 55" screen right above the piano, so there's great potential to make a pretty show.
Still WIP, but easy to edit: https://github.com/whyboris/Digital-Piano-Visualization
I used Processing because of how easy it is to use and how performant it is for smooth animations.
Still WIP, but easy to edit: https://github.com/whyboris/Digital-Piano-Visualization
I used Processing because of how easy it is to use and how performant it is for smooth animations.
This sounds really cool, looking forward to your pictures.
Use a metronome.
I've been astounded by the number of free pianos I see on Facebook marketplace. I totally get the allure (and used to play a bit myself), but I fear it's a dying art.
Don't underestimate the number of digital pianos that are being sold, they don't have to be tuned regularly which substantially reduces the cost of ownership and they tend to be a lot smaller and easier to move around. The quality of the latest batch is excellent. I have both an acoustic and a digital one and to be fair the acoustic is half a century old and sounds better up close but for practical reasons I find myself playing the digital one much more often using headphones so I don't disturb others.
Even so, you are right, it is definitely not a growth market by any stretch of the imagination, it takes a ton of effort to learn how to play and in a world full of distractions and ready made music more than you could ever listen to in a lifetime the enthusiasm for doing this is waning. There are exceptions to this though, for instance, in Asia where playing the piano is a status thing and still in its ascendancy phase.
Even so, you are right, it is definitely not a growth market by any stretch of the imagination, it takes a ton of effort to learn how to play and in a world full of distractions and ready made music more than you could ever listen to in a lifetime the enthusiasm for doing this is waning. There are exceptions to this though, for instance, in Asia where playing the piano is a status thing and still in its ascendancy phase.
A piano, if not cared for. Is literally just a liability after a while. Most people have to pay to get them taken away. I wouldn’t consider this an indicator of the art dying. Cars go to junk yards too, but cars aren’t dying.
Any tips for getting started? Should I do lessons? How can I motivate myself to practice when I could just be browsing reddit?
Mind sharing resources you’re using to learn? Also do you have background in music theory or is this from scratch?
I built pianojacq.com to help me practice sightreading and to keep track of where I'm making mistakes. It is still far from perfect but quite useful. The main problem is to get the pieces I want to practice into MIDI format, but there is a wealth of MIDI files out there that can be used with a little editing.
I have this pipeline where I take a youtube video, download it as an MP3, convert that to MIDI and then edit that midi to split left/right and to ensure it is all set to time and of the proper length so I can show it as sheet music.
I knew next to nothing about music theory when I started this beyond the very first basic stuff, but after watching many youtube videos on the subject and reading a lot of stuff it is starting to make sense. This is a subject that is overcomplicated to the point that it seems much harder than it really is, there are only very few good teachers out there to make that which looks complicated but it ultimately relatively simple simple again.
If you want I can do a write-up of all the resources that I've used over the last year and a half.
Currently practicing Ennio Morricone's "Chi Mai" arranged for piano.
Progress is still slow but if I compare my sightreading spead, accuracy and general quality of play with a year ago the difference is huge even if you can't see it day-by-day. Each new piece brings new challenges, and teaches me something that re-inforces the pieces that I already know how to play which then all get a little bit better.
Overall I'm having a ton of fun with this and the joy I get from playing a piece end-to-end without mistakes, at speed and in a way that is nice to listen is hard to describe.
It's obvious that an experienced pianist would probably laugh at the level of my accomplishments but that's fine with me, I'm enjoying this and that's what counts. It's also one of very few things in my life that I've done without any commercial goal, and which is just for myself. Overall if I could do this life over I'd tone down the business career in favor of making more music. And the programming skills came in handy while making pianojacq.com, so in a way this allowed me to combine two things I love.
I have this pipeline where I take a youtube video, download it as an MP3, convert that to MIDI and then edit that midi to split left/right and to ensure it is all set to time and of the proper length so I can show it as sheet music.
I knew next to nothing about music theory when I started this beyond the very first basic stuff, but after watching many youtube videos on the subject and reading a lot of stuff it is starting to make sense. This is a subject that is overcomplicated to the point that it seems much harder than it really is, there are only very few good teachers out there to make that which looks complicated but it ultimately relatively simple simple again.
If you want I can do a write-up of all the resources that I've used over the last year and a half.
Currently practicing Ennio Morricone's "Chi Mai" arranged for piano.
Progress is still slow but if I compare my sightreading spead, accuracy and general quality of play with a year ago the difference is huge even if you can't see it day-by-day. Each new piece brings new challenges, and teaches me something that re-inforces the pieces that I already know how to play which then all get a little bit better.
Overall I'm having a ton of fun with this and the joy I get from playing a piece end-to-end without mistakes, at speed and in a way that is nice to listen is hard to describe.
It's obvious that an experienced pianist would probably laugh at the level of my accomplishments but that's fine with me, I'm enjoying this and that's what counts. It's also one of very few things in my life that I've done without any commercial goal, and which is just for myself. Overall if I could do this life over I'd tone down the business career in favor of making more music. And the programming skills came in handy while making pianojacq.com, so in a way this allowed me to combine two things I love.
I'm on the same journey with the guitar, highly recommended, was one of the key things that improved my life during the pandemic -- and still excited to keep at it afterwards.
Piano has also been my go to this pandemic. I've also been finding a lot of joy in applying my programming skills to music as well. What are you using to convert MP3 to MIDI? How accurate is it?
Either this: https://piano-scribe.glitch.me/ or my own cobbled together piece of software. Depending on the content anywhere from 80 to 95% accurate, good enough to get you started and typically the errors are reasonably easy to deal with because of repeating patterns.
Not OP but I'm going through "Alfred's Basic Adult All in One Course" book series. It assumes no prior piano/theory knowledge and is one of the most recommended books on r/piano.
ooh! I'm doing exactly the same! I purchased a Casio and started taking lessons. So happy to learn!
I'm assuming that's a PX-S** series and I've looked at those, they are very good value for the money. Track your progress, make some videos and then look at yourself a couple of weeks or months later so you can see in a very concrete sense how you are progressing, this is a huge motivator, and it is easy to keep track of this on a day-to-day basis.
Yes, nailed it! Got a PX-S1000 because it's hammer action and I love the minimalist design.
Will absolutely do this :) I'm so down to see my progress as I go. Today I had my class and started working on some chords!
Will absolutely do this :) I'm so down to see my progress as I go. Today I had my class and started working on some chords!
Cool, mail me if you have questions, it sounds like we're roughly in the same bracket. [email protected]
best!
best!
I'm sure many here on HN did this long ago, but for me: Learning how to get by in a large org for the first time.
1 month ago I was responsible for the entire IT function of an SMB. I was the guy who knew everything required to get stuff done, and I reported directly to the CEO. A lot of processes were not formalised because the overheads of doing so weren't worth it.
New job, now working for the government in a skyscraper full of colleagues. I know virtually nothing, there is no onboarding to speak of, and I am second from the bottom in a huge hierarchy strangled by red tape. Every day I find out that there is another whole team dedicated to doing something I thought I was going to have to work out myself - which has pros and cons. I haven't even seen an org chart yet, but I've just been told "those teams over there are getting outsourced next month". So I think I know why there is no up-to-date org chart...
It's different. But it's a pay rise, and I'm not bored anymore. The level of coordination required to get anything done here is a learning exercise in itself. After my first week I was worried I wasn't cut out for this sort of thing, but after a couple more weeks I'm finding it... fun? Still weird though.
1 month ago I was responsible for the entire IT function of an SMB. I was the guy who knew everything required to get stuff done, and I reported directly to the CEO. A lot of processes were not formalised because the overheads of doing so weren't worth it.
New job, now working for the government in a skyscraper full of colleagues. I know virtually nothing, there is no onboarding to speak of, and I am second from the bottom in a huge hierarchy strangled by red tape. Every day I find out that there is another whole team dedicated to doing something I thought I was going to have to work out myself - which has pros and cons. I haven't even seen an org chart yet, but I've just been told "those teams over there are getting outsourced next month". So I think I know why there is no up-to-date org chart...
It's different. But it's a pay rise, and I'm not bored anymore. The level of coordination required to get anything done here is a learning exercise in itself. After my first week I was worried I wasn't cut out for this sort of thing, but after a couple more weeks I'm finding it... fun? Still weird though.
A couple of things I've learned over time:
- Soft skills matter, but performance (against your metrics) is still what matters in the end. Group dynamics only comes into it when you have a bunch of people at the same level of performance.
- You'll be ahead of a lot of your peers if you stay positive and don't gossip and don't do office "politicking" (in a bad sense).
- Plan your career around three year stints. At the end of each stint, evaluate your career progress against your long term goals. Don't be afraid to transfer jobs or take time off for learning (e.g., by getting a graduate degree).
- Soft skills matter, but performance (against your metrics) is still what matters in the end. Group dynamics only comes into it when you have a bunch of people at the same level of performance.
- You'll be ahead of a lot of your peers if you stay positive and don't gossip and don't do office "politicking" (in a bad sense).
- Plan your career around three year stints. At the end of each stint, evaluate your career progress against your long term goals. Don't be afraid to transfer jobs or take time off for learning (e.g., by getting a graduate degree).
> You'll be ahead of a lot of your peers if you stay positive and don't gossip and don't do office "politicking"
This is important. I've worked with people who are constantly criticizing the company/other people, and while they are usually right, it undermines the morale of everyone else.
This is important. I've worked with people who are constantly criticizing the company/other people, and while they are usually right, it undermines the morale of everyone else.
Try reading High Output Management by Andy Grove. He built many of the processes at Intel and his book is guide and a narrative on how he did it. The principles are now commonplace in many companies but no one tells you how they came about —- this book helped me figure out how management worked in a large company when I started at one years ago and gave a behind the scenes look which was helpful for me to decipher my experiences.
At the very least, reading this book is a way to pick the brain of one of the most brilliant managerial minds of our time (he passed away a few years ago). It’s usually hard to find good mentors in any company, so reading books is one way to get mentored by someone outside the company.
At the very least, reading this book is a way to pick the brain of one of the most brilliant managerial minds of our time (he passed away a few years ago). It’s usually hard to find good mentors in any company, so reading books is one way to get mentored by someone outside the company.
Good luck with that. Keep a sharp eye on the door and have a 'plan-B' in case you need it.
This hit the frontpage a few weeks ago, and may be interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27414443
That sounds in every way like my nightmare and the reason I want to cram tech back into the hobby pile and switch careers.
I've tried following the Donut 3D tutorial. Midway, I thought "wow my donut already looks better than anything I've ever done in 3D", and by the end of it I couldn't believe I actually made the donut (sure, following step by step, but anyway that was an amazing feeling). It took a few hours but the result speaks for itself:
https://twitter.com/FPresencia/status/1402267525262491658
https://twitter.com/FPresencia/status/1402267525262491658
My kid is doing the donut too! Have fun!
I’m learning donut too
Chemistry. I was never really interested in it, but recently discovered that it's one of the best (and enjoyable) ways to learn more about the workings of the physical world, purely for curiosity's sake. Doing the MIT 5.111 course on OCW and the MIT 3.091 course on EdX.
Also re-learning modern JavaScript, and TypeScript too - I've been using JavaScript professionally since 2003, but always begrudgingly. And spending some time picking up Flutter (and Dart). We're doing more and more work on the front-end and on our mobile app, and as a technical founder it's good to have some idea of what's going on even if you're not writing the code yourself.
Learning to be a better manager too, one mistake at a time, as I've been doing for the past few years.
Also re-learning modern JavaScript, and TypeScript too - I've been using JavaScript professionally since 2003, but always begrudgingly. And spending some time picking up Flutter (and Dart). We're doing more and more work on the front-end and on our mobile app, and as a technical founder it's good to have some idea of what's going on even if you're not writing the code yourself.
Learning to be a better manager too, one mistake at a time, as I've been doing for the past few years.
5.111 and 3.091 together? Seems like a lot! Hope you enjoy the Sadoway videos - he’s the best.
I was actually just over halfway through 3.091, and it was going quite well, but I had a slight uneasy feeling about knowledge gaps (all my chemistry knowledge is from high school). That's when I started 5.111, and it's really helping to solidify things.
I didn't know about Sadoway, the EdX course has a different instructor. But I checked some of his videos on OCW now, and I really like his enthusiasm!
I didn't know about Sadoway, the EdX course has a different instructor. But I checked some of his videos on OCW now, and I really like his enthusiasm!
Currently working on textbooks in:
Topological Manifolds (Lee: Topological Manifolds)
Abstract Algebra (Dummit and Foote)
Geometric Algebra (Doran: Geometric Algebra for Physicists)
Differential Geometry (Fecko: Differential Geometry and Lie Groups for Physicists)
Though I'm less invested in these last two currently, as the diff geo's a prep for the masters I'll be doing and the other is something I'd really like to pursue but can't motivate myself to start working the problems out on.
I play around with some tech stuff, but nothing major -- just doing FreeCodeCamp and trying to keep my Python skills from going too rusty.
I'm fixing to start an Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics masters, so might review QM and CM as well as it's been a while since I've done them in school and I need a refresher, even if I hope to lean towards the 'Applied Math' (which is mostly numerical algorithms related, etc.) side of things in the masters.
Otherwise, I've been continuing working with Irish (Gaelic), and keep dabbling in some other languages, ranging from Spanish to Latin to Japanese. I also try to read widely in various topics from religious studies, philosophy to linguistics, psychology (I know...), sociology, pop science, etc. I've also bought an ocarina I need to try to practice since I'm off for the summer and don't have to worry about disturbing my roommate. But this is all mostly dabbling at this point, as I'm fixing to move countries for (at least) a year, so...
Topological Manifolds (Lee: Topological Manifolds)
Abstract Algebra (Dummit and Foote)
Geometric Algebra (Doran: Geometric Algebra for Physicists)
Differential Geometry (Fecko: Differential Geometry and Lie Groups for Physicists)
Though I'm less invested in these last two currently, as the diff geo's a prep for the masters I'll be doing and the other is something I'd really like to pursue but can't motivate myself to start working the problems out on.
I play around with some tech stuff, but nothing major -- just doing FreeCodeCamp and trying to keep my Python skills from going too rusty.
I'm fixing to start an Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics masters, so might review QM and CM as well as it's been a while since I've done them in school and I need a refresher, even if I hope to lean towards the 'Applied Math' (which is mostly numerical algorithms related, etc.) side of things in the masters.
Otherwise, I've been continuing working with Irish (Gaelic), and keep dabbling in some other languages, ranging from Spanish to Latin to Japanese. I also try to read widely in various topics from religious studies, philosophy to linguistics, psychology (I know...), sociology, pop science, etc. I've also bought an ocarina I need to try to practice since I'm off for the summer and don't have to worry about disturbing my roommate. But this is all mostly dabbling at this point, as I'm fixing to move countries for (at least) a year, so...
Are you aware of bivector.net, a new Geometric Algebra community? Join the discord https://discord.gg/vGY6pPk.
I've been on the bivector discord since the beginning (aka chakravala), you can find my geometric algebra library Grassmann.jl
https://github.com/chakravala/Grassmann.jl
Yep, I'm actually in the discord server though I've got it muted because I'm not focused enough on it yet. Hoping to get back into it more deeply next month and be more active. Thanks for the invite!
Biology on Khan Academy. We're making plant-based cheese and are experimenting with enzymes to make better and new varieties of cheese. We already have one Ricotta-style cheese (fresh cheeses you often make with acids, so that works well with soy protein, too).
Our hypothesis is that there must be enzymes that works similarly with plant proteins as chymosin (part of rennet used in cheese making) works with casein.
So, I need to catch up on my bio basics to be able to better understand what's going on :-)
Our hypothesis is that there must be enzymes that works similarly with plant proteins as chymosin (part of rennet used in cheese making) works with casein.
So, I need to catch up on my bio basics to be able to better understand what's going on :-)
this sounds really interesting. i am personally very passionate about this space (reducing the impacts of factory farming due to unethical treatment of animals), but as a systems engineer (with degree in mechanical/electrical/software) i don’t really have the Bio background to get more involved.
did you find that to be a hindrance for yourself?
did you find that to be a hindrance for yourself?
Thanks, yes it an important topic that's still underrated today I think.
I wouldn't say hindrance, but it would probably be a bit easier if I had a biochemistry or food engineering/science background.
My partner has an environmental science background, so that helps a bit and she is the one doing most of the experimenting.
But in the end, it's about trial and error. That's also what an expert would need to do. I think if you're interested enough in the topic it's possible to acquire the necessary knowledge.
We plan to hire experts later on once we have the cash to do so (we're not raising money, all bootstrapped).
I wouldn't say hindrance, but it would probably be a bit easier if I had a biochemistry or food engineering/science background.
My partner has an environmental science background, so that helps a bit and she is the one doing most of the experimenting.
But in the end, it's about trial and error. That's also what an expert would need to do. I think if you're interested enough in the topic it's possible to acquire the necessary knowledge.
We plan to hire experts later on once we have the cash to do so (we're not raising money, all bootstrapped).
- Graphics Design because people really listen when stuff is pretty.
- French which has to be done but is quite hard.
- Some math because the more I work with computers there more I understand how it would be very useful.
- Combat sports because it keeps me fit and its good for your posture if you know how to throw a punch.
- Traveling. Never learned it, work too much and would like to see the world before being an old fuck.
- Basic EE digital circuits and microcontrollers. One should really have a grasp how computers work on a fundamental level.
- Cooking. Because it is social, full of culture and makes you independent.
- French which has to be done but is quite hard.
- Some math because the more I work with computers there more I understand how it would be very useful.
- Combat sports because it keeps me fit and its good for your posture if you know how to throw a punch.
- Traveling. Never learned it, work too much and would like to see the world before being an old fuck.
- Basic EE digital circuits and microcontrollers. One should really have a grasp how computers work on a fundamental level.
- Cooking. Because it is social, full of culture and makes you independent.
Regarding French, I am learning it as well.
I built a small site for myself to help in learning the 5000 most frequently used French words. It is, and always will be, free and with no account sign up needed.
Check it out, you might find it to be useful:
https://cinqmille.app
I built a small site for myself to help in learning the 5000 most frequently used French words. It is, and always will be, free and with no account sign up needed.
Check it out, you might find it to be useful:
https://cinqmille.app
I have been "learning" French for 5+ years... what resources are you using that you would recommend?
For first timers
- Duolingo(don't do it for more than a few months)
For beginners
- https://www.languagetransfer.org/free-courses-1#french
For all others, some sort of immersion approach is the only way if you don't live in the country. Figure out the general approach below and adapt for your target language.
- AJATT http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/all-japanese-all-t...
- TMW https://learnjapanese.moe/
- Refold https://refold.la/
- Duolingo(don't do it for more than a few months)
For beginners
- https://www.languagetransfer.org/free-courses-1#french
For all others, some sort of immersion approach is the only way if you don't live in the country. Figure out the general approach below and adapt for your target language.
- AJATT http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/all-japanese-all-t...
- TMW https://learnjapanese.moe/
- Refold https://refold.la/
I haven't tried Duolingo in the last couple of years, but I thought it wasn't the best to begin with a language.
It's pretty good to learn basic vocabulary, but I felt you would need something before, just to get some grounding in the language. Like basic grammar, and a very high level overview of how the language "works". You can infer some of it from the example, but that's a lot more difficult than already having this context in my opinion.
It's pretty good to learn basic vocabulary, but I felt you would need something before, just to get some grounding in the language. Like basic grammar, and a very high level overview of how the language "works". You can infer some of it from the example, but that's a lot more difficult than already having this context in my opinion.
I'd also recommend glossika
[deleted]
What do you mean by "learn" travelling? Isn't it just... travelling?
I never traveled when I was younger. So I would say I never learned it. The mechanics of taking time off, not working, knowing where to go, where to stay etc. That all needs some practice. It is of course not something that you would "study"
Is that all at the same time? If so, do you have concurrency issues?
Yes but in small pieces and with varying intensity. Just sticking to something and making small incremental progress does compound.
And: unrelated skills and the act of learning itself also compound. Learning gets easier as you do more of it because you have more of a method to do so and more knowledge to help you integrate your new knowledge. So as you know more/have more skills adding new skills or more knowledge gets easier.
Nice list! Can you share your resources for Graphics Design?
Curious, how are you learning graphic design?
Learning the basics of Computer Vision and Image Recognition via Machine Learning by following along with this book:
"Learning OpenCV 4 Computer Vision with Python 3: Get to grips with tools, techniques, and algorithms for computer vision and machine learning"
by Joseph Howse, Joe Minichino - 2020, Packt Publishing
available here (library genesis): http://libgen.lc/item/index.php?md5=9208FA33E5C1F93918E128F8...
"Learning OpenCV 4 Computer Vision with Python 3: Get to grips with tools, techniques, and algorithms for computer vision and machine learning"
by Joseph Howse, Joe Minichino - 2020, Packt Publishing
available here (library genesis): http://libgen.lc/item/index.php?md5=9208FA33E5C1F93918E128F8...
Cool. Another book you'll want to check out is Richard Szeliski's free draft of "Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications", second edition, https://szeliski.org/Book/
This looks choice! Seriously-- looks like just the guide I need. Plus the author is a professor of the topic material. I am super grateful to you for making me aware of this resource.
Thanks for recommending it! Just this week I started a sabbatical devoted to putting together a computer vision + ML project. So this will be useful. Adding it to my learning journal.
Thanks for recommending it! Just this week I started a sabbatical devoted to putting together a computer vision + ML project. So this will be useful. Adding it to my learning journal.
If you are interested in more maths and 3D Geometry, the bible of the field is "Multiple view geometry in computer vision" by Hartley and Zisserman. Szielski's book is very hands on, but is it more of a formulas + litterature review book than a clean derivation book.
A lot of 3D Geometry algorithms are based on clean derivations and estimations, thus depending on your math fluency, you will find great enjoyment in that book too. The proofs flow really well.
A lot of 3D Geometry algorithms are based on clean derivations and estimations, thus depending on your math fluency, you will find great enjoyment in that book too. The proofs flow really well.
Thanks for the book recommendation. I've also got a machine vision project I've been meaning to tackle one-of-these-days, and hopefully this will be enough of a nudge to get me started!
To sleep on my back. Being a life-long side sleeper has caused a lot of shoulder and upper back problems that sometimes make it hard for me to reach out and type. I wish I'd done this ages ago. It's one of the hardest things I've had to learn.
I had to go the other way, learn to sleep on the side because of a spinal fracture since anything else was too painful. Never went back.
Shoulders are very flexible but also extremely weak and sensitive, they should rarely be used out of neutral position. I've taught martial arts for a long time and most issues I see with people's shoulders is due to (improper) overuse.
My point is that maybe the cause of the problem isn't in bed at all. My experience says that sleeping on the side makes everything easier, from breathing to offloading the spine.
Shoulders are very flexible but also extremely weak and sensitive, they should rarely be used out of neutral position. I've taught martial arts for a long time and most issues I see with people's shoulders is due to (improper) overuse.
My point is that maybe the cause of the problem isn't in bed at all. My experience says that sleeping on the side makes everything easier, from breathing to offloading the spine.
My wife and I have tried this, but it causes each of us to snore intermittently. Did you contend with snoring as you learned to sleep on your back?
This is the main reason I don't sleep on my back, too. Not sure what the solution is if I want to sleep on my back - I'd hate to jump straight to a cpap machine if I don't need to. Maybe those nighttime breathing strips would help?
Depends on the cause of snoring. For me, I've broken my nose a few times so it's a combination of that and mild sleep apnea---I can manage it by losing a little bit of weight. If you think your nasal passages have an issue, it's worth talking to a ENT about it. There are a number of different things that can be fixed with fairly mild surgery.
I’d love to have a hole in my mattress and sleep face down with no pillow. It’s so comfortable but can’t find a way to breathe.
The best method I have found is to have several blankets, and to put one blanket underneath, and then to rearrange it until everything is supported exactly how I want it.
Then later I may move around and find another position.
Then later I may move around and find another position.
I am having frozen shoulder issues for 2 months after heavy bowling. Sleeping on right shoulder gives pain. I'd like to know how are you practicing it and is there any side effect of it?
Most likely you have a jammed nerve in there somewhere, switching sleeping position isn't going to solve the problem.
I would suggest finding a good chiropractor and describing the problem.
I would suggest finding a good chiropractor and describing the problem.
I sleep less deep when on my back.
Believe there's studies on amyloid plaque clearance differing b/n different positions. And I believe back sleeping has less of such than side.
Believe there's studies on amyloid plaque clearance differing b/n different positions. And I believe back sleeping has less of such than side.
https://americanpostureinstitute.com/proper-sleeping-posture...
Unfortunately for me I'm a coffin sleeper.
Unfortunately for me I'm a coffin sleeper.
The hard thing being to fall asleep or stay at sleep?
Both, but the biggest issue has been reverting to my side while asleep. I've re-aggravated my rhombus muscle a number of times doing that.
I often wind up sleeping in contorted positions, and I've had a similar issue with my rhomboid muscles.
About 6 months ago, I switched to a split keyboard and it's made a big difference for me. Sitting with my arms shoulder width apart has taken a lot of the strain out of my neck and back.
About 6 months ago, I switched to a split keyboard and it's made a big difference for me. Sitting with my arms shoulder width apart has taken a lot of the strain out of my neck and back.
Kundalini yoga works great for my shoulder-sleep issues. Perhaps it can help others?
How did you learn?
I stopped using a pillow under my head because back sleeping + pillow = neck pain. Then I got a thin, light pillow and placed it on my chest to mimic the "wrapped up in blankets" feeling I was used to.
Normal adult pillows are no good for back sleeping but I found having no pillow wasn't very comfortable. I ended up using a memory foam pillow for toddlers[1] that we originally bought for our son. It's perfect - provides just the right amount of lift for me.
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004M3PS4O/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_gl...
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004M3PS4O/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_gl...
I did the same thing! Works well, but I have some shoulder pain now and I don't know if it's related
Drawing, Really enjoy just grabbing the ipad and creating things. It's amazing how 2d shapes can trick the viewer in actually understanding what you've drawn.
Got a background in 3D and Programming, but I think the 3d industry has the same approach to problems as programming. Couple of frameworks and libraries and poof, you have an applications.
In 3d you grab a render engine, a light setup, some assets and poof, you have an image/game/animation. I miss the days that I 3d was exploring and experimentation. The alternative would be to dive into 1 subject (modeling, rendering, lighting, FX etc). But in my experience that just made me feel like a factory worker. Piece of concept art, here you go.
3D can really trap you into polishing a soulless turd, so I'm learning drawing. where you can't cut as many corners and enjoying the creative process again.
On the programming side I'm just enjoying work and learning on the job, also going back to the fundamentals like shell, sql and regex. It's amazing how much you can automate.
Got a background in 3D and Programming, but I think the 3d industry has the same approach to problems as programming. Couple of frameworks and libraries and poof, you have an applications.
In 3d you grab a render engine, a light setup, some assets and poof, you have an image/game/animation. I miss the days that I 3d was exploring and experimentation. The alternative would be to dive into 1 subject (modeling, rendering, lighting, FX etc). But in my experience that just made me feel like a factory worker. Piece of concept art, here you go.
3D can really trap you into polishing a soulless turd, so I'm learning drawing. where you can't cut as many corners and enjoying the creative process again.
On the programming side I'm just enjoying work and learning on the job, also going back to the fundamentals like shell, sql and regex. It's amazing how much you can automate.
Could you recommend some resources?
Especially resources for deliberate/edge practice.
Especially resources for deliberate/edge practice.
* I've been studying Brazilian Portuguese for a couple of years. It's the first Romance language that I've studied in depth (I took French in high school but never progressed very far). I've become fascinated by Romance language grammars, and Portuguese has grammar in spades, e.g. tons of conjugations like the future subjunctive, personal infinitive, imperfect, etc. The great thing is that once you've studied one Romance language, you almost always get an automatic headstart in another. (except for outliers like Romanian). For example, through my study of Portuguese I've found that I automatically gotten (written) Spanish for free. I can now read simple Spanish texts even though I've never studied the language (though I still have to beware of false cognates; also, more complex articles like those in El País still stump me.)
* The other thing I've been investigating is meta-learning techniques for predictive modeling, like ensembling, stacking and boosting (the kinds of techniques used in ML competitions) -- basically ways to combine statistical models to extract more signal without overfitting. At some point individual statistical models are limited in their ability to extract signal from data (even though the signals are there) -- and neural networks are a step too far because of the data volume requirements -- so learning how to combine multiple models is the way to go. None of this stuff is new and I'm a few years late to the game but better late than never.
* The other thing I've been investigating is meta-learning techniques for predictive modeling, like ensembling, stacking and boosting (the kinds of techniques used in ML competitions) -- basically ways to combine statistical models to extract more signal without overfitting. At some point individual statistical models are limited in their ability to extract signal from data (even though the signals are there) -- and neural networks are a step too far because of the data volume requirements -- so learning how to combine multiple models is the way to go. None of this stuff is new and I'm a few years late to the game but better late than never.
Recently, I tackled Genetic Algorithms to solve some specific NP-hard problems, and Zero Knowledge Proofs. Now I'd love to pick up Elixir and some frontend development.
I routinely keep a web page updated with all my learning projects, both the ones I did and the ones I'd like to do [1]. I found that it keeps me accountable, plus it might be useful for some.
This thread is a gold mine of ideas to expand it!
[1] https://giansegato.com/learning/
I routinely keep a web page updated with all my learning projects, both the ones I did and the ones I'd like to do [1]. I found that it keeps me accountable, plus it might be useful for some.
This thread is a gold mine of ideas to expand it!
[1] https://giansegato.com/learning/
Pragprog has a book on genetic algorithms using Elixir!
https://pragprog.com/titles/smgaelixir/genetic-algorithms-in...
https://pragprog.com/titles/smgaelixir/genetic-algorithms-in...
Thanks a lot! Great tip!
As a web developer, I'm often ashamed to admit that I knew very little about AI. Especially because I worked on a AI product on my day to day. I was perfectly fine debugging our python code and updating spacy, but had no clue what it was doing internally.
So 6 months ago, I quit my job, published a short book, then studied AI. It's funny how so many material makes the vast assumption that you already know so much. They gloss over activation functions, loss functions, vanishing gradients, or the most fundamental things like properly loading your data. No one even tells you how to load the data!
Anyway, I got my Deep Learning Specialization certificate, I watched all 3blue1brown videos, I built a smart assistant that runs on raspberry pi in my car. The goal is to have it Assist the driver, with blind spots and keeping the eyes on the road.
So 6 months ago, I quit my job, published a short book, then studied AI. It's funny how so many material makes the vast assumption that you already know so much. They gloss over activation functions, loss functions, vanishing gradients, or the most fundamental things like properly loading your data. No one even tells you how to load the data!
Anyway, I got my Deep Learning Specialization certificate, I watched all 3blue1brown videos, I built a smart assistant that runs on raspberry pi in my car. The goal is to have it Assist the driver, with blind spots and keeping the eyes on the road.
Funny you should mention this, as I'm on my way there. I'm just at the Data Analytics with Python portion of my studies, but with time I want to learn the Machine Learning and AI (baby steps, I suppose). I like to know the behind the scenes sections and the inner workings, so I tend to get side tracked on occasion and deep dive into parts that interest me... Probably not good for forward momentum, but better for my interest, I suppose =/
I took the Coursera's Machine Learning course in 2017 just because I had some time then. But I didn't work on any related project, back to square one now. A few weeks back I started to revise the course but it's appears to be boring because I know that I've done it already and I feel that I'll forget it once again.
Can you please share how you started and the projects you worked on?
Can you please share how you started and the projects you worked on?
I'm writing an article about it, hopefully I'll post it by next month. What got me started was that when I left my job, I had a hard time explaining how the AI part of the product works. We automated customer service for large e-commerces. I wrote a simple yet buggy neural network in JavaScript and it got me excited. I immediately jumped to building a smart device where I can say "Hey Jaziel" (merged name of my kids) and it can perform a command. My JavaScript model failed.
So I turned to coursera, took the deep learning specialization course by Andrew Ng. In a month, I had a working prototype. Sorry I haven't published it yet, but it will also be posted here. Hopefully it makes it to the front page.
So I turned to coursera, took the deep learning specialization course by Andrew Ng. In a month, I had a working prototype. Sorry I haven't published it yet, but it will also be posted here. Hopefully it makes it to the front page.
> I got my Deep Learning Specialization certificate
What is this? Will it help you get a job?
What is this? Will it help you get a job?
Extremely late reply!
Some specialization courses offer a certificate on Coursera. I don't know that it is recognized by institutions, but I believe completing an Andrew Ng class, with the addition of building a project with this new knowledge can be helpful.
By the way I'm in the process of interviewing with FAANG, so let's see how much it will matter :)
Some specialization courses offer a certificate on Coursera. I don't know that it is recognized by institutions, but I believe completing an Andrew Ng class, with the addition of building a project with this new knowledge can be helpful.
By the way I'm in the process of interviewing with FAANG, so let's see how much it will matter :)
Event streaming/multiple views into your data based on whatever the listeners care about. It sounds nice, but it's a lot different than the usual CRUD apps I'm used to. Still wrapping my head around when it's best used, how to generate the event (do you just generate the event, or do you save to a db and then use CDC to emit the event) etc.
Think of Facebook. You create a post and see it on your wall right away. The rest of the world doesn't need to see it right away, but you should or else you think the post wasn't saved. Does that post get saved in some db/cache specific for you, and _then_ an event is emitted?
But yes, I'm learning things like that.
Think of Facebook. You create a post and see it on your wall right away. The rest of the world doesn't need to see it right away, but you should or else you think the post wasn't saved. Does that post get saved in some db/cache specific for you, and _then_ an event is emitted?
But yes, I'm learning things like that.
This is cool - I love this space and it's indeed pretty complicated. And not that you asked for it but I'll try to add some additional insight.
It depends on what you're trying to achieve - are you trying to increase reliability by going fully event driven? Are you trying to improve just one particular flow? Are you wanting to expose certain data for data science?
Unfortunately I don't think there is a good prescriptive answer to this - it all "depends" on your situation. If this is a publicly exposed service - you probably would want to commit/record that a user signed up or posted something and THEN emit an event which will start the chain reaction of other services reacting to the event.
If the user created a post - it probably has an ID and you would probably want to communicate that in your event - but if you did not commit anything to the DB, then what are you exactly communicating?
Your goal should be to try to be as async as possible - but in some cases, it just doesn't make sense. For example - receive an HTTP request to do something is a 100% synchronous operation. But _after_ you've handled that event - most, if not all things, can be async.
Contrived example:
Finally, some non-abstract advice - if you're building an event driven system from scratch, I would probably avoid doing CDC as the primary event emission mechanism and instead have your application emit events instead. You'll have a lot more granular control over what is in an event and not be tied directly to the DB schema. Your event schema will evolve and maybe it won't fit what's in the DB.
I would lean towards CDC if you are trying to retrofit an existing system.
Anyway, hopefully that's a bit helpful! I've been working on this sort of stuff for a while (and actually have a YC-backed startup that focuses on event driven: https://batch.sh).
I recently presented on event driven design at a few local meetups and made some slides, it might be useful: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1j6Cyid88Ca1shwEN6uyI...
It depends on what you're trying to achieve - are you trying to increase reliability by going fully event driven? Are you trying to improve just one particular flow? Are you wanting to expose certain data for data science?
Unfortunately I don't think there is a good prescriptive answer to this - it all "depends" on your situation. If this is a publicly exposed service - you probably would want to commit/record that a user signed up or posted something and THEN emit an event which will start the chain reaction of other services reacting to the event.
If the user created a post - it probably has an ID and you would probably want to communicate that in your event - but if you did not commit anything to the DB, then what are you exactly communicating?
Your goal should be to try to be as async as possible - but in some cases, it just doesn't make sense. For example - receive an HTTP request to do something is a 100% synchronous operation. But _after_ you've handled that event - most, if not all things, can be async.
Contrived example:
1. User signed up -> UI hits public API which is backed by "Main API service" which commits to DB -> emit USER_SIGNUP event
2. Billing service consumes USER_SIGNUP event and creates a subscription in a 3rd party billing system (and maybe emits another event)
3. Metrics service consumes USER_SIGNUP event and starts recording metrics for this user
4. Audit service consumers USER_SIGNUP event and creates an audit log trace
5. --- Finally, the "Main API" service listens to all kinds of other events that causes it to update its "view" of the user.
Finally, some non-abstract advice - if you're building an event driven system from scratch, I would probably avoid doing CDC as the primary event emission mechanism and instead have your application emit events instead. You'll have a lot more granular control over what is in an event and not be tied directly to the DB schema. Your event schema will evolve and maybe it won't fit what's in the DB.
I would lean towards CDC if you are trying to retrofit an existing system.
Anyway, hopefully that's a bit helpful! I've been working on this sort of stuff for a while (and actually have a YC-backed startup that focuses on event driven: https://batch.sh).
I recently presented on event driven design at a few local meetups and made some slides, it might be useful: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1j6Cyid88Ca1shwEN6uyI...
Spanish - more relearning at this point and getting practice.
Running - also relearning, which happened quickly this time. I'm already back to running 5ks after just a few weeks (though I also spent 6 months building up my cardio with a rowing machine).
How to be offline and focused. Computers (and smartphones) are fantastic tools of distraction. I'm trying to regain my focus overall. Reading physical texts is helping immensely with this. I've mostly reinstated my personal "no tech in the sitting room" rule, aside from my Kindle Fire which is sufficiently anemic to be useful as a reader and not as major distraction with other media.
Running - also relearning, which happened quickly this time. I'm already back to running 5ks after just a few weeks (though I also spent 6 months building up my cardio with a rowing machine).
How to be offline and focused. Computers (and smartphones) are fantastic tools of distraction. I'm trying to regain my focus overall. Reading physical texts is helping immensely with this. I've mostly reinstated my personal "no tech in the sitting room" rule, aside from my Kindle Fire which is sufficiently anemic to be useful as a reader and not as major distraction with other media.
I don't know your background, but be careful ramping up long distance running too soon. Especially if you're running on concrete. It feels good till it doesn't lol
Well, I was only out of it for about 2 years at this point (I ran for 2 months last year, but an unrelated injury pulled me out of it), and before that I ran for about 6 years 2-3 times a week, never less than a 5km (once I got up to doing 5km distances) and did a lot more training during that time too (which often incorporated shorter runs or sprints).
I already took care of the weight I'd gained through improved diet and 6 months of rowing five times a week (got up to 30 minutes of moderate to high intensity). So my cardio condition is great, not where I want it, but great overall. It's really my running form I have to improve, and getting my feet and knees used to the impact again. I'm now back under 180 (versus 210 this time last year) which is a much healthier weight to be running at.
I'm being deliberate about adding distance slowly to minimize the risk of injury (from running). Recovering from an injury at 26 wasn't too bad, at 36 it took a lot longer, and now I'm about to hit 40 so I'm being more deliberate than I would've a decade ago. I'm doing 2x3km runs with a 5-8km run once a week. I plan to add 1-2 total extra kilometers a week and only if the runs have gone decently (don't need to be great, but need to be complete). I have no intention of pushing the short runs past 5km or the long run past 10km. Then I hope to find a soccer league and team I like to get my extra running in on weekends.
When I said I'm running 5ks, it's just the one a week. But I can actually finish it, which was a pleasant surprise (I thought it'd take longer to reach that point).
I already took care of the weight I'd gained through improved diet and 6 months of rowing five times a week (got up to 30 minutes of moderate to high intensity). So my cardio condition is great, not where I want it, but great overall. It's really my running form I have to improve, and getting my feet and knees used to the impact again. I'm now back under 180 (versus 210 this time last year) which is a much healthier weight to be running at.
I'm being deliberate about adding distance slowly to minimize the risk of injury (from running). Recovering from an injury at 26 wasn't too bad, at 36 it took a lot longer, and now I'm about to hit 40 so I'm being more deliberate than I would've a decade ago. I'm doing 2x3km runs with a 5-8km run once a week. I plan to add 1-2 total extra kilometers a week and only if the runs have gone decently (don't need to be great, but need to be complete). I have no intention of pushing the short runs past 5km or the long run past 10km. Then I hope to find a soccer league and team I like to get my extra running in on weekends.
When I said I'm running 5ks, it's just the one a week. But I can actually finish it, which was a pleasant surprise (I thought it'd take longer to reach that point).
Lately I have been diving deep into ancient astronomy, Babylonian astronomy in particular. I have a PhD in astronomy, but I've found that a lot of astronomers tend to have a somewhat superficial knowledge of the history of their field. To motivate myself to learn more about it I started podcasting what I learned with the schtick being that I release episodes every full moon to force myself to keep it up.
I've got a book you might like then. I recently discovered there was an 'Astronomy Across Cultures' book, as ethnoastronomy is something I've been interested in for a while (It's always neat to see how other people interact and describe the stars and sky. Shame a lot of this info is being lost as languages die and peoples assimilate). The book focuses on non-Western methods of astronomy, and is part of a series titled 'Science Across Cultures'.
Full reference is: Astronomy Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Astronomy ed. Helaine Selin and Sun Xiaochun (ISBN: 978-94-010-5820-9, DOI: 10.1007/978-94-011-4179-6)
Full reference is: Astronomy Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Astronomy ed. Helaine Selin and Sun Xiaochun (ISBN: 978-94-010-5820-9, DOI: 10.1007/978-94-011-4179-6)
Thanks, I'll check that out! I'm starting to transition from Babylonian astronomy to Greek astronomy, but my plan after that is to go through the astronomy of non-Western cultures: Indian, Chinese, Mayan, Aboriginal Australian, among others. That looks like a really helpful resource for those cultures.
Very interesting. I enjoy both astronomy and history, do you know any books/materials you would recommend to someone who is just an enthusiast? Also, would you share the title of your podcast?
I've found a couple of books that have been very good:
A History of Astronomy by A. Pannekoek has a reasonably detailed and readable history of ancient astronomy, though as I've been diving into it I've found that parts are a little dated. But it's really good to get a high level overview of what the main problems early astronomers were trying to solve and how they were trying to solve them.
Episodes in the Early History of Astronomy by Aaboe is really good, too, though it's more from the perspective of a modern astronomer trying to put the ancient methods into modern mathematical notation. It's very valuable if you're not intimidated by equations.
Exploring Ancient Skies by Kelly et al. is by far the most detailed and contains the most up-to-date scholarship on ancient astronomy, but it's pretty hard to read casually. In some parts it's kind of like a review article that's just a bunch of pointers to other references.
My podcast is Song of Urania and you can find it here: https://songofurania.com/
The full moon was today, so naturally I'm procrastinating here on HN rather than editing my latest episode. :)
A History of Astronomy by A. Pannekoek has a reasonably detailed and readable history of ancient astronomy, though as I've been diving into it I've found that parts are a little dated. But it's really good to get a high level overview of what the main problems early astronomers were trying to solve and how they were trying to solve them.
Episodes in the Early History of Astronomy by Aaboe is really good, too, though it's more from the perspective of a modern astronomer trying to put the ancient methods into modern mathematical notation. It's very valuable if you're not intimidated by equations.
Exploring Ancient Skies by Kelly et al. is by far the most detailed and contains the most up-to-date scholarship on ancient astronomy, but it's pretty hard to read casually. In some parts it's kind of like a review article that's just a bunch of pointers to other references.
My podcast is Song of Urania and you can find it here: https://songofurania.com/
The full moon was today, so naturally I'm procrastinating here on HN rather than editing my latest episode. :)
Thanks, glad to see you're on Spotify. I'll definitely check it out!
The reason we have a 7 day week, the names of the days, and the reason those names are in their particular order stem from Babylonian astronomy. It's one of my favourite stories.
Not learning anything just yet, but there’s quite a few things I’ve been wanting to learn when I get the time:
• I’d quite like to learn how to do ‘low-level stuff’, particularly microcontrollers — I rediscovered an old Arduino which I’ve had some fun playing around with. I particularly want to get to the point where I can write low-level Forth code and flash it to the microcontroller. Also, I should learn assembly language at some point, but it’s proving difficult since I’m on Windows.
• Relatedly, I want to learn the basics of electrical engineering. My physics degree has given me a good overview of the underlying concepts, but I still can’t even design a basic circuit for my Arduino.
• I have very little knowledge of how the networking stack works, so I’m thinking of getting myself a Raspberry Pi and learning how to build and host my own website.
• Wrt linguistics (a favourite subject of mine), I’d like to learn more about morphosyntactic alignment, specifically split intransitivity and alignment in person marking. I have a whole stack of papers stored up which I’d like to read.
• Time management — I feel like I have so much time but am wasting most of it.
Luckily, university vacation started this week, so I may even get enough time to learn some of these!
• I’d quite like to learn how to do ‘low-level stuff’, particularly microcontrollers — I rediscovered an old Arduino which I’ve had some fun playing around with. I particularly want to get to the point where I can write low-level Forth code and flash it to the microcontroller. Also, I should learn assembly language at some point, but it’s proving difficult since I’m on Windows.
• Relatedly, I want to learn the basics of electrical engineering. My physics degree has given me a good overview of the underlying concepts, but I still can’t even design a basic circuit for my Arduino.
• I have very little knowledge of how the networking stack works, so I’m thinking of getting myself a Raspberry Pi and learning how to build and host my own website.
• Wrt linguistics (a favourite subject of mine), I’d like to learn more about morphosyntactic alignment, specifically split intransitivity and alignment in person marking. I have a whole stack of papers stored up which I’d like to read.
• Time management — I feel like I have so much time but am wasting most of it.
Luckily, university vacation started this week, so I may even get enough time to learn some of these!
Edit: I'm sorry, that EdX course doesn't seem to be the one I was thinking of. The cool website is https://www.tinkercad.com though. Definitely worth poking around and experimenting.
There’s a great (very low-level introductory) IoT course from Curtin University on EdX[1] that will teach you the absolute basics of circuitry and get you started building things with arduino. MIT also has almost all of their courses available for free (search “MIT OCW” or “MIT open courseware”) if you’re looking for something more technical, given your physics background. I believe their introductory circuits course for EE/EECS students is 6.002.
The EdX course is cool though because it uses a site (I wish I could remember the name) that simulates circuits to let you build things with an arduino right in your browser.
[1]https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-the-internet-of-t...
There’s a great (very low-level introductory) IoT course from Curtin University on EdX[1] that will teach you the absolute basics of circuitry and get you started building things with arduino. MIT also has almost all of their courses available for free (search “MIT OCW” or “MIT open courseware”) if you’re looking for something more technical, given your physics background. I believe their introductory circuits course for EE/EECS students is 6.002.
The EdX course is cool though because it uses a site (I wish I could remember the name) that simulates circuits to let you build things with an arduino right in your browser.
[1]https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-the-internet-of-t...
Thanks for the recommendations! I was having trouble finding resources, so I’ll have to check those out.
(Further question: do you by any chance happen to know of a good textbook? I personally find that I learn better from textbooks than I do from online videos.)
(Further question: do you by any chance happen to know of a good textbook? I personally find that I learn better from textbooks than I do from online videos.)
Learning Latin following this method: http://wcdrutgers.net/Latin.htm and also working on some mobile apps (iOS using SwiftUI, lot to learn but pretty pleasant experience) for personal use.
Edit: In the past I've tried to do too many things at once and ended up making only limited progress on any of them as a result, so I'm trying to focus on just 1 or 2 things at a time now.
Edit: In the past I've tried to do too many things at once and ended up making only limited progress on any of them as a result, so I'm trying to focus on just 1 or 2 things at a time now.
Thanks for sharing that link, I've been exploring options on the best way to learn Latin.
Clojure. Is a complex language but it seems really speeding up your programming when you learn how to use it properly. And the community is really addicted to it.
Hey congrats! I have been using Clojure professionally for 9 years and absolutely love it. A really important concept I tell all the new Clojurists at work:
Clojure is simple.
Nearly everything is just (function arg1 arg2 ...), even at a fundamental language level. It's actually our background experience in complex languages with all kinds of wacky syntax that makes Clojure seem hard at first. But it's very simple. So if you can't remember the syntax or why something is the way it is, step back and you'll realize it's just (function arg1 arg2 ...).
For example:
(defn add-these [x y] (+ x y))
is still just
(function arg1 arg2 arg3)
Where:
function = defn
arg1 = add-these (a symbol)
arg2 = [x y] (a vector)
arg3 = (+ x y) (an expression, which itself is just (function arg1 arg2))
You may already know all that, but regardless I hope it's encouraging because the bottom line is Clojure is easer than you think and you can do it! :-)
Clojure is simple.
Nearly everything is just (function arg1 arg2 ...), even at a fundamental language level. It's actually our background experience in complex languages with all kinds of wacky syntax that makes Clojure seem hard at first. But it's very simple. So if you can't remember the syntax or why something is the way it is, step back and you'll realize it's just (function arg1 arg2 ...).
For example:
(defn add-these [x y] (+ x y))
is still just
(function arg1 arg2 arg3)
Where:
function = defn
arg1 = add-these (a symbol)
arg2 = [x y] (a vector)
arg3 = (+ x y) (an expression, which itself is just (function arg1 arg2))
You may already know all that, but regardless I hope it's encouraging because the bottom line is Clojure is easer than you think and you can do it! :-)
Been using Clojure for 8 years or so. It's a very productive language.
Clojure is actually simpler (and eventually way, way easier) than most mainstream languages. It's just a bit different from what most people are used to and what is commonly taught as "programming".
Clojure is actually simpler (and eventually way, way easier) than most mainstream languages. It's just a bit different from what most people are used to and what is commonly taught as "programming".
Two things that accelerated my learning:
1. There are several fantastic books on Clojure. The Joy of Clojure and Elements of Clojure are some of my favorites.
2. Watching a professional using an editor/IDE with a REPL attached to it. Look for online videos. This is the biggest reason to why people are „addicted“ to it. The language and it’s ecosystem are made in a way that enables this „living in the code“ experience.
1. There are several fantastic books on Clojure. The Joy of Clojure and Elements of Clojure are some of my favorites.
2. Watching a professional using an editor/IDE with a REPL attached to it. Look for online videos. This is the biggest reason to why people are „addicted“ to it. The language and it’s ecosystem are made in a way that enables this „living in the code“ experience.
I started on Clojure a few months ago and I'm pretty obsessed. It's really reinvigorated my love of programming.
Same. But I think is just a bit difficult to switch from other ordinary languages, mainly due to the lack of a good way to debug. Cljs is wonderful, but reading an error on the console log is quite terrifying.
Does anyone have resources for learning Clojure?
I am interested in the actual Clojure bits. I mean, I know Lisp syntax and functional programming basics. But one also needs language-specific things: standard libraries, namespaces, etc. What is a nice resource for these?
I am interested in the actual Clojure bits. I mean, I know Lisp syntax and functional programming basics. But one also needs language-specific things: standard libraries, namespaces, etc. What is a nice resource for these?
Classical AI planning in Picat, which is like a mix of Prolog, Python and Haskell. Following this book here: http://picat-lang.org/picatbook2015.html
I think planning is extremely neglected and undervalued for what it is. The field is a mess, but there's real opportunity now with all the progress in reinforcement learning.
I think planning is extremely neglected and undervalued for what it is. The field is a mess, but there's real opportunity now with all the progress in reinforcement learning.
How to make beautiful 3D characters and scenes. I started with Blender and now I'm learning Substance for painting the models because the work flow is creativity focused. The possibilities are truly amazing with today's tools.
Working in 3D has opened my eyes to new possibilities. I believe that having skills in 3D will become very important over the next five years with adoption of mixed reality hardware.
Working in 3D has opened my eyes to new possibilities. I believe that having skills in 3D will become very important over the next five years with adoption of mixed reality hardware.
I've picked up Blender in the past few months. Previously I had dabbled with 3dsMax in the late 90's in highschool, but the piracy and license cracks eventually turned me away. Until recently Blender's UX kept me away too.
It's been fun seeing the world in a new way again. I like the nostalgic feeling of looking around and seeing the material nuance in everyday objects, how light behaves, and the uniqueness of everything around us.
It's been fun seeing the world in a new way again. I like the nostalgic feeling of looking around and seeing the material nuance in everyday objects, how light behaves, and the uniqueness of everything around us.
Totally agree. I'm working on a mixed reality app and have started learning Blender as well to set up asset pipelines and toolchains, so being sucked into the 3D modeling world also. I've been surprised to find a ton of overlap between 3D modeling and ML-based tools to assist in the process. Would love to trade notes if you're available to chat sometime.
I'd love feedback too. I tried my hand at using scipy.optimize to tune Blender lighting and materials to a reference image that didn't turn out how I expected. Would love to hear other about other ideas in this space.
I'm really interested to hear about your process using ML tools and Blender. Nvidia Canvas is one I plan to test this week.
My current work flow is very hands on because I'm creating characters for a game and want an oil painted texture look. I'd like to find a way to copy the style from one character to the next.
My current work flow is very hands on because I'm creating characters for a game and want an oil painted texture look. I'd like to find a way to copy the style from one character to the next.
Introduction to Mathematical Thinking (https://www.coursera.org/learn/mathematical-thinking/home/we...). A foundational course on mathematical language and thinking, a great refresher course, at least for me after leaving school a long time ago
I'm currently diving deep into Compilers and Programming Language Theory. Have subscribed to the subreddit/Discord of r/ProgrammingLanguages. Also trying to implement/read these books:
1. 'Write a Interpreter in Go' by Thorsten Ball
2. 'Write a Compiler in Go' by Thorsten Ball
3. 'Crafting Interpreters' by Bob Nystrom
4. 'Ruby under a Microscope' by Pat Shaughnessy
Also, I'm trying to learn Racket in my spare time.
1. 'Write a Interpreter in Go' by Thorsten Ball
2. 'Write a Compiler in Go' by Thorsten Ball
3. 'Crafting Interpreters' by Bob Nystrom
4. 'Ruby under a Microscope' by Pat Shaughnessy
Also, I'm trying to learn Racket in my spare time.
I'm in Sicily for 40d, remote working and learning kitesurf and windsurf.
Kitesurf is really nice but you need to account for a few lessons before you can even stand on the board and prob a few more before you can rent on your own. In my case I did 6h base course, then another 10h with the teacher, typically 2h/day.
Windsurf you can start cruising around much faster, so I guess it's more rewarding immediately. This said many ppl told me that the progression is the opposite, meaning that with Kite you get better quickly, but with Wind it takes a lot of effort to grow from beginner.
On the language/stack side I'm deepening typescript and nestjs (nest with a S, not next) and will prob play more with rust soon.
Kitesurf is really nice but you need to account for a few lessons before you can even stand on the board and prob a few more before you can rent on your own. In my case I did 6h base course, then another 10h with the teacher, typically 2h/day.
Windsurf you can start cruising around much faster, so I guess it's more rewarding immediately. This said many ppl told me that the progression is the opposite, meaning that with Kite you get better quickly, but with Wind it takes a lot of effort to grow from beginner.
On the language/stack side I'm deepening typescript and nestjs (nest with a S, not next) and will prob play more with rust soon.
C++20, as it contains myriad major things (e.g. concepts, ranges, and when cmake supports it modules too...) and minor things as well (e.g. lambda capture issues, the spaceship operator and sane inference for comparison to avoid boilerplate). Given that C++23 is likely to be a very small set of changes, I think 20 will be the next "major standard" most folks move to.
Great question - thanks for posting! Looks like most of use are blowing past the scope you introduce at the end :)
Creative Focus: Since the beginning of the pandemic, I’ve been reducing the number of projects I take on to the ones that bring me the most joy. I manage an engineering org during the day and compose music by night, and have often felt I needed to —be- all aspects of each world. I felt I couldn’t lead my team without being fluent in every language, framework, ideology that they employ. In music, I felt like I needed to run multiple bands reflecting my range as a player, book those, publish a podcast on a regular cadence, make noise about what I’m doing every 2 weeks on the socials,etc. Now I practice, work on the projects I love, and invest time in my next learning area:
Teaching my team Conscious Self-leadership: I’m responsible for amplifying the superpowers of the humans on my team in an org that has a lot of 'old-world' patterns - expecting a parent to come in and solve your problems, expecting one person to issue an edict on technical direction without collaboration, expecting articulation of a goal to be enough, etc. I'm sure there are jargon words you can point me to for the patterns I'm seeing - I'm still on my first cup of coffee. In a remote-first world, people of all personality stripes need space to lead themselves where their most energized/joyful, and making that space can feel byzantine, but I don't think it has to. So: I'm sharpening patterns and techniques that I'm seeing work.
Villa-Lobos Etudes: I've been a guitarist for just about 40 years (yikes) and finally dug into these last year. I feel I'll be exploring them for the rest of my life, finding new things to work through every week.
Music Engraving: I'm publishing some pieces of mine (including https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmvI6H64SPI and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2M7vOIHOeeU) and am learning a ton about how to make a beautiful page of music for guitarists with my mentor John Stropes.
Creative Focus: Since the beginning of the pandemic, I’ve been reducing the number of projects I take on to the ones that bring me the most joy. I manage an engineering org during the day and compose music by night, and have often felt I needed to —be- all aspects of each world. I felt I couldn’t lead my team without being fluent in every language, framework, ideology that they employ. In music, I felt like I needed to run multiple bands reflecting my range as a player, book those, publish a podcast on a regular cadence, make noise about what I’m doing every 2 weeks on the socials,etc. Now I practice, work on the projects I love, and invest time in my next learning area:
Teaching my team Conscious Self-leadership: I’m responsible for amplifying the superpowers of the humans on my team in an org that has a lot of 'old-world' patterns - expecting a parent to come in and solve your problems, expecting one person to issue an edict on technical direction without collaboration, expecting articulation of a goal to be enough, etc. I'm sure there are jargon words you can point me to for the patterns I'm seeing - I'm still on my first cup of coffee. In a remote-first world, people of all personality stripes need space to lead themselves where their most energized/joyful, and making that space can feel byzantine, but I don't think it has to. So: I'm sharpening patterns and techniques that I'm seeing work.
Villa-Lobos Etudes: I've been a guitarist for just about 40 years (yikes) and finally dug into these last year. I feel I'll be exploring them for the rest of my life, finding new things to work through every week.
Music Engraving: I'm publishing some pieces of mine (including https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmvI6H64SPI and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2M7vOIHOeeU) and am learning a ton about how to make a beautiful page of music for guitarists with my mentor John Stropes.
Book design - really just the interior parts for now. I have a (private) website for writing branching fiction (kinda like CYOA but not in second-person present tense), and my friends and I have been using it to write a novel over the last year or so. So far it's about 250 chapters out of a projected 350, it should end up just under 1000 pages so I'll probably have to break it into two volumes.
Ideally I'd like to press a button on the site and have it generate a manuscript - so far I've been looking at a combination of markdown, pandoc, and LaTeX for the formatted form. From what I understand that's frowned upon for Real Publishers, but works well for the DIY process (amazon, book baby, Ingram). I'm playing around with LaTeX templates now, and have a subsection of the book laid out manually now, using various guidelines I can find for font, font size, margins, etc.
I'm also writing a separate book more having to do with how people can respectfully share reasoned conclusions with each other - for that, I'm also using a LaTeX book template and am just writing it in LaTeX, since it's kind of fun to see an approximation of what the actual book would look like as I write it.
There's a long way to go on learning this though and I haven't found a lot of good resources, so I'm definitely open to suggestions for folks who have written good technical dynamic pipelines for book publishing - particularly anything that can be wired into a web backend that starts with markdown data.
Ideally I'd like to press a button on the site and have it generate a manuscript - so far I've been looking at a combination of markdown, pandoc, and LaTeX for the formatted form. From what I understand that's frowned upon for Real Publishers, but works well for the DIY process (amazon, book baby, Ingram). I'm playing around with LaTeX templates now, and have a subsection of the book laid out manually now, using various guidelines I can find for font, font size, margins, etc.
I'm also writing a separate book more having to do with how people can respectfully share reasoned conclusions with each other - for that, I'm also using a LaTeX book template and am just writing it in LaTeX, since it's kind of fun to see an approximation of what the actual book would look like as I write it.
There's a long way to go on learning this though and I haven't found a lot of good resources, so I'm definitely open to suggestions for folks who have written good technical dynamic pipelines for book publishing - particularly anything that can be wired into a web backend that starts with markdown data.
Brazilian Jiu Jutsu. Every single day I go through the same cycle of wanting to skip that days class, convincing myself to drag myself there and walking out incredibly happy I went. I don't know what it is, but I'm loving being a complete beginner at something again.
BJJ was a ton of fun, I did it for 3 or 4 years before moving (just before COVID hit). I've been wanting to get back into it but none of the gyms with a decent reputation (let alone ones with a good reputation) are within a convenient drive of our home. I had actually moved to an apartment in my old city partially to be near my gym (I was tired of driving 30 minutes there and 30 minutes back in the evenings, a 10-minute walk was more convenient; it was also a more interesting area in general though).
Was in a rut for way too long. Slowly getting back to learning by doing https://www.nand2tetris.org/. So far it has been enjoyable.
This is really cool, and I can really relate to being in a rut.
Thank you so much for sharing.
Piano.
I learned Japanese for several years and decided to learn something new, but I wanted the same experience I had for learning Japanese. There's just an insane dearth of GOOD learning tools for Japanese.
It turns out there's good stuff for Piano too, but none hit the right spot. So I made my own learning tool called Piano Gym.
https://pianogym.com
Piano Gym is flash cards + midi piano + spaced repetition to teach you music theory and performance using actual sheet music and music theory tools.
It's SUPER cool, and I stream myself using it every day. I have a whole curriculum using a Piano method's book, so it's exciting to know that the content I'm going through is actually made by someone else.
I made a ShowHN post, but this site is weird, so if you're interested you can see that here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27304875
Either way, it's pretty cool to learn using a tool I created. Excited to keep it going!
I learned Japanese for several years and decided to learn something new, but I wanted the same experience I had for learning Japanese. There's just an insane dearth of GOOD learning tools for Japanese.
It turns out there's good stuff for Piano too, but none hit the right spot. So I made my own learning tool called Piano Gym.
https://pianogym.com
Piano Gym is flash cards + midi piano + spaced repetition to teach you music theory and performance using actual sheet music and music theory tools.
It's SUPER cool, and I stream myself using it every day. I have a whole curriculum using a Piano method's book, so it's exciting to know that the content I'm going through is actually made by someone else.
I made a ShowHN post, but this site is weird, so if you're interested you can see that here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27304875
Either way, it's pretty cool to learn using a tool I created. Excited to keep it going!
Spanish. It's been the focus of most of my free time for the last 1.5 years and I've seen incredible results.
I'm surprised by those who commented that they're learning multiple unrelated subjects at once. Are you learning anything beyond a superficial level? Or is the goal to pique your curiosity on a new subject and then decide if you want to make it your core focus?
I'm surprised by those who commented that they're learning multiple unrelated subjects at once. Are you learning anything beyond a superficial level? Or is the goal to pique your curiosity on a new subject and then decide if you want to make it your core focus?
I'm one of those doing multiple unrelated subjects at once. For me, it's because I have the time. I'm a teacher, and we're out for summer, so I've got time to focus on several different things. I can do an hour or so of math a day, alternating the various books I'm going through, and give myself an hour of Irish immersion a day (mostly reading) as I'm already at a comfortable B2+ (officially tested) so it's just a matter of keeping it going. Then I can read some in whatever textbook I'm doing of an evening. My other subjects are much more superficial, happening mostly from reading books while I exercise (walking and biking on a stationary bike are perfect for this).
But, really, it's mostly because I have more time and few other hobbies currently (not starting anything new before I move countries in a few months).
But, really, it's mostly because I have more time and few other hobbies currently (not starting anything new before I move countries in a few months).
I’m learning to fly. Working on my private pilot license in SoCal.
I had spent a lot of time prepping before starting my training, so some stuff has been expected but other stuff has been a pleasant surprise.
One of the things that crosses over to engineering is the concept of flows. This idea that you’re constantly wanting to check on certain items throughout flight, and then at different phases of flight work through a flow.
You have checklists that you use and reference, but certain flows you commit to memory. This is very similar to incident response work as someone who has been in infrastructure for the last decade. How I triage and work through a problem has a very specific flow to it that helps me quickly sort out where the issue is (even if it doesn’t immediately tell me how to fix it). I always love seeing how two skills, like engineering and flying, can have correlated patterns.
For anyone with a love of aviation, go take a discovery flight. General aviation flying is a wonderful thing.
I had spent a lot of time prepping before starting my training, so some stuff has been expected but other stuff has been a pleasant surprise.
One of the things that crosses over to engineering is the concept of flows. This idea that you’re constantly wanting to check on certain items throughout flight, and then at different phases of flight work through a flow.
You have checklists that you use and reference, but certain flows you commit to memory. This is very similar to incident response work as someone who has been in infrastructure for the last decade. How I triage and work through a problem has a very specific flow to it that helps me quickly sort out where the issue is (even if it doesn’t immediately tell me how to fix it). I always love seeing how two skills, like engineering and flying, can have correlated patterns.
For anyone with a love of aviation, go take a discovery flight. General aviation flying is a wonderful thing.
I'm on the first and second book of Teach Yourself Computer Science curriculum [0].
https://teachyourselfcs.com/
https://teachyourselfcs.com/
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu aka BJJ. Physical problem solving under pressure.
Came here to say this. I trained for about 7 months before Covid shut everything down. I figured maybe I would just focus on lifting from here on out.
Then, 6 weeks ago someone stole my laptop from me while sitting in a cafe in San Francisco. Without thinking, I chased him down and was able to wrestle my laptop back from him. Without the BJJ, I probably would have just yelled at him. Anyway, I'm back at the BJJ studio!
Then, 6 weeks ago someone stole my laptop from me while sitting in a cafe in San Francisco. Without thinking, I chased him down and was able to wrestle my laptop back from him. Without the BJJ, I probably would have just yelled at him. Anyway, I'm back at the BJJ studio!
I found BJJ to be an excellent ego crusher, which I sorely needed at the time. Highly recommended if your joints can handle it :-)
I started training kickboxing now, after 2 years of mma and 1 year break of physical activity. Martial Arts are the best!
I agree. I learn Muay-Thai (Thai boxing), and this is incredibly useful, mainly because I have to (try to) switch from my usual "thinking for hours/days/months to a problem" mode into "flowing, neglecting analysis/systemics/... and letting whatever is left take control and act/react RIGHT NOW".
Do you worry at all about taking kicks to the head or it damaging your body long term?
This is really a problem in the professional world, and at a lesser extent in some high-end amateur setups, mainly when some competitors want to become pros or if there is some animosity between gyms/people.
They cut weight, have good technique and power, and the stakes sometimes are very high. This is dangerous.
Cutting weight reduces the amount of water in the body => the brain bounces on the skull at a greater speed => more kinetic energy => major risk (hemorrhage...).
Many sports are much more dangerous than commonly thought. Each and every friend who practiced judo or BJJ developed serious joints problems, or even major hips-related ordeals. Comparing football and MMA leads to surprising observations: https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2830774-football-vs-mma-...
My take: do not compete (and do not aim at becoming a professional!), avoid any gym where hard sparring is mandatory, or where the trainers don't closely monitor the sparring sessions or don't immediately break anything getting out-of-hands. There is some residual risk, but IMHO probably no higher than walking down the streets, and the gains are worth it.
They cut weight, have good technique and power, and the stakes sometimes are very high. This is dangerous.
Cutting weight reduces the amount of water in the body => the brain bounces on the skull at a greater speed => more kinetic energy => major risk (hemorrhage...).
Many sports are much more dangerous than commonly thought. Each and every friend who practiced judo or BJJ developed serious joints problems, or even major hips-related ordeals. Comparing football and MMA leads to surprising observations: https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2830774-football-vs-mma-...
My take: do not compete (and do not aim at becoming a professional!), avoid any gym where hard sparring is mandatory, or where the trainers don't closely monitor the sparring sessions or don't immediately break anything getting out-of-hands. There is some residual risk, but IMHO probably no higher than walking down the streets, and the gains are worth it.
This is a really fascinating perspective, and contains info that I hadn't come across previously. Thanks for sharing; I'm excited to read a bit more about these points.
Which point seems particularly interesting?
About dehydration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_distance_(boxing)#Distance...
About dehydration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_distance_(boxing)#Distance...
I’ve been playing with bare metal Raspberry Pi programming and really enjoying it. There are two great frameworks — Circle and Ultibo. The former is in C++, but the latter is in… Free Pascal. Which is kinda weird but kinda fun. Having a Pi boot up and run your application in 2-3 seconds is pretty stunning.
I'll jump on your thread because it's similar in some ways. I'm learning Forth and more importantly, how to implement Forth from scratch. I'm targeting bare metal Raspberry Pi (especially the Zero at first). Looks like someone already combined bare metal Pi stuff from Alex Chadwick and an arm port of jonesforth (by Richard WM Jones which is in assembly but runs on Linux x86) but it also uses a lot of C libraries and stuff that they've added for USB keyboards etc and I just want everything to be a minimal assembly kernel and then build up from there in Forth itself. This is the branch that has taken things the farthest that I ran across: https://github.com/Avoncliff/pijFORTHos
Aside: I'll never understand why C++ immediately implies everything needs to be classes. In fact, deep class hierarchies that I've seen in other projects muddle the design and confuse extensibility.
I much prefer a C++ lite, with stl library, interfaces instead of classes, and c++ syntax sugar + procedural programming, please.
I much prefer a C++ lite, with stl library, interfaces instead of classes, and c++ syntax sugar + procedural programming, please.
Hold up. Do all the peripherals work?
I mean, it kind of depends what you're looking for. But out of the box, you get:
- HDMI video (I've only tried the first on Pi 4's)
- HDMI sound, PWM sound, headphone sound
- I2C controller/peripheral base classes
- SPI support
- serial logging
- USB controller/hub PnP support, including mouse, keyboard, and gamepads
- FAT support
I haven't messed with networking or wireless of any sort yet. Not needed for my use case, but I believe ethernet is there, at least.
- HDMI video (I've only tried the first on Pi 4's)
- HDMI sound, PWM sound, headphone sound
- I2C controller/peripheral base classes
- SPI support
- serial logging
- USB controller/hub PnP support, including mouse, keyboard, and gamepads
- FAT support
I haven't messed with networking or wireless of any sort yet. Not needed for my use case, but I believe ethernet is there, at least.
Learning about aws transit gateway and firewalls. Recently been put into a project where I need to architect whole infrastructure. First time leading a project, so excited and nervous. Learning how manage time with 18month kid, work and a daily audio log podcast
I am learning how the audio stacks in Windows and Linux work. I plan to create a simple library to play sound on both platforms (like RTAudio/PortAudio but simpler).
I am using C/C++ to program the library while learning essential concepts.
I am using C/C++ to program the library while learning essential concepts.
Nice post yesterday about the next generation Linux audio system. I've been using Pipewire on my desktop for a while and it's been working well.
https://venam.nixers.net/blog/unix/2021/06/23/pipewire-under...
https://venam.nixers.net/blog/unix/2021/06/23/pipewire-under...
His previous blog on Unix Audio Systems cleared up a few concepts I had in mind.
BTW I use Fedora 34, and PipeWire works flawlessly for screen-sharing and Bluetooth audio :^)
BTW I use Fedora 34, and PipeWire works flawlessly for screen-sharing and Bluetooth audio :^)
- DataScience. Just started a masters
- PC Modding, Who would say that soldering and re arranging power supplies would be fun!
- Gardering. Gives me mental peace.
- PC Modding, Who would say that soldering and re arranging power supplies would be fun!
- Gardering. Gives me mental peace.
DevOps/GitOps.
Need to build a stack consisting of Kubernetes (zero downtime, volumes), Docker for images, Django Rest Framework (backend), Nginx (reverse proxy for static files), Uwsgi (for Nginx-Django coordination), Next.js (front), Postgresql (db), Flux (for syncing with private docker registry images using maybe semver and for github repository polling), Ansible (for agentless initial configuration for test/qa/production servers), and Github Actions for CI (maybe later CD; servers allow only polling at the moment).
Need to build a stack consisting of Kubernetes (zero downtime, volumes), Docker for images, Django Rest Framework (backend), Nginx (reverse proxy for static files), Uwsgi (for Nginx-Django coordination), Next.js (front), Postgresql (db), Flux (for syncing with private docker registry images using maybe semver and for github repository polling), Ansible (for agentless initial configuration for test/qa/production servers), and Github Actions for CI (maybe later CD; servers allow only polling at the moment).
Your stack looks similar to this (https://panelbear.com/blog/tech-stack/)
This might help
Thanks for the link. The summary seems to have a couple of tools I'm not familiar with.
Gamedev! Last year I tried Godot and really liked what I was learning but felt like something was missing from the community or product, I wasn't really sure what. I tried Game Maker Studio 2 this year and was fascinated with how easier it was to create a prototype real quick. So I might stick with GMS2 for now.
I hope that I can meet an artist some day and participate in a game jam.
I hope that I can meet an artist some day and participate in a game jam.
- F# : I've learned basic concepts of functional programming through JavaScript/typescript, but have wanted to learn a more functional language. I do C# for work, so F# seems like a logical next step.
- Databases : in the past I feel that I've learned too heavily on ORMs, so lately I've been trying to learn how databases actually work. Things like how to interpret execution plans, the data structures used for indexes, etc. Found some really cool tools like Postgrest & Postgraphile that are making me more interested in database-centric apps.
- Math : as a self taught dev that studied English in college, I was never exposed to much math. But I love thinking about the underlying patterns and structures of anything, and math seems to be an invaluable tool in doing this. Not sure how I'm going to self-teach math (or where to begin), but the little bit of discrete math I've learned has been super fascinating.
- Databases : in the past I feel that I've learned too heavily on ORMs, so lately I've been trying to learn how databases actually work. Things like how to interpret execution plans, the data structures used for indexes, etc. Found some really cool tools like Postgrest & Postgraphile that are making me more interested in database-centric apps.
- Math : as a self taught dev that studied English in college, I was never exposed to much math. But I love thinking about the underlying patterns and structures of anything, and math seems to be an invaluable tool in doing this. Not sure how I'm going to self-teach math (or where to begin), but the little bit of discrete math I've learned has been super fascinating.
Math: if you're self taught, have you heard or looked at Open Universities maths degree? It's well regarded for an online course and around £18k for the entire thing. I know a DPhil at Oxford who came from that course.
I've not heard of that, is this a 4-yr degree? I'm on the fence about going back to school for something like this, as it would just be for personal growth (and I already spent 4 yrs in university, albeit other fields). Math seems difficult to self-teach compared to software dev though.
It's a 3-year degree in the UK but you can take up to 16 years to complete it paying per module. It is very well respected compared to your normal 'online degrees' though!
6502 assembly language for the Atari 2600 (which actually uses a 6507). I've always wanted a lower level understanding of computers, but it took childhood nostalgia to finally motivate me. I also enjoy reading about the original engineers from Atari, Activision, Commodore, etc, so it's been rewarding to dabble in that world.
Sounds interesting! What resources are you using to learn?
In case you haven't seen it already, http://8bitworkshop.com/ provides an online IDE.
In case you haven't seen it already, http://8bitworkshop.com/ provides an online IDE.
Thanks! 8bitworkshop is a great resource.
I am currently working through this online course by Gustavo Pezzi called "6502 Assembly Language for the Atari 2600". https://courses.pikuma.com/courses/atari2600 It has been excellent. Just the pace and level of detail that I need. I am lucky to have stumbled upon it.
I am also reading "Making Games for the Atari 2600" by Steven Hugg. Previously I was simply exploring what is available on http://www.6502.org/, working through the Easy 6502 tutorial https://skilldrick.github.io/easy6502/, and checking out YouTube tutorials.
I am currently working through this online course by Gustavo Pezzi called "6502 Assembly Language for the Atari 2600". https://courses.pikuma.com/courses/atari2600 It has been excellent. Just the pace and level of detail that I need. I am lucky to have stumbled upon it.
I am also reading "Making Games for the Atari 2600" by Steven Hugg. Previously I was simply exploring what is available on http://www.6502.org/, working through the Easy 6502 tutorial https://skilldrick.github.io/easy6502/, and checking out YouTube tutorials.
I'm building a sauna in my parents backyard. I've framed and sided a couple houses, but always with someone who knew what they were doing. Building even a small insulated shed (which is what a sauna basically is) from scratch w/ no plans, whole other world. Lots and lots of things I have to figure out along the way.
Jump rope - it’s great cardio and really fun.
It feels good to be a total beginner and then slowly learn different tricks/moves.
It feels good to be a total beginner and then slowly learn different tricks/moves.
I'm learning to solve differential equations with analog computer techniques. I don't have access to an electronic or mechanical analog machine, only simulations, but I find simulations quite flexible and enjoyable. There are a lot of great books from 50's and 60's on the topic.
Tig welding. I think being able to craft with metal will open up a nice chunk of the technology tree for me.
I've spent the past week attempting to learn about the reaction-diffusion algorithm[1], and trying to translate it into Javascript code which I can then use to build an online, interactive generative art demo in a 2D canvas[2].
Sadly, it's gonna take me some more learning and experimenting to get there.
[1] - https://itp.uni-frankfurt.de/~gros/StudentProjects/Projects_...
[2] - All the online code examples I can find are using three.js or WebGL shaders and I have a stubborn belief that this is doable in vanilla JS using the 2D canvas API. Just because I've failed so far doesn't mean it's a Bad Idea!
Sadly, it's gonna take me some more learning and experimenting to get there.
[1] - https://itp.uni-frankfurt.de/~gros/StudentProjects/Projects_...
[2] - All the online code examples I can find are using three.js or WebGL shaders and I have a stubborn belief that this is doable in vanilla JS using the 2D canvas API. Just because I've failed so far doesn't mean it's a Bad Idea!
I am thinking about changing career from accounting to IT/programming. Been a hobby programmer for 20+ years but I think the best way to move forward is to go for functional consultant kind of a role. MS Dynamics certification is what I’m serious about right now.
I plan to learn Gleam. I write Elixir for work and to have access to a statically typed functional language that can compile to (as of just recently) both the BEAM and to JavaScript fits an actual use case that we have.
For non coding related stuff: acoustic guitar and French.
For non coding related stuff: acoustic guitar and French.
I've been getting obsessed a bit with guix (and learning a little Guile, of course), mixed with trying to sort out the Haskell stack/cabal situation for some complicated projects to package in Guix. Guix is very cool, and looking to build my next system with it. Any excuse to do more things with anything Lisp. In the meantime I've already submitted a few patches to fix bugs in some packages and the Haskell build system, first time I've done that in such a large project. A good learning experience so far, just hope those patches get picked up!
(I know it is supposed to be pronounced 'geeks' but I can't help but want to say 'goo-eeks')
(I know it is supposed to be pronounced 'geeks' but I can't help but want to say 'goo-eeks')
After nearly 13 years out of it, I picked up a 3D printer. I did a fair amount of printing and modeling in my last years of college, but since transitioning into programming not long after graduation it's been something that I hadn't had the time for, or the avenue to apply it.
So far I've had more failed prints than successes over the last week or two, but I'm still excited to be doing it. I'm learning the ins and outs, which were different from the last printers I worked with. The wheels are churning as to what I can make, and I'm very excited to continue exploring and "resharpening" the skills that I once had.
So far I've had more failed prints than successes over the last week or two, but I'm still excited to be doing it. I'm learning the ins and outs, which were different from the last printers I worked with. The wheels are churning as to what I can make, and I'm very excited to continue exploring and "resharpening" the skills that I once had.
The main thing is to level the bed. Once you do this, it shouldn't require releveling except maybe every 1-2 months.
Upgrade the bed to the glass bed. Get yourself some hairspray and spray the bed every few prints. You'll never get failed prints again.
Upgrade the bed to the glass bed. Get yourself some hairspray and spray the bed every few prints. You'll never get failed prints again.
Thanks for the tips. I'm actually resin printing, rather than doing FDM, but there's still leveling the build plate. I actually had some good prints over the weekend, so I think I'm past the first few bumps in the road
In specifics, I'm learning about using AWS's CDK to set up API Gateways and Lambdas.
On a broader level, I'm learning about creating APIs/microservices.
On an even broader level, I'm learning how to make (architectural) decisions and run projects.
On a broader level, I'm learning about creating APIs/microservices.
On an even broader level, I'm learning how to make (architectural) decisions and run projects.
What resources are you using for the first two?
I was interested in Elixir and Phoenix, but as I am working as a PHP dev (with JS for the frontend), I decided to only learn technologies that I might one day use in my workplace.
So I'm learning Dart and Flutter. Flutter (which uses Dart), now has some full support for web in its latest version, so it's a real possibility I might get to propose we create some front end parts of our app in Flutter web, and even suggest we adopt it for the mobile version of our product.
We are going to do some kind of mobile version, but are currently thinking about a PWA using either React or Vue.
Apart from that, I really need to improve my knowledge of PHP design patterns.
So I'm learning Dart and Flutter. Flutter (which uses Dart), now has some full support for web in its latest version, so it's a real possibility I might get to propose we create some front end parts of our app in Flutter web, and even suggest we adopt it for the mobile version of our product.
We are going to do some kind of mobile version, but are currently thinking about a PWA using either React or Vue.
Apart from that, I really need to improve my knowledge of PHP design patterns.
At work because I have no alternative I'm learning VBA, MS Access, and Excel/word automation.
At home I'm looking at Common Lisp and APL (which are so far out of my frame of reference I can feel my brain hurting when I sit down to them).
At home I'm looking at Common Lisp and APL (which are so far out of my frame of reference I can feel my brain hurting when I sit down to them).
Kayaking
I used to be afraid of the water - especially natural bodies of water. This comes from learning to swim late due to tubes in my ears. So rivers carry a lot of mystique for me. I got into class 2-3 whitewater kayaking as a teenager, gained confidence in rivers, then did a bit more after college.
Recently, in my 40s, I realized “it’s ok to have interests your partner/family doesn’t”. Somehow this was a eureka for me to find more hobbies away from coding. So for me kayaking has been a part of that and my family has been supportive. Hopefully I'll find a local group that shares my interest at my beginner skill level :)
I used to be afraid of the water - especially natural bodies of water. This comes from learning to swim late due to tubes in my ears. So rivers carry a lot of mystique for me. I got into class 2-3 whitewater kayaking as a teenager, gained confidence in rivers, then did a bit more after college.
Recently, in my 40s, I realized “it’s ok to have interests your partner/family doesn’t”. Somehow this was a eureka for me to find more hobbies away from coding. So for me kayaking has been a part of that and my family has been supportive. Hopefully I'll find a local group that shares my interest at my beginner skill level :)
What I'm actually taking steps to learn vs the huge pile of things I want to learn is something quite different.
Right now I suppose I'm semi-actively learning Erlang & OTP (I vastly prefer the syntax compared to Elixir).
In the future I want to learn more about the BEAM (how it's implemented, my basic details are good but I'd like to get to internals). I want to learn about compilers too, to be able to for example contribute to BEAM. Oh, and I want to learn lisp + work through SICP.
edit: oh also just the small matter of Mathematics (from like half way through GCSE to A Level). Russian would also be interesting.
Right now I suppose I'm semi-actively learning Erlang & OTP (I vastly prefer the syntax compared to Elixir).
In the future I want to learn more about the BEAM (how it's implemented, my basic details are good but I'd like to get to internals). I want to learn about compilers too, to be able to for example contribute to BEAM. Oh, and I want to learn lisp + work through SICP.
edit: oh also just the small matter of Mathematics (from like half way through GCSE to A Level). Russian would also be interesting.
- Data Engineering. I'm a data scientist looking to make the switch.
- FoundryVTT. My friends and I have tried a couple of times to run some remote DnD games over the last several years on Roll20 and Virtual Table Top, with mixed results. Discovered Foundry and am very excited to try it out, though there is a bit of a learning curve to get a game up and running.
- Procreate. I almost majored in Graphic Design as an undergrad but since switching to STEM haven't done much artwork. I've been using Procreate on my iPad to create isometric assets for the above-metioned Foundry VTT DnD session.
- FoundryVTT. My friends and I have tried a couple of times to run some remote DnD games over the last several years on Roll20 and Virtual Table Top, with mixed results. Discovered Foundry and am very excited to try it out, though there is a bit of a learning curve to get a game up and running.
- Procreate. I almost majored in Graphic Design as an undergrad but since switching to STEM haven't done much artwork. I've been using Procreate on my iPad to create isometric assets for the above-metioned Foundry VTT DnD session.
Elixir! I've got such a mixed bag of feelings for that language.
It's elegant but it's build-times are pretty terrible.
It has the RPC stuff built-in but I've never seen anyone use it in production and instead folks are doing redis or
something else traditional.
It has elegant process management but it's cloaked in magic (that you have to carefully learn).
Non Linear Dynamics course by Elisabeth Bradley:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MizhVorgywY
Started implementing some algs in Rust, just to learn it. Liz Bradley seems super impressive as a teacher and researcher, haven't heard easier explanations for complex concepts :) The course is mind blowing to me so far.
There's more on the https://www.complexityexplorer.org/ website.
Started implementing some algs in Rust, just to learn it. Liz Bradley seems super impressive as a teacher and researcher, haven't heard easier explanations for complex concepts :) The course is mind blowing to me so far.
There's more on the https://www.complexityexplorer.org/ website.
How to be a father...oh and mountain biking! (Though not at the same time) :)
Also, in my free time during work I'm trying to improve my writing by creating technical and leadership blog posts...it's difficult!
Also, in my free time during work I'm trying to improve my writing by creating technical and leadership blog posts...it's difficult!
I'm working on a website for my honey business using Angular 8. I know it would be much faster and easier to something like Wordpress, but I want to build a basic competency with a relevant frontend language. I mostly work in Python and Java, but our team doesn't have any frontend members and we might end up with this type of work in the future (ie becoming a mentor would be my ticket to finally getting promoted to senior dev... if I don't get a low rating this year, which I was told I likely would).
Probably interesting because meta: I plan to research better sources for information access by vetting the YC/HN www sites linked by the submitters. This, in order to find new good and reliable sources of information and similar, which are currently extremely scarce in my pool.
This is not learning a skill, but it is an enabler for learning: first, using the correct sources for studying which will be identified, and first, because it will be projectedly a time-saver (processing bad information is very time consuming, a waste).
This is not learning a skill, but it is an enabler for learning: first, using the correct sources for studying which will be identified, and first, because it will be projectedly a time-saver (processing bad information is very time consuming, a waste).
I am looking for ways to improve communication (and hence also negotiations). Far too many times I have been too very direct - I really envy typical HR's soft-spoken language, even if it is to deliver something horrific. I don't know if this is just how I am build mentally or not. The only way to find is to learn and try to adapt.
So, not sure if this fits the question - spent a lot of time learning new tech, focusing on non-tech for a short period of time. I feel that I have been overlooking that side of skill-set.
So, not sure if this fits the question - spent a lot of time learning new tech, focusing on non-tech for a short period of time. I feel that I have been overlooking that side of skill-set.
I've been working on this, too (admittedly... for years)! I similarly have a 'very direct' style of communication. I've received formal feedback on more than one occasion calling me 'abrasive'.
fwiw, two books helped me massively in this area:
1. The Field Guide to Human Error. This book I read on a whim just because I thought it would be useful for software development. The first few chapter's ended up being kind of life altering. It felt like along personal attack on my character. In short, it was about perspectives we take when dealing with other people, and how viewing from our vantage point is not only frequently wrong, but it's lazy.
Even with things like CR comments. I now ask myself "_why_ do they think that's the right approach?"
2. Never Split the Difference. While it's about negotiations, it deals a lot with how humans think, and despite what we tell ourselves or want to believe about we being rational creatures, emotion dominates almost all interactions. It gives all kinds of useful advice for framing conversations and using language which avoids being confrontational or accusatory.
This was another huge one for me, as it shifted just about all of my conversations from starting with "you're dumb and here's why" to "let's make sure we agree on what the problem is" and then making finding the solution a collaborative effort, rather than a top down directive.
fwiw, two books helped me massively in this area:
1. The Field Guide to Human Error. This book I read on a whim just because I thought it would be useful for software development. The first few chapter's ended up being kind of life altering. It felt like along personal attack on my character. In short, it was about perspectives we take when dealing with other people, and how viewing from our vantage point is not only frequently wrong, but it's lazy.
Even with things like CR comments. I now ask myself "_why_ do they think that's the right approach?"
2. Never Split the Difference. While it's about negotiations, it deals a lot with how humans think, and despite what we tell ourselves or want to believe about we being rational creatures, emotion dominates almost all interactions. It gives all kinds of useful advice for framing conversations and using language which avoids being confrontational or accusatory.
This was another huge one for me, as it shifted just about all of my conversations from starting with "you're dumb and here's why" to "let's make sure we agree on what the problem is" and then making finding the solution a collaborative effort, rather than a top down directive.
Sorry I am late on replying to this. I am checking both of the suggested books, will start looking into `The field to Human Error`, nothing like 'personal attack on my character' which makes you related to the book.
You might want to checkout out NVC:
https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/2019/03/06/want-to-impr...
I found it through HN and for me, personally, it has helped.
https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/2019/03/06/want-to-impr...
I found it through HN and for me, personally, it has helped.
Holy shit that was a good read honestly.
Learning about Personal Knowledge Management systems. This includes Zettelkasten, PARA, Building a Second Brain and other systems. On the look out for more frameworks in this space.
I've made a deal with my friend: I'll be teaching him basic Analytic Geometry to support his interest in computer graphics, and he'll be teaching me UI design.
I'm a postgrad, in an interdisciplinary field, so probably too much:
learning quantum-resistant crypto - Learning With Errors and variants. Because they interest me, however, little direct value to work.
Generally how to provision a server and deploy an app on it. Mostly to migrate slow-and-steady workloads off my laptop, but also as a skill in its own right.
Language learning: Julia. I tried porting some models to Rust, it has its strengths, but if you need matrices as a first-class feature - just don't.
learning quantum-resistant crypto - Learning With Errors and variants. Because they interest me, however, little direct value to work.
Generally how to provision a server and deploy an app on it. Mostly to migrate slow-and-steady workloads off my laptop, but also as a skill in its own right.
Language learning: Julia. I tried porting some models to Rust, it has its strengths, but if you need matrices as a first-class feature - just don't.
Programming-related: Full-Stack Web Dev through Harvard's CS50 web (Django backend, JS/React Frontend). I only started learning to program about 3 months ago, and the regular CS50x course was a blast.
Otherwise: Japanese for 2-3 hours a day (will hopefully pass the N2 exam in December), and have also been reading a lot of pedagogical theory lately, and will implement some of it in a curriculum that I'm proposing soon (My day job is teaching).
Otherwise: Japanese for 2-3 hours a day (will hopefully pass the N2 exam in December), and have also been reading a lot of pedagogical theory lately, and will implement some of it in a curriculum that I'm proposing soon (My day job is teaching).
Video production for educational purposes.
I have wanted to produce some useful tutorials on coding and robots for kids. I taught some lessons at my daughter's school. This gave me some great insight, but I want to reach a bigger audience online.
I am finding that thumbnail, title, and how well you structure your cuts into a story makes a big difference. I am mostly trying things out and seeing how an audience responds to a video in terms of average view duration.
I have wanted to produce some useful tutorials on coding and robots for kids. I taught some lessons at my daughter's school. This gave me some great insight, but I want to reach a bigger audience online.
I am finding that thumbnail, title, and how well you structure your cuts into a story makes a big difference. I am mostly trying things out and seeing how an audience responds to a video in terms of average view duration.
Been reading up on DAOs and asnyc collaboration models and learning a little Solidity too.
Feels like there is potential for something interesting to emerge in the knowledge + social graph layer/squad/studio operating models.
Particularly with everyone moving around now and the increasingly fine lines between legal corporate entities, co-living, creative work, and intellectual property.
Open to any recommended readings on the topic, or just to chat about tangential spaces!
Feels like there is potential for something interesting to emerge in the knowledge + social graph layer/squad/studio operating models.
Particularly with everyone moving around now and the increasingly fine lines between legal corporate entities, co-living, creative work, and intellectual property.
Open to any recommended readings on the topic, or just to chat about tangential spaces!
React.
I've been developing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27627381 using Django and its templates for UI. This became unmanageable fast. These days there are wonderful volunteers, who help me. We've chosen React for the UI and I learn it to be able to contribute to and maintain the new UI.
I've been developing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27627381 using Django and its templates for UI. This became unmanageable fast. These days there are wonderful volunteers, who help me. We've chosen React for the UI and I learn it to be able to contribute to and maintain the new UI.
Digging deeper into Alloy through the Alloy book, working through Book of Proof, skimming through the introductory material to separation logic.
"Circuits and Electronics 1: Basic Circuit Analysis" from EDX. Was attracted to it by great names participating in the curriculum.
Taking a break from learning this summer to enjoy the world opening up again (American).
Will hit the books on how Data Clean Rooms work once the fall comes.
Will hit the books on how Data Clean Rooms work once the fall comes.
Deno! I’m a long-time Node.js and Python developer, and I’m excited about writing TypeScript that can finally compile into a single binary; very useful for building CLIs.
Deno’s locked-down permission system and wide support of browser APIs is really cool, and they’ve been cooking up some really cool stuff (see their new Deploy cloud service).
Deno’s locked-down permission system and wide support of browser APIs is really cool, and they’ve been cooking up some really cool stuff (see their new Deploy cloud service).
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How important it is to read employment offers from a worst case perspective and redline shit that isn't defined, even if you have a verbal agreement on what something means. Am currently dealing with my (soon to be former) company trying to fuck me out of a bunch of stock because they couldn't c&p correctly.
How to take care of myself. I've neglected it for too long. With my 30th birthday coming up, I've started to exercise, meditate, cook healthier food, and get plenty of sleep. It's had a huge positive impact on my mental health. I would definitely recommend any or all of these practices to anyone.
Swift, SwiftUI, Node/Express - been building a simple stock holdings/portfolio tracker app after getting annoyed with the mobile experiences of all my banks/brokers: https://stocketa.com/
hope to release in a few months
hope to release in a few months
Started playing Kerbal Space Program game and seems like I'd have to learn a lot of physics such as Orbital Mechanics to make the rockets fly properly. So much fun though!
On a more relaxed note, also learning more techniques about how to do proper gardening to grow more veggies and flowers.
On a more relaxed note, also learning more techniques about how to do proper gardening to grow more veggies and flowers.
Back-end development! It's quite a paradigm shift from front-end, a lot of known unknowns and even more unknown unknowns, I'm trying not to panic too much as I'm deploying my Sass in production. I'll get good eventually (but the anxiety might never go away).
I was going to say this, but you already did, so yeah, me too. I'm enjoying it a lot more, so far. I don't like the pixel-perfect demands of front-end, and actually find back-end more of a creative exercise so far.
Learning Terraform, Packer, Vault, Ansible to deploy docker containers on ec2. The project uses Laravel Jetstream for UI. Rails to manage some scrapers. And Go for some http routes to return proxies and ips of selenium instances.
After that getting Grafana, Prometheus and Influxdb going.
After that getting Grafana, Prometheus and Influxdb going.
I also need to learn German. If anyone wants to learn French in exchange and/or while pair coding.
Micromasters in Statistics and Data Science - MITx. I didn't realize that it involve this much maths when I started. It is really pushing my boundaries by a huge margin.
Machine learning - how it works behind the scenes was really insightful.
(Currently working as a PHP backend developer, Drupal.)
Machine learning - how it works behind the scenes was really insightful.
(Currently working as a PHP backend developer, Drupal.)
Natural language processing- trying to build something similar to InspiroBot but with obituaries.
Cooking- trying to make 25 recipes for each of the Eight Great Traditions of Chinese cuisine. Just finished Fujian, doing Cantonese now.
Biking- exploring different markets and bakeries in the city I live in.
GeoGuessr.
Cooking- trying to make 25 recipes for each of the Eight Great Traditions of Chinese cuisine. Just finished Fujian, doing Cantonese now.
Biking- exploring different markets and bakeries in the city I live in.
GeoGuessr.
Been reading about CI/CD and testing best practices.
I'm an SRE and my company has had these as pain points for years... Might need to learn how to advocate for adoption next XD.
Also looking into ML for time series data (metrics). Greykite and Kats seem to be interesting candidates.
I'm an SRE and my company has had these as pain points for years... Might need to learn how to advocate for adoption next XD.
Also looking into ML for time series data (metrics). Greykite and Kats seem to be interesting candidates.
Swimming. Front crawl technique is a bottomless source of self-improvement and incremental gains
Likewise.
Front crawl really seems to be one of the most beautiful & rewarding processes to master.
Front crawl really seems to be one of the most beautiful & rewarding processes to master.
Learning and experimenting about building a highly scalable streaming service using golang. Also learning about microservices and currently working in a company where we are migrating from monolithic Java code bases to scalable Go microservices.
TCP/IP and the very basics of computing - Basically I want to understand deep down how everything functions. I also want to learn about blockchain just so I can improve my arguements and identify flaw's with more precision.
I'm feeling out how, in my free time, to have fun again and still be somewhat productive. I've been kinda burned out for a while.
I've been skateboarding more and reading my books about statistics in a no pressure, leisurely manner.
I've been skateboarding more and reading my books about statistics in a no pressure, leisurely manner.
Capacitor. We had a project that was on Cordova, but it's likely time to switch.
That was my first foray into app development when I was making an app for my BlackBerry back in high school. Fascinated that it is still around as I assumed the use case died when mobile coalesced around two platforms.
Antifragile by Nassim Taleb. Good stuff about randomness and how to benefit from it.
After spending a decade as a Backend Engineer, now started learning Kotlin, Android.
I started a law degree and picked up the piano again.
Given the decline of European culture, law is on really shaky philosophical foundations. I’d seriously like to figure out if Roman law concepts can be refounded upon something like Vedanta.
Given the decline of European culture, law is on really shaky philosophical foundations. I’d seriously like to figure out if Roman law concepts can be refounded upon something like Vedanta.
I've been learning Haskell for a few months now. I really like it and am looking to write a small compiler in it. Anyone have any pointers?
I'm also smoking ribs for the first time today, that should be a fun learning experience.
I'm also smoking ribs for the first time today, that should be a fun learning experience.
You can do these small set of languages to get some idea: http://plzoo.andrej.com/ .
Thanks, these look great!
Roku, and their strange world of SceneGraph and BrightScript!
It's actually quite similar to React meets Ruby or something, but without the nested dependency breakages you get with node in React. Anyway, client wanted so client gets.
It's actually quite similar to React meets Ruby or something, but without the nested dependency breakages you get with node in React. Anyway, client wanted so client gets.
Stenography (typed) - maybe it'll be a useful skill in the future, maybe not. It's an excuse to spend an hour a day dissacosiating and developing muscle memory, and I need that dissacosiation a bit too much.
English. Nobody has told that. Btw English as mother language is not a magority.
Developing a gameboy emulator from ground up with zig programming language.
Just finished a Udemy course on Rust, and now I'm going through the rust book.
Just taking it slower this time, doing ALL the examples and trying stuff for myself.
It's going way better than my first attempt about a year ago.
Just taking it slower this time, doing ALL the examples and trying stuff for myself.
It's going way better than my first attempt about a year ago.
How to bootstrap side projects.
I have a strong hypothesis that working on my side projects full time would make me happier. These days I focus on noticing my own problems and exploring whether others have them too.
I have a strong hypothesis that working on my side projects full time would make me happier. These days I focus on noticing my own problems and exploring whether others have them too.
Yes, though non-technical : Driving.
I'm 31 and for whatever reason (financial, time etc), kept putting off need to learn and acquire this basic skill set until I felt helpless in certain situations.
I'm 31 and for whatever reason (financial, time etc), kept putting off need to learn and acquire this basic skill set until I felt helpless in certain situations.
[deleted]
Been learning eBPF bytecode slowly. Feels strange to go back to 'assembly' after 20 years of x86. I wish there was some kind of sandbox/unit-test environment.
Figuring out how to debug third party application in Windows on event it crashes. Without source code or anything, I wonder if I will ever get down to the root cause.
I’m looking forward to build my own keyboard: printing pcb, parts, doing soldering and etc. There are a lot of things I have not done before so I had to learn some.
Learning how to do better SEO and Content Marketing as a Tech Founder. It is fascinating what people do in the SEO world to continue to keep up with Google.
FaunaDB is incredibly charming. It ticks all the boxes - faster, cheaper, better. The last time I had a good feeling like that was with Kotlin and MongoDB.
SwiftUI, Kubernetes, Terraform and Elasticsearch. And from non-tech stuff, I finally got around to study acoustics and relearning the math behind it.
I'm learning Electric Guitar from JustinGuitar website. Justin is a cool teacher. He teach not just about Guitar lessons, but life lessons too.
Haskell and Elixir. Also thinking of trying out Gleam.
I also started learning Elixir, really loved it.
But I have wanted to go through the whole of SICP for a while. I realized that that is a better thing to do (grow core, fundamental skills) during the pandemic where I can get uninterrupted time.
I can learn a language any time. But I was more focused towards learning the functional paradigm rather than the language itself. It's a fun language to code in, though.
But I have wanted to go through the whole of SICP for a while. I realized that that is a better thing to do (grow core, fundamental skills) during the pandemic where I can get uninterrupted time.
I can learn a language any time. But I was more focused towards learning the functional paradigm rather than the language itself. It's a fun language to code in, though.
Finally getting around to learning full stack JS. Been doing Angular/React on the frontend for a while, but never did much beyond that.
ROS2 - currently following some youtube channels and their wiki. Trying to make my own robot to change the world, or rather clean it up
As primarily a frontend developer, I'm learning SQL/relational databases to be able to fully realize projects on my own.
- Solidity and writing about it on my blog as I am getting more inquiries about work related to it.
- Exploring Manifestation and subconscious mind.
- Exploring Manifestation and subconscious mind.
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Gem and glass faceting.
Would also like to learn knapping and more about blacksmithing, but hard to find someone to learn from around here.
Would also like to learn knapping and more about blacksmithing, but hard to find someone to learn from around here.
Drawing.
I want to express my ideas though drawing. I want my drawings to be beautiful. I work as a civil engineer.
Do civil engineers still learning manual drafting, or is it all CAD now?
Unfortunately my training didn’t include manual drafting.
Parameter tuning for deep learning models.
Learning to teach. Teaching programming with python to my friend's kids over Google Meet. So much fun.
Lately, I have been catching up with the latest web dev tools: Wasm, React, Redux, NextJS and Serverless.
You'll probably get tons of people pitching their favorite tech, but I was recently doing the same thing and Redux just wasn't clicking for me. I think MobX is way more intuitive and it's also quite stable. Worth taking a look if you don't like Redux
Unreal Engine ( + Blender ) - pretty big learning curve for a programmer, but heaps of fun.
What are you focusing on there? C++ scripting or the visual scripting?
I am using the visual scripting, with Python to create a lot of the data tables (loaded manually for now).
The hard part is more the animation and 3D work, but it is a lot of fun.
Basic Number Theory with the purpose of understanding modern cryptographic systems.
Group theory for condensed matter physics from Dresselhaus, Dresselhaus, and Jorio.
- car maintenance, via ChrisFix
- how to fix my xaomi m365 battery
- Japanese
- basics of koi ponds, for a gift to my mother in law
- cooking with a instant pot
- ayurveda
- how to fix my xaomi m365 battery
- Japanese
- basics of koi ponds, for a gift to my mother in law
- cooking with a instant pot
- ayurveda
Probability theory with Jaynes.
Computer org and design (risc-v) with Patterson
Digital signal processing
Computer org and design (risc-v) with Patterson
Digital signal processing
[deleted]
Almost up to 365 days on Duolingo: French, German, Italian.
practical common lisp
From this weekend. Jenkins, Groovy and BitBucket
iOS development. I've been backend/infrastucture for a while now and want to be more well rounded.
How to start a business and Rails (the experience has been a surprising breath of fresh air after fighting Xcode for 10 years)
Chinese, piano, and Starcraft 2
This week I've been learning a lot about PDF file format internals, which are a staggeringly complex mix of brilliant and totally boneheaded. The annotations spec alone is more complexity than the whole document format ought to be. I'm working on one PDF parser in C and writing another one in Python to facilitate easier exploration and prototyping. This has led me to think a lot about the serialization/deserialization problem and the closely allied schema upgrade/downgrade problem. Maybe some of the resulting ideas will yield something useful. We'll see.
For that PDF parser I wrote a Packrat parsing engine, which I think might end up as a useful way to explore some of the possible optimizations that could be applied to Packrat to reduce its dismaying constant factors in both memory and time. So I've been learning a lot about Packrat too.
I've been learning about the Imp language, which is a sort of followup to Eve, and it has a lot of really interesting concepts in it. But I wouldn't say I'm "learning Imp" yet.
This weekend I learned to use an old Arduino with Sigrok as a logic analyzer and get Sigrok to decode the PS/2 keyboard protocol.
I've been learning about the history of political philosophy and social movements, much of which is very unsavory.
I've been learning about economics and current events. Did you know that China now produces more than half the world's cement? Or that their electrical power generation has doubled over the last decade? Or that in tropical and subtropical countries photovoltaic power plants are not only cheaper than building coal or nuclear plants, they're cheaper than keeping existing ones running? Or that the Federal Reserve permanently stopped publishing M2 monetary supply data in February, after updating it monthly for 41 years?
Last night I melted glass with a torch for the first time, but I don't think I can reasonably say I'm "learning glassblowing" yet. I didn't cool it slowly enough and it cracked as it cooled. I did learn vermiculite will stick to glass if the glass is soft enough for long enough.
This month I learned about Melisa Orta Martinez's brilliantly simple "Haplink" design for a two-degree-of-freedom mechanical actuator and encoder, originally designed for haptic user interface research, but in my view much more broadly applicable.
I've been learning about planetary roller screws, which with modern advanced digital fabrication technology could plausibly replace a lot of existing linear actuators with significant improvements in precision and achievable reduction ratios. Also I think you can use them as a worm gear to get these benefits and more for rotary motion. I haven't built one yet.
I've been learning about the RISC-V instruction set and some of the issues that go into designing and implementing such a thing. But I haven't written a RISC-V simulator yet.
I've been learning about exotic mineral cements like "geopolymers", aluminum borate, and aluminum phosphate, which can be precipitated hydrothermally as well as with high-temperature reactions. But I haven't synthesized them yet, just calcium phosphate.
I've been folding origami from strange materials. Aluminum foil, aluminum window screen, corrugated cardboard (must precompress your crease pattern), aluminum cans, plastic coke bottle walls.
I've been learning how to keep my potted plants alive and deal with insect pests.
I've been learning more about abstract algebra (the conventional kind, with rings, lattices, and semigroups, not category theory) and how it relates to algorithm design.
I've been learning about food-product rheology, and how thixotropic flow isn't quite the same thing I thought it was, nor is it caused by the same causes. Thixotropy is super important for digital fabrication.
I've been reading about filled polymer systems, especially the kinds of surface treatments used to adjust the adhesion between the matrix and the fillers. I wouldn't say I'm learning it yet because I haven't been able to get much of anything to work. But I will, if I can stay alive a bit longer.
I'm learning how widespread outright fraud is on MercadoLibre. The last thing I bought there was a "1600x1200" USB microscope which turned out to be 640x480 (from DUAITEK). I also got a "600 watt" immersion blender that turned out to be 300 watts. I'd like to take "Origins of Persistent National Poverty" for $800, Alex.
I'm learning that HN doesn't value people like me, and I'd be better off spending my time elsewhere.
For that PDF parser I wrote a Packrat parsing engine, which I think might end up as a useful way to explore some of the possible optimizations that could be applied to Packrat to reduce its dismaying constant factors in both memory and time. So I've been learning a lot about Packrat too.
I've been learning about the Imp language, which is a sort of followup to Eve, and it has a lot of really interesting concepts in it. But I wouldn't say I'm "learning Imp" yet.
This weekend I learned to use an old Arduino with Sigrok as a logic analyzer and get Sigrok to decode the PS/2 keyboard protocol.
I've been learning about the history of political philosophy and social movements, much of which is very unsavory.
I've been learning about economics and current events. Did you know that China now produces more than half the world's cement? Or that their electrical power generation has doubled over the last decade? Or that in tropical and subtropical countries photovoltaic power plants are not only cheaper than building coal or nuclear plants, they're cheaper than keeping existing ones running? Or that the Federal Reserve permanently stopped publishing M2 monetary supply data in February, after updating it monthly for 41 years?
Last night I melted glass with a torch for the first time, but I don't think I can reasonably say I'm "learning glassblowing" yet. I didn't cool it slowly enough and it cracked as it cooled. I did learn vermiculite will stick to glass if the glass is soft enough for long enough.
This month I learned about Melisa Orta Martinez's brilliantly simple "Haplink" design for a two-degree-of-freedom mechanical actuator and encoder, originally designed for haptic user interface research, but in my view much more broadly applicable.
I've been learning about planetary roller screws, which with modern advanced digital fabrication technology could plausibly replace a lot of existing linear actuators with significant improvements in precision and achievable reduction ratios. Also I think you can use them as a worm gear to get these benefits and more for rotary motion. I haven't built one yet.
I've been learning about the RISC-V instruction set and some of the issues that go into designing and implementing such a thing. But I haven't written a RISC-V simulator yet.
I've been learning about exotic mineral cements like "geopolymers", aluminum borate, and aluminum phosphate, which can be precipitated hydrothermally as well as with high-temperature reactions. But I haven't synthesized them yet, just calcium phosphate.
I've been folding origami from strange materials. Aluminum foil, aluminum window screen, corrugated cardboard (must precompress your crease pattern), aluminum cans, plastic coke bottle walls.
I've been learning how to keep my potted plants alive and deal with insect pests.
I've been learning more about abstract algebra (the conventional kind, with rings, lattices, and semigroups, not category theory) and how it relates to algorithm design.
I've been learning about food-product rheology, and how thixotropic flow isn't quite the same thing I thought it was, nor is it caused by the same causes. Thixotropy is super important for digital fabrication.
I've been reading about filled polymer systems, especially the kinds of surface treatments used to adjust the adhesion between the matrix and the fillers. I wouldn't say I'm learning it yet because I haven't been able to get much of anything to work. But I will, if I can stay alive a bit longer.
I'm learning how widespread outright fraud is on MercadoLibre. The last thing I bought there was a "1600x1200" USB microscope which turned out to be 640x480 (from DUAITEK). I also got a "600 watt" immersion blender that turned out to be 300 watts. I'd like to take "Origins of Persistent National Poverty" for $800, Alex.
I'm learning that HN doesn't value people like me, and I'd be better off spending my time elsewhere.
First off I want to say that I agree with most of what you say, especially in your post below concerning tptacek's unfortunate single-word comment sans explication. It seems that current discourse has forgotten, or even possibly dismisses, the classic fallacies of argumentation. The result is discourse that devolves to simple labeling followed by social dismissal. In such a situation argumentation ceases to be useful and etiquette vanishes. Without etiquette there cannot be mutual respect, and learning and communication cease. But that was the entire purpose of argumentation!
But that said, I have another question that I hope you will indulge. When you said that:
>"...people like me, who do learn things quite a bit. ..."<
I had to nod: you obviously know and learn a great deal in any period of time. But I must ask: do you ever forget? In a way you remind me of Jorge Luis Borges' character Funes in the short story "Funes the Memorious". But of course you are not as limited as Funes (e.g., he is incapable of abstract thought). Also, to me, you seem to be studying so many different areas. What would happen if you focused on one, two or even a handful of projects? In any case, it seems that you are intellectually indefatigable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funes_the_Memorious
But that said, I have another question that I hope you will indulge. When you said that:
>"...people like me, who do learn things quite a bit. ..."<
I had to nod: you obviously know and learn a great deal in any period of time. But I must ask: do you ever forget? In a way you remind me of Jorge Luis Borges' character Funes in the short story "Funes the Memorious". But of course you are not as limited as Funes (e.g., he is incapable of abstract thought). Also, to me, you seem to be studying so many different areas. What would happen if you focused on one, two or even a handful of projects? In any case, it seems that you are intellectually indefatigable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funes_the_Memorious
Why do you think HN doesn't value people like you? This whole thread is about learning things, and it seems like you do that quite a bit.
Yesterday I wrote a simplified outline of the orthodox economic account of the factors of production, how they relate to the historical process of industrialization, and how these relate to market incentives and cross-border capital flows, in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27639177. The post is downvoted to -4 and has no responses.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27502867, where I explained some basic errors in a comment written to rebut one of my own, is downvoted to 0 and has no responses.
In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27448878, I described the incentive structure of cryptocurrency mining and how it relates to recent developments in the price structure of the energy market. My comments in the thread all have positive vote scores but the responses from others are mostly things like "This is incoherent," and "I've heard this argument 1000 times. It is bogus," apparently because their author is unaware of the most basic relevant facts and unwilling or unable to absorb new information.
When I shared my experience of why people use Bitcoin in Argentina in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27448744 I got accused of tax evasion—by someone who openly admits he himself has arranged to avoid paying those same taxes. (Which, as it happens, I am paying, except for those I'm legally forbidden to pay—a problem I hope I can solve this year.)
My comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397765 got flagged and downvoted to -4 and got me called "gross" and "racist" for, apparently, not hating the Chinese Communist Party. I didn't say anything negative about any ethnic or racial group in the entire thread, but evidently, people like tptacek who really, really hate the CPC a lot can't distinguish between anti-Chinese bigotry and unremarkable facts about Chinese popular opinion.
And that's just in the last month.
— ⁂ —
An even bigger clue than my own experience, though, is to look at the words people on HN use in a derogatory sense:
"Weird": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27646082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27646489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27646624
"Strange": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27646481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27646609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27646758
But "weird" and "strange" are just synonyms for "novel" or "unfamiliar". Learning is, profoundly, seeking out the things that seem weird and strange to you in order to take them into yourself and become weird and strange. If you detest whatever is weird, strange, and odd, you will sedulously avoid any opportunity to learn, and you will detest anyone who has learned things you have not—most vividly illustrated by the gross racist tptacek incident I linked earlier. And this mindlessly conformist attitude of hatred for the unfamiliar, far from being roundly rejected as it should be on a "hacker" site, is very commonplace here—all six of the noveltyphobic comments I linked above were posted in the last three hours, and those were just the ones that were easiest for me to find. Although many of these comments attracted pushback, in no case was it for the anti-intellectual attitude implicit in this wording; it passed without comment, just as it would in the larger anti-intellectual society.
— ⁂ —
Basically, to me, HN is the intellectual equivalent of the slums where I used to volunteer. Eight times out of ten, people silently approve of informed, thoughtful discussion, but don't participate. One time out of ten, they do participate, and it's great. The other one time out of ten, I get pistol-whipped and left bleeding on the sidewalk—in this case, thankfully, only metaphorically. It's not an environment that welcomes people like me, who do learn things quite a bit. It's an environment where the nail that sticks up gets hammered down, where the rule of the day is baseless calumny and casual accusations of criminality and dishonesty (though blessedly "this is disingenuous" seems to have become less common). It's contemptible.
I'm certainly capable of spinning out baseless calumny and casual accusations of dishonesty, but I think of that as the worst aspect of my character, not the best. And it does not create a favorable environment for people to learn things or to share what they've learned—or, especially, what they are in the process of learning.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27502867, where I explained some basic errors in a comment written to rebut one of my own, is downvoted to 0 and has no responses.
In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27448878, I described the incentive structure of cryptocurrency mining and how it relates to recent developments in the price structure of the energy market. My comments in the thread all have positive vote scores but the responses from others are mostly things like "This is incoherent," and "I've heard this argument 1000 times. It is bogus," apparently because their author is unaware of the most basic relevant facts and unwilling or unable to absorb new information.
When I shared my experience of why people use Bitcoin in Argentina in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27448744 I got accused of tax evasion—by someone who openly admits he himself has arranged to avoid paying those same taxes. (Which, as it happens, I am paying, except for those I'm legally forbidden to pay—a problem I hope I can solve this year.)
My comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397765 got flagged and downvoted to -4 and got me called "gross" and "racist" for, apparently, not hating the Chinese Communist Party. I didn't say anything negative about any ethnic or racial group in the entire thread, but evidently, people like tptacek who really, really hate the CPC a lot can't distinguish between anti-Chinese bigotry and unremarkable facts about Chinese popular opinion.
And that's just in the last month.
— ⁂ —
An even bigger clue than my own experience, though, is to look at the words people on HN use in a derogatory sense:
"Weird": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27646082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27646489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27646624
"Strange": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27646481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27646609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27646758
But "weird" and "strange" are just synonyms for "novel" or "unfamiliar". Learning is, profoundly, seeking out the things that seem weird and strange to you in order to take them into yourself and become weird and strange. If you detest whatever is weird, strange, and odd, you will sedulously avoid any opportunity to learn, and you will detest anyone who has learned things you have not—most vividly illustrated by the gross racist tptacek incident I linked earlier. And this mindlessly conformist attitude of hatred for the unfamiliar, far from being roundly rejected as it should be on a "hacker" site, is very commonplace here—all six of the noveltyphobic comments I linked above were posted in the last three hours, and those were just the ones that were easiest for me to find. Although many of these comments attracted pushback, in no case was it for the anti-intellectual attitude implicit in this wording; it passed without comment, just as it would in the larger anti-intellectual society.
— ⁂ —
Basically, to me, HN is the intellectual equivalent of the slums where I used to volunteer. Eight times out of ten, people silently approve of informed, thoughtful discussion, but don't participate. One time out of ten, they do participate, and it's great. The other one time out of ten, I get pistol-whipped and left bleeding on the sidewalk—in this case, thankfully, only metaphorically. It's not an environment that welcomes people like me, who do learn things quite a bit. It's an environment where the nail that sticks up gets hammered down, where the rule of the day is baseless calumny and casual accusations of criminality and dishonesty (though blessedly "this is disingenuous" seems to have become less common). It's contemptible.
I'm certainly capable of spinning out baseless calumny and casual accusations of dishonesty, but I think of that as the worst aspect of my character, not the best. And it does not create a favorable environment for people to learn things or to share what they've learned—or, especially, what they are in the process of learning.
I think you may be expecting a little too much from people. While this site and its comment section is a little more mature than say, reddit (full of memes and jokes for the most part), it's also not at a level of something like a professional conference full of PhD's where your comments will be received at the same level as they are given.
From your comments you seem like a very learned individual, possibly with much education, who comments about many different subjects and has much knowledge accumulated in each. Some people may find this off-putting, perhaps even being a bit jealous, because of the breadth of your interests and knowledge.
You have a very extensive vocabulary and your writing style is very organized. You use section dividers: — ⁂ — which, while appreciated to keep things easy to read, might come off as pretentious and trying to show off.
Some comments may come off as racist or biased, while all you're trying to do is engage in discussion and present a different viewpoint.
There is so much to learn in the world, that there is no need to dumb things down for others, no need to fall in line with what the thought-du-jour is on a subject, and no need to be ashamed for wanting to better ourselves in both knowledge and understanding. I feel this way, and I hope you do too.
I personally believe that another community is needed to get to the level of discussion you're after. I would go to that site. But I hope you don't become discouraged and stop posting here. Because even if people don't engage with your comments, or perhaps down-vote you because they feel threatened or put off by what I mentioned above, there are those (like myself) that read things and learn from them. We may not comment much, but we're out there.
From your comments you seem like a very learned individual, possibly with much education, who comments about many different subjects and has much knowledge accumulated in each. Some people may find this off-putting, perhaps even being a bit jealous, because of the breadth of your interests and knowledge.
You have a very extensive vocabulary and your writing style is very organized. You use section dividers: — ⁂ — which, while appreciated to keep things easy to read, might come off as pretentious and trying to show off.
Some comments may come off as racist or biased, while all you're trying to do is engage in discussion and present a different viewpoint.
There is so much to learn in the world, that there is no need to dumb things down for others, no need to fall in line with what the thought-du-jour is on a subject, and no need to be ashamed for wanting to better ourselves in both knowledge and understanding. I feel this way, and I hope you do too.
I personally believe that another community is needed to get to the level of discussion you're after. I would go to that site. But I hope you don't become discouraged and stop posting here. Because even if people don't engage with your comments, or perhaps down-vote you because they feel threatened or put off by what I mentioned above, there are those (like myself) that read things and learn from them. We may not comment much, but we're out there.
> Some comments may come off as racist or biased, while all you're trying to do is engage in discussion and present a different viewpoint.
At the point where it "may come off as racist or biased" for me to say that many Chinese people who grew up in China think the Chinese government is good and will be offended by attempts to demonize it, we've entered into some kind of toxic mental pathology that goes far beyond questions of whether I'm pretentious (I guess I am) or off-putting (undoubtedly at times, perhaps always), or whether HN is "something like a professional conference." God, let's hope that never happens!
HN can avoid being degraded into a professional conference without becoming the Salem witch trials. Those aren't the only two alternatives!
At the point where it "may come off as racist or biased" for me to say that many Chinese people who grew up in China think the Chinese government is good and will be offended by attempts to demonize it, we've entered into some kind of toxic mental pathology that goes far beyond questions of whether I'm pretentious (I guess I am) or off-putting (undoubtedly at times, perhaps always), or whether HN is "something like a professional conference." God, let's hope that never happens!
HN can avoid being degraded into a professional conference without becoming the Salem witch trials. Those aren't the only two alternatives!
leetcode(eat/drink/sleep) and system design, ML Infra
Sculpting in Blender
Elm and Colemak.
napi, c and desktop gui development.
Leetcode
I am going through SICP. I have just begun.
I am learning more about Transformers architecture and modern NLP using the Hugging Face API.
Building a computer from scratch using nand2tetris on Sundays.
Learning to meditate following a detailed meditation guide. This has been working better than I expected.
Going on and off with learning classical music online (with a piano).
Learning German.
I am primarily focused on learning deploying AI to embedded devices right now. Working with the TinyML book and the course on edX.
As someone who does Computer Vision for a living, and always loved Electronics in college (no microcontrollers experience), I am finding it right at home with this. I wish I had started earlier. Really liking the experience.
I am learning more about Transformers architecture and modern NLP using the Hugging Face API.
Building a computer from scratch using nand2tetris on Sundays.
Learning to meditate following a detailed meditation guide. This has been working better than I expected.
Going on and off with learning classical music online (with a piano).
Learning German.
I am primarily focused on learning deploying AI to embedded devices right now. Working with the TinyML book and the course on edX.
As someone who does Computer Vision for a living, and always loved Electronics in college (no microcontrollers experience), I am finding it right at home with this. I wish I had started earlier. Really liking the experience.
What's the meditation guide you're following?
You can look up "The Mind Illuminated" by Yates (Culadasa) and Immergut.
It is completely devoid of run-of-the-mill pseudo-spiritual stuff, and consists of practical advice that you can follow.
It is a complete guide that provides step-by-step instructions.
It is completely devoid of run-of-the-mill pseudo-spiritual stuff, and consists of practical advice that you can follow.
It is a complete guide that provides step-by-step instructions.
Ah, perfect, that's exactly the sort of thing I was looking for, thank you!
Those are a lot of things to be learning at once, I'm impressed you're keeping up with all that. Do you mind if I ask what your time management looks like? I'm curious how many hours you spend a week on this stuff, and how much of you free time it takes up. I also like to learn a lot of different things on the side but I struggle to find time for everything that I want to cover.
Well, I will have to write many paragraphs to fully understand your questions.
Let me tell you that I am highly unsuccessul as a piano player. I cannot play much more than a few simple "pieces". Becaue I am highly irregular.
And apart from work and reading SICP, I don't do everything everyday. I read SICP 7 days a week. But work only five. No Deep Learning on Sundays. On Saturdays, no work, only personal learning, reading papers, attending study groups, etc.
Actually I can work for no more than five hours a day- proper, hard work, "deep work" if I may.
I want to extend that to 8/10. That is my main motivation behind meditation. I am better than most in concentrating during learning and work. I just want that to last for longer hours.
I studied Electronics and Computer Architecture (from the Mano book mostly) before, so I don't find nand2tetris very challenging. It is fairly challenging at times, but not the hardest thing that I do. It's more fun than challenge.
SICP is challenging at times. But I spend time with it very regularly, say 1-2 hours a day.
I have learned from my experiences that, when you are learning something fundamental, new, it is best to learn it over many days and months rather than bouts of short sprints.
So, I am regular with it, but don't spend long hours.
Being with a highly career focused partner helps a lot, too.
I discussed my time management techniques here-
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27356883
I spend 30 or so minutes every day reading novels, poetry or about the culture and history of the Bengali people.
I also exercise regularly.
I like to swim, but pools are closed.
Let me tell you that I am highly unsuccessul as a piano player. I cannot play much more than a few simple "pieces". Becaue I am highly irregular.
And apart from work and reading SICP, I don't do everything everyday. I read SICP 7 days a week. But work only five. No Deep Learning on Sundays. On Saturdays, no work, only personal learning, reading papers, attending study groups, etc.
Actually I can work for no more than five hours a day- proper, hard work, "deep work" if I may.
I want to extend that to 8/10. That is my main motivation behind meditation. I am better than most in concentrating during learning and work. I just want that to last for longer hours.
I studied Electronics and Computer Architecture (from the Mano book mostly) before, so I don't find nand2tetris very challenging. It is fairly challenging at times, but not the hardest thing that I do. It's more fun than challenge.
SICP is challenging at times. But I spend time with it very regularly, say 1-2 hours a day.
I have learned from my experiences that, when you are learning something fundamental, new, it is best to learn it over many days and months rather than bouts of short sprints.
So, I am regular with it, but don't spend long hours.
Being with a highly career focused partner helps a lot, too.
I discussed my time management techniques here-
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27356883
I spend 30 or so minutes every day reading novels, poetry or about the culture and history of the Bengali people.
I also exercise regularly.
I like to swim, but pools are closed.
Logic and Proofs. It’s making me much more specified in my thinking, but man is it hard to find a learning community in northern rural England!
Figuring out how to make recurring revenue so that I don't go bankrupt if I end up in a hospital for an year.
screenwriting
Personally I'm learning Elixir, and it's such a pleasant language. It feels great to write, and the packaging/build tools feel refreshing compared to the mess of Python.
Now, handing you the mic. Is there a new stack or language on your mind?