Ask HN: What Are You Learning Right Now?

10 points by mechanician 7 years ago | 15 comments

mindcrime 7 years ago |

The list is almost too long to post, which is one of my weaknesses... I spread myself too thin.

That said, I've been going through a process of (re)-learning some lower level math, and hopefully eventually transitioning into learning some math I never studied. I stopped with Calc I in college, so my goal is to get through the typical Calc I/II/III stuff, Differential Equations, Linear Algebra, and Probability. Going beyond that is questionable, although I'd love to, time and energy permitting. For all of this stuff, I'm just self-studying, using a variety of resources: Youtube videos, Khan Academy, books, forums, etc.

Also, various aspects of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. I'm doing - on Coursera - the Deeplearning.ai sequence, along with Geoffrey Hinton's older "Neural Networks for Machine Learning" class, the "Advanced Machine Learning" sequence from National Research University Higher School of Economics, the "Statistics with R" sequence from Duke, and the "Data Science" sequence from Johns Hopkins.

I'm also enrolled in the Strategic Leadership and Management sequence from UIUC on Coursera.

And I've been using LinuxAcademy.com to study for the AWS Certified Cloud Solutions Architect test, and the Docker Certified Associate test.

I'm also spending some time studying books on two particular topics: sales (as in B2B / enterprise software sales) and Knowledge Management.

Free time in my life is at a premium... :-)

mindcrime 7 years ago | |

@user104245 - your post is [dead] so I can't reply to you directly. But the main reason I'm doing the Duke one and the Johns Hopkins ones both, is that I started with the JH one, and got to the Statistical Inference class. Some of the reviews of that class said it was much harder than the others, while the Duke program had an inference class that the reviews were more favorable to. So I thought I'd jump over to the Duke one, go through it (it's shorter anyway), then come back to the JH sequence and pick back up with their Statistical Inference class.

It turns out, the Duke program is pretty accessible for the first three courses, but then their course on Bayesian Statistics, IMO, gets a bit harder. So I've been stalled out on that for a while... I keep switching sessions because every time I start on it, I get to a certain point, get busy, put it aside for a while, and by the time I come back to it, I've forgotten the stuff I'd already studied and decide to start back at the beginning. I guess this class is my version of Sisyphus and that damn rock...

One day I'll get super-focused on it and plow through.

On a related note, the main reason I'm taking that "Advanced Machine Learning" sequence is because I enrolled in it by mistake. But I figured "fuck it, might as well go ahead and do it now that I'm enrolled."

user104245 7 years ago | |

If you don't mind my asking, why are you doing Duke and Johns Hopkins concurrently? There's got to be significant overlap between the two if my memory serves me correctly.

danbolt 7 years ago |

At work we're writing game Entity-Component-Systems with EnTT[1]. It's an interesting take compared to previous entity-subclass takes on game object modelling. I'm excited about future work in terms of parallelizing jobs in the future, much like Unity's ECS or the specs-rs package. [2]

[1] https://github.com/skypjack/entt [2] https://github.com/slide-rs/specs

otras 7 years ago |

I'm currently learning simple computer fundamentals as I work through Ben Eater's Build an 8-bit computer from scratch program [0]. I remember seeing the initial videos and thought I remembered him saying he had no plans to make schematics/plans, but I looked it up recently and saw that he had kits/tutorial videos. A week later and I'm working on the clock module and enjoying it so far!

[0]: https://eater.net/8bit/

jwilbs 7 years ago |

At work: we finally updated our prod environment to accommodate a more recent version of Spark, so have been playing with rewriting some jobs in spark (now that I’m not limited to only using the RDD api). At home: trying to integrate D3 with React in as pain-free a manner as possible; just ordered an online book thing from Swizec Teller that looks promising in that area :).

ecesena 7 years ago |

Hardware! Mostly stm32 to be useful at solokeys, arduino to do a meaningful porting, and I was excited about Android things but news are saying it’s no longer a thing... looking forward to learning about the next thing.

rasikjain 7 years ago |

Currently learning the fundamentals of Machine Learning. Once done, will be going through fast.ai course.

Antoninus 7 years ago |

Container stuff. Devops in general.

mbrock 7 years ago |

How to flatten and sharpen a chisel and plane iron...

mechanician 7 years ago | |

Properly sharpening a chisel blade on a stone is an art.

slipwalker 7 years ago |

flutter for mobile side-projects and typescript+nodeJS for daily job.

natalyarostova 7 years ago |

Mathematical statistics

voldybot 7 years ago |

Apache NiFi

sammex 7 years ago |

C++