Ask HN: What Are You Learning? This question pops up on HN occasionally, but I am posting it here again. These days, besides working as a data scientist, I am learning game theory and curious to know what you are learning besides your job. |
Ask HN: What Are You Learning? This question pops up on HN occasionally, but I am posting it here again. These days, besides working as a data scientist, I am learning game theory and curious to know what you are learning besides your job. |
I know it doesn't work for everyone, but all of the (admittedly few) people that I have met who have been through SICP said it helped them get to the next level.
I want to use the old pi as a node in a k3s (lightweight kubernetes distro) cluster but the current releases won’t run. I’m currently reading up on qemu and the k3s build process (which to me seems kinda convoluted).
tbh I feel very scattered. I really need to pick one or two things and focus.
This is timed so perfectly for me to say this. Building things still is great but the amount of stack-specific knowledge I need day-to-day is skyrocketing.
C++ I get to use more but the others not so much yet
Haskell is brutal
I'm trying to help a not for profit save some money managing weather stations
For example:
1 Channel Relay Module with Optocoupler Isolation ~$4 https://www.aliexpress.com/item/2251832713449142.html
GL-MT300N-V2 OpenWRT router ~$27 https://store.gl-inet.com/products/usa-only-mango-gl-mt300n-...
GL-MT300N-V2 OpenWRT Specs https://openwrt.org/toh/gl.inet/gl-mt300n_v2
- UART pins
- GPIO pins available (requires soldering)
- 1x USB 2.0
Example of toggling GPIO44 10 times, then leaving it on:
let GPIO_STATE=0
for i in $(seq 10)
do
echo $GPIO_STATE > /sys/devices/virtual/gpio/gpio44/value
# Toggle GPIO_STATE variable between 0 and 1 via XOR
((GPIO_STATE ^= 1))
sleep 5 # sleep for 5 seconds
done
# Enable GPIO44 at the end
echo 1 > /sys/devices/virtual/gpio/gpio44/value
Skateboarding
Home renovation and improvement.
- Pytest (With Brian Okkens book)
- CPython (with Anthony Shaws book)
- Frontend tools: Rollup, Lit Web Elements
- latest Ecmascript features
- Azure services- App Service, CDN, Translator, Storage
- Flask Blueprints, SQLAlchemy with Alembic
- PostGreSQL
Similarly, 30+ years ago I learned how to ride a motorcycle, and rode for 30 years without crashing. It was great having a hobby that had absolutely nothing to do with computers. I recently sold the bikes and gear, it's just too risky at my age.
This led me to start as I could practice at night while the kids slept, and not be embarrassed sucking and/or driving people insane doing exercises/ scales
Totally agree. I’m also learning guitar and I started with an acoustic and have continued with it because, even though I borrowed a friends electric, there is something awesome and refreshing about a practice so far from computing that it doesn’t even require a power source.
To sibling threads that ask about self-taught: I highly recommend group Zoom guitar lessons at the very least. Holds you accountable, you can ask questions, and you don’t have to chart your own study course.
Reading/watch list:
- Thought and Knowledge: An Introduction to Critical Thinking, by Diane F. Halpern
- Understanding Arguments: An Introduction to Informal Logic, by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Robert J. Fogelin
- Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely
- Evidence-based Software Engineering - http://knosof.co.uk/ESEUR/ESEUR.pdf
- A Philosophy of Software Design, by John Ousterhout
- https://www.coursera.org/learn/mindware
This is research for a book I'm writing on that topic.
Aside from that, I'm learning a lot about virtual machines by porting FreeBSD to run in the Firecracker VM.
I truly believe that parenting has made me a better employee/worker/person. It’s taught me patience, the importance of saying no (and continuing to say no), empathy (and how correct or challenge someone even when I’m deeply empathetic with them), improved my public speaking (treat those bedtime book readings as performances!), and importantly how to simplify explanations for a young child.
Parenting is wonderful, joyful, and challenging experience in and of itself, but it can and does integrate with the other parts of your life. Although perhaps not porting an OS to a VM hypervisor…
1. https://courses.dibya.online/courses/1690878/lectures/383852... [done]
2. https://www.deeplearningbook.org/ [currently reading]
Other than that. Midnight Commander (always had it, never learned it), picking up some Perl, Janet, Groovy. Some GDevelop with my kids.
Theory wise I'm working within my field to study some esoteric personality theory. A bit of math here and there. Some astrology stuff also for esoteric interest. Researching microscopes to look at buying one in the future.
I think that I've been lucky so far because most of the traction is based on the strength of the product, and that has meant that I can sit back and gather feedback and opinions without doing anything outside of asking. However it's left me in a position where I'm unsure which steps I should be taking as I get closer and closer to launching.
If anyone has any resources that they've found particularly helpful, I'd love to read them.
Good book reads:
- The Mom Test
- Build by Tony Faddel
I’m reading IndieHackers.com every day.
What product are you launching?
I'm trying to be as active as possible on IndieHackers. It definitely can be a good resource, it's just finding the posts which are actually good advice vs marking their own startups.
My current project is https://feetr.io which is a stock discovery algorithm, currently averaging ~4.1% daily increase per stock. Please feel free to give as brutal feedback as possible. You can message me here, through twitter (at twitter.com/feetr_io) or email at smcn@feetr.io.
My current understanding is that the "Maximum potential returns" just seems too unrealistic, despite it being the compounding interest of buying the best performing stock at open, and selling it at the highest point of that day. It's unrealistic that anyone could achieve that on a consistent basis but I personally have achieved over 1000% returns, and some of my beta testers have achieved much better than that.
Super cool! This is my go-to setup for all my at-home stuff. I was previously running Kubernetes for my home lab and had a bunch of fancy stuff for it setup (I'm a platform security engineer in an AWS environment) -- but I went back to managing Docker containers for each application I care about as it is so dang simple.
Good luck on your Docker/container journey. Totally useful in any situation in my opinion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8KFPWkK0bI&list=PLawkBQ15ND...
I've always been fascinated with robotics, and the barrier to entry is getting lower by the second.
But I want to know all the details, so I'm going slow and steady at it (Like, instead of using libraries - at least when learning - I'm coding 100% of the stepper motor control routines).
I plan on making my own designs, and make my own versions of known ones: The first thing I want to try my hand at is either (my own version of) a PolarGraph or an AxiDraw.
Then I'll move to other things, also in the early stages of designing a chess playing (arm) robot.
My first project was not robotic, but an automated hydroponic system. The automation is dead simple but I’ve been really pleased with it. It’s one tent divided into a nutrient film technique section and a flood and drain section. Just timers, fans, and pumps, and a lot of 3d printed parts to pull it together.
Now I’m really interested in automation of my nutrient reservoir. I suspect it’s a terrible idea, but I’m happy to learn from failures. The gist of it is a system that occasionally reads the total dissolved solids and pH of the reservoir, then automatically adds the correct amount of nutrient, pH balancing solution, and water to balance the system again.
No where near as interesting or challenging as a robotic arm that moves chess pieces, but, baby steps!
Luckily I'm using PLA for printing, but I do plan to take the printer out to the balcony once I start printing "big" pieces.
- Cooking via YouTube (Food Wishes w/ Chef John, and Kenji Lopez Alt's channel)
- ML model architectures (AI Coffee Break, and Yannic Kilcher's channels)
- Exploring different ways of thinking about and responses to the question: What is the meaning of life? (I don't think there is one, so it's more about how we derive one for ourselves.)
On my radar for the Fall is learning a second language and beginning to learn woodworking. Speaking of that, any advice on the first tools a beginning woodworker should add to their shop?
I’m also spending some quality time with software and enterprise architecture books, working on some container oriented side projects, and somewhat surprisingly learning the Microsoft Power Platform, as my team keeps catching requests that are a good fit for a low code solution.
A little bit of everything and trying to put them together in different projects.
Recommend the Pinecil!
https://www.alfred.com/alfreds-basic-adult-piano-course-less...
I went through it page by page, each day I started I'd go back maybe 5-10 pages. I do contrawise 2 handed scales as a warm up. I've been approaching it as work (ie concentrate hard, do deliberate practice not messing around) and have seen really fast improvement. I practice maybe 30 mins 5 days a week.
I'll also just have fun - I just try and play the songs I really like (Greensleeves, Scarborough fair, House of the rising sun, Canon in D etc) until they're really good. I can (barely) play Canon in D after maybe a month (though I played Violin for 5 years and piano for 2 as a kid)
If I don't know a song, I'll google it before tackling it as I find that makes it way easier, eg here's Canon in D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFRYPg5dwss
You can also download sheet music, eg Aphex Twin, and easy version of Europe's the final countdown etc which is pretty fun to play as a synth.
Good luck!