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.
Ask HN: What Are You Learning?
151–160 of 362 posts
Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?
#152Complexity 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…
Great to see this list. I started reading Origin of Wealth last week and wish I had encountered the book earlier.
Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?
#153Tig welding. I think being able to craft with metal will open up a nice chunk of the technology tree for me.
Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?
#154Great 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.
Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?
#155Chemistry. 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.
Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?
#156Book 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.
Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?
#157Biology 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…
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?
Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?
#158Lately 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 title…
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.
Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?
#159To 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'd love to learn this but get sleep paralysis for 30-60 seconds at a time for like an hour (i have no way of knowing how long the intervals are but that's what it feels like) every time I do - has anyone overcome this?
Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?
#160Just 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.