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Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

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Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a similar vain, I recommend getting a sous vide circulator. You'll make perfect steaks and pork chops every time, and it's extremely clean and convenient. You can cook all sorts of other things sous vide style as well. I recently got one, and I've been cooking at home a lot more often as a result. I think more people would cook their own food if they knew how to make it taste really good.

I fully support the value system here in that we both want people cooking for themselves more, but I have to say that sous vide cooked steaks taste like boiled meat to me, aka terrible. People around me are swear by it until I slap a ribeye onto the pan for them, high heat, making sure to render the fat. To each their own but imo a sous vide is a big, expensive, plastic waste of counter space.

Yea I’ve found the same. Nothing like slapping a nice marbled ribeye on a hot grill.

I will say though the sous vide does work really well for some things. Batch cooking of chicken breast, venison in nearly any form, and various cuts of pork that you want rare but want to make sure it’s safe to eat.

Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apart from the cardio, is there added strength value to doing burpees specifically instead of squats and push ups separately?

Your strength will never go up that much until you force more resistance into the picture, either via bands or weights. You will be getting a shitload of hypertrophy with all this bodyweight exercising though so you'll look shredded if your body fat is low.

Not fully true, body weight can make you gain lots of muscle, but you do need to add resistance. However, resistance doesn’t need to be weight or bands, but do a more difficult version of the exercise. Push ups are easy for you? Do planche pushups or diamond pushups.

Squats easy for you? Try pistol squats.

Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learn to enjoy poetry. There is so much of great poetry in English, but I think it is not being read and appreciated enough. It is a kind of mental challenge like doing a puzzle, to unlock the full vivid meaning. Also reading fiction, though how exactly it helps one is beyond me, but it offers glimpses into other worlds. For example I read recently 'The French Lieutenant's Woman', I doubt its richness of detail, and…

Is there any evidence that poems have meaning? I could easily imagine a world where poets fool themselves into thinking the words they wrote contained their intentions, while readers fooled themselves into thinking they had uncovered those intentions.

You might as well ask "does music have meaning?" Poetry is many things, but at the root it's about the beauty of words themselves, their sound and shape and feeling and even taste.

Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

#204

When I read the latest "who is hiring" post I was overwhelmed by the amount of Python listed; I've always used PERL but I seem to be the only one at the office left who can.

So you're becoming a niche developer. Congrats, now is time to shine and rack in the big dough. While everybody flocks to Python, go search jobs for Perl and ask for big buck. I bet there are plenty of legacy projects for Perl.

I moved from python to Perl in 2011. I miss writing Perl but career options are a lot better using Python - there are more of them and the money is better.

Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

deadlift's are quite dangerous for the untrained. Start with "Fix Rounded Shoulders" and "Fix Anterior Pelvic Tilt" if you have not already done so. Plenty of great advice on YouTube on those topics.

> deadlift's are quite dangerous for the untrained. It's odd to me you picked deadlift to call out as dangerous. The deadlift is certainly dangerous, but only in the sense that almost any large lift is dangerous for the untrained. But in my experience, the deadlift is a very natural motion for me and most people who I've seen get into lifting heavy. Fixing people's natural instincts is usually just pointing out a few…

I've seen people confuse clean and jerks with deadlifts. Maybe that's what's happening here? The biggest deadlift injury I've seen is scraped shins. It's hard to injure yourself without straps.

Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like Docker, I like microservices, but I feel like I'm just not excited about Kubernetes itself. There seems to be a "bullshit complexity" that people add to it that I really don't think is going to stick. But, I really do like the "GitOps" experience. A merge to a master branch is a deploy. Should I just get over this perception and learn Kubernetes, or could I find joy and professional usefulness out of another t…

Don't get why you got downvoted. Kubernetes is the right tool for some type of issues. If you want to host low complexity infrastructure like a simple website but still want to use containers go with nomad / docker swarm.

Its over used right now. Probably why the downvotes were given.

Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a fellow language lover I second the suggestion, but not the reasoning. What's your evidence for "some thoughts only make sense in a given language"? From what I've read, this isn't agreed upon in the linguistic community. As for Esperanto, it's heavily biased towards Western speakers, so it wouldn't necessarily be easy to start with for someone whose native language is non-Western.

On the most superficial level: It's easier to talk about snow or numbers in languages that have more words for these concepts than in languages that have less.

Having recently listened to John McWhorter's lectures on the history of human language, I was surprised to find out that there is no reliable evidence for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that language affects thought). The Wikipedia article on linguistic relativism states:

> The strongest form of the theory is linguistic determinism, which holds that language entirely determines the range of cognitive processes. The hypothesis of linguistic determinism is now generally agreed to be false.

Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

#208
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you read these papers, or are you just repeating something you read online?

I mean, I haven’t watched every 9-hour-long flat earther video on YouTube either, but I’m still pretty certain that the world’s not flat.

Is flat earth promoted by mathematicians and scientists with PhDs from Princeton and Cambridge, and published in mainstream IEEE journals?

At any rate, you seem to be saying you have not read any of the relevant papers. I encourage you to look at least at one of the papers I mention (not just the criticisms others have written), and make up your own mind as to its validity. Most are free PDFs hosted online, and are not very long reads. The game of life paper is the most accessible, IMO. You can even reproduce the results yourself if you become interested enough. At that point, you'll be in a better position to dismiss the work.

Even though I agree with you on flat earth being a pseudoscience, I have at least read some of their arguments to see what they are claiming. Same with 9/11 truthers and holocaust denialists. I at least read their arguments, so I can debunk their arguments myself. There is always the possibility that some position I vehemently disagree with might be correct.

Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a similar vain, I recommend getting a sous vide circulator. You'll make perfect steaks and pork chops every time, and it's extremely clean and convenient. You can cook all sorts of other things sous vide style as well. I recently got one, and I've been cooking at home a lot more often as a result. I think more people would cook their own food if they knew how to make it taste really good.

I fully support the value system here in that we both want people cooking for themselves more, but I have to say that sous vide cooked steaks taste like boiled meat to me, aka terrible. People around me are swear by it until I slap a ribeye onto the pan for them, high heat, making sure to render the fat. To each their own but imo a sous vide is a big, expensive, plastic waste of counter space.

Quick sanity check - are they not finishing the sous vide steaks in the pan/grill?
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