Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 876 posts

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

#261

Post by [deleted] »

yters wrote: post #254
bufferoverflow wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, don't waste your time on "intelligent design". It's pseudoscientific garbage pushed by the Christians.

Thomas Nagel, David Berlinski, and David Stove are all atheist/agnostic philosophers who find the arguments of intelligent design worth considering. They don't agree with inferring a deity from the findings, but they do think there is something special about mental causation, and it seems to show up in biological history, which is the core of ID theory. Theological inferences are a tertiary matter that is not fundame…

[deleted]

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

#262

Post by exdsq »

inform880 wrote: post #120
a_bonobo wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have the money (and it sounds like you have), there are quite a few recipe box companies which send you boxes of ingredients and recipes every few days. It's a nice stepping stone towards fully cooking for yourself as it cuts out the shopping/deciding part.

Anyone have suggestions for these?

I use Riverford in the UK. Comes with all your ingredients and a recipe - I've learnt to make quite a few of my favorite dishes thanks to these guys.

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

#263

Post by akerro »

chrissnell wrote: post #100

Some suggestions: - Build something. A new workbench for your office. Fix up an old car. Build a pull-up bar in your garage. Use your hands, cut some wood and metal, and treat yourself to a new tool or two. Do this with every project and you will have a nice tool collection before you know it. - Learn to take pictures on a manual camera. You can do this with a modern automatic camera if it has a manual mode. Learn ab…

>- Listen to classical music. This one didn't come to me until my 40s but I finally realized: there's a reason that this music has been popular for 300 years. Opera is great, too. Listen to Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro". Download the KUSC app and listen to the amazing Metropolitan Opera broadcast every Saturday morning at 10 AM Pacific.

How is this a skill?

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

#264

Post by vector_spaces »

bitexploder wrote: post #35

I will share one that has served me well for over 20 years: learn RDBMS and SQL. Learn normal forms, good schema design, and how to write complex queries. NoSQL adopters often avoided schemas like the plague and ended up with unmaintainable messes after a few years. I have seen more than a few NoSQL -> SQL conversions by now. Data is the most important thing in your app. Give it a great design. Plus databases like Po…

Any references in particular you recommend to learn schema design, particularly with an orientation towards performance (e.g. for high-volume sites)?

A couple years ago I got dinged on a take-home project that involved building a db schema, but didn't get any specific feedback on my work, and it's sort of haunted me to this day (especially since SQL is one of my primary languages)

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

#265

Post by Psyladine »

danenania wrote: post #132
inform880 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cooking thing really hits home. I work in a high stress, banking environment at a fortune 500 company, and I eat out most days. I know theoretically how to cook, but between the time it takes to shop, cook, and clean, AND I'm doing well financially it's so hard to convince myself to cook. Living alone doesn't help either.

Get a slow cooker and have your groceries delivered. You can make delicious, nutritious 1 pot meals that last you 2 or 3 days a pop with minimal prep time and cleanup.

I wish. Minimum $$ and limited inventory available for delivery through my local grocers. Anyone who cooks beyond some veggies and out-of-the-box meal components knows quality of ingredients is the utmost. Like, going to multiple butchers for the best cut of meat kind of quality.

It's like anything else, you must invest the time and energy to get the quality. Restaurants simply abstract this away by increasing the cost.

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

#266

Post by kerkeslager »

phowat wrote: post #62
kerkeslager wrote: post #9

Starting conversations with strangers. Squat and deadlift. Eating healthier. Doing something kind for someone else every day. Honesty. Listening to people you disagree with. Driving safer (this is the most dangerous thing we do on a regular basis). Meditation.

From this list, the thing I struggle most with is conversations with strangers. Any suggestions on how to improve that?

Well, one thing is just a mindset thing: as long as you go in with kind intentions, there's almost no way anything can go wrong. Maybe the person you talk to will be bored or uninterested, but that is a good thing because a) you've chipped away at your social anxiety a little, and b) you can check them off your mental list of potential friends/contacts/whatever.

As for tactics: just ask questions. Everybody likes to talk about themselves. Eventually, you'll get good at finding out what interesting things people have going on in their lives (most people have something).

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

#268

Post by Tehchops »

mattrp wrote: post #229
chrissnell wrote: post #100

Some suggestions: - Build something. A new workbench for your office. Fix up an old car. Build a pull-up bar in your garage. Use your hands, cut some wood and metal, and treat yourself to a new tool or two. Do this with every project and you will have a nice tool collection before you know it. - Learn to take pictures on a manual camera. You can do this with a modern automatic camera if it has a manual mode. Learn ab…

> - Build something. A new workbench for your office. Fix up an old car. Build a pull-up bar in your garage. Use your hands, cut some wood and metal, and treat yourself to a new tool or two. Be careful... my wife gave me a drill one year and I’ve since renovated two houses and now have a small fortune in tools. If you don’t have a garage, basement or backyard for it, your local community college might have a “maker l…

I always found the "idea" of that kind of work enticing.

However, once I owned a house and had to do renovating/updating, I ultimately found it frustrating.

Some jobs are incredibly frustrating if you don't have the exact tool to make it easier.

The likelihood the angles and geometry of your home are square is, IME, near 0. Even measuring and re-measuring multiple times, I end up with a lot of wasted, mis-cut material.

YMMV, but I always found when you add up the time spent and material cost, it's nearly a wash to just pay someone else to do it.

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

#269

Post by woile »

tnel77 wrote: post #225
chrissnell wrote: post #100

Some suggestions: - Build something. A new workbench for your office. Fix up an old car. Build a pull-up bar in your garage. Use your hands, cut some wood and metal, and treat yourself to a new tool or two. Do this with every project and you will have a nice tool collection before you know it. - Learn to take pictures on a manual camera. You can do this with a modern automatic camera if it has a manual mode. Learn ab…

What blows my mind is how much I took my ability to cook for granted. So many people my age (millennial) can barely cook anything. I have friends who eat out every single meal of every single day. People give me weird looks when every single workday I have the same answer to “you wanna go out and get some lunch?” “Nope. I have leftovers!”

For me it's quite similar, in the office they always tell me "Wow! That look amazing, I can't believe you do it everyday". Even when it's a salad with 3 ingredients

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

#270

Post by mesaframe »

kerkeslager wrote: post #9

Starting conversations with strangers. Squat and deadlift. Eating healthier. Doing something kind for someone else every day. Honesty. Listening to people you disagree with. Driving safer (this is the most dangerous thing we do on a regular basis). Meditation.

Starting conversations with strangers.

But how?

I have anxiety and it's really difficult to talk to strangers.

Edit:I would also like to mention. I talk very less reason being whenever I tell people honestly about my feelings. Later or sooner they use it against me.

Post reply on HN