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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?

#361

Post by brodouevencode »

cgh wrote: post #334
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.

All great suggestions that sound easy but are not. For the exercise part, I'd say deadlifts and overhead press.

I see a lot of people shitting on deadlifts in this thread, but OHPs are way more risky. Great if you have great form and know your body, but still pretty damn risky.

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

#362

Post by ricg »

ryugarden wrote: post #64

Learn how to make more friends. Communicate. Learn how to talk with people, how to be adaptive and contextual. Learn about yourself as much as you can, either via introspection or from other people. Learn what your values are, and what makes them satisfied. "You are your own ally, when you make yourself an enemy even though you should trust yourself, you become the victim hit the hardest". Learn agency. Remember that…

Care to elaborate on "learn agency" for a non-native English speaker?

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

#363

Post by ubercow13 »

kerkeslager wrote: post #284
rriepe wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well... the two common issues I see are: 1. Hunching your back. This can cause slipped discs and some muscle issues. 2. Trying to controlled-lower the bar to the ground. Contrary to the policies of a lot of gyms, you should get to the top of your deadlift and basically drop: you might keep your hands on it to keep it from rolling away after it reaches the ground, but you definitely don't want to try to slow it down a…

Any source for (2)? A quick google doesn't seem to support that assertion at all.

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

#364

Post by billfruit »

goatinaboat wrote: post #341
gozzoo wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been trying the same and each time I failed miserably. I just don't get it and certainly can't enjoy it. Can someone recomend good poetry sutable for highly analytical mind or a book about apreciating poetry?

Have you tried Dylan Thomas, the greatest poet in all of Wales? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_Thomas Those of a more Scottish persuasion might prefer Robbie Burns.

I would suggest Walter Scott rather than Burns for the Scottish perspective. In general, Tennyson, I think is a good place to start.

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

#365

Post by blueside »

snarf21 wrote: post #113
ryugarden wrote: post #64

Learn how to make more friends. Communicate. Learn how to talk with people, how to be adaptive and contextual. Learn about yourself as much as you can, either via introspection or from other people. Learn what your values are, and what makes them satisfied. "You are your own ally, when you make yourself an enemy even though you should trust yourself, you become the victim hit the hardest". Learn agency. Remember that…

I've come to believe that introspection is the one true real superpower. Here is an exercise for the reader. Every year on your birthday, write down what you "know" to be true about life, work, love, politics, money, meaning, happiness, environment, etc. and then seal it. Now read what you wrote last year and see how dumb you used to be.

I don't think it's good to regard it as "how dumb you were". I used to do something similar to this but this screwed me up a bit mentally, leading to a big lack of confidence.

How can I be confident or feel good about my decision if I am currently "dumb"?

You're not dumb if you make the best choices you can with the information you have at the time.

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

#366

Post by brodouevencode »

jader201 wrote: post #295
Tehchops wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 materia…

I think woodworking != home improvements. I would agree that often projects to fix up your home can be more frustrating than satisfying, unless, like you said, you have the right tools and some prior experience. Building things that sit in your home (furniture) is likely a bit less frustrating & rewarding, even without the perfect tools and experience.

Agreed, carpentry and fine woodworking aren't the same thing, but a lot of the tools/practices/methods overlap.

Start small and work your way up. Make a cutting board, fast forward a couple of years and you'll be building cabinets. Fast forward from that and you'll be shaving backs on a Windsor chair.

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

#367

Post by papreclip »

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…

>NoSQL adopters often ... ended up with unmaintainable messes

learning SQL seems much more straightforward than learning NoSQL. personally I'd like to find a good resource that will help me use a non-relational database without creating a mess

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

#368

Post by Spellman »

marcofiset wrote: post #315
neuroticfish wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been trying to learn to cook off and on for years now and I get so discouraged all the time because I'm still either overcooking or undercooking something, still not getting the flavors right, not using the right amount of oil despite the recipe's prescription. I can't be alone in feeling that way.

It took me years of cooking every day to get to a level where I'm confident in my cooking skills. It's a lot of trial and error. Look up a recipe that looks good, and try to follow it exactly . There's no eyeballing when you are learning. There's a reason those ingredients are added in that particular order and quantity. I've come to a point where I can whip up a recipe and improvise some, but that's after years of f…

Want to re-emphasize, cooking is a skill that's learned by repetition.

There are methods to help. Over cooking vs undercooking is because of guesswork. Remove that by buying an Instant Read thermometer. Over and under season? Taste as you go, add more seasoning if it needs it.

Also, make sure you find a consistently good recipe. Allrecipes is a crapshoot even though it's consistently a top Google search. Another poster mentioned Kenji Lopez who tests the crap out of his recipes. I'd also recommend Alton Brown having solid but accessible recipes. America's Test Kitchen/Cook's Illustrated and Bon Apetit for when you're getting more advanced. More beginner friendly stuff like Budget Bytes tends to be less flavorful, but typically simple enough and cheap enough you don't feel bad screwing up.

Basics with Babish is decent, at least the early episodes, for helping explain and visualize some of the basic skills.

But again, it's a skill that requires practice. I've been cooking consistently for years and I still can't spin up a recipe from memory or by feel. I mostly rely on trusted recipes and maybe do my own riff if I've done something similar before.

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

#369

Post by jdgiese »

astura wrote: post #288
tnel77 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!”

> I have friends who eat out every single meal of every single day. I have friends who do too but it's not because they don't know how to cook, it's because they don't like to and don't wanna bother and can afford the luxury of having someone else to do it for them.

I love cooking sometimes, but then again, other-times I would rather spend my time working on a client project. When you add up the time spent:

1. planning meals (may be minimal if you can ad-hoc quickly)

2. walking/driving to the grocery store

3. cooking

4. cleaning

It can easily be more expensive for an individual person (or even a couple) to cook than it is to eat out. (I think this makes intuitive sense too, since there are economies of scale and efficiencies with how restaurants are run.) If you love cooking, then you are doing it for fun---thats great! But I think for people who don't like cooking, it can be rational to eat out for most meals.

Many people are not paid at an hourly rate, so this analysis may not make sense for them.

(Also, where I live, there are plenty of healthy and cheap places to eat out at.)

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

#370

Post by brodouevencode »

linsomniac wrote: post #319
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…

Agreed. The skill I'm working on this year seems to be woodworking. I made my wife a little box to put her Christmas present in, and designed and built a storage system for the garage over the holidays. Now I'm working on building a new set of workbenches for the garage to replace the ones the previous owner built.

It's bloody addictive isn't it? I started out doing cutting boards and my last commission was to make a custom poker table.
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