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Ask HN: What are you learning?

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Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#361

Post by returningfory »

senderista wrote: post #283
EnderMB wrote: post #138

I'll probably get a lot of shit for this, but LeetCode. I've recently been furloughed, and I think that redundancies aren't too far away. There aren't many companies hiring in my area at the moment, and if I'm going to move it's going to be for a big company, so I'm dusting off the CV and am applying to some Big N companies. A recruiter recently reached out to me, and I've got an interview with one Big N company comi…

I hate to say it, but I got no discernible advantage from my non-trivial coding projects during my last job search. My time would have been far better spent just grinding leetcode, from a purely economic perspective. I wouldn’t have had nearly as much fun, but I probably would have gotten more offers.

100% percent my experience too. In the last 3 months I've been on-site at 3 of the FAANG companies. Not a single interviewer brought up the large personal projects I've done and which are given decent space on my resume; my weeks of leetcoding was definitely far far far more beneficial for getting a job.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#363

Post by AlchemistCamp »

AndreasBackx wrote: post #29
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice! I just did a simple roguelike in Rust a few months ago. I somewhat regret not looking at what it would take to make is work with wasm from the beginning, though.

Did you happen to use this? https://bfnightly.bracketproductions.com/rustbook/ If not, what did you use?

I learned from this tutorial, which is a bit simpler: https://tomassedovic.github.io/roguelike-tutorial/

I have been wanting to go through the tutorial you shared when I get the time, though!

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#364

Post by kristopolous »

jlelonm wrote: post #342
kristopolous wrote: post #329

The business side: How do you find your customers, position a product, and create demand. What about new markets, segmentation, downstream and upstream? Bad technology that gets this part right almost always does phenomenally, astoundingly, inconceivably better than great technology that gets it wrong. I'm tired of building things that only I and a few people really like, like some underground band only a few people…

What are some resources you’re using to learn that stuff?

Here's some books

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

https://www.davidow.com/books/marketing-high-technology/

https://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steve-Blank/dp/09...

Each of those books are projects (the order I put them in is more or less recommended) ... that's probably a couple months of careful study.

If you want to intersperse it with light reading, the following non-fiction novels are really good examples of the principles in practice (in not always obvious ways):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Doom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine

You can get used copies on ebay for about $3 each.

Thoughtfully engaging with the material is likely worth 1,000 times that.

Also the commonly cited Reid Hoffman, Seth Godin and Peter Thiel books I think are mostly a waste of time. Al Ries is ok (and quick) and Jim Collins is good if you're trying to turn around a 5,000 person company, but oh, if only I was so lucky.

Anyway, if you want to come back after reading those, I can give additional recommendations

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#365

Post by jlelonm »

cs702 wrote: post #252

* Learning and building a more intuitive understanding of Projective Geometric Algebra (PGA). Looks very disruptive for all kinds of computer graphics applications. PGA replaces the use of Vectors, Quaternions, Dual Quaternions, and the entire machinery of Linear Algebra with a single unified, elegant framework that "just works." Feels a bit like magic. * Exploring and playing with new capsule routing algorithms in d…

What makes it so disruptive?

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#366

Post by chairfield »

I'm learning how to level up my more fundamental life skills: nutrition, exercise, and character. Character I'm learning through the study of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People which I'm working through with a friend. For exercise, I'm enjoying learning a safe kettlebell program with the book Simple and Sinister. With nutrition, I'm just trying to cook/prepare all my own meals while keeping the ingredients healthy.

I've spent so much time studying skills more directly related to my work as a software engineer, or hobbies like photography, that this shift is both challenging and refreshing. I think it'll make a huge difference in the long run.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#368

Post by kovac »

tomxor wrote: post #56
zetalemur wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So far tried fbdev (but doesn't work well with X), now playing with XCB. Another idea would be to use SDL which essentially provides functionality to make windows, draw pixels and handle input/output. If you do not want to use any library at all and do not mind low "resolution", you could use your terminal as window and regard characters as pixels. Sure, there is the curses library to abstract away different termin…

I was indeed trying to avoid the big libraries, since this is just for personal use I don't care about cross platform which allows me to escape these potentially - I may well end up back at the SDL + OpenGL level later when features or performance are a concern. My current goal is to find a balance of least dependencies and least boilerplate to draw a pixel buffer so i can play with C, nothing more. Once I can do tha…

Have you tried A allegro5? Any take on which is better? I've tried both, but I'm too much of a newbie to have a reasonable opinion. Thinking of getting back on to one of the two.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#369

Post by christophergs »

Twisol wrote: post #275

I'm working through Aluffi's Algebra: Chapter Zero , which covers abstract algebra (groups, fields, vector spaces, etc.) with category theoretic foundations. I took undergraduate algebra several years ago, and I'm really interested in category theory from a compositionality perspective, so this is a good opportunity to brush up on both topics. Aluffi is really well-written. It assumes some degree of mathematical matu…

IIRC in this podcast: https://player.fm/series/superdatascience-2532807/sds-345-ma...

The interviewer is a researcher at Twitter Cortex applying category theory to ML. His intuition about the possible links reminds me of this kind of extending of senses you describe.

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