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Ask HN: What are you learning?

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Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#371

Post by kralos »

mjfl wrote: post #333
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…

You know something? I know a little abstract algebra: groups, subgroups, quotient groups, and the relvent theorems behind them. It's been disappointingly useless to me though. Maybe someday I will take the quotient group of two matrix groups... I'm not sure though.

I studied vector mathematics in high school; matrix operations, dot product, cross product etc. All through these lessons I thought; "what a stupid thing to learn, who would ever use this?". Then after school I became a CAD/CAM developer and spent most of my time working with vector mathematics. It was with the help of OpenGL so I technically didn't need to understand how these operations worked under the hood but yep... what a stupid thing to learn indeed.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#372

Post by koeng »

Twisol wrote: post #280
koeng wrote: post #80

Prolog. I think that genetic logic can largely be expressed in Prolog to enable doing some crazy stuff that hasn’t been explored yet. It’s crazy to me that synthetic biology hasn’t really used logical programming yet for gene design.

Logic programming is badly underapplied in general, I think. Most of the amazing work in this area never seems to have gotten far out of academia (if at all) -- Prolog being the almost singular exception. Would be awesome to see some motivating examples for this application. It sounds really cool!

In synthetic biology, the application is super clear.

Let's say we want to make cocaine (or related compounds) in yeast (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-11588-w). Well, we know the biosynthetic pathway to get to that molecule (https://biocyc.org/META/new-image?type=PATHWAY&object=PWY-58...), and we know the biosynthetic pathways in yeast that intersect with that pathway.

In the tropane paper, they express 15 new genes and did 7 disruptions.

There should be a way to declare "I want this end product" and a system knowledgeable about the proteins associated with the reactions necessary to get there should be able to fit the puzzle of "ok, if you express these proteins you get that end product, and if you knock down these genes in the organism it should increase your production".

This generalized system should be applicable to nearly any biosynthetic pathway, and I think there is definitely a profitable niche at being good at that.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#373

Post by sddhrthrt »

Beefin wrote: post #357
oblib wrote: post #340

I've been watching youtube videos about ancient cultures and sites. Some of them are lectures that are very well down, others go off on some pretty silly tangents but the videos of the sites they show are often pretty good and that's as close as I'll ever get to visiting most of them so I focus on that when they get to talking about aliens building them and what not. I think I've about exhausted that line though. I'v…

ancient cultures videos sound cool, and recs?

+1

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#374

Post by mrslave »

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…

On LeetCode, how would you estimate the split between slogging-enldlessly-at-things-I-already-know and I-actually-learned-something?

I had never heard of it until I read the thread under your comment so I apologize if this is obvious to people in the know. From the comments it sounds like more of the former and less of the latter.

I had a good experience with Project Euler back in the day (account long since lost). There was absolutely no focus on immediate employability but there were improvements in my "human capital".

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#375

Post by christophergs »

ericax wrote: post #78

World-building. After reading about storytelling, I realized that I'm as fascinated to a well-crafted world as good plots and characters. There's not much to read about, as a fiction world can contain as much detail as the real world. I'm spending time looking at the fiction worlds that I like and taking them apart. As an exercise, imagining places and races is also interesting. You'll be amazed by the amount of deta…

NK Jamisin (3 time Hugo winner) talks about world building as a technique. It's something mentioned in this great video about why "The Expanse" is awesome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGIovBe7pL8

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#376

Post by xthetrfd »

I am trying to improve my web development skills by writing a chat application. I will implement saving messages to the database next.

Also I want to learn something ml-ish probably play with opencv or pytorch.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#378

Post by gameswithgo »

scarface74 wrote: post #276
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 use to hate the idea of studying leetCode and I still refuse to do it. But then I realized how hypocritical I was being considering all of the time I’ve spent “grinding architecture and infrastructure”, reading white papers and studying videos on TOGAF so I could talk the talk on an “Enterprise Architect” or a “Digital Transformation Consultant”. But if I have to play a game to get the next salary upgrade after I t…

it can be a fun game, and it is a useful game. brushing up on fundamentals is useful in any human endeavor no matter how advanced you get.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#379

Post by rc-1140 »

Trying to develop (ha) some web development skills and I was studying interview questions. I've never done anything web-related outside of making API calls, so I'm reading "The Little ASP.NET Core Book" by Nate Barbettini. I appreciate that the author is focusing on presenting the things one needs to know to do $"{foo}" so far, other materials are either too wordy or are really childish/tasteless.

I started doing Leetcode several months ago because I wanted to change jobs soon, but it's really exposing what not having a traditional CS background is costing me. I feel guilty looking at the answers on there and in Cracking the Coding Interview but I genuinely don't know how to make things faster. Seeing some of the answers in CTCI after attempting some of the string related questions made me ask myself "well, why wasn't that talked about in the informational section preceding the questions?"

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#380

Post by olalonde »

Writing my first library/cli in Rust. Never felt so productive in a systems level language but I still quite haven't internalized the variable ownership system and will probably look back at my code in a few months with total disgust. I'm on Rust's discord server (https://discord.gg/rust-lang) if any fellow learners want to chat.
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