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Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

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Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

#371

Post by quantpunk »

Trasmatta wrote: post #20

I'm pretty intensely depressed, so I think I'd like to learn how to be a little less of that. I've tried so many things, but I guess there's always more. Thinking about getting a personal trainer, because I try to stay active, but have no idea how to actually work out. Seems like a good skill to learn, and should help somewhat with the crushing weight my brain seems to be in constantly.

The language models can give you a good quick program right now.

The bigger hurdle is the intimidation of the gym. It doesn't help that the gym will be packed on January 1st. I deload every January to avoid the gym as much as possible in January. It will be back to normal by mid February. A new lifter would be so much better off waiting until March 1st to join.

Walking 30 minutes a day to get your cardio up will almost certainly help your brain chemicals improve after a few weeks and no new skills needed.

Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

#372

Post by darubedarob »

I want to get good at exterior cascades. Seeing them. Using them. Detecting potential in the physical world that exist now or soon will exist. Lining up companies and academia with that potential. Organizing funding that unleashes that cascade into companies and change. I think we had way too much focus on interior changes and optimizations, zero sum games at best and exterior cascade preventing at worst.

Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

#373

Post by ifh-hn »

darubedarob wrote: post #372

I want to get good at exterior cascades. Seeing them. Using them. Detecting potential in the physical world that exist now or soon will exist. Lining up companies and academia with that potential. Organizing funding that unleashes that cascade into companies and change. I think we had way too much focus on interior changes and optimizations, zero sum games at best and exterior cascade preventing at worst.

Apologies for my ignorance but what is "exterior cascades"?

Without that context I can't make head nor tail of your comment.

Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

#374

Post by Zyten »

For the past decade, I‘ve been at basically the same employer, even if in different institutes. Maybe it’s time for a switch, also to grow more experience in the fields I‘ve worked in, lastly mainly HPC performance analysis tools and working with parallel paradigms in such field.

The past few years, I‘ve gotten close to development on compilers and parallel runtimes, such as OpenMP, but never looked into working on them directly. However, I‘m really interested in it. So one of the things I really want to spend time on is understanding more of the compilers and their code base, and start contributing.

Learning another programming language is also high on my priority list. C/C++/Python are languages where I‘m quite versed in, but looking into Rust, Go or Zig would be quite interesting for me as well.

Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

#375

Post by bonesss »

imron wrote: post #342
kukkeliskuu wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is step 3 of “draw the rest of the owl” :-) Fair enough :-) This reminds me about pigeon research by Skinner. Skinner placed hungry pigeons in a "Skinner box" and a mechanism delivered food pellets at fixed, non-contingent time intervals, regardless of the bird's behavior. The pigeons, seeking a pattern or control over the food delivery, began to associate whatever random action they were performing at the mom…

Thanks for the info. I try a mix of things I know well and things I want to play around with. Swift and iOS was something that didn’t work so well for me. I wanted to play around with face capture and spent a day with Claude putting together a small app that showed realtime video of a face and put dots on/around various facial features and printed log messages if the person changed the direction they were looking (up…

Challenging my own LLM experiences cynically: for a period it really does feel like I’m interactively getting exactly what I need… but given that the end result is generated and I have to then learn it, I’m left in much the same situation you mentioned of looking at the developer docs where a better cleaner version exists.

Subjectively interacting with an LLM gives a sense of progress, but objectively downloading a sample project and tutorial gets me to the same point with higher quality materials much faster.

I keep thinking about research on file navigation via command line versus using a mouse. People’s subjective sense of speed and capability don’t necessarily line up with measurable outcomes.

LLMs can do some amazing things, but violently copy and pasting stack overflow & randomness from GitHub can too.

Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

#376

Post by manuj10 »

Staff engineer, 12 years in. I've had side project ideas rattling around for years but never had the bandwidth to build them end to end. AI tooling has changed that, I can now ship complete apps solo in a fraction of the time. Planning to launch and market a few of these myself in 2026. Mostly as a learning exercise in the non-engineering side of things.

Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

#378

Post by smokel »

nicbou wrote: post #368
smokel wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cost of all the paper I wasted in the last 5 years is probably less than the cost of a pizza. Once you get into it, there is an amazing assortment of papers that can cost up to a pizza per sheet. Especially if you're going for the larger formats. https://arches-papers.com/arches-range-of-papers/watercolor-...

Yes, but let's not nitpick our way out of understanding the point. Don't be afraid to soil a notebook with bad drawings, and waste as much paper as it takes. Mistakes are part of the process, not something to avoid.

Oh, I'm sorry, no nitpicking intended. Just wanted to share some enthousiasm :)

Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?

#380

Post by greenie_beans »

mmcconnell1618 wrote: post #223
busymom0 wrote: post #14

I want to try once again to learn piano. Previously, many years ago, I took lessons for 1.5 years but gave up because it was just too hard and I wasn't enjoying it. This time, I plan on trying to self learn. Been watching YouTube tutorials recently and as soon as I return from my trip, I will try once again. I have bought the Nancy Faber adult piano adventures book 1 too. Any tips are welcome.

Learning to play individual notes from sheet music only helps you learn one song. The breakthrough for me was thinking in musical structure. - There are 12 keys on the piano just repeated - A scale can start on any of those 12 keys - The "home" key of the scale get labels with a roman numeral one, I - The rest of the keys in the scale get roman numerals ii,iii,IV,V,vi,vii - The I,IV,V are all upper case to represent…

> Most pop songs use I,IV,V from a scale

this is the blues. just learn how to play a blues progression on the piano and you'll learn what this poster is trying to teach.

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