I want to give a go at learning to make chocolate.
Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?
381–390 of 433 posts
Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stock trading can be quite lucrative if it's a good match. Have a look at Qullamaggie on YouTube. > Edit, I say this as someone that has been learning to trade the last 6 months. To be completely transparent I've actually overall lost money doing this, but have also brought my account back up from having halved to almost break even a couple times now and can definitely see the possibility of doing very well. If I was…
Stock "trading" is statistically against the odds. "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" was published nearly 50 years ago and remains generally true. No YouTuber or perfect instruction following would make you 100% likely to be profitable. The most profitable (and effort efficient way) is to routinely invest in a broad basket of stocks over a long period. Ie Voo and Hold.
The EMH is provably false.
Moreover if you can get an edge that is even 2-3% over a coin flip all you need is risk management to make money.
Not understanding this is how you go broke. I traded for a number of years and did well. It was not hard to regularly beat the market, especially in futures and options.
Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?
#383My incomplete list:
- learn to sew clothes - improve my kitesurfing skills - I want to create and share more online - not to improve, but run more
This last bit is critical, I’ve been working on projects never really finishing them. I think part of that is I really, really dislike sharing unfinished things with strangers. The other part is that I struggle if something just works, I always want to make that perfect (when building for myself, ironically I’m usually the person to advocate for iterative approach). So this next year I’m going to focus more on improving that skill (already started this year).
Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not downvoting you, but I think you are probably getting downvoted because "Stock trading can be quite lucrative" is statistically just not true. Even professional financial advisors almost never beat the market [0]. Only hedge funds that pay for huge amounts of priveledged financial information do, and even then not always. Here's a good video that makes a case for this. Even if you don't agree, you might find s…
Statistically speaking, we typically end up with a bell curve right? So who's on the ends of the bell curve?
No offense intended, just speaking by the numbers you shared above, but it sounds like you are at the lower end of the bell curve. Most day traders are, largely because they don't have access to priveledged information like the datasets that hedge funds buy. If they make better bets than you do, then they literally take your money. Those aren't good odds.
Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?
#385Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?
#386Write an operating system in Forth. I've digested Wirth's THE paper. And the XINU book, as well as the BSD book. Anyhow it's for my own use on my own hardware, but it must be beautiful. I've been encouraged by feedback on my Forth code's clear Forthiness, in the way of small, comprehendable word units. That add up to poetic top level loops like OVER PROCESS OVER SCHEDULE IDLE
That's a very specific skill development. I'd ask why Forth, yet guess because "must be beautiful"? Seems like kind of strange / yet somewhat appropriate choice since Forth "traditionally use neither operating system nor file system." and "A full-featured Forth system with all source code will compile itself". Bootstrap your own operating system on a computer with literally nothing. Interesting to read about though a…
The primary virtue of a Forth system is that it is interactive. You can see this on any 1990s system that can start up in Open Firmware.
I've started with a FIG-Forth kernel in 9900 assembler, which fits into 8K. Many authors worked that code up to the 1990s branch I grabbed.
To bring up the board, I cross-assemble to produce two Flash EEPROMs, plug them in, and power up. The Forth kernel looks at block 6 for customizations where I tell it to compile some source packages I want from Flash. One of these is -ASSEMBLER, which lets me create short chunks of native machine code to work on very low-level things like bit I/O, the SPI and I2C peripheral behavior. Very good for debugging initial hardware.
When I'm happy with some code, I add the source to the next EEPROM build.
Block numbers were originally 1K chunks of disk, but can refer to any kind of storage like pages of ROM/RAM, or even to a process' virtual address space.
Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?
#387I’ve played guitar for 20 years, but I’ve decided to do something different and just got some drums. I need to spend some time away from work lest I suffer from burnout again…
That will be fun. I am actually going to come back to electric guitar in 2026 after 15 years away.
I tried learning piano but that was a total waste. Drums I think make a lot of sense as a compliment to guitar.
Piano just made me feel like I wasted my life practicing guitar.
Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?
#388Technical: Audio programming with C++. I was a professional film/game composer for the first 10+ years of my career, but when I started programming I was mostly interested in solving problems that required web and infrastructure skills. Also, I always looked at C++ as something to tackle once I was a better programmer -- I now think I'm a pretty okay programmer and am ready to take it on. I'd like to eventually do a…
Have you ever done anything with tone.js?
I think of this completely opposite. C++ and audio is the incumbent relic that will progress one funeral at a time. Librosa and Pyo are just incredible in python but for offline processing.
Rust and audio would be really cool in terms of wasm. Anything VST is IMO a complete waste of time. That was saturated 15 years ago.
Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 s…
Right. This is how I feel. I can get the LLM to generate code that more or less does what I need, but if I objectively look at the result and the effort required to get there it's still not at the point where it's doing it faster and better than what I could have got manually (with exceptions for certain specific use cases that are not generally applicable to the work I want to do).
The time I save on typing out the program is lost to new activities I otherwise wouldn't be doing.
Re: Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?
#390I 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…
After playing guitar for 25 years, I quit guitar and got a digital piano.
I practiced enough to learn to play Satie - Gnossienne No. 1 in the right hand and then sold the piano.
My fav music is Chopin, Satie, Ravel, Debussy, Rachmaninoff, Ligeti on piano.
The distance between starting from zero on the guitar, to anything ever composed for the guitar is a 100X less than starting from zero on piano to Ligeti.
Learning to solo on electric guitar, play the flute, play the alto sax to me makes so much more sense than trying to learn to play piano or classical guitar as an adult. Classical guitar is hard enough. Piano is just a whole other level to that.
A monophonic instrument is just going to be so much better bang for the buck in terms of time woodshedding. Or a percussion instrument.