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Ask HN: What are you learning?

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Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#461

Post by thomashobohm »

I'm still in school and am just starting to get into more difficult math; right now I'm learning introductory odes, vector calculus, and introductory analysis. All three are really enjoyable, but in some ways vector calculus and differential equations feel like a review, in that the hardest part of each is just the calculus I've forgotten since Calculus I-III. I find analysis to be the most interesting course because of how novel it is. I remember at the start of the semester, it was so confusing; the concepts weren't difficult to grasp, but I just didn't understand why we were learning what we were learning, or what it had to do with calculus, for which we were supposedly trying to develop some theoretical foundation. But as the weeks went on, I began to appreciate the beauty of the subject, in small increments. I began to understand why the real numbers were constructed just so, and why we needed to understand ideas like compactness before we could talk about ideas like convergence.

One quote about analysis that I read online somewhere is that you should study it until it starts to feel "natural." At the time, I guess it sounded true, but I didn't appreciate what it actually meant. Now, I'm starting to.

It takes a lot of effort to digest each new lecture, but I'm excited to see what the rest of the course holds, and to graduate to "real analysis" afterwards.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#462

Post by luis8 »

sour-taste wrote: post #450

Quantum Computing for the Very Curious: https://quantum.country/qcvc Wonderful into to the topic and easy to understand. It's my first foray into the field so I really appreciate the Author's writing style.

This is awesome! thank you for sharing it. I was looking for something like this.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#463

Post by scarface74 »

crimsonalucard wrote: post #406
scarface74 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Architecture is way easier than algorithms. I'm actually the opposite. I hate the idea that people are studying intensely for architecture because it just takes reading the wikipedia summary to get the main point. Architects are usually just managers who are ex-engineers and have been out of the front lines for so long that they aren't technical enough to get back into coding. This is fine, but the idea that "archite…

Not to mention that the more physical nature of architecture makes it less flexible than code itself so "architectural" patterns are, as a result, significantly less abstract and complex than coding patterns/algorithms.

This is the reason that software engineers need adult supervision. The fact that you think that modern infrastructure is physical and static displays a lack of experience. There is nothing static about modern cloud infrastructure.

I just had to deploy an API to ECS/Fargate (Docker). We had to determine the best combination of memory/cpu of the Fargate runtime environment and what hardware we wanted to give the ElasticSearch environment. I basically wrote a CloudFormation template (infrastructure as code) that defined the environment and then wrote a Node script that ran the CF template and passed in parameters to vary the hardware environment (cpu/memory). After the environment was created, the script then ran a series of Artillery load tests, recorded the results of the load tests, gathered metrics from CloudWatch and estimated the monthly cost compared to the performance.

We reported that to management to let them decide how much they were willing to spend for the throughout they needed.

I’ve created entire environments with databases, Redis Caches, ECS clusters (think AWS version of EKS), etc as a proof of concept by using CloudFormation deploying code to it, showing management as a demo, and then tearing it all down just by clicking delete until we can come back to it after the contract is signed and then spin it back up with one command.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#464

Post by shivekkhurana »

I have lost my contract as a developer and am helping a non-profit [1] streamline their operations. The organization aims to provide food and heath kits to the marginalized. We have already distributed over 600 kits and are on track to reach a 1000 in this week. Each kit is designed to support a family of 4 for 1 month.

I was introduced to them by a friend who was helping them build an open platform [2], open in the sense that all processes, donations, procurement and guides are public.

Although my core competency is building and managing Saas, I took up the task of setting up their operations. I find a striking similarity b/w managing Saas and not-for-profit distribution.

We are relying heavily on Airtable.

Despite of being jobless, I feel less worried. The situation on ground is much worse than mine.

--- [1] https://karuna2020.org [2] https://open-data.karuna2020.org

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#465

Post by verandaguy »

Norwegian!

Originally, I was going to do a hiking and photography tour of Fennoscandia in the Fall. I'm not sure if that'll still come to pass with the ever-looming collapse of society, but at least it's pretty refreshing to learn a new (non-programming) language for the first time in over a decade, and for the first time in my adult life.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#466

Post by johndoe42377 »

HanQi wrote: post #452

I am taking this course[1]: Programming Languages. It emphasizes on big ideas behind languages and functional programming which is very interesting and enlightening.You will implement a type checker and interpreter through this course(I am struggling ML's pattern matching now but feel quite pleasant ). [1] https://www.coursera.org/learn/programming-languages/

One of the best courses ever.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#467

Post by glouwbug »

shitoujizu wrote: post #396
returningfory wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

sometimes feels very sad about this since one's value should be reflected by the awesome projects he has done. I think it's just laziness of the FAANG companies. If the interviewer is well prepared and keeps digging the resume, then he should know the candidate is good or not. But by leetcoding, it's simpler for them, just keep asking the repeated questions.

From my personal experience, a company wants a "yes man", someone who will do as they command. From their perspective, if you can't pass (or refuse!) the coding challenge, you're already in the red flag zone. That's just how it is.

The funny thing is that a single fairly large personal project will develop your engineering skills 42 times that of the hundred something leetcode problems you solved for your FAANG interviews.

One teaches deep long term critical thinking. The other short term critical thinking. You won't see any small short sighted systems out in the real world.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#468

Post by miqkt »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #443
miqkt wrote: post #415

D3 for work, and Russian out of pure (seemingly masochistic) interest. I'm a native English speaker and Russian would be my fourth language. Perhaps I'm simply approaching the limits of my language ability, but the grammar rules with cases that I've learnt so far are doing my head in. It's very discouraging. I don't intend on becoming completely fluent, and so I'm trying to find shortcuts to be fuzzy about the volume…

I'm also learning Russian at the moment! I'm a native English speaker and am presently dealing with the current global events while cooped up in Siberia. What have you found difficult? What resources are you using? For me, I tried memorizing the rules for cases, but it was a complete waste of time: it was trivia disconnected from any usage of the language. What is (slowly) working for me is focusing on a single phras…

Oh wow, stay safe!

Thank you for sharing your experiences and the YouTube channel recommendation.

I've been alternating between the interactive lessons on http://learnrussian.rt.com/ and "The New Penguin Russian Course". I've been enjoying the former a lot more because there's audio to accompany written content, which helps when I try to enunciate words. There are also tests, which helps me measure retention. The latter book feels more like dry reading to me, but coverage seems very comprehensive.

I haven't been learning for all that long, but the two things that have been regularly catching me out are:

- Knowing which "o" letters in the word are stressed, in order to pronounce it correctly (I default to reading them as "o" when they should instead be "a")

- Looking up new words in sentences is a bit harder because they often occur in conjugated forms (i.e. not only verbs, but nouns too)

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#469

Post by CGamesPlay »

spydr wrote: post #432
miqkt wrote: post #415

D3 for work, and Russian out of pure (seemingly masochistic) interest. I'm a native English speaker and Russian would be my fourth language. Perhaps I'm simply approaching the limits of my language ability, but the grammar rules with cases that I've learnt so far are doing my head in. It's very discouraging. I don't intend on becoming completely fluent, and so I'm trying to find shortcuts to be fuzzy about the volume…

So you actually find it difficult? I am a native Russian speaker and have also taken 3 quarters of Russian in college. Compared to English I found the grammar much easier to understand. A word is read exactly how you would sound out each letter (with a few exceptions). Ukrainian grammar is even more simple.

I have no difficulty pointing out the exceptions to strict "read-as-written" in Russian, but it is definitely much more consistent than English. The cases are totally foreign to an English speaker, though. I also find the variety of Russian motion verbs to be a hurdle.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#470

Post by nstart »

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…

This sounds fun. Curious what you read about storytelling that sparked an added interest in world building?
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