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Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

#531

Post by jasonford1 »

randomNumber7 wrote: post #334
dredmorbius wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every local library could store the full digitised book contents of the LoC[1] for about $5,000. That this isn't happening is a crime. ________________________________ Notes: 1. I get about 200 TB based on 40 million books, OCRd at 5 MB per book. A 2 TB SATA 5200 RPM drive runs about $100, and the full collection would fit on 50 such drives. Full optical scans are ~10x larger. The LoC's collection includes another 13…

> That this isn't happening is a crime. I agree and like the discussion you guy's started from my seemingly innocent comment. I add one argument why I think scientific papers and nonfiction books (Library Genisis) should be free (and legal) ... You often hear the complaint that so many people are uneducated and believe in conspiracy theories (or other stupid things). This is (imho) problematic for a democracy. Giving…

Re: Uneducated / conspiracy theories... I think you are discounting the general public’s desire to seek knowledge outside of what the ‘engagement’ driven algorithms feed them.

The algorithm’s prime directive is at odds with serving quality books and papers because they are not as engaging relative to fiction passed as non-fiction (lies) and misinformation.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

#532

Post by Trailing2Dots »

While my professional life was going well, my personal life sucked. I considered my self a self-development junkie - trying one method after another. I lucked onto a seminar called "The Secret of Creating Your Future". One of its tenets is goal setting. This seminar was an introduction to NLP - a worthy goal. My original goal was to better my professional development, but I discovered that my personal development was improving enormously as well.

Eventually I was enrolled in courses aimed primarily at professional therapists. They certainly welcomed me as they need people to practice with as they themselves are learning new techniques.

This series has enormously transformed both my professional and personal life. Highly recommended.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

#533

Post by npsimons »

bluehatbrit wrote: post #452
npsimons wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I spent some time a decade ago learning better emacs skills (macros on the fly). This. I spent a week in 2000 focusing on learning Emacs. To this day, I'll use downtime to browse through packages, forums and documentation looking for new (to me) things to tweak Emacs with, or new (mostly CLI) tools. I just discovered the various rainbow modes last month, and life is so much better.

Do you have any advice of where to get started learning Emacs? I don't get on with vim and have the very basic editor / navigation commands down in emacs, but finding well written learning resources past that point seems really difficult. Should I learn a package manager before Emacs lisp? Or start learning some of the built in more advanced functionality past opening and editing files? I'm struggling to find resourc…

I just went through the Emacs tutorial (C-h t), then used Emacs everyday, for everything. I pick up bits and pieces here and there across the web. I went through Chassel's Emacs lisp book a while back, but can't remember most of it as I felt it's more aimed at developing Emacs itself.

A lot of Emacs is self-documenting and I use that. Look at the docs for the current mode (C-h m), learn keybindings (C-h b), change settings (M-x customize-group), read the info pages (C-h i m emacs).

Funnily enough, studying Common Lisp has helped me more easily read elisp.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

#534

Post by alignedclarity »

gtf21 wrote: post #67

As a founder / CTO the best money I have spent is on a really good coach. My coach (my cofounder's too, and now some of our leadership team) doesn't have particular expertise in founding or leading companies, but works with many founders, and she's not technical, but the things I think I have found hardest to learn are mostly around people management and leadership, which I think are underrated skills that require se…

Finding a stellar coach is much like making any other hire - their skills and style need to match your needs. It is definitely worth speaking to a few individuals to find a perfect fit.

I am a leadership coach with 15+ years experience hiring and developing top talent for Google, Amazon, IBM, and more than 30 startups. I love helping leaders build clarity and confidence.

If you'd like to book a complimentary call, you can find me at https://calendly.com/alignedclarity/discovery

Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

#535

Post by joelwallis »

vorpalhex wrote: post #362
gadders wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>For instance, my favorite tactic when someone is pushing hard to sell me something or negotiate is the "Appeal to the authority" (i.e. "Let me first talk about it to my wife (or co-founder) about it." In the UK, some sleazy sellers of things like double glazing won't even start discussing the sale unless both husband and wife are present to prevent this tactic.

Suddenly time to become poly. "Uh, let me ask my second husband about this too..."

Omg it would be legendary

Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

#536

Post by lelele »

michjedi wrote: post #138

Books. I read about 30-100 work-related books a year and have seen salary double every few years. I try to alternate books between different areas, more or less from these sections: Technical(on currently used technology) Technical(unused tech vaguely related and may be useful) Management Domain(scientific textbooks, best to search from related university course reading lists) Biographies/accounts/events of typical a…

> I read about 30-100 work-related books a year and have seen salary double every few years.

Your salary didn't double because of books. I read a lot of work-related books, too, but my salary has been stagnant for years.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

#537

Post by tobiasbischoff »

I was always working on laptops ever. But given that travel moved to zero and will stay that way for some time I invested in a maxed out desktop PC that triple boots into linux, win10 and MacOS - a real dream and productivity workhorse.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best money you have spent on professional development?

#538

Post by equality_1138 »

ploika wrote: post #515
equality_1138 wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll pass - can't figure out how well you know about Enron and its similarity to other financial scandals, ripple effects of management incompetence, and corporate governance in general. I don't think it would help to provide just one or two examples at this point.

That's such a bizarrely condescending comment. What on Earth are you trying to talking about?

I'm not giving concrete examples about my job, nor my thoughts on Enron in this thread. Sorry if I exaggerated the point but I do find it offensive to get a grilling about my private life. Not woke at all.
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