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Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

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Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

#661

Post by jeromegv »

yibg wrote: post #646
throwawaypa123 wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought food to cook for 2 days at a time. Requires 3 visits to grocery store per week. Given your shopping list is small doesn't take that much.

Yes but then you loose the bulk discounts. Getting 2 days (for one person) worth of veggies, meat etc isn't much cheaper than eating out. Plus the time spent doing the grocery shopping 3 times a week, with the time to cook the individual portion, then cleaning up for me just wasn't worth it. Individual preference obviously, but just didn't make sense for me most of the time.

You can definitely argue on the time aspect, it is definitely much longer, but if you actually start adding tax and tip and really look at transactions, there's no way that eating out is anywhere close than food cost.

Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

#662

Post by Xcelerate »

yibg wrote: post #612
tnel77 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What blows my mind is how much I took my ability to cook for granted. So many people my age (millennial) can barely cook anything. I have friends who eat out every single meal of every single day. People give me weird looks when every single workday I have the same answer to “you wanna go out and get some lunch?” “Nope. I have leftovers!”

I used to eat out almost every meal as well. It wasn't because I didn't know how to cook, and I even like cooking. The economics (monetary and time) just didn't work out for one person. I can't buy in bulk (at least not fresh produce) because there is only one of me, so the cost is about the same as eating out. It also takes me a while to cook, clean etc, which takes more time than just eating out some where or getti…

I love cooking and have recently become obsessed with it, but doing it well is extremely time consuming. The best equipment is all meant to be washed by hand (knives, aluminum baking sheets, cast iron and stainless steel skillets, etc.) and cleaning all this easily takes over an hour per meal, never mind the time to actually cook the meal (which, depending on what I’m cooking takes 1-4 hours of active prep time). Also, finding high quality ingredients requires planning and trips to farmers markets. I could save a bunch of time and money by buying from the local grocery store and using cheap dishwasher safe products, but I’ll be dissatisfied with the end result, so I might as well eat out somewhere inexpensive then.

Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

#663

Post by omar12 »

chrissnell wrote: post #100

Some suggestions: - Build something. A new workbench for your office. Fix up an old car. Build a pull-up bar in your garage. Use your hands, cut some wood and metal, and treat yourself to a new tool or two. Do this with every project and you will have a nice tool collection before you know it. - Learn to take pictures on a manual camera. You can do this with a modern automatic camera if it has a manual mode. Learn ab…

Cooking is one of my favorite activities that I'm actually decent at. One "cooking sin" that I do is that I don't taste my food throughout cooking. The general feedback on my cooking has been positive.

When I try and cook new dishes, I do it by theme. The theme can be:

* Ingredients (eggs, poultry, grains, tomatoes)

* Courses (breakfast [eggs, pancakes from scratch], dinner, desserts [flan, custard]

* Execution (baking, sauté, oven)

* Cuisine (Mexican, Thai, French, Puertorican)

You will easily overlap the themes the more you cook, the themes are a starting point.

Two of my favorite books that the audience here might appreciate are The Food lab[0] and Cooking for Geeks[1].

* [0]: https://www.amazon.com/Food-Lab-Cooking-Through-Science-eboo...

* [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Cooking-Geeks-Science-Great-Hacks/dp/...

Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

#664

Post by jjcm »

brlewis wrote: post #656

I'm surprised at all these great non-technical suggestions and few coding suggestions. I'll supply some web-focused ones for the next 3 years. In 2020 learn TypeScript really well. Learn all the ways to compose types. It's earned its popularity. In 2021 learn deno. It's going to be big. In 2022 learn the best way to structure a CSS project. I think we will have figured out what it is by then.

++ to typescript and deno. Deno might not end up being the runtime, but at some point we're likely to see a dedicated typescript runtime. Getting on top of it now and understanding the implications is worth being aware of.

One other thing I'd add to this is learn webcomponents. Likely we'll see things like React/Vue/etc use them under the hood in the future, but it's worth learning what they're good at and what they aren't.

Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

#665

Post by MFLoon »

heinrichhartman wrote: post #13
kerkeslager wrote: post #9

Starting conversations with strangers. Squat and deadlift. Eating healthier. Doing something kind for someone else every day. Honesty. Listening to people you disagree with. Driving safer (this is the most dangerous thing we do on a regular basis). Meditation.

deadlift's are quite dangerous for the untrained. Start with "Fix Rounded Shoulders" and "Fix Anterior Pelvic Tilt" if you have not already done so. Plenty of great advice on YouTube on those topics.

> deadlift's are quite dangerous for the untrained.

This is just false. Sure, the untrained should get some instruction on proper form, and start with manageable weights, as with any exercise. But deadlifting is the least dangerous of the power lifts, and far less dangerous than half the activities in the average WOD.

> Start with "Fix Rounded Shoulders" and "Fix Anterior Pelvic Tilt"

Definitely don't. These are non-scientific maladies invented by fitness personalities to convince you to pay for their specialized expertise to fix your particular biomechanical imperfections. You don't need perfect posture as a prerequisite to benefiting from deadlifting, or any kind of exercise. If you're physically capable of doing the movement, even if your version of the movement is imperfect and not adhering to the mechanical ideal, you're able to benefit from it.

Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

#666

Post by pawelk »

8ytecoder wrote: post #533
chrissnell wrote: post #100

Some suggestions: - Build something. A new workbench for your office. Fix up an old car. Build a pull-up bar in your garage. Use your hands, cut some wood and metal, and treat yourself to a new tool or two. Do this with every project and you will have a nice tool collection before you know it. - Learn to take pictures on a manual camera. You can do this with a modern automatic camera if it has a manual mode. Learn ab…

+1 on all of the above. I just want to add one thing - Learn an instrument. Just for fun. You don't have to play in an orchestra or a band. I came to this thread expecting it to be about tech skills, glad to see this comment at the top. Overall, I'm more grounded and happier for it (and less depressed).

I am a hobby (unplugged) woodworker with a quite large collection of vintage tools... it all started because I needed some basic temporary furniture for the new house and w were broke enough to not be able to afford it - the kitchen I built is still around after 7 years and I have developed a lot in this area.

I use manual cameras, or digital cameras in manual mode / with manual lenses because that's how I learned photography in 1990's

I like to cook, 95% of our meals are home made, I can prepare a whole week worth of meals in abut 3 hours, including cleaning. I usually just improvise, my wife says I can make a delicious meal out of an empty fridge...

Yet music somehow eludes me - and it is THE thing I have always wanted to be proficient at way more than any of the above. I just don't have any idea how to approach it. Let's say I get a musical instrument - be it a piano (keyboard), a guitar, saxophone or percussion. What's next? Practice the notes until I'm "touch-typing" them? Then try to mix and match? Try to play some sheet music or repeat what I've heard before by brute-forcing? I am actually able to re-create a simple melody by trying the keys on a toy keyboard, but in all the other areas (woodworking, cooking, photography) I went almost straight to improvisation - which I enjoy the most - and I have the feeling that in music there is some set of basic skills required to unlock this, yet I don't know what it entails. Woodworking is all about hiding the imperfections, photography is about selecting the best shots / being prepared for lucky timing, and an imperfect meal can be (usually) fixed with herbs/spices/salt. Music is either spot on, or too far off to be tolerable - am I missing some middle ground opportunity here?

Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

#667

Post by baroomba »

maccard wrote: post #607
m3kw9 wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cooking plus cleaning is usually a 2 hour experience. So you really need to enjoy cooking to do it or if you have no choice. Yes I see most cookers here omit cleaning which is part of the deal

Theres two approaches to solving this. If there is more than one of you, or you have kids, then the person who cooks doesn't clean. The other (more sensible approach) is once you enter the kitchen, you don't leave it until the meal is done. If a meal takes 30 minutes from prep to plate, chances are a lot of that time is waiting. Cleaning during that time is how you minimise that cost. I cook every other night (and we…

I find it pretty hard to get cooking down to 30 minutes of actual clock time spent working, not counting cleanup (I do a decent job of cleaning as I go anyway). Most recipes with short nominal "hands-on time" achieve it by not accounting for the prep to have all the ingredients ready, as specified in the ingredients list (dicing vegetables, grinding & mixing spices, cutting up meat, that sort of thing) and usually the shorter the nominal time the more important it is to have all that stuff ready from the start, as there's little slack to do that as you're cooking.

Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

#668

Post by ako »

jdgiese wrote: post #369
astura wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have friends who eat out every single meal of every single day. I have friends who do too but it's not because they don't know how to cook, it's because they don't like to and don't wanna bother and can afford the luxury of having someone else to do it for them.

I love cooking sometimes, but then again, other-times I would rather spend my time working on a client project. When you add up the time spent: 1. planning meals (may be minimal if you can ad-hoc quickly) 2. walking/driving to the grocery store 3. cooking 4. cleaning It can easily be more expensive for an individual person (or even a couple) to cook than it is to eat out. (I think this makes intuitive sense too, sinc…

You need your daily excercise, going to the shop, cooking, cleaning all count towards 10k steps per day on your Fitbit.

Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

#669

Post by dillonmckay »

Xcelerate wrote: post #662
yibg wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to eat out almost every meal as well. It wasn't because I didn't know how to cook, and I even like cooking. The economics (monetary and time) just didn't work out for one person. I can't buy in bulk (at least not fresh produce) because there is only one of me, so the cost is about the same as eating out. It also takes me a while to cook, clean etc, which takes more time than just eating out some where or getti…

I love cooking and have recently become obsessed with it, but doing it well is extremely time consuming. The best equipment is all meant to be washed by hand (knives, aluminum baking sheets, cast iron and stainless steel skillets, etc.) and cleaning all this easily takes over an hour per meal, never mind the time to actually cook the meal (which, depending on what I’m cooking takes 1-4 hours of active prep time). Als…

What do you think the ‘somewhere inexpensive’ restaurant uses for ingredients and equipment?

Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

#670

Post by kls »

ravenstine wrote: post #413
komali2 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully support the value system here in that we both want people cooking for themselves more, but I have to say that sous vide cooked steaks taste like boiled meat to me, aka terrible. People around me are swear by it until I slap a ribeye onto the pan for them, high heat, making sure to render the fat. To each their own but imo a sous vide is a big, expensive, plastic waste of counter space.

It sounds like it's the people around you doing sous vide wrong and you're actually doing it correctly(by virtue of searing the steak). I've never heard anyone suggest eating a sous vide steak without searing it or using a torch to brown it, render the fat, etc. A sous vide steak should still taste at least halfway decent without searing because of the amount of salt and seasoning used in the process. Your viewpoint…

In culinary school we where taught that a steak does not touch the flame until it is room temperature. The reason for this is it shocks the steak and causes it to draw up, it takes longer to draw out the moisture in the surface and it allows some of the organic decay of the fat. Most restaurants use sous vide to short circuit this process as they can hold them in immersion below rare temp and then take them directly to the grill. Nothing wrong with this, it accomplishes the same end result and that is you don't seize the meat and cause it to draw up and you pull some of the moisture out of the surface while breaking down some of the fat.

I think most people mess up on doing it all in a pan due to the fact that they go from at least fridge cold to the pan. Put one on the counter, salt it, cover it and let it sit for an hour or two and most people will be surprised at how well of a steak they can produce in a pan. If one really wants a good crust, leave it salted and uncovered in the fridge to dry for 3 day. It takes a lot of energy to evaporate moisture and you need the moisture out of the surface to brown a steak rapidly.

That being said I use my sous vide machine to bring them to temp as it also does a better job of distributing the salt and garlic I like to use.

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