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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?

#691

Post by trianglem »

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…

- I take commission based wood working projects - Cannot use a manual camera - Wife cooks most nights - always take a nightly walk with my dog - listen to classical music with my baby everyday

I’m not doing too badly by this list and I’m relatively happy.

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

#692

Post by astura »

the_gastropod wrote: post #401
jdgiese wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you care about it, it's easy to save money by cooking yourself with this one crazy trick: leftovers. It takes very little extra effort to make a much larger batch of whatever you're cooking. It's pretty simple to cook ~10 servings of a solid meal that costs ~$0.25 (e.g., Chana Masala w/ brown rice) each with about ~2 hours of time all in with grocery shopping + cooking + cleaning. Sure, if you're making $200+/hour…

The trade off here is that now you're eating the same meal for 10 meals straight. Most people would rather not do that if they could afford not to.

It doesn't particularly bother me to eat the same thing everyday, but some people absolutely hate it. I am good friends with someone who absolutely refuses to eat leftovers, ever.

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

#693

Post by trianglem »

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’ve spent the better part of a decade trying to learn an instrument and I’m terrible at the guitar. I guess it’s just not for some people.

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

#694

Post by ajsharp »

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #226
bitexploder wrote: post #35

I will share one that has served me well for over 20 years: learn RDBMS and SQL. Learn normal forms, good schema design, and how to write complex queries. NoSQL adopters often avoided schemas like the plague and ended up with unmaintainable messes after a few years. I have seen more than a few NoSQL -> SQL conversions by now. Data is the most important thing in your app. Give it a great design. Plus databases like Po…

To expand on this, learn about some of the neat things you can do within a SELECT statement. Learn how the JOIN syntax works[0], and how to use OUTER JOINs. Learn about WINDOW[1] functions and what kind of problems they can solve. In particular, many reporting needs can probably be solved with WINDOW functions instead of tracking state as you loop through a result set in application code. Learn about Common Table Exp…

WINDOW is incredible. Probably among the most useful yet least understood areas of SQL.

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

#695

Post by unnouinceput »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #578
unnouinceput wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, some will. But none of HN crowd. We'll all die, me, you, him.

Well, not me. That's my point. I live in a well-stocked rural setting with independent food, water, energy.

walls? moat? traps? guns and a lot of ammo? because you answer "no" to any of that, your well-stocked rural setting going to be visited by the hoards fleeing from city and depleted in a week, leaving you to die of starvation in next 3. So that month I was talking about, still going to happen

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

#696

Post by qorrect »

mattrp wrote: post #515
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem I find is if you aren't doing it regularly everything takes three times as long as a it would take a contractor.

just like writing code!

It's almost like we have an interdependent society where we each specialize and use the money we make to pay other people to do their specialty!

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

#697

Post by NateEag »

terry_y_comb wrote: post #678
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…

Agree. Cooking works out much better when in relationships. I am surprised BlueApron isn't doing well as they taught me how to cook, what to get, in a relatively simple instructions.

That may be part of why they aren't doing well.

Once you know how to cook, you don't really need the training wheels any more, and the cost of their overhead is just that: extra cost.

I have a hard time imagining them beating grocery stores / delivery long-term.

Maybe if they get enough customers to get economies of scale so large they can offer meals cheaper than grocery stores, despite their extra overhead (meal planning, recipe development, and software maintenance come to mind immediately).

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

#698

Post by JoeAltmaier »

unnouinceput wrote: post #695
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, not me. That's my point. I live in a well-stocked rural setting with independent food, water, energy.

walls? moat? traps? guns and a lot of ammo? because you answer "no" to any of that, your well-stocked rural setting going to be visited by the hoards fleeing from city and depleted in a week, leaving you to die of starvation in next 3. So that month I was talking about, still going to happen

Well, not to reveal too much, but we're not going to be giving anything away to the 'hoards'.

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

#699

Post by samsolomon »

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…

A few tips I learned from a professional chef that changed everything:

— Mise en place (Get everything you need prepped)

— Clean as you cook

Get a bunch of small glass dishes and get all the ingredients you need measured, chopped and placed into those dishes. This will make combining them effortless when cooking.

If you've done prep, you'll have some down time while cooking. As you finish using pans and utensils wash them and put them away. By the time you're done cooking you'll also be almost done cleaning—save the pan that needs to soak a bit in the sink.

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

#700

Post by ianai »

yibg wrote: post #648
Jtsummers wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cooking for myself became easier when I started using rice/quinoa/beans + meat with vegetables. The first part is a single pot, and can usually be made in large enough quantity to last most of the week (via reheating or reuse, like old rice into fried rice). The second part can also be done in a single pot. And I have found that vegetables last far enough into the week that usually one trip covers me. To handle runni…

I had periods of doing something similar too. Make a pot of stew / curry / jambalaya with rice, eat with some salad. Advantage of stew / curry is they can be frozen and later thawed and reheated. Over time though it got really monotonous for me. I like good food, and importantly variety. Feels like there is some opportunity here. A way to scale home cooking for a bunch of individuals. Like if a few people in close pr…

The real thing would be to have a freezer. Cook enough for now and freeze a cache for later. Do this quick enough and you’ll be able to stock up multiple recipes in the freezer with omit needing to cook once a week (for me, preferably). My trouble is my apartment won’t allow a freezer.
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