Ask HN: What are you learning? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#731

Post by billfruit » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 12:59 PM UTC

enhdless wrote: post #338

I'm trying to learn to draw. I feel comfortable enough with my technical skills where I feel like I can pick up a new language or framework with relative ease, so I want to switch gears and improve my drawing and visual communication skills. I believe that any project can benefit from a compelling visual component. For now, I've been trying to start slow and just have fun; for example, telling myself to do three quic…

I recommend John Ruskin's classic "The Elements of Drawing".

"Supposing then that you are ready to take a certain amount of pains, and to bear a little irksomeness and a few disappointments bravely, I can promise you that an hour's practice a day for six months, or an hour's practice every other day for twelve months, or, disposed in whatever way you find convenient, some hundred and fifty hours' practice, will give you sufficient power of drawing faithfully whatever you want to draw, and a good judgment, up to a certain point, of other people's work: of which hours if you have one to spare at present, we may as well begin at once."

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#732

Post by tomxor » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 1:00 PM UTC

jfkebwjsbx wrote: post #675

tomxor wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My goal is to attain a balance of least dependencies and boilerplate. From what I've read so far it seems that implementing xclient protocols directly would require considerably more boilerplate than using XCB, (and my understanding is that XCB is just that: a generic xclient implementation and nothing more). Please do elaborate if I'm wrong though! I would be delighted if it's possible to implement a simple subset m…

I meant using Xlib, the client library for X11, which is going to always be available if you are using X! You can of course implement the library parts yourself, but that is more boilerplate.

XCB is actually lower level than xlib, in that sense it is more directly using X11 because unlike xlib it only really implements the client protocol and wraps it up into an interface.

I was however planning on trying out Xlib anyway on my path of exploration from simplest/lowest level to complex/higher level libraries: fbdev, DRM < DirectFB, libdrm < XCB < Xlib < SDL et al.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#733

Post by shivekkhurana » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 1:05 PM UTC

david_w wrote: post #721

shivekkhurana wrote: post #464

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…

Each kit is designed to support a family of 4 for 1 month. That's some freaking "kit" !!!

For the curious, we also published how we assemble these kits: https://karuna2020.org/guides/ration-and-safety-kit-assembly...

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#734

Post by tomxor » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 1:10 PM UTC

idoby wrote: post #603

tomxor wrote: post #10

... Don't laugh: C I learnt programming mainly through various scripting languages, some of which had some relatively simple visual output available, which I personally found invaluable for learning and visualizing. I realized that better visual output was the main thing holding me back from doing more in C since there are so many options, often complex, involving much boilerplate. So my mini project is essentially e…

Why would I laugh? I've done a lot of C programming over the years and I still consider it one of the most elegant languages I've had the opportunity to work with. With the right skillset, you can be as productive as a programmer of any other language or system. And it's great to see where some of the things we take for granted in programming, come from. If you want to draw pixels, give Cairo a try. It's fun to use!

Nice to hear from people still enthusiastic about C :)

Thanks for the suggestion, I hadn't considered Cairo, for some reason I thought it was only for SVG, maybe from it's use in Firefox. I will try it out once I get out of XCB territory.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#735

Post by collyw » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 1:11 PM UTC

freddref wrote: post #701

collyw wrote: post #689

I really think the idea of constantly learning (something new) is pushed too much in our field. I think we should encourage mastery in fewer topics rather than shallow superficial knowledge of lots of things. It's a balance I know, and we shouldn't be super focused especially early on in our careers. But at my current job we have a huge tech stack and a tiny team, I am constantly learning, but never in any depth, jus…

Right, I think the key is learning something new in an area where you know the least. Even getting to know the simplest concepts can go a long way. My favorite example: cropping a photo to improve composition. It's simple and easy to do, but it can have a comparatively large impact on a photo. Learning more and more specialized tech can give diminishing returns.

Yes that makes sense to an extent. The problem is that people were insisting on using MongoDB for problems better suited to a relational DB when it was faishionable, and now that decision lives on 6 years later.

Or I see a lot of CV's where people collect web frameworks - which essentially do the same thing. Yet whenever I inherit Django code, it seems to be done by someone with only the most basic knowledge of how to get things done.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#736

Post by CodeGlitch » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 1:12 PM UTC

Janani Ravi's Machine Learning course on PluralSight[1]

It's using scikit-learn, which I've been meaning to pick-up for awhile. Other than that, learning how to use the ELK stack (ElasticSearch, Kibana) for some network-traffic analysis stuff I've been meaning to implement.

I think we'll all come out of this period a lot smarter :)

[1] https://pluralsight.com

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#737

Post by david_w » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 1:15 PM UTC

stdlin wrote: post #669

nequalstim wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here :) Just started reading At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others by Sarah Bakewell It has a really nice narrative and tells the story of the aforementioned. Kierkegaard also makes some occurrences.

if you tend to like that book I would highly recommended Walter Kaufman's Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre and Goethe, Kant, and Hegel

Second this also. Also enjoyed Will To Power as a kind of well of "things well said, which make you think, " even if they're not strictly correct.

Bertrand Russell wrote a lot of very accessible Western philosophy overview or survey books which I found orienting:

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/a-history-of-western-philosoph...

and

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-problems-of-philosophy_ber...

the former is online here:

http://www.ntslibrary.com/PDF%20Books/History%20of%20Western...

About this one he said :(paraphrasing from memory now), "A big book is a big evil. You may ask why then the author proposes to lay before you the present work..."

He's a hoot.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#738

Post by lostsoul8282 » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 1:16 PM UTC

I've been dividing my life into different parts - fitness, technology, wisdom, food and love.

Fitness, I cannot hit the gym anymore so at home I'm doing body weight training goals. Current goal is 1k squats a day(done), 1k burpees day(70/day right now, It's 1 week in so progress is very fast right now), and a bodyweight program my gym is offering.

For tech, I'm learning machine learning applied to a environmental program I'm trying to build which I'm passionate about.

Wisdom, this is subjective but I'm going back into old philosophy books. Just finished some work by Stoics and will read the plague by Albert Camus.

food, Every other day I'm trying to learn how to cook something new. I tried baking which is awesome, today I will try to make a chilli on a pot(never did that before).

Love, this is the hardest but also the easiest in theory. I'm trying to connect to the things that I love but because life got busy, I didn't connect to as much. This included just having conversations with friends, training my dog, loving how my body can do complex movements(squats/burpees), the beauty of technology, or just observing nature.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#739

Post by joflicu » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 1:17 PM UTC

Twisol wrote: post #337

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This really reminds me, it's been two decades now since I've taken _any_ Algebra. I'd really love to go re-learn it from the basics on up. I mean, I still remember a lot of it here and there but some sort of refresher course up to doing more advanced would be awesome. Any recommendations?

I think Linear Algebra is traditionally recommended, since you can readily apply a lot of geometric intuitions while picking up the mathematical ones. The drawback is that you have to make sure you're not cheating yourself of the mathematics by over-relying on the geometry. Sheldon Axler's acclaimed "Linear Algebra Done Right" is freely available as a download [1] through July due to the pandemic. I've not read it (y…

I wonder whether HN has heard of "Linear Algebra" by Hoffman and Kunze. I learned from it as an undergraduate and remember it being told that it was a classic. Another more abstract book is by the great Halmos: "Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces". Both books will stretch and entertain you.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#740

Post by tomxor » Mon, Apr 06, 2020, 1:20 PM UTC

CmdrKrool wrote: post #583

tomxor wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My goal is to attain a balance of least dependencies and boilerplate. From what I've read so far it seems that implementing xclient protocols directly would require considerably more boilerplate than using XCB, (and my understanding is that XCB is just that: a generic xclient implementation and nothing more). Please do elaborate if I'm wrong though! I would be delighted if it's possible to implement a simple subset m…

I'm not necessarily recommending you go this route in general, but this is a fantastically actionable article for going deep on various Linux graphics APIs including X11 right on the socket: http://betteros.org/tut/graphics1.php

Yes, I really like this article, I used it to get going with fbdev before I moved on to XCB, but only skimmed the remainder since it was avoiding libraries completely it was getting a little verbose (although on second thought DRM doesn't look too bad, and also I missed libdrm should probably see how much that can do).

Just realized now revisiting this that the author also showed how to directly implement xclient! the example is rather large confirming my suspicions RE parent comments.