Ask HN: What's your process for learning?

For me, I deliberately split across multiple topics/books because my brain has different thresholds of concentration depending on time of day. The early mornings are best for more challenging subjects (e.g. math, deep learning algorithms, etc). At night, it's easier to read softer topics like history and politics. I think it's important to pay attention to your brain's energy levels and when/how it gets distracted. With that knowledge, you optimize your learning schedule around that.

>- Do you use any tools to track your resources, todos, notes, or goals?

Since learning time is finite, I think it's a important to put together a little curriculum of all the topics you want to learn. Prioritize them.

>Are there any pain points you have while learning

Another piece of advice that nobody ever seems to emphasize (but I wish I had known early in life) is that there are topics that will be a waste of time to learn. In my case, I regret I spent hours on PowerBuilder, IBM DB2, and DOS batch scripting with VBScript. It doesn't mean those skills are bad for others but a little research would have made me realize there were other more important skills to spend precious hours on. (Time spent learning X is time not spent on learning Y.) The tldr is that people will often evangelize things for you to learn that you really don't need to learn. They have good intentions with their advice but they don't know the complete picture of your life's goals.

> it is like throwing mud to the wall hoping that it sticks

I must have not explained it well because that's the exact opposite of what I'm talking about. It's not about what sticks, it's about creating the connect-the-dots

> It's much more effective to focus on each topic and try to remember and repeat the informations just read.

Effective for what? Assuming that a neural net is a good approximation of the human learning model, why do nns tend to be be trained over multiple epochs?

You're not reading a book five times, cover to cover. That's not a productive use of your time. Instead, you should breeze through the table of contents. Skim the first chapter. Still interested? Skip to the last chapter and read that. Jump around to the parts that interest you. Read through it again with a broad outline of what you're reading. Encounter a boring section? Skip ahead by twenty pages or drop the book altogether.

This is the best strategy for reading books for knowledge, and not just to say you've read a certain book.

1. bookmarks: pinboard.in / chrome plugin, add bookmark - add any relevant tags

2. backlog: todoist.com with tagging

3. speed read: beelinereader.com / found this to be useful but didnt use that often

4. reading offline: kindle

5. watching videos faster: video speed controller from chrome store