Ask HN: What's your process for learning? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What's your process for learning?

#51

Post by majewsky » Mon, Jun 26, 2017, 7:02 PM UTC

Joeri wrote: post #40

I almost always only learn things that I can immediately apply afterwards, because otherwise I find I don't retain enough useful knowledge that I have to go through the same learning resources again by the time I need the knowledge. I have two learning modes. When I first come across a new topic, e.g. hadoop, I will go broad and skim as many learning materials as I can to get an idea of the lay of the land. Once I fe…

> I almost always only learn things that I can immediately apply afterwards, because otherwise I find I don't retain enough useful knowledge that I have to go through the same learning resources again by the time I need the knowledge.

This. A friend of mine (senior sysadmin on a different team) has ranted about how his boss put tasks like "Learn Docker" in his list of goals for the year. First, such a task is hilariously underdefined. Second, if you're not going to apply the knowledge, it will be forgotten within a few weeks, and time spent studying it will be wasted.

Re: Ask HN: What's your process for learning?

#52

Post by killjoywashere » Mon, Jun 26, 2017, 7:04 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #34

killjoywashere wrote: post #31

def learn(thing, max_time=0, max_attempts=1): while run_time Always set a time limit or a maximum number of attempts. Default to at least try (you may already know it). Edit: I don't write code very much, and certainly don't claim to earn my living on it.

Pedantically, aside from the values that are tested without being initialized, with the default values, this always fails at the first test of the outer loop, without making any attempts.

Good thing I don't write code for a living.

Re: Ask HN: What's your process for learning?

#53

Post by 1001101 » Mon, Jun 26, 2017, 7:09 PM UTC

adamnemecek wrote: post #6

For books, you have to generally read them like 5 times. The first pass might take me like an hour, it's mostly to establish a general mental framework for what's in the book (actually try to read the table of content, and like familiarize yourself with the words you might not know). On the second pass, you will actually try to read the book and retain like 20% of what you read. On the next one try the next 30%. This…

I do a bit of a twist on this : I get as many books on the same subject as I can and read them all at least once. I typically find that each one has valuable nuggets, one really clicks with my brain, and all contribute to scaffolding a solid internal representation.

Re: Ask HN: What's your process for learning?

#54

Post by laythea » Mon, Jun 26, 2017, 7:13 PM UTC

pdog wrote: post #25

tigershark wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is extremely inefficient to just read a book 5 times, it is like throwing mud to the wall hoping that it sticks. It's much more effective to focus on each topic and try to remember and repeat the informations just read. Having a general mental framework on the book on the other hand is very helpful.

Sorry, but you're wrong. 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…

I agree that this scatter based approach to learning works very well for me, mainly because I am always interested in what I am learning. This approach also works for narrow scope based topics, by "flitting" between resources (internet links etc) rather than obsess about a single (possibly badly worded) article/tutorial.

Re: Ask HN: What's your process for learning?

#55

Post by gregw134 » Mon, Jun 26, 2017, 7:24 PM UTC

Joeri wrote: post #40

I almost always only learn things that I can immediately apply afterwards, because otherwise I find I don't retain enough useful knowledge that I have to go through the same learning resources again by the time I need the knowledge. I have two learning modes. When I first come across a new topic, e.g. hadoop, I will go broad and skim as many learning materials as I can to get an idea of the lay of the land. Once I fe…

We definitely need a well designed website or search engine for learning materials. I've wanted an algorithmic way to figure out the most useful websites to learn a topic. Perhaps if you had data on which websites users bookmarked, you could cluster websites by topic and also figure out which sites are bookmarked by beginners and which sites are bookmarked by experts. Of course a simple crowd-sourced upvoting system might work just as well.

Re: Ask HN: What's your process for learning?

#56

Post by garysieling » Mon, Jun 26, 2017, 7:40 PM UTC

I built a tool to hep me find good talks, https://www.findlectures.com. I've been curating some of the best of these and sending them out in an email (http://www.findlectures.com/emails), which has forced me to push a lot further exploring available topics.

I split my time between multiple topics, generally aiming for variety over depth, and collect recommendations for books / speakers from various places (friends, Hacker News, the evening news, etc).

I've found that having multiple simultanous books or project s is helpful, because they can interact in interesting ways E.g. one author has accidental insight into the topic of a second book, for instance, or a footnote to a problem in one project solves a major problem for the other project.

Re: Ask HN: What's your process for learning?

#57

Post by photonios » Mon, Jun 26, 2017, 7:45 PM UTC

jvanloov wrote: post #15

Doing. I pick a project that interests me at some point; currently "I'd like to have an internet music player that sits on my cupboard and doesn't require my tablet". Then: * decide on platform (CC3200, because it has wifi, enough processing power, and I happened to have one) * build something that decodes an MP3 stream (investigate, pick Helix as the decoder, make it run on the CC) * think about hardware (DAC, ampli…

Came here to say this. Couldn't have said it better.

Re: Ask HN: What's your process for learning?

#58

Post by cgag » Mon, Jun 26, 2017, 7:55 PM UTC

Multiple books, rotating between them relatively quickly (interleaving), usually 20 minutes.

Make anki cards for key points.

If I'm actually dedicating time to studying that's how I do it, haven't had that session in a while though.

Re: Ask HN: What's your process for learning?

#59

Post by kowdermeister » Mon, Jun 26, 2017, 7:58 PM UTC

adamnemecek wrote: post #6

For books, you have to generally read them like 5 times. The first pass might take me like an hour, it's mostly to establish a general mental framework for what's in the book (actually try to read the table of content, and like familiarize yourself with the words you might not know). On the second pass, you will actually try to read the book and retain like 20% of what you read. On the next one try the next 30%. This…

> The first pass might take me like an hour

How do you fast read it? It's more like skimming it rather than actually understanding it. It would be frustrating for me, I'm more like a perfectionist who hates to leave behind not understood paragraphs. The idea is neat though, I lean the same way, but it's not true how I read books.

Re: Ask HN: What's your process for learning?

#60

Post by awa » Mon, Jun 26, 2017, 7:59 PM UTC

pdog wrote: post #25

tigershark wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is extremely inefficient to just read a book 5 times, it is like throwing mud to the wall hoping that it sticks. It's much more effective to focus on each topic and try to remember and repeat the informations just read. Having a general mental framework on the book on the other hand is very helpful.

Sorry, but you're wrong. 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…

I am reading "How to read a book" and the process you described is akin to inspectional reading. The book goes in great detail how to utilize the inspectional reading process and improve it.

It also describes the next step "analytical reading" which comprises of mostly asking questions about the topic in general and about the author's intent.