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Ask HN: What skills to acquire in 2019?

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Re: Ask HN: What skills to acquire in 2019?

#101

Post by philliphaydon »

vladf wrote: post #86
lwansbrough wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a lot of better ways to work out than crossfit. But I agree with the basic premise! Learn the skill of lifting heavy things and running farther than you’re willing to walk. I’d add to presentation skills: negotiation skills. I’ll recommend Chris Voss’ book “Never Split the Difference” as I have been to all my relatives this Christmas.

Can you elaborate on why other things are "better" than crossfit? I've found it to be very time-efficient and well-rounded.

CrossFit is an easy way to injure yourself.

Re: Ask HN: What skills to acquire in 2019?

#102

Post by sethammons »

vladf wrote: post #86
lwansbrough wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a lot of better ways to work out than crossfit. But I agree with the basic premise! Learn the skill of lifting heavy things and running farther than you’re willing to walk. I’d add to presentation skills: negotiation skills. I’ll recommend Chris Voss’ book “Never Split the Difference” as I have been to all my relatives this Christmas.

Can you elaborate on why other things are "better" than crossfit? I've found it to be very time-efficient and well-rounded.

A lot of folks give CrossFit crap (and a some of it is justified). It is hip to hate on it. If you can get a box that has a good owner/coach, CrossFit is an excellent way to learn about fitness and your limits. The biggest issue I have is the lack of quality control between gyms. The community/class aspects help push you, the types of movements and workouts can be very effective at both strength, cardio, and capacity. Work on mobilizing and form and you are golden with CrossFit.

Re: Ask HN: What skills to acquire in 2019?

#103

Post by freedomben »

Maultasche wrote: post #14

I've been learning Elixir, which is really good for creating concurrent and scalable systems. Concurrency has always been something that has fascinated me and I see in Elixir a chance to make very concurrent code without having to deal with locks, race conditions, and all the other icky low-level stuff. Elixir is also a functional language, making this is the first functional language I've learned, which is another r…

I second Elixir, but I'd add Phoenix to the pile, especially if you do any web programming. Read these two books, in this order, and buy them from pragprog.com since they are DRM free there:

1. Programming Elixir by Dave Thomas (https://pragprog.com/book/elixir16/programming-elixir-1-6)

2. Programming Phoenix by Chris McCord, Bruce Tate and José Valim (https://pragprog.com/book/phoenix14/programming-phoenix-1-4)

Re: Ask HN: What skills to acquire in 2019?

#104

Post by trevyn »

owl57 wrote: post #81
nilshauk wrote: post #6

I would love for us tech folk to dip our toes in idea history, hermeneutics and rhetoric. We need to think about the way we think and talk about the way we talk. I mean reflect on the state of things, instead of blindly increasing shareholder value. We glorify engagement, but we’re arguably glorifying how addictive our creations are. What if apps maximized for less time spent, like help users just do their work and g…

What if apps maximized for less time spent Today I used an automated delivery booth. At the end it reported in big letters: "you took your order in 2 minutes 12 seconds". Made me vividly remember the end-of-level screen in classic Doom. Maybe that's a good idea: make the session time prominently visible, to have an urge to optimize.

Like a package locker? Why did it take two minutes?

Re: Ask HN: What skills to acquire in 2019?

#105

Post by randcraw »

Writing. Clarity, brevity, and expressiveness are all too rare these days, especially in technical writing and presentations. Writing well can greatly improve your thought process and make your message sing.

I'd start by reading Strunk & White, which nicely addresses clarity and brevity, leaving only a source for expressiveness, which is basically storytelling. There I like the writing books by Steven King, Ray Bradbury, and Ursula LeGuin, but many other worthwhile primers of style are (almost) as good.

Then practice writing while critically reading the best works of good writers, carefully observing their techniques, and then stealing them liberally. Ask friends you trust to assess your work and explain what they liked, didn't like, and why.

Re: Ask HN: What skills to acquire in 2019?

#106

Post by rkho »

brianbreslin wrote: post #94
giladoved wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great advice! Do you know of any links/resources to help develop skills 2 and 3?

read Iwillteachyoutoberich.com to start on #2 his site is by no means the end all be all, but it will give you a start.

+1 to this, I think Ramit Sethi's material is a great introduction to financial knowledge. This year I'm following up with Bogleheads and, if I can handle it, The Intelligent Investor

Re: Ask HN: What skills to acquire in 2019?

#108

Post by mooreds »

kurosawa wrote: post #45

Do something that would be orthogonal to the current sum of your life experiences.

This!

If you have time off, do something risky that you wouldn't do normally. Why? Because soon enough you'll likely be back in the normal swing of things and unable to take that risk.

Examples:

Work on a farm

Do the Appalachian trail (or similar)

Take the train across Australia

Learn to ride a motorcycle

Learn to play guitar

Etc Etc

Re: Ask HN: What skills to acquire in 2019?

#109

Post by EpicEng »

jasode wrote: post #9

You don't state your programming background but you mentioned C# in previous comments. I would recommend machine learning as a very useful skill to acquire. I have to be more specific because "machine learning", "artificial intelligence", and "data science" are really large topics that can encompass difficult math and PhD research. For application programmers, I think a very realistic subset is using an existing "mac…

I don't mean to imply it's impossible, or throw out some appeal to authority, but dabbling in ML is not going to open doors for you. I worked in and around the field for more than a decade. Companies who are serious about this stuff can sniff a beginner out and they tend to want credentials. It's a deep subject, so that's not terribly uncalled for, and knowing how to throw a classifier together does not in any way mean you're competent and able to solve hard problems.

Not trying to be a downer, just my $0.02. For fun? Sure, go for. For career development? You had better be serious and ready to devote the next 5-10 years. I do not at all agree that ML is going to become a baseline skill.

Re: Ask HN: What skills to acquire in 2019?

#110

Post by crb002 »

Postgres, Rust, and Angular is the current long term support tech stack. Start with Heroku and some AWS S3 buckets to store media assets.

UX research methods. Then finding projects/teams you want to work on.

Personally? Thinking about writing a book on SMT solvers, extending jHipster to other languages, doing some high performance SAAS offerings, publishing my semigroup research, my serverless complie optimzation toolchain, and my LLVM based operating system call taint annotation for C++/Rust to get Haskell style IO annotations.

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