Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What skills to acquire in 2019?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 194 posts

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

#151

Post by vondro »

CPLX wrote: post #53

The skill I am working on the hardest for 2019 is being able to put down my phone. Or more generally to stop the cycle of mindless addictive loops, checking for comments and upvotes on social media, endlessly refreshing forums, and so on. I’ve tried a few times over the past year to make headway on this and haven’t felt successful, so I’m redoubling and trying to deconstruct the concept a little, figure out some rule…

Hey! I've been fighting the same battle, mainly with facebook and smartphone usage.

With facebook, I unfollowed all the people and groups and pages, rendering my wall totally empty. Now I can still use it as an actual SOCIAL network - messaging friends on messenger and taking part in/creating events.

With smartphone - I highly recommend turning your display into grayscale. On android, it can be found in developer settings (google how to enable it). Together with high contrast settings, everything is perfectly readable, you can still call and text, take pictures, whatever. But looking at the grey display just doesn't give the satisfaction nice colors do. Try it. Also wristwatch helps, since you don't need to look at the phone to check time.

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

#152

Post by thisisit »

EpicEng wrote: post #109
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 me…

> Companies who are serious about this stuff

What about companies who are not serious about this stuff? There are tons of companies who are not actually trying to solve a hard ML problem. They just want their own recommendation or prediction engines. That doesn't require any deep understanding or 5-10 years in this field.

A ML puritan might say that is not real or serious stuff and this is all fad. That might be true. But I think that is one of the ways someone can start off their 5-10 years journey - working on simpler problems and getting paid.

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

#153

Post by bionsystem »

xiphias2 wrote: post #19

Investing is a great skill to have. Starting with understanding different asset types, their histories, modern portfolio theory, diversification, tail risks of all assets, how central banks and other banks work. I believe the market can be beaten, but you have to have more financial knowledge than the average retail investor.

I would recommend Robert Shiller's course at Yale (available on youtube) which covers all those subjects + some.

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

#154

Post by karanke »

_asummers wrote: post #127
freehunter wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Rails for my web programming needs, and I've heard a lot of people talk about switching from Ruby/Rails to Elixir/Phoenix because of "concurrency", but I'm going to be honest and say I don't know what that means. I'm not a CS grad and I'm not super familiar with all of the terminology. Can someone help me with two things? Really trying to understand the benefit. 1. When you say "concurrency" do you just mean "h…

I'm a single core server, and I have a queue of tasks. I can process them one at a time. But say I don't want to work on one task at a time. I might decide to do some database operation and while I'm waiting for the response to come back, I might decide to do some work on a separate thread so I'm not idling. We now have concurrency. If I add more cores, and my program is coded to be able to take advantage of that, I…

I enjoyed this explanation, thank you.

Curious to know what the differences are vis-a-vis big data tools like Hadoop or Spark; as a user of those tools I recognized a lot of common failure patterns in the example above. Thanks!

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

#155

Post by nilshauk »

afarrell wrote: post #122
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…

Got any recommendations on How to get started studying rhetoric?

I took a course in rhetoric and encountered the book Don’t Think of an Elephant by George Lakoff https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Think-Elephant-Democrats-Progres...

Short book, yet enlightening on rhetoric. Can recommend, regardless of political affiliation.

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

#156

Post by ryanwaggoner »

natestemen wrote: post #112
davmar wrote: post #96

Our industry is behind when it comes to understanding race and racism. Proof: Slack's mistake this last week. In 2019, learn about institutional racism and why we have to undo it. Take a course from the People's Institute. If you haven't learned about this in depth before, be prepared to learn a lot and have your preconceived notions challenged. https://www.pisab.org/ I promise you'll walk away with new perspectives…

I'm glad someone has mentioned this here. It's something our industry is really not taking seriously at all and needs more people pushing for. As you mentioned company decisions have real racial effects, and those decisions are often made by homogeneous teams that lack diversity and perspective. If anyone wants a recommendation for reading to build up some knowledge about these issues I would recommend reading "White…

I start with a pretty strong bias against any philosophy that counts skepticism of itself as proof of its own existence. It's like a religion that says you know it's true because other people will claim it's not true.

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

#157

Post by ryanwaggoner »

febin wrote: post #146
ultrasounder wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you post a link to your medium posts or atleast divulge your medium username so that I can look your articles up?

https://medium.com/@heyfebin I have written a lot of bullshit due to ignorance. However, some articles turned out to be decent. Here are a few. https://hackernoon.com/popular-use-cases-of-blockchain-techn... https://hackernoon.com/the-impatient-programmers-guide-to-le... https://hackernoon.com/how-to-build-it-fast-and-cheap-cffbd2... https://hackernoon.com/3-popular-types-of-blockchains-you-ne... https://medium.com/w…

Agreed with the other commenter: don't be too hard on yourself. At first glance, these are pretty solid and nothing to be ashamed of.

A few things that have helped me tremendously as a writer:

1. Volume. There really is something to the idea that going for quantity over quality eventually results in higher quantity and quality. The more you write (and read), the better you get at it. Also, no one churns out consistently great stuff. You may need to write dozens of mediocre pieces to find a great one.

2. Consider hiring an experienced editor to go over a few of your posts. You'll learn a lot in the process.

3. There's a need for "shallow" writing too. You might want to write a WaitByWhy-style 25,000 word post on blockchain, but 1) that's incredibly hard to do, and 2) there's only so many people who want to read that. The audience of people who might want to read a 800 word post on the subject is a lot bigger, and writing a short-but-informative post is its own skill.

4. Why do you want to write? In 10 years, what do you hope to look back and have gotten out of it?

Anyway, keep up the good work :)

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

#158

Post by confounded »

loteck wrote: post #28

Organizing. Not necessarily in your workplace, but sure, that too if you're into it. Mostly I mean community groups of like-minded folks who stay in touch, remain active and do meaningful things together, like speaking up against bad uses of technology in government and law enforcement. Or training people how to get started in tech. Or hacking something together that could be meaningful for the lives of people in a c…

This has been the most satisfying tech-related thing I’ve done in the last few years.

It’s how I’ve felt most useful outside of my day-job, and also how I’ve gained a broader perspective on the culture, values, and practices at other companies.

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

#159

Post by 7ewis »

benburleson wrote: post #57
ojhughes wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go is undeniably very useful, just feels like such drudgery actually working with it.

Just my 0.02, but I started my primary project in Golang this year (a first for me) and have genuinely enjoyed getting deeper into using the language. Great tools, great community, and a clever language -- what more could you want?

In my limited experience so far, I just keep finding out how to do something then wondering why it's so complicated.

Things I could do in Python in ~10 lines, seem to require at least double in Go.

I'll keep learning it though, I'm sure I'll start to see the benefits soon!

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

#160

Post by slow_donkey »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #73
jsgoller1 wrote: post #67

Interviewing. I spent about 3-4 months this year working on my interviewing and competitive programming skills via LeetCode, reading The Algorithm Design Manual, and taking classes at Bradfield School of CS in San Francisco. I feel like it's made a world of difference. I know Hacker News tends to hate on programming interviews, but it really pays to be good at them (and trust me, it's a learnable skill). I do agree t…

You spent 3-4 months honing your interview skills, that sounds very expensive. Are you claiming that this practice made you a better programmer overall or just better at interviews? It isn’t just hackernews hating on the current way of doing programming interviews, it’s a widespread sentiment in the industry. The current way of doing interviews seems both excessive (requires 2 months of practice) and easily games (wi…

I'd also argue it's more like a 2x pay jump if you're early career. I'd love to know about companies who paid that well and didn't require leetcode
Post reply on HN