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Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

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Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

#171

Post by bluGill »

mcv wrote: post #52
unnouinceput wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you'll die within a month if modern society collapses. Just focus on making a difference on current society instead of becoming a fatalist.

If society collapses that badly, I'll probably move to my brother-in-law's farm. Farms are generally the best place to be when society collapses.

Most farms depends on big tractors - if society collapse they will have a lot of food rotting in the field unless humans get out there and deal with it by hand. You won't like your lifestyle, but if you can get to a remote farm (remote is key - you need to get away from labor competition) you can do okay.

Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

#172

Post by brenden2 »

chrissnell wrote: post #100

Some suggestions: - Build something. A new workbench for your office. Fix up an old car. Build a pull-up bar in your garage. Use your hands, cut some wood and metal, and treat yourself to a new tool or two. Do this with every project and you will have a nice tool collection before you know it. - Learn to take pictures on a manual camera. You can do this with a modern automatic camera if it has a manual mode. Learn ab…

+1 to taking walks. Having a dog makes this really easy, because you have to take them out 3-4 times/day. Or at least, you really should.

Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

#173

Post by jimbokun »

mcv wrote: post #116
maayank wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they though? Haven’t seen many companies with graph problems at such scale that require a new solution integrated, leaving aside the social network trope

You don't need scale to make graph databases useful. As soon as relationships between items are more important than the data within a table, graph databases make your data easier to navigate than joins upon joins.

Any concrete examples of these kinds of data management problems where graph databases are a good fit?

Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

#174

Post by komali2 »

danenania wrote: post #153
michaelbrooks wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Burpees are one of the best movements for all-around muscle development and the best thing is you don't need any weights. If you can perform a full burpee (from standing to the floor) then the benefits are huge. You can also scale and go from standing to plank position or use a swimming pool (stand in the pool near the edge, jump onto the ledge and then back into the pool and go into squat position underwater).

Apart from the cardio, is there added strength value to doing burpees specifically instead of squats and push ups separately?

Your strength will never go up that much until you force more resistance into the picture, either via bands or weights.

You will be getting a shitload of hypertrophy with all this bodyweight exercising though so you'll look shredded if your body fat is low.

Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

#175

Post by lkrych »

billfruit wrote: post #138
chrissnell wrote: post #100

Some suggestions: - Build something. A new workbench for your office. Fix up an old car. Build a pull-up bar in your garage. Use your hands, cut some wood and metal, and treat yourself to a new tool or two. Do this with every project and you will have a nice tool collection before you know it. - Learn to take pictures on a manual camera. You can do this with a modern automatic camera if it has a manual mode. Learn ab…

Learn to enjoy poetry. There is so much of great poetry in English, but I think it is not being read and appreciated enough. It is a kind of mental challenge like doing a puzzle, to unlock the full vivid meaning. Also reading fiction, though how exactly it helps one is beyond me, but it offers glimpses into other worlds. For example I read recently 'The French Lieutenant's Woman', I doubt its richness of detail, and…

I second this.

Poetry is play and learning to play with language can open up new worlds. Here is a favorite of mine.

Again by Ross Gay

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/92019/again-586e779b0...

This book[1] compares poetry to music. There are many genres and styles of music, and it is likely that you don't like all genres. Enjoying poetry is about trying to find the "genre" of poetry that moves you.

[1] Don't Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems - Stephanie Burt

Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

#176

Post by rihegher »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #44
yaman12 wrote: post #19

Learn a another human language. You don’t have to be good at it or even able to converse. Languages are systems of thinking as much as they are systems of communication. Some thoughts only make sense in a given language! The process of learning a language builds cognitive skills and perhaps fights cognitive decline. If you have absolutely no “ear” for human language start with Esperanto and work your way to additiona…

I was thinking of learning French, can anyone recommend which tool to use?

Lexilize flashcards on smartphone and tablets

Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

#177

Post by bluGill »

There are more good answers to this question than there is time. Since prophecy doesn't seem to be a skill you can learn you will need to make some educated guesses. Dead skills are still in demand for someone, but if everybody learns them it was a waste of time for most - unless they did it purely from interest in the subject and not usefulness.

Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

#179

Post by Jach »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #44
yaman12 wrote: post #19

Learn a another human language. You don’t have to be good at it or even able to converse. Languages are systems of thinking as much as they are systems of communication. Some thoughts only make sense in a given language! The process of learning a language builds cognitive skills and perhaps fights cognitive decline. If you have absolutely no “ear” for human language start with Esperanto and work your way to additiona…

I was thinking of learning French, can anyone recommend which tool to use?

I can give you a couple suggestions from my own experience, of course take them with a lot of salt... Unless you're very studious, start with an environment where French is spoken at you and you occasionally have to speak back, with comprehension routinely above 80%. Typically this means a classroom unless you have or are confident with other social engagements...

I did 5 years of French throughout junior and high school. I didn't quite reach fluency, but over a decade later without any further instruction I can still read a good amount, absorb new vocabulary quickly (and retain it pretty well -- I just wish I knew about Anki back then), and understand well-enunciated/slower speaking people. (Favorite recent example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLsxYlTA9Ds He's basically talking about why people find it easy to understand him vs. some random Parisian.) I've forgotten some of the grammar but if I ever get motivated to refresh that I'd go through the book we used in the final year again and make an Anki deck. (https://www.amazon.com/Fois-Pour-Toutes-Hale-Sturges/dp/0801... -- Une Fois Pour Totes. If you can reach the level by whatever means where you can start a feedback loop of teaching yourself more within the target language, I think it helps a lot. Even using a French-to-French dictionary, rather than English-to-French.)

In contrast to French I've been lazily teaching myself Japanese over the past few years, but I haven't been diligent about it and thus my conversational ability is still basically 0, my vocab is limited (though recently expanding quicker as I'm able to pick out more and more words/phrases from media), and my kanji count is only ~500 out of 2000. With more diligence I think I have enough books and methods to synthesize them that I could achieve similar proficiency as my current level of French even without a classroom environment to test it in, but I'm also fighting prioritization. If it were higher priority I think I'd try and enroll in a community college class or something just to get a boost on speaking with immediate teacher feedback.

TLDR: As far as free tools go, Anki is great for any language, especially when you build the decks yourself. (I like the existing "french core 3k" deck as it includes audio for its sentences, but unless you already have a basic understanding of French grammar, I think it might be too much to start with.)

Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?

#180

Post by FabHK »

yaman12 wrote: post #19

Learn a another human language. You don’t have to be good at it or even able to converse. Languages are systems of thinking as much as they are systems of communication. Some thoughts only make sense in a given language! The process of learning a language builds cognitive skills and perhaps fights cognitive decline. If you have absolutely no “ear” for human language start with Esperanto and work your way to additiona…

> Languages are systems of thinking as much as they are systems of communication. Some thoughts only make sense in a given language!

This sounds like the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis [1], and it's been refuted, by and large. There's a good pop-sci book examining it [2], and it concludes that there is really only instance where language clearly influences world view, and that is that in the Guugu Yimithirr languages: people don't use left, right, front, back, but the cardinal directions north, south, east, west (as in, "there's an ant on your western leg"), and that does appear to give them a superior sense of direction.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8444621-through-the-lang...

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