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

Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 362 posts

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#131

Post by firefoxd »

As a web developer, I'm often ashamed to admit that I knew very little about AI. Especially because I worked on a AI product on my day to day. I was perfectly fine debugging our python code and updating spacy, but had no clue what it was doing internally.

So 6 months ago, I quit my job, published a short book, then studied AI. It's funny how so many material makes the vast assumption that you already know so much. They gloss over activation functions, loss functions, vanishing gradients, or the most fundamental things like properly loading your data. No one even tells you how to load the data!

Anyway, I got my Deep Learning Specialization certificate, I watched all 3blue1brown videos, I built a smart assistant that runs on raspberry pi in my car. The goal is to have it Assist the driver, with blind spots and keeping the eyes on the road.

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#134

Post by millerthomas »

elias94 wrote: post #8

Clojure. Is a complex language but it seems really speeding up your programming when you learn how to use it properly. And the community is really addicted to it.

I started on Clojure a few months ago and I'm pretty obsessed. It's really reinvigorated my love of programming.

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#136

Post by dorchadas »

antognini wrote: post #40

Lately I have been diving deep into ancient astronomy, Babylonian astronomy in particular. I have a PhD in astronomy, but I've found that a lot of astronomers tend to have a somewhat superficial knowledge of the history of their field. To motivate myself to learn more about it I started podcasting what I learned with the schtick being that I release episodes every full moon to force myself to keep it up.

I've got a book you might like then. I recently discovered there was an 'Astronomy Across Cultures' book, as ethnoastronomy is something I've been interested in for a while (It's always neat to see how other people interact and describe the stars and sky. Shame a lot of this info is being lost as languages die and peoples assimilate). The book focuses on non-Western methods of astronomy, and is part of a series titled 'Science Across Cultures'.

Full reference is: Astronomy Across Cultures: The History of Non-Western Astronomy ed. Helaine Selin and Sun Xiaochun (ISBN: 978-94-010-5820-9, DOI: 10.1007/978-94-011-4179-6)

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#137

Post by personlurking »

yesenadam wrote: post #69

Brazilian music. Gilberto Gil, Chico Buarque, Milton Nascimento, João Donato, Toninho Horta, Yamandu Costa, João Gilberto etc etc. There's a great youtube channel with hundreds of videos of guitarist Nelson Faria chatting and playing music at home with a different Brazilian musician each time, a lot with English captions. https://www.youtube.com/c/umcafelaemcasa/videos

Check out the lesser known Márcio Farraco's album Ciranda [1]. The title song features Chico. If you like him, you might like another singer-songwriter, Pierre Aderne, too [2]. Both Márcio and Pierre have a French connection, with the former living there and the latter being born there.

And if you want to virtually travel to Portugal, check out Antonio Zambujo. Here he is singing a song [3] written by both Márcio and Pierre, as luck would have it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QRdaL3GEiQ&list=OLAK5uy_lCU...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vr2qTlFkytk&list=OLAK5uy_n3k...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlZcTFBxWVY

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#138

Post by simonswords82 »

I've been a private pilot for about 5 years and a couple of weeks ago I was out in crappy weather. I knew the weather would be awful and had the foresight to bring my instructor friend with me.

We ended up in cloud, I handed over control to my instructor and spent the next 10 minutes wondering what I would have done if he wasn't with me (hint: not good).

So I slept on it, text my instructor a couple of days later and told him I want to be able to do what he did. He told me I need an Instrument Rating (Restricted) rating, which allows me to fly in and above cloud.

So that's my learning for the next 10 weeks or so. I've got to take one written exam, one flying exam, and then I'm cleared for flying cloudy days.

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#139

Post by 3bodyProblem »

Drawing, Really enjoy just grabbing the ipad and creating things. It's amazing how 2d shapes can trick the viewer in actually understanding what you've drawn.

Got a background in 3D and Programming, but I think the 3d industry has the same approach to problems as programming. Couple of frameworks and libraries and poof, you have an applications.

In 3d you grab a render engine, a light setup, some assets and poof, you have an image/game/animation. I miss the days that I 3d was exploring and experimentation. The alternative would be to dive into 1 subject (modeling, rendering, lighting, FX etc). But in my experience that just made me feel like a factory worker. Piece of concept art, here you go.

3D can really trap you into polishing a soulless turd, so I'm learning drawing. where you can't cut as many corners and enjoying the creative process again.

On the programming side I'm just enjoying work and learning on the job, also going back to the fundamentals like shell, sql and regex. It's amazing how much you can automate.

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#140

Post by qq4 »

I've been learning Haskell for a few months now. I really like it and am looking to write a small compiler in it. Anyone have any pointers?

I'm also smoking ribs for the first time today, that should be a fun learning experience.

Post reply on HN