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Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

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Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#61

Post by eddd-ddde »

kerkeslager wrote: post #53
dan_lannan wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind expanding on this? I’ve had learning Rust on the back burner for a while and still default to cpp when I need to get lower level

I suspect if you're looking at C++ as a viable language for the problems you're solving, you're solving quite different problems from me, so take this with a grain of salt. What I wanted from Rust was basically a strongly-typed C and more modern tooling. I'm open to more checking than that, depending on what cost it has. What I'm getting is strong typing and more modern tooling--cargo, for example, is excellent. But…

Have you tried looking at zig?

Also, unsafe is not meant to ease the borrow checker pains, that's like using void* everywhere in C because you don't know how to type a function pointer. Unsafe is meant for places where rust simply doesn't know better, like reading memory mapped registers.

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#62

Post by pavel_lishin »

geocrasher wrote: post #58
pavel_lishin wrote: post #45

Welding. I'm looking forward to making a few sculptures that we can also use in our garden, as well as some Frankenbikes, though that might be a longer-term project - I don't want to spend money on it, so I'm hoping to source all of my parts from the trash - so far, I'm up to four frames, and my marriage is still intact!

Be sure to check out Atomiczombie.com, if you have not already. Definitely THE resource for frankenbike/recumbents. I've built two recumbents. One directly from their plans (the Meridian) and another one of my own design, a trike based on the Meridian. Bike hacking is a lot of fun!

Ooh, thank you! I want to build a four-wheeled contraption to ride around town like a weirdo.

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#63

Post by perrygeo »

Relearning statistics with a Bayesian approach. My undergrad education was in social science research methods and I spent 4 years learning the strict frequentist approach of orthodox statistics. It made sense for highly-controlled experiments and simple dice games. But it broke down horribly when faced with any complexity and I never understood why. 25 years later, it's time to fill in the gaps. My reading list:

- E.T. Janes "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science" provides the fundamental theory.

- Robert McElreath "Rethinking Statistics" provides a practical application of the theory in R.

- Andrew Clayton's "Bernoulli's Fallacy" is a non-technical book that provides historical context to the frequentist vs bayesian debate.

I'm fairly convinced now that Bayesian approaches have more mathematical rigor than the crusty old heuristics of traditional statistics. But in terms of user-experience, doing Bayesian calculations still requires more effort on model design and more compute power. It's flexible to a fault, without a well-defined workflow. There is a strong temptation to follow the easy path - shove your data into a black box and publish if p<0.05. It's going to take a generation of (re)training and improvements to statistical software before Bayesian methods are widespread.

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#64

Post by etrautmann »

maroonblazer wrote: post #55

Drawing/sketching. Apropos of the other HN article on the elder mathematician who credits his success by studying the simple things until he understands them really, really well, I'm practicing drawing boxes in any/every orientation in 3D space. This includes drawing two boxes connected by a common edge - imagine a box with a lid the same size as the box itself, slightly opened. For me this is profoundly difficult to…

This is awesome. I love the way exercise of this - it’s both meditative and skill building.

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#65

Post by kerkeslager »

eddd-ddde wrote: post #61
kerkeslager wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect if you're looking at C++ as a viable language for the problems you're solving, you're solving quite different problems from me, so take this with a grain of salt. What I wanted from Rust was basically a strongly-typed C and more modern tooling. I'm open to more checking than that, depending on what cost it has. What I'm getting is strong typing and more modern tooling--cargo, for example, is excellent. But…

Have you tried looking at zig? Also, unsafe is not meant to ease the borrow checker pains, that's like using void* everywhere in C because you don't know how to type a function pointer. Unsafe is meant for places where rust simply doesn't know better, like reading memory mapped registers.

> Have you tried looking at zig?

I have given it a very cursory look, but ultimately it doesn't fit my needs for reasons unrelated to the features of the language. Specifically, I'm releasing my C work under the GPL and would not like to write off the possibility of integrating into GNU. Zig doesn't have a GPL implementation (Rust has one which is committed to reaching maturity).

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#66

Post by djvdq »

Basic math. I'm amazed how little I remember 11 years after finishing high school.

I also want to learn some frontend.

I started learning Rust some time ago.

I really need to remind me a lot of basic IT topics.

The problem is how much I'd really learn.

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#67

Post by ivansavz »

solardev wrote: post #30

Working my way up to calculus for the first time in my life, at nearly 40 years old. I've always hated math :( When I was a kid, they always told me math would be super useful, especially if I liked computers. Well, 20+ years of a dev career later, I still have never used anything more than basic arithmetic and rudimentary algebra (to calculate responsive component sizes). But with web dev jobs going the way of the h…

It sounds like you might enjoy my book on MACH+CALC, which comes with prerequisites included (a summary of the essential parts of high school math requited to understand calculus).

Check out the extended preview here: https://minireference.com/static/excerpts/noBSmathphys_v5_pr...

Here is the concept map from the book which might be useful to you as general orientation in the "concept space", now matter which book you're learning from: https://minireference.com/static/conceptmaps/math_and_physic...

Last but not least, I highly recommend you check out the computer algebra system SymPy, which provide functionality for doing all kinds of basic algebra (`solve`, `simplify`, `expand`, etc.) You can use it to invent practice problems for yourslef, check answers, etc. It also has useful functions for calculus which you will need when you get to that. Here is a little tutorial on it: https://minireference.com/static/tutorials/sympy_tutorial.pd...

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#68

Post by ivansavz »

djvdq wrote: post #66

Basic math. I'm amazed how little I remember 11 years after finishing high school. I also want to learn some frontend. I started learning Rust some time ago. I really need to remind me a lot of basic IT topics. The problem is how much I'd really learn.

What are you using to review/relearn basic math? I'm asking because this is the space I'm working in, so I wonder what "products" people are hiring to do this "job."

PS: Check out this concept map that shows the high school math concepts and topics that you can use as a "progress bar" for what there is to review: https://minireference.com/static/conceptmaps/math_concepts.p...

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#69

Post by ivansavz »

perrygeo wrote: post #63

Relearning statistics with a Bayesian approach. My undergrad education was in social science research methods and I spent 4 years learning the strict frequentist approach of orthodox statistics. It made sense for highly-controlled experiments and simple dice games. But it broke down horribly when faced with any complexity and I never understood why. 25 years later, it's time to fill in the gaps. My reading list: - E.…

+1 for the Statistical Rethinking book by McElreath. I recently took the 2024 edition of the self-paced course https://github.com/rmcelreath/stat_rethinking_2024 and the lectures on youtube are amazing. He's not just teaching stats, but how to do science!

Another, more basic, book on Bayesian stats is: https://allendowney.github.io/ThinkBayes2/ The author uses the grid approximation for everything, so there is no need to get into Stan or other framework.

Myself, I'm still trying to (re)learn frequentist stuff properly (will post a separate comment about that), but the deeper I go the more convinced I am that it is total crap, and my desire to convert to the church of Bayes increases...

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#70

Post by geocrasher »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #62
geocrasher wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be sure to check out Atomiczombie.com, if you have not already. Definitely THE resource for frankenbike/recumbents. I've built two recumbents. One directly from their plans (the Meridian) and another one of my own design, a trike based on the Meridian. Bike hacking is a lot of fun!

Ooh, thank you! I want to build a four-wheeled contraption to ride around town like a weirdo.

You are in good company my friend. Here's my trike:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3SEndDnVXg

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