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Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

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Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#71

Post by ivansavz »

Statistics.

I started (re)learning this subject in preparation for a new book, thinking all I had to do was review what I studied in my university days, and summarize the essential ideas, but it turns out statistics is A LOT more complicated than that. It's like a black hole that you can never get out of. There is lots of historical baggage, strong opinions, unjustified rules of thumb, etc. I've been in it for 5+ years now! As a physicist, I want to understand how things work under the hood, so I can explain to readers the underlying mechanisms and not just give formulas without explanations, and this has been very hard to do. The whole thing is well summarized by this quote from Richard McElreath "Statistics is a horrible thing."

There is hope though, in recent years teaching frequentist statistics is moving toward simulation based methods, a.k.a. the modern statistics curriculum, which makes a lot of sense. Here is a blog post about that: https://minireference.com/blog/fixing-the-statistics-curricu...

You can see the notebooks from the upcoming book here: https://nobsstats.com/ and concept map here: https://minireference.com/static/excerpts/noBSstats/conceptm...

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#72

Post by ivansavz »

lord-squirrel wrote: post #36

Marketing, Sales and SEO for a SaaS of mine. Found out that is what sells your product and not the features of your product.

Do you have any recommendations for learning resources for marketing/advertisement/SEO ? I want to get into that, but it's a very noisy domain with lots of "experts" selling their knowledge, so difficult to know what is good or bad.

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#73

Post by pavel_lishin »

geocrasher wrote: post #70
pavel_lishin wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Hoo boy, now I'm feeling equal parts inspiration and intimidation :P

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#74

Post by robinhoodexe »

Nix for developer environment and building containers.

I’m wondering if it’s worth it to introduce to the rest of the company. We’re pretty comfortable building/“maintaining” ~400 container images, and it’s relatively fast (~3-5 min build time if no packages are changed), but there a lot of shared dependencies between all these container images, and using nix to get actual reproducible AND minimal container images with a shared cache of Linux and language-specific packages (dotnet, node, python and R) would bring in a ton of efficiency, as well as a very consistent development environment, but I won’t force all the developers to learn nix, so the complexity should optimally be absorbed into some higher level of abstraction, like an internal CLI tool.

I’m aware that the caching of dependencies can be improved, as well as creating more minimal container images, but it’s tricky with R and Python in particular, and then I figured why not just to balls-deep on nix that actually solved these issues, albeit at a cost of complexity.

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#75

Post by sn9 »

solardev wrote: post #54
slekker wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What resources are you using to learn calculus? I am on a similar boat

I'm taking a class at the local community college. It's OK, just some class notes and an e-textbook that I never bother to read. The pedagogy is much as I remember it, the teacher going through the problems on a whiteboard and expecting everyone to rote-memorize things. But mostly, I'm learning from ChatGPT. You can enter (or take a picture of) any problem and ask it to break it down step by step and it does that ver…

Memorization can be a useful part of mathematics, but that's more true of higher level courses where you might expend some effort in memorizing definitions to have them at hand to use in proofs.

But most of the time memorization is a side-effect of just solving lots of problems, which is the most effective way to learn mathematics in the same way that writing programs is the most effective way to learn programming.

I'd highly recommend Cal Newport's books on studying [0] and his older blog posts on effective study habits [1]. Barbara Oakley's Learning How to Learn course on Coursera is also excellent [2].

In your current context, I'd probably just focus on time management and consistently grinding problems in areas you don't find easy with things like Schaum's Problem books and Outlines. You could use software like Anki to schedule review of problems and concepts that you've solved or understood.

If you aren't constrained by time, you could also use the Art of Problem Solving books to rebuild your math foundation at a much deeper level [3].

[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0767922719?linkId=98a11bfd...

[1] https://calnewport.com/case-study-how-i-got-the-highest-grad...

[2] https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn

[3] https://artofproblemsolving.com/store/list/all-products

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#76

Post by sn9 »

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…

I don't know if you're literally using this or you are unaware but coincidentally using similar methods, but this site is highly recommended [0].

[0] https://drawabox.com/

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#77

Post by sn9 »

alok-g wrote: post #50
betimsl wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you learning this?

Self-learning via books. I've bought a bunch. Am currently going through Susskind's Theoretical Minimum Classical Mechanics [1], also looking through No Nonsense Classical Mechanics [2]. AI chatbots sometimes come to rescue when I am stuck. Not with mathematics though. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Classical-Mechanics-Theoretical-Georg... [2] https://www.amazon.com/No-Nonsense-Classical-Mechanics-Stude...

You might enjoy Morin's problem books [0].

[0] https://davidmorin.physics.fas.harvard.edu/books/classical-m...

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#78

Post by solardev »

milesjag wrote: post #57
solardev wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, you're like my evil twin! Longtime web dev here who always wanted to learn more data engineering. HTML/CSS/JS is fun and creative to some degree, but kinda abstract. Data engineers get to work with real-world phenomena! What prompted the interest in web stuff?

Hello from the other side :) 1 - I feel like more bespoke interfaces could be amazingly useful in the data world. 2 - Data engineering doesn’t really get me building creatively. 3 - Getting 3 languages to play ball (and that’s front-end only) sounds crazy challenging. Data projects are nightmares but it is good exposure to the messiness of the real world. Have you had a chance to dig into DE much yet?

All good reasons :)

I never did proper "data engineering" per se, but we did have casual run-ins with geodatasets and GIS, and used them to build a home solar calculator that takes a ZIP code and estimates that area's available yearly sunlight, utility rates, electricity consumption, etc. and combine it into an estimated size for a home solar system. It was like a primitive version of Google Sunroof (https://sunroof.withgoogle.com/), which is much, much better.

I too love the intersection of data and visualization/usability, turning obscure spreadsheets into useful public interfaces :) The geospatial world is just one part of that. It used to be cool, but I guess nowadays it'd probably be more about turning data into LLM-digestible training sets so that they can more directly analyze questions and answer them in plain language.

Do you think traditional DE is still worth learning, with Skynet on the horizon? What's a good way to get started?

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#80

Post by wmoser »

solardev wrote: post #54
slekker wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What resources are you using to learn calculus? I am on a similar boat

I'm taking a class at the local community college. It's OK, just some class notes and an e-textbook that I never bother to read. The pedagogy is much as I remember it, the teacher going through the problems on a whiteboard and expecting everyone to rote-memorize things. But mostly, I'm learning from ChatGPT. You can enter (or take a picture of) any problem and ask it to break it down step by step and it does that ver…

There is a book, “how to ace calculus, the streetwise guide” that sounds a little gimmicky but is actually a bit entertaining to read. Looks like it can be had on thrift books or eBay for about $5. It helped me understand some of the concepts at a deeper level than math text books. The problem with math text books are they’re mostly written by mathematicians who seem to think different than the rest of us, so when they try to explain things it’s in a mathematician way.
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