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Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#111

Post by Sn0wCoder »

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…

IMO taking Calculus later in life is probably easier for most (study of 1) people (assuming you have seen some of it before). I took Calculus at 19 years old and passed but I did not have any idea what it was really used for. Taking it again during Grad School (mid 30s) Calculus made way more sense. Ideas would click (mostly not CS related) but more in the general world view (think washers for nuts and bolts – area under a curve). I will be the first to admit that making front ends and tuning a DB will almost never need any calculus (but it does happen) and admit I did horrible in high school but turned it around in college (I was behind when I got there the first time for sure). How much do I remember right this second (not much), but I do feel its worth doing as if only a right of passage to say we deserve that 6-figure salary and maybe not feel too bad about calling our self’s engineers. Good luck with the singing lessons and new job, but if your married (or have children) do NOT quit that day job just yet If not, well hell go for it my friend!!!

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#112

Post by vinhnx »

I'm learning LLM at the moment, RAG particularly. [1]

I ended up built InkChatGPT as my learning project and it was huge fun. It is an AI Agent that could help learning from multiple documents and you can chat with it, thank Chat PDF GPT.

I use LangChain as LLM framework to simplify the backend, and using Streamlit as front end UI and deployment. Using OpenAI `gpt-3.5-turbo` model, Use HuggingFace embeddings to generate embeddings for the document chunks with `all-MiniLM-L6-v2` model.

To be honest, coming from Mobile development background, learning about ML and reading about LLM models, prompt tuning and various techniques really opens my mind, but the vast information and knowing how to start is difficult.

[1] InkChatGPT: https://github.com/vinhnx/InkChatGPT

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#113

Post by thisTh4ng »

LLM -> 3D frontend pipeline

Not just 3D assets but also text recreation

There’s an A* influenced planner that helps manage the output flow so things don’t go crazy

Sketching out saving good outputs to disk and sync them across clients while I work on the core AI ->frontend bits

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#114

Post by thisTh4ng »

ivansavz wrote: post #67
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 yo…

Does math have many prerequisites?

Always just saw it as the handful of operations and a handful of generalized objects (sets, variables, etc) that represent data. So knowing those parts is all there is. Contrived compositions used in school to prove ourselves to some teacher just seems like patronizing helicopter parenting type vibes.

Went at most of my math classes with that in mind and didn’t really worry about relating it to past things

I don’t really buy into a notion like “more abstract” or “less” abstract. Everyone is its own abstract.

I dunno. That philosophy has worked for me so far shrug

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#116

Post by mlsu »

xMichael24 wrote: post #102
mlsu wrote: post #100

I'm learning PCB design, and embedded Rust to go along with it. Building a flight computer for an RC plane (I've been working on laying out and programming the computer for almost a year now -- haven't even started the airframe.) It's been very fun. I keep saying that I'm going to do a blog series about it, once I get it in an MVP stage. The state of embedded Rust is also progressing very quickly underneath me, which…

Sick! I’m an embedded software engineer, but I want to grow my PCB design skills as well. Can you suggest some resources on this topic that you’re finding most valuable?

I'm in embedded also, I started this journey at work doing board bring-up. I wrote drivers mostly, not doing any direct electrical work, but after reading the schematics I thought, "oh wow, so that's how they do schematics professionally," followed by "wait, I can do that!" Before that, I just did a few small things with Arduino.

The Youtube channel Phil's Lab has a really good series [1] on PCB design focused on STM32 series chips, that is where I started.

I also got a lot of good information in this thread [2]

And I got feedback on one of my designs on the PrintedCircuitBoard reddit, which is very active and full of amateur and pro-am PCB designers getting feedback. You can post a schematic or layout and people will leave high quality critiques.

For vendors, I have had 2 runs made with JLCPCB (with each run having flaws; some bad, and some not too bad; my board is fairly complex/ambitious so that's part of it). I have heard PCBWay is similarly cheap and good. No quality issues but I've kept traces, spacing, and components on the larger side.

I'm not good at PCB design but am having a blast with it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVUqaB0IMh4

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38812244

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/PrintedCircuitBoard/

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#118

Post by p1esk »

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…

You might want to look up “descriptive geometry”. It used to be a required course for mechanical engineering majors.

Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

#119

Post by defrost »

p1esk wrote: post #118
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…

You might want to look up “descriptive geometry”. It used to be a required course for mechanical engineering majors.

Technical Drawing was a core required course for first and second year Engineering students (Electrical, Civil, Mechanical, Electronic) in Commonwealth countries in the 1980s and for decades before.

Descriptive Geometry was a major component of Tech Drawing, everybody in pre CAD digital age (and still, I'd say at least) needed a good grounding in blueprints, schematics, and "constructive drawing" good enough to take measures from during building.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_drawing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descriptive_geometry

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