Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

The wide world of esp32 and bringing an IOT product to market. Espressif, the manufacturer of esp32, is a leader in the embedded category by offering a robust sdk and extensive documentation, yet there are many foot cannons and their documentation is misleading, creating a lot of friction in the process of productionizing a device. There's so much involved other than firmware development.

Happy to speak on that! I mostly wanted to dig into something I hadn't done before, with a whole new set of tools to learn. In this case, I had been super interested lately in the Apple ecosystem/platform. I'd spent some of my career in .NET/Windows land and got to see a bunch of stuff there and how it all worked, so I figured why not try out what Apple has to offer.

I also felt like since I have no real intent to try and turn what I'm learning into something that makes money, I could go a little crazy/niche and dig in.

This all being said, If someone asked me about making an app as something they want to release/make money off/turn into a company I'd fully be pointing them at tooling like React Native.

I’m learning psychology. But I don’t want to be a psychologist that works with the mentally ill people.

I basically want to study and be an expert in social engineering if I’m being completely blunt. That’s my whole motivation for studying psychology. And I think I should just clarify it’s not because I want to use social engineering knowledge to go do terrible things - I just find it literally fascinating.

Finnish, mostly. I moved to Finland a few years ago and have been making slow but consistent progress along the vectors I care about ever since. I just wish language learning didn't take so much time.

I've built some little tools for the task, which ended up teaching me enough about modern development that I could enter back into software as a career without too much hassle. There were no good Anki frequency list decks, so I made https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1331009943 and later https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1149950470 .

These in turn led me to devour a book on the inner workings of SQLite and web dev, because I needed some way to scrape Tatoeba without losing my data every time. Eventually I got good enough to start reading the 'clear Finnish's news, but then I realized YLE.fi didn't seem to have an easy way for me to scrape all previous news articles, so I built https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/selkouutiset-archive/ as an excuse to get a little deeper into Hugo and also learn some stuff about Git modules, systemd timers, doing things on a Raspberry Pi, doing things in GCP...

... And finally today I made the first lurching version prototype of a flashcard generator for that news archive, at https://github.com/Selkouutiset-Archive/selkokortti . I guess I just keep stringing the tools and interests I have together to make bigger and bigger things. Maybe that's all a career/vocation really is at the end of the day.

I've also been learning a lot about QEMU and virtualization. That's mostly for work. I make software that runs on trains.

I’m in the exact same boat as solardev (non-traditional student, taking precalculus, relying on LLMs, getting good grades but not having any true understanding) and I came here to recommend this same book.

It’s a great supplement because it gives you a chance to understand the ‘why’ of things and not just the ‘how’. The writing style is neither too dry nor too watered-down. It feels like the piece that was missing from K-12 education.

On a side note, I’ve found the LLMs to be terrible at math, but insanely good at writing LaTeX. I’ve been using GitHub Copilot to speed up the rewriting of my class notes and I’m just gobsmacked at how accurately it can print out the steps to some calculation after feeding in the original problem.