I self-taught piano last couple of years. I'm now getting a real instructor to teach me properly.
Ask HN: What Are You Learning?
181–190 of 242 posts
Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?
#182I'm working on the AZ-204(azure cloud) cert. My company uses on-prem, but we want to shift to a hybrid model in coming months/years.
Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?
#183Rust. There's certainly a lot of interesting things happening with Rust but I'm one or two problems away from deciding that Rust isn't a viable replacement for the situations where I use C.
For me learning Rust isn't about "OMG this is my #forever-language", it's more about presenting me with a new way of thinking about and through problems. I code 99% in Python at my day job and when I made the effort/struggle to learn Clojure a few years ago it fundamentally altered how I think about problems. This is the same result I'm looking for from Rust. Basically just adding more tools to the mental toolbox.
Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?
#184Working 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 u…
Lol, I hope I get to feel that way in hindsight! Right now it's just the struggle and the grind... math feels like a bad Asian MMO where you just run around crunching numbers to make other numbers go up slowly. And if you die/miss an assignment, you have to go back a few levels and do it all over again. Sigh.
> that 6-figure salary and maybe not feel too bad about calling our self’s engineers
Hah! I've only ever briefly made a 6-figure salary, and I quit that job because of its bureaucracy. I'm just some rando dev and I would NEVER call myself an engineer (even though my job title sometimes says that). It's an insult to all the REAL ones who actually survived the math, lol.
(Frontend) web dev has always been more similar to me to graphic design than anything I would call "engineering": It's pretty-looking shiny stuff backed by spaghetti code, not anything I'd ever trust to life-and-death scenarios like dams or bridges.
Anyway, that's not the point :)
> well hell go for it my friend!!!
Hah. This is the upside of a minimal DINK life. We don't have much money (at all), but we have fun!
Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
The LLMs completely changed education for me. Whether it's math or music theory or programming, I'd rank ChatGPT amongst the best teachers I've ever known. (There are amazing real-human ones too, but it's really hit and miss!). For $20/mo it's totally worth it, way cheaper than tutoring or buying more textbooks. But for infrequent use, probably the free plan is enough...? I tried MIT OCW but found the videos too long…
Would be very keen to know more about your learning experience and ideas to make it better. Would you be open to jump on a 15 mins call with me?
Hi! I'm probably not your target audience here, unless you're specifically developing a product that targets math education for midlife washouts, lol. But if you want some rando dude's opinion, sure, I'd be happy to jump into a call with ya. Just let me know and I'll find a slot on your Calendly.
But I think you'd get better feedback from someone who's actually in your target audience/user demographic :) I'm just an annoying grumpy gramps who hates math.
Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?
#186I am trying to learn Erlang. The idea is to write a CRUD app which is a multi-user PWA app completely without framework. For front end, HTML, CSS and JS with reefjs for reactivity (these are are things I already know). The idea is to experiment and stress test with the idea of write once run forever to the max. See how far can I get. Any resource for Erlang will be much appreciated. Currently using exercism and Joe's…
Why not use something like cowboy?
Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 re…
> Does math have many prerequisites? [...] handful of operations and a handful of generalized objects (sets, variables, etc)
This handful of MATH is precisely what I was referring to as the prerequisites: notation, numbers, sets, equations (and the general procedure for solving them), functions, and a bit of geometry. I agree that with these concepts in place, you can tackle A LOT of topics, possibly filling in other knowledge in a just-in-time manner. This is what I find very fascinating (and a big part of my startup's mission): the fact that (re)learning a handful of math topics opens so many doors, that currently a vast number of adults are keeping firmly shut because they believe they are not "math people."
* Sorry for the confusion: there is a typo in my comment, I meant to write my book is on MECH+CALC, and the prerequisite are the handful of MATH topics you listed.
Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?
#188The 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.
Hardware production is wonderful/terrible and constant learning. A lot of people get tripped up not understanding that the manufacturing process is a product equal to your actual product.
Hit me up if I can help. I've brought a half-dozen devices to market; right now I'm bringing a modular data logger to production and blogging about it at https://blog.supermechanical.com
Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?
#189LLM -> 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
sounds interesting, what kind of problem would you solve with this?
Re: Ask HN: What Are You Learning?
#190I'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 gener…
Very interesting project. I thought something along the lines for learning this field too. This is a great introduction. Thank you.
Thank you for your compliment, I just wandering and tinkering all weekend. I am picking to update the app UI and learn more about improving the app recently.
I plan to pickup more on LLMs topic and will start experimenting with different models.