Ask HN: How do you stay sharp?

Learning new programs like Sketch, or taking classes on Udemy and Coursera makes no sense to me if you don't apply it.

You don't really know unless you apply it. I grew up disassembling and competing cracking programs, then I learned c because assembler was too slow for creating things like compilers that I wanted to create.

Then I had to learn c++ in order to create graphic interfaces for my programs.

Then I needed python in order to develop faster... java, objective c, c sharp, they provided me with things that I needed.

Then after years of programming I created a company and felt behind. We were so f*ching slow. We needed something else: we discovered metaprogramming in Lisp. Much better then, things improved.

We modified the CLang compiler in order to do much better than anybody else what we did. We were pretty successful.

But it is not enough. We want to change the world. We want people of the world understanding each other using their own languages. We want to understand DNA and end cancer and aging. We want robots that drive and cook. We want to understand nuclear fusion. We want to improve battery technologies, to remove the salt from sea water cheaply. We want to make inexpensive LED plant growing so we can travel to Mars or Venus.

And all the technology that we have is not enough for solving those problems. When you face those problems you became humble and you met the best people you could ever imagine.

Surrounding yourself with really smart people you will learn in a year what you will in your entire life if you only face trivial problems.

I agree there's a lot to be said about the mental benefits. Highly recommend anyone interested checking out Insurgency. I've played every competitive FPS game over past 16 years and latest Insurgency version is the most exciting realistic twitch FPS ever, especially 5v5 competitive mode.

How do you seek out folks that challenge you?

The OP asked how to stay sharp - not how to obtain ultimate happiness, or how to obtain the best balance of everything. Being a founder is probably the best way to learn and stay sharp. Of course it's not for everyone. Of course you're going to fail (at least a little, most likely a ton).

And why is it decades of ruin? I could argue that running and failing your own company for 2-3 years will work better for you financially than going to work for a big tech company straight out of school (or at any point in time really).

There's no need to "throw caution to the wind". Just be on top of what you're capable of, where your priorities are, and what your financial situation is (stay sharp on all these things).

Seconded...learning is not a linear-time experience...or, it shouldn't be at least.

I didn't learn much during and right after university. But after a few years on the job as a reporter, I started getting ideas about how to apply my programming experience. One of my first programming-on-the-job experiences was writing a scraper for the local sheriff's website, so I didn't have to manually click through the inmate list.

(this seems to be a common idea among programming journalists; someone wrote a tutorial about it: https://first-web-scraper.readthedocs.org/en/latest/)

To reiterate LoSboccacc's point...with every new thing I wanted to explore, I had many excuses to try out new languages and tools...early on, many of my ideas were dumb (Drupal was my first concept of a website backed with a database)...but after enough misguided, but not crippling efforts, you get much better at being less misguided. And learning new technologies becomes less of a chore :)