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Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?

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Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?

#431

Post by jacquesm »

robertAngst wrote: post #51

Real World Embedded Systems. Built a dishwasher that cleans and sets your dinner table. C++, Arduino, Electrical Engineering, and worked with a mechanical engineer on the design execution. Here is the story, skip to the bottom if you want to see the youtube video- Started this year working on a finance App, this one needed to be perfect. React Native, Laravel PHP mysql. The app is almost finished, and is worthy of a…

Props to you. And it works! Reminds me of some of Simone Giertz' work. It's an amazing feeling when your software has a real world effect.

Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?

#434

Post by sbov »

I spent most of my time in 2018 getting a deeper knowledge in pieces of tech I already use: Spring/Spring Boot, Hibernate, Postgresql, and Javascript. Did a lot of documentation reading. And source code reading. Built a suite of examples of ways to accomplish a variety of goals in a variety of ways and why it works the way it does.

Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?

#435

Post by shriek »

jmkni wrote: post #298
corysama wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to do machine learning, those two ops are pretty much the foundation of how it works under the hood. If you want to do coding in general, I like to say that you can have a career in code without being good at math. But, math is how great coders do what seems like magic to other coders.

That’s a really nice way of putting it. As a grown up who has already been working as a software developer for ~10 years, do you have any recommendations on books to read, courses to do etc if I want to improve my maths? I’m not terrible, but I know I could be a lot better!

I'm same as you too but I did have some background in math from college but I've been rusty on them already.

- I know it's said over and over again but KhanAcademy is pretty good for high-school math - For probability, I'm also going over this website[1] at the moment. Maybe someone else has other recommendations too - Linear Algebra is next on my list but others have given some reference for it already - Andrew Ng's course on Machine Learning from Coursera is also another frequently recommended if you are trying to learn math for it

[1] https://www.probabilitycourse.com/

Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?

#436

Post by Zhyl »

catacombs wrote: post #349
Zhyl wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth getting a few insights into what it does well. As with any language it _can_ do anything, but a few key features that made it stand out for me: * Perl is set up for really terse one-liners. You can basically emulate or surpass most Unix tools with only a cursory knowledge of the syntax * Perl syntax is highly geared towards text processing and regular expressions. File handling and regexes are so much quic…

> * Perl is set up for really terse one-liners. You can basically emulate or surpass most Unix tools with only a cursory knowledge of the syntax This definitely interests me. How does perl surpass Unix tools? I guess perl has the benefit of handling the equivalent of sed and awk.

Yeah, it has equivalents for each.

Sed:

perl -pe 's/foo/bar/' file1

Grep:

perl -pe '/foo/' file1

uniq:

perl -ne 'print unless $seen{$_}++' file1

But then you can combine conditions:

perl -ne 's/foo/bar/ if /baz/ && /yot/; print "Line number $. changed to $_"' file1

And do some awk-ish line splitting:

perl -F, -ane '$sum += $F[2]; END{ print "The sum of column 3 is $sum" }' file1

It absolutely flies in the face of the unix philosophy and is much more complicated than picking up each tool individually, but once you get to grips with 'em they're very handy.

Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?

#437

Post by pvarangot »

p2detar wrote: post #56
dsiegel2275 wrote: post #23

Machine Learning. In 2018 I went from "zero to sixty", so to speak. At the beginning of the year I knew nothing about ML, and my math skills had gotten so rusty I couldn't even remember how to do simple derivatives or multiply two matrices. In the first half of 2018 I relearned the college math that I had forgotten by working through MIT OCW's Linear Algebra, Calculus, and Probability courses. In the Fall, I enrolled…

Thanks a lot for the MIT OCW lectures hint! I want to do the same in 2019. What works for me in general is diving into a side project and learning by hacking, but I fear ML won't be susceptible to this approach.

The Linear Algebra OCW is great if you do all the exercise and read the book as you study. For Calculus it's not so great, though the ODE course is fine.

This kind of courses from UPenn are really good if you need to refresh single variable, though I did an older version were all the courses were given together than I can't find in the current Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/learn/single-variable-calculus

Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?

#438

Post by ilikehurdles »

justwalt wrote: post #420
ilikehurdles wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Derivatives were available for the most advanced level students in high school where I went. Even then it was understood that they were receiving college credit early. Linear algebra not at all.

Which is odd, in my opinion. Linear algebra is easier than Calculus and would likely be more useful to the average person.

Agree completely. In my university, calc was a pre req for linear algebra and it didn’t make any sense to me then either.

Re: Ask HN: What technologies did you learn in 2018?

#440

Post by 4thaccount »

maliker wrote: post #355
4thaccount wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you be more specific as to what you do? Power transmission or distribution?

Mostly focused on distribution engineering analysis: distributed generation interconnection, energy storage dispatch, demand response planning. Hoping to do more transmission analysis in the future but for now work mostly with distribution utilities.

Interesting. I'm working a bit with energy storage modeling on the transmission side and am familiar with the other topics you mentioned although everything is 10x harder with distribution as the load flows are unbalanced as I understand it. Transmission systems are gargantuan, but at least you can assume steady-state in most cases.

Are you with a utility, University, national lab, or contractor?

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