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Ask HN: What are you learning?

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Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hell yes! I love hearing about people interested in abstract algebra and wholly support your endeavor! Here is a pretty decent resource on relevant texts: http://www.cargalmathbooks.com/#Abstract%20Algebra That page in general is pretty gold for math texts in general. Also, #math on freenode has lots of algebra-strong users on it, though depending on your luck some can be less helpful than others. I love chatting abo…

Hi there, the email field doesn’t show up - you need to put it in your about section for people to see it :)

Uff. Thanks! Done.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Architecture is way easier than algorithms. I'm actually the opposite. I hate the idea that people are studying intensely for architecture because it just takes reading the wikipedia summary to get the main point. Architects are usually just managers who are ex-engineers and have been out of the front lines for so long that they aren't technical enough to get back into coding. This is fine, but the idea that "archite…

Not to mention that the more physical nature of architecture makes it less flexible than code itself so "architectural" patterns are, as a result, significantly less abstract and complex than coding patterns/algorithms. This is the reason that software engineers need adult supervision. The fact that you think that modern infrastructure is physical and static displays a lack of experience. There is nothing static abou…

>This is the reason that software engineers need adult supervision. The fact that you think that modern infrastructure is physical and static displays a lack of experience. There is nothing static about modern cloud infrastructure.

Note how I said "more physical nature," meaning that it's closer to physical but not completely physical. Either way, all abstractions suffer from leakage from the physical world. Data and processes, while seemingly abstract all occupy physical and temporal space and this fact leaks to all layers of the stack. Thus, technically, everything in the universe including computation is physical and nothing is ever purely a virtual entity.

Honestly, you think I don't know about docker? You think I don't know about the cloud? "Infrastructure as code" oooh buzzwords, you're just using a shittier domain specific language to write something that you can also do with Regular code (such as python, no buzzwords needed).

Give me a break, what web developer doesn't know about the above stuff? None.

>I just had to deploy an API to ECS/Fargate (Docker). We had to determine the best combination of memory/cpu of the Fargate runtime environment and what hardware we wanted to give the ElasticSearch environment. I basically wrote a CloudFormation template (infrastructure as code) that defined the environment and then wrote a Node script that ran the CF template and passed in parameters...................

OK, the stuff you did isn't even usually what a "architect" does. It's devops. An architect just diagrams the boxes and lines and gives it to the devops guy to spit out working infrastructure or a POC. But that's besides the point...

Can you write your own programming language? Can you write your own database? Can you write your own Operating System? These are actual specialties (none of which involve "architecture"), not some garbage made up specialty like "architect." At the very least, if you want to be part of an actual specialty in the IT world you need to build shit and that shit needs to be HARD to build, you can't just do some easy diagraming of a bunch of stuff while acting like you have some superior understanding of the latest architecture pattern you can look up on wikipedia.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#483

I'll probably get a lot of shit for this, but LeetCode. I've recently been furloughed, and I think that redundancies aren't too far away. There aren't many companies hiring in my area at the moment, and if I'm going to move it's going to be for a big company, so I'm dusting off the CV and am applying to some Big N companies. A recruiter recently reached out to me, and I've got an interview with one Big N company comi…

Back when I was preparing to apply to a FAANG, I built a game engine as my vehicle for practice. From scratch. Well almost from scratch, if you consider bare nekkid OpenGL to still be "from scratch".

There's tons of opportunities in a game engine for exercising and honing your performance chops and your algorithm chops. It also gave me an opportunity to learn a new language and programming model - the GL shader language. Building it onto a game helps to keep it real.

Best of luck.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#484

Stanford's CS143 Compilers course: https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:StanfordOnline+SOE... I've always been interested in making things that make other things, and compilers definitely fall into that category. In the middle of the second assignment, the parser. It's a lot to consume, but I feel like the theory isn't particularly difficult, about half my learning has been getting to know the tools (so far: fle…

Thanks for your recommendation !I am pretty interested in web security partly because I want to start my own start up in two years, and I want to make sure my customer's data is safe. I am also interested in compilers but just can't bear C++, so I plan to take this course :https://www.coursera.org/learn/nand2tetris2. It doesn't limit languages you can use .So I plan to write the compiler by Racket(which can also sharpen my functional programming skill).

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#485

How to take care of a toddler from 5 AM - 8 PM while trying to manage work and phone calls. Then how to not fall asleep while I"m working on projects until 1 AM. So learning how to function on 4-6 hours of sleep.

I have a renewed appreciation of so much that we usually take for granted, chief among those are the contributions of our teachers and child care professionals.

Most teachers don't have to deal with toddlers and the ones that do don't have to do another job while taking care of the toddler. It is not such a big deal unlike being a full time housewife which does have to take care of toddlers while doing other house jobs. The economic value of a full time housewife is probably bigger than many of the jobs done by women in the office.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#486
High school is out so I am learning SIMD instruction sets, like AVX2 and SSE, and using these to speed up Hamming/Levenshtein distance calculations in Rust. Preliminary testing shows a 20x speedup using vectorized SIMD operations! The end goal is a full Rust library for edit distance routines.

Sneak peek of the code: https://twitter.com/daniel_c0deb0t/status/124224838155819008...

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#488

Cantonese - it is an incredibly rich language with tons of regional differences, slang, and history spanning thousands of years, way more rich than modern Mandarin. The fact that it has fewer resources online to learn it has made me more resourceful at finding good books, academic grammar articles, and has gotten me deep into HK pop culture. I'm a native romance language speaker and Cantonese is so fundamentally diff…

What is your background? By the time I lived in HK I found it more difficult to study compare to Mandarin in terms of speaking and listening. Though learning traditional characters seems more exciting. But now I live in Japan, Japanese has more intersections between Cantonese rather than Mandarin

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#489
Reading various biographies!

Some of the books on my list are: The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí Doctor Goebbels: His Life and Death I, Claudius by Robert Graves The Agony and the Ecstasy Lust for Life Carl Jung Memories, Dreams and Reflections. Stephen King - On Writing

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#490
More about Adobe Premier Pro. I've been doing video editing for a couple of years as a hobby, and I am continually amazed at the depths you can go in video production.

I'm also learning that you can only do so much in post. Sometimes, you just need a different shot.

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