Ask HN: What are you learning right now?

33 points by kotrunga ↗ HN
Can be anything. What are you currently learning?

73 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] thread
Crossing the Chasm (Moore)
That and Hard Thing About Hard Things are the only business books I can recommend.
A lot. I'm in college, so Stats, Japanese, Communication, and History there. But that's just the surface.

I'm also reading a lot of eBooks (mostly nonfiction books: Deep Work, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Models: Attracting Women through Honesty.) I also want to read Wilson's new translation of The Odyssey.

Finally, I just realized I had feelings for a friend of mine when she started dating someone else. I decided that it'd be healthier for both of us if I wished her the best and moved on. We're on good terms, so that's good. So I'm learning a lot about myself and relationships there.

Japanese- through a class in college?

I just finished learning all of the Hiragana pronunciations. Trying to figure out if I want to commit to learning the language or not.

We're required to take 3 semesters of language (has to be the same one). I fell behind somewhere last semester, and now I'm more in "get a good grade" mode than "learn it for life" mode.

The way sentences are structured is fascinating though, so I would recommend it for that. But learning it to speak it would probably be a huge time-sink.

If you are reading Mark Manson I would also suggest: As You Are by Nick Sparks

Good on you for being honest with how you felt, it's something I still struggle with.

Yeah, +1 for openly sharing challenging things. Working on that too.
Thanks for the book recommendation, I’ll check it out.

Yeah, it’s a goal of mine to be both confident and vulnerable, and being honest with myself and other people is how I do that.

I am learning python so our team can build a microservice for predications and analytics for our SaaS product!
CAF (C++ Actor Framework). I plan to use it to compete against Facebook.
I googled up CAF after you mentioned this. It looks interesting but looks too new for me (seeing the version number).

Also how does it compare to Erlang? The website mentions state of the art scheduling I'd like to see that claim against Erlang's BEAM vm.

Are you interested in building a Facebook competitor? If so, I'd love to hear when it launches.

I know many friends/family members who use Facebook despite my repeated attempts to explain Facebook's business model.

If your competitor respects user privacy, I'll certainly look into it.

Angular 4 for Ionic 3. A little bit of VueJS on the side and hoping to start working on my Cantonese again.
Azure (esp. function, queues, tables), git-flow & friends (to try and optimise our processes), brushing up on ASP.NET and Selenium.
Density estimation techniques and parts of an optics design software I didn't know.
How to run a bootstrapped startup as a single founder. I don’t have a problem with the tech etc. and those that see it and experience it, love it.

However, that cliche stands true - marketing and sales are hard. ‘Cold emails’ feel extremely spammy to me, as I know when I’m on the receiving end they get deleted almost straight away. I’m working on content marketing (blog posts etc.), but that is a slow burn that doesn’t provide any returns for a while, or at least that is how looks to me from the outside.

At the same time, it’s a great experience and I’m loving that fact I get to talk to strangers about tech and security almost daily, it is certainly a great new way to look at things.

Out of curiosity, what does your startup do/what is it called? I suppose your comment itself could function as advertising.
That was a temptation, but I held off as my Show HN didn't get much traction both times I posted it, so figured it is best not to come across as trying to force it.

It is however in my profile, if anyone feels so inclined..

That's not how you sell! Give me a link I can click easy :)
https://breachinsider.com - Feedback welcomed :)
So took a look. My first reaction is "meh". It doesn't really save me time or make my product more effective. It is like buying insurance. Also there are incentives to plug your ears and say you don't know about any breach. If you don't know then you have plausible deniability and don't have to report it.

So all in all I think you're gonna have a uphill climb in breaking into this market. It isn't saving me any time or making me more money.

I somewhat agree with what jtchang said, and it may be difficult to reach profitability with obstacles such as those. However, it certainly is a unique idea and I'm sure some businesses will find value in it. On to more marketing, I suppose.
I feel my cold emails are spammy when the value I'm proposed is not a good deal for the reader. Either a still bad product or a overpriced offer.
Cold emails are spammy no matter how good the deal is.

Fifteen years ago you might have got away with a well targeted message but that well has been poisoned now. If you send me unsolicited mail I'm going to assume you aren't the sort of people I want to work with.

Right but if you send me a 100 dollars I would love this "spam".
The C programming language, classical guitar, Olympic weightlifting, music theory, and how to play Overwatch better.

I'm thinking I should try to pare this down a bit, but I feel awful when I have free time that I could be using to learn something.

Screenprinting. I have an online t-shirt store where I fulfill via on-demand DTG printing, but I want better final product and quality control. Planning on getting a press next spring and setting up in my garage. I also just like the feeling of making stuff by hand.
In the most general sense, way too much to list here. But in terms of specific classes or something...

1. I'm taking 3 different Neural Networks related courses on Coursera right now (why 3? Well, I accidentally signed up for one I didn't mean to, but since I already have a Coursera subscription, and since you can keep switching sessions, I just decided to keep it). The three are: Geoffrey Hinton's original NN class, the first class in Andrew Ng's new Deep Learning specialization, and Introduction to Deep Learning, the first course in the Advanced Machine Learning specialization from the Higher School of Economics.

2. I'm taking the first class in the GIS specialization on Coursera.

3. I'm taking the 4th class (Bayesian Statistics) in the "Statistics with R" specialization from Duke on Coursera.

Outside of that, I'm trying to find some time to spend reading Artificial Intelligence - A Modern Approach.

1. Survey Analysis - class

2. Survival Analysis- class

3. GLM- class

4. Tree base classification algorithm (currently reading QUEST) - Thesis

5. Scientific C++ - Thesis

6. Folklorico Dance

7. Salsa (Not doing well... =/)

> 7. Salsa (Not doing well... =/)

If you have the basic step down you may want to try rueda which will take some of the pressure of leading away. You still have to lead the move but you don't have to choreograph at the same time as that's done by the caller.

distributive systems! hoping to get a solid grasp on that then parallel programming & concurrent programming. i have an idea i want to toy around with dealing with a distributive system on mobile devices
Re-learning C++. Took a layoff package from my previous co (product manager), and it's damned tough to find a similar gig without relocating. Besides, it's taking me back to my roots.
Been there, found a gig remote. Good luck with your search.
React Native and its suite, including Redux/React.

It's been a journey. Once I had to upgrade RN to use RNFirebase on Android side, all the dependencies started falling like dominoes. Right now - dealing with RN not building production, and RN+Android not creating JS bundle correctly.

On the bright side, it's bound to stabilize, and I'm learning a lot about how RN works internally.

> On the bright side, it's bound to stabilize, and I'm learning a lot about how RN works internally.

Exactly! I'm having a lot of troubles the last month (been working professionally for 2 years). I don't mind because I hope it will fixed soon and React 16 was an important move.

Elixir and OTP. Really enjoying it and writing some blog posts about it. My latest [1] was an experiment in creating my own simple supervisor.

I am working my way up to having an Elixir application spread across many containers where the processes can pass messages to processes in other containers.

[1] https://medium.com/@tylerpachal/let-it-crash-creating-an-exa...

What is OTP?
OTP comes from Erlang (which Elixir is built on) and it is a framework that is used for creating distributed applications (it originally stood for Open Telecom Platform). It has databases, a test framework, and debugging tools to help.

Down in Elixir land you mainly see it in the form of GenServer (generic servers that are essentially actors) and Supervisors for supervising those GenServer workers and other tasks/processes/

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How to have fun after 10+ years of depression. I'm finding it…tricky.
Stick with it, it's worth finding it. I wish you well!
+1 on XOPJ.

Long time depression is something which changes you forever. Once you find joy you'll love it.

I've been in a similar place recently. It's extremely tricky. I'm slowly making progress and enjoying life a little more.

Instrumental to me in this has been strangely enough, getting sacked from jobs and realizing that work isn't all that important. Yes, it is, but there's a whole lot more to life.

Distributed systems and their architecture

- Samza, Kafka and interesing approach to data modelling - Terraform spin up Kubernetes clusters with a few MAC addresses - Raft

Clojure + going through all of the problems on 4Clojure. It's brining a bit of fun back into programming after years of C++ and Python.
Metallurgy, orbital mechanics, and rocket propulsion. Been bitten by the physics bug!
I'm currently learning React Native [0]. It's interesting that it is in such active development, as the course I'm taking (from a few months ago) already has some outdated lessons.

However, I've enjoyed the experience so far and look forward to building other apps with React Native.

[0]: https://github.com/zanedb/learning-rn