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Ask HN: Things to learn to make money and live peacefully

17 points by cookies2eat ↗ HN
I am interested to learn or do MOOC's. First thing is I don't believe in paid courses/MOOC's/Books. Generally I use to audit courses in platforms like Coursera/Edx/NPTEL/MIT OCW. Second and my main dilemma is what to learn so that my career will be sustainable for the long run (make money peacefully). Also I don't think MBA in reputed colleges make sense, I feel its a myth. On some deep research, Data management stuff's was reasonable to me. However in current era everyone speaks about AI/GenAI (Which I don't like), sustainability, META, Blockchain, Everything cloud, Now 5G (later other G's)...etc. Technologies will be keep changing and continuous learning process through out the life is an opportunity not everyone gets. So my understanding was to get foundational learning at a free of cost and career experience should be the learning process.

Share your thoughts on your realization which foundational learning at a free of cost can help to get career that gives balanced life .....So that people will not rush towards hypes.....

22 comments

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BMc2020
Learn how to do taxes for other people. VITA offers a free 5 day course every year. https://www.taxpayeradvocate.irs.gov/get-help/filing-returns...

You'll start out with simple returns at your skill level during tax season. After a few years you will be pretty good at individual income taxes.

Needless to say, this is a valuable skill that will help you for the rest of your life.

cookies2eat
VITA is based out of US. If there any similar programs in India will be helpful ?
mkbkn
Are people eligible to learn and practice this if they are not a US citizen and/or based outside.
throwaway888abc
Here is peaceful and fulfilling carrier path to consider without MBA overhead

https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/finding-a-job/how-to-be...

ttymck
Subsistence farming perhaps. But my understanding is that making money as a modern farmer requires serious skill in planning, optimization, and negotiating.
cookies2eat
Along with that climate/environment should favor us and selling the cultivable is the big challenge because not all farmers can able to do it by themself, so for selling the cultivable they have to depend on dealers/brokers who actually set the price for farmers efforts and dealers/brokers who earn in hefty will less efforts in comparable with farmers.
raptorraver
If you consider becoming a farmer check out the works of Joel Salatin and Richard Perkins. Both have good ideas how to bootsrap your farm business without big investments on a rented land.
mejutoco
Being a notary or any other public service or semi-public (depending on the country) seems like a safe and easy job once you are in.
brudgers
I don't believe in paid courses/MOOC's/Books.

Why?

gtirloni
> First thing is I don't believe in paid courses/MOOC's/Books

> what to learn so that my career will be sustainable for the long run (make money peacefully)

> get foundational learning at a free of cost and career experience should be the learning process

Maybe OP thinks education should always be free. But I got confused because they think on the job learning is the learning process and then obviously your employer is paying for your training indirectly or directly. So maybe the point is that OP doesn't believe in paid courses by themselves but is fine with employers paying for that?

Obviously people should be compensated for their work creating courses/MOOCs/books

But OP wants to make money like everyone else and live peacefully. But others have to work for free for OP's benefit.

I don't know how to process this. I'm confused.

cookies2eat
Basic foundational learning need to there at a free of cost that can lead to a job to the career path. From where we should gain knowledge through job experience which should raise money for our life. I don't mean courses paid by corporates and you get it at free. Now what we do is we keep learning and learning as technology changes through courses/classes. There will be no full stop for this. So I am looking for opportunities in foundational learning -->job to the career path-->knowledge through job experience-->money for our sustainable life.
austin-cheney
I have spent a ton of time refining use of sockets and test automation these past years in personal projects. These are winning me employment in areas that are far less opinionated.
pillefitz
Sockets.. sounds oddly specific. In what regards did your learning help you?
austin-cheney
I learned a couple of things from dealing with sockets:

* It dramatically simplified my application architecture with regard to any kind of network services or web application.

* It made every aspect of my application event-oriented. That means no network polling, no round trip delays, no performance bottle necks. Everything becomes super concurrent as network messaging is fire and forget. I suspect UDP would be even faster, but I have not tried it. I am reluctant to give up the fidelity of TCP for UDP.

* It allows radical scale of network services and everything reliant upon network services in ways I could not do before. I simply receive unexpected network messages and then handle them according to the respective message type. I can bolt on new service functionality without refactoring anything.

cookies2eat
Very interesting, For sure your experience can't match anything. However can you please provide the learning references for sockets.
austin-cheney
I have nothing to provide. It was all trial and effort on hobby code refactoring the architecture of a personal application and writing an original WebSocket client/server.

I did spend a lot of time trying to make sense of RFC6455. I also spent a lot of time trying to get self-signed localhost TLS certificates working cross-OS and this is a continuous struggle.

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