Ask HN: What new skills are you learning?

Yes! I heard draw right is a really good book. But learning how to draw is like learning how to program: too many resources can cause analysis paralysis. I really just need to shut up and draw

The first thing I did was draw the alphabet every day. For example, I would draw something that started with the letter a, then the letter b the next day, etc. It took me more than a month to finish but I saw a huge skill improvement from the later drawings.

I have three short answers for you.

1. http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Well-30th-Anniversary-Nonficti...

2. Watch the video at the end of this link: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/watch-me-write-this-arti... The take away is write, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, and rewrite some more.

3. Pay attention to the people who write well in your life. When you read an email that feels well written try to figure out why you like it. And use those elements in your future writings.

For writing, I am almost done with this book and it is great:

Writing That Works; How to Communicate Effectively In Business by Roman and Raphaelson

Stresses clarity and writing how you talk.

Sure thing -

I'm not one for reading books I think there's more value in just building stuff:

Check out Prediction.IO - http://prediction.io/ it's an out of the box machine learning server, it uses hbase, but hbase in this configuration is sitting on top of the local filesystem, not HDFS -- so the first task I assigned myself was to learn how to setup hadoop, and then configure HBase to store data in HDFS.

Once I have that, I'm going to use PySpark to use spark to query the data. (Thats where the python comes in)

Another cool project (not related to the tech stack above) is Pyro https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Pyro4 ... this consumed a whole weekend of mine a few weeks back, building a small distributed search engine for querying compressed DNA sequences ... think a parallel boyer-moore. As a learning exercise try doing that, it's great fun!

I would suggest using myhdl (www.myhdl.org), and then plugging the verilog/vhdl it generates into your vendor's tools.

It's still in the idea stages, why my original idea of sending an FPGA doing active video processing would be computationally and energy expensive, where transmitting a low-latency signal to a processing unit on the ground wouldn't cost an arm and a leg. I'm looking at a ZYNQ-7000 board because the free eBook by Xilinx looked very approachable to a newbie at hardware design. If optimized properly, I'd hope to be able to integrate the quadcopter controls onto a better fpga and be a single unit. It's gonna be an all-summer project.

I learned a bit on my own time last year. Check back on this thread in a few days—I'm writing up a post detailing how I went about learning it with links to a whole bunch of resources. It'll probably be useful to you, so I'll post it as a reply to you here once it's done.

I hope this isn't flippant, but have you read the Perl regex man pages [0]? "Perl compatible" regexes are very common, and are explained _really_ well. Similarly, the Perl Cookbook (from O'Reilly) has a whole chapter on regular expressions -- even crazy ones like detecting US phone numbers (hard!) -- with explanations. That chapter is QUITE good, and I highly recommend it even you don't write Perl.

For your specific problem at hand, I assume you want to replace spaces with a tab character.

In Perl, you could do:

  # replace four spaces with a tab, globally
  $line =~ s/    /\t/g;

You can do this directly on the command line as well:

  perl -e 'while (<>) { $line = $_; $line =~ s/    /\t/g; print $line; }' < foo_spaces.py > foo_tabs.py

I have a gist [1] which has very slightly more comments, if you prefer. To paraphrase XKCD, there are now N+1 regex explanations, and I apologize that mine is comparatively worse than all of them. :)

0: http://perldoc.perl.org/perlre.html 1: https://gist.github.com/gknoy/94c382299c4543f2e863

Have you looked at sed yet?

Not helpful at all for learning, but I've found RegExper[1] is fantastic for visualizing existing expressions, particularly ones you haven't written but need to understand or edit.

[1] http://www.regexper.com/

for JavaScript devs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Guid...

also http://overapi.com/regex

This is also a great tool to play around with / construct regexes: http://regex101.com/

Here's a free e-book on Haskell that I used in university: www.learnyouahaskell.com

You can also support the author by purchasing a copy!

Edit: I'm new and do not know how to make that into a link. Sorry about that.

I've been learning Haskell for the last year and a half, though I've been working with functionally inspired languages for 8 years. Haskell is wonderful, easily the most fun I've had learning a language in 20 years.

I'd advise not getting distracted by monads and other glamorous parts of the language. Monads are pretty abstract, and they won't likely make much sense until you've written enough Haskell to feel the pain-points they address.

I've learned a lot by reading blog posts from these people:

* Aditya Bhargava: http://adit.io

* Gabriel Gonzalez: http://www.haskellforall.com/

* Joseph Abrahamson: http://jspha.com/

* kqr (I don't know this person's full name. Avatar not withstanding, I'm pretty sure kqr isn't David Bowie): https://github.com/kqr/gists

* Edward Kmett: https://www.fpcomplete.com/user/edwardk

Most of all, I advise not getting discouraged. Haskell has a lot of concepts that seem intimidating. Many times I've spent days trying to figure out what the hell a contravariant functor is, only to get really discouraged. At times I've doubted my own abilities and whether learning the language was worth it. I stuck to it, and a year and a half later I'm pretty damn capable with Haskell (and I know what a contravariant functor is!) and I'm having the time of my life learning more about it.