15 ms·
Ask HN: How old are you (optional) and what was the last thing that you learned?
Doesn't have to be tech related.
- DEADBEEFC0FFEE 8y ago47m, I was reading about installing Kubernetes the hard way, when I learned my 9yo son is a badass sniper in Fortnite.
- cerberusss 8y ago41m, Swift protocol-oriented programming
- HugoDaniel 8y ago35, yesterday I learned how to play poker (texas hold'em)
- antoniorosado 8y agoTexas hold’em is life :)
- majewsky 8y agoI played Texas hold'em last week, and all of us hadn't played it in multiple years. It was pretty hilarious since we started from the assumption that "this ain't so complicated, we've done it before", but then debated for most of the time how blinds work.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- gaspoweredcat 8y ago34. How to build a HiFi tube amplifier
- unimpressive 8y ago22 - How to write an Android app
- markatkinson 8y ago31m, how important air conditioning is to my sanity.
- deven88 8y ago30 - Yesterday, I learned how to make flask (python) web app.
- scottydelta 8y agoExcellent choice.
- shriphani 8y ago27 - this morning I learned to apply gold leaf to wood. Most recently acquired skill - chip carving wood.
- makeupsomething 8y ago28 - how to layout webpages with flexbox and css grid
- blue_tongue 8y ago49, TIG welding for bicycle frames.
- abhiminator 8y ago21. Last thing I learnt was fixing my Android device's super annoying boot-loop.
- cbluth 8y agoNexus 5x? Single core bootloader fix?
- kregasaurusrex 8y agoI remember being 17 and doing that on the very day I got my first android phone! Decided to flash a custom ROM (CyanogenMod) without charging the device first and nearly bricked it, and forced me to learn how adb and device bootloaders work.
- boxhead852b 8y agoWhy does age matter ? What is the point of asking about age ?
- nift 8y agoNot the OP, but I can be an interesting metric with regards to what people learn. For instance with regards to languages, do "younger" commenters learn more "hyped" languages than "older"? Or is the reverse? In general I would classify it "just for fun" and the OP did state it was optional. Perhaps edited after your comment?
- cvaidya1986 8y agoImagine someone responding I am 200 and last thing I learned is the secret to immortality.
- boxhead852b 8y agoWhy does age matter ? What is the point of asking how old a person is?
- jonnismash 8y agoLol they did say optional.
- malux85 8y ago33. Apache Arrow
- minikomi 8y ago35. 1.5 mount and Buddha's revenge.
- Scea91 8y ago26 - Walking 5 meters on slackline.
- I_complete_me 8y ago56. how to ssh into an AWS instance. Oh the joy!
- Raed667 8y ago26- I learned that my body is not as "unbreakable" as it was ten years ago
- maccard 8y agoIf it helps,im the same age as you, and I learned my body wasn't as unbreakable as I thought it was when I was 16. Hope it works out for you. What I've learned is our bodies are impressively good at fixing the things that go wrong with them
- flashgordon 8y ago39. I feel the same way as you!
- sunstone 8y agoA forty year old body takes twice as long to heal as a 20 year old body :( I learned this quite some time ago but it still seems surprising.
- flashgordon 8y agoHah - Surprising yep. And dissappointing too :)
- DecoPerson 8y ago24 – I learnt how helping myself helps me help others. My body and mind are instruments and they require attention and maintenance. On the tech side, I started learning Rust and delved deeper into how Perforce works so I could write a tool to backup and restore my pending changelists to/from Git repos.
- DanielBMarkham 8y ago53 - How to change a bike tire and tube
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago54 - Cocoa and Objective-C (on a 2003 G4 iMac).
- Lunatic666 8y ago40. Apache Spark
- fbomb 8y ago55. Just stumbled across a philosophy course online. I had always thought of philosophy as archaic, useless and boring. I could not have been more wrong.
- mookid8000 8y ago39. Learned (and am still learning) how to brew beer. This is great.
- jakidud 8y agoAny good resources?
- rufius 8y agoI learned to brew many years ago and have always liked this book: How To Brew: Everything You Need to Know to Brew Great Beer Every Time https://www.amazon.com/dp/1938469356/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_JTFxBbB9D5154 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1938469356/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_JTFx... This book is pretty commonly sold with starter kits too.
- mohitmun 8y ago25, learned vim, went from 100% sublime to 100% vim in 6 months.
- jakidud 8y agoWhat are the differences and why do you prefer vim?
- jwilbs 8y agoAs someone who switched from sublime to vim after college (dev team was all sublime), I second the request for any benefits of vim over sublime (aside from being cooler). I’ve been wanting to relearn using it with fluency, but can’t justify the time-sink/productivity loss yet.
- aliencat 8y agoI would say that in terms of efficiency, Vim is >= Sublime. I have yet to see anyone using a GUI text editor beat the text editing speed of Vim. Plus, you are at full productivity when working with terminal. Think about how easy it is to ssh to a server and edit files with Vim.
- wastholm 8y ago48. Started learning music theory, so far by means of parts 1 and 2 of "Music Theory for Electronic Music" on Udemy. I dabbled in music in my 20s but never really knew what I was doing so it's amazing fun.
- 52-6F-62 8y agoOh if you missed this you should check it out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17638067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17638067
- double_h 8y ago32. Journey of a packet from NIC to the application.
- Yetanfou 8y ago52, currently building a house, finished the roof (ceramic tiles, angled buildout, valley gutters, etc).
- boomboomboomboo 8y ago38 - learned from wife that it's my fault my 2 year old pooed on the floor downstairs while I was in the shower upstairs because 2 year old was calling me even though wife was downstairs with 2 year old at the time.
- LocalMan 8y agoAnd therefore you learned that wisdom can be most obscure.
- pan69 8y ago45. Just learned how the vga's modex works after it being a mystery to me for 25 years.
- dazhbog 8y ago29 - Learned how antenna tuning works for cellular, LoRa, GPS, etc. Still a dark art and im still a noob at it.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- BerislavLopac 8y ago50. The very last thing I learned is that the language which gave us the original word for orange is now using the English word for it (yesterday). The last completely new thing (for me) I learned was how to write a "hello world" program in Rust. ;-)
- stefanjudis 8y ago32 - learned about place-items in css
- dkersten 8y ago33, not the last thing I learned, but the last thing I put sustained long term (since December) effort to learn is sleight of hand and card magic in general. I went from knowing almost nothing about it to being able to perform multiple illusions and tricks, and being able to understand the mechanics of many magicians’ routines that I see on television or YouTube. Still have a long way to go, though.
- antoniorosado 8y ago45, yesterday I learned how to fingerpick “don’t think twice, it’s alright” by bob Dylan on the ukulele.
- jimholcomb 8y ago63. Docker. I have Plex, Wordpress, Nagios, SQL Server, Pihole, and VPN containers in a CentOS VM under Parallels on my Mac. It’s been fun setting this up.
- jarfil 8y ago40, yesterday I opened a mechanical keyboard for the first time and learned how to disassemble and fix a cherry (outemu) mechanical switch.
- lecarore 8y ago26, how to make Mexican tortillas from scratch at home
- nasalgoat 8y ago46, and I learned how to use redis sentinel without having to integrate it into your code by leveraging haproxy to handle failover.
- KentGeek 8y ago63 - PowerShell scripting. I think I learn some little thing almost every day.
- vidanay 8y ago46, I took Discrete Math I & II this past spring. It wasn't easy. Last math class I has was (failed) Calculus I in 1989 and (failed) again in 1990. I got a B+ and an A- this time, but I probably put in 30 hours per week studying and doing homework.
- hiram112 8y agoJust out of curiosity as I'm probably closer to your age than I am to the majority of folks here, are you taking these classes as part of a grad program in CS or related?
- kup0 8y agoI actually enjoyed Discrete Math and Calculus as subjects, but the professors I had were so bad that once I was out of there I never really revisited them. I've had that happen with a few subjects, unfortunately. Now, years later, I've been wanting to revisit the subjects again.
- TylerJewell 8y ago42. Ground and tower comms related to pursuing private pilots license.
- hellisothers 8y agoPrivate pilots’s license was some of the best money and time I’ve spent on myself in my adult life. Enjoy!
- benjohnson 8y ago44 - Learned how to use a 4.25 inch grinder to strip apart a safe that I can't move. I now realize that padlocks are just there to keep the honest people honest.
- sawmurai 8y ago31. Polish. Still in progress and will probably take another couple of years.
- zigzaggy 8y ago41 - learning to trade options on the stock market.
- evonsdesigns 8y ago28 - learning to trade covered calls.
- marketgod 8y agoLook into the wheel strategy.
- fwdpropaganda 8y ago"learning to trade" says almost nothing, as there are many different strategies that you could be learning. So what did you learn exactly? :-)
- evonsdesigns 8y agoI'm not employing a specific strategy. A better wording would be discovering covered calls. I already own the shares so the downside risk is inherent. Betting against upside is great in these volatile markets, and given enough capital for the stock, I can buy 100 more if I get close to break-even price on the upside. For the last two weeks I sold calls for TQQQ.
- kaybe 8y agoCan anyone recommend a path to learning about investing?
- iKlsR 8y ago24. Tennis
- hellisothers 8y ago39. Class struggle and racism in America from its founding up to the present through a series of books a history post-doc friend assembled for me. “Going deep” on a topic as Tyler Cowen suggests.
- tucaz 8y agoI’d suggest you to take a look at what other “right” leaning people have to say about the subject. Especially Dinesh D Souza, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro and Yaron Brook.
- cm2012 8y ago27. Don't hire painters from Handy.com.
- kahlonel 8y ago30 - How to cook a perfect steak at home
- 52-6F-62 8y ago31. Germanium transistors perform inconsistently in different temperatures, and not necessarily to a fault. Great thread subject, btw. This is interesting.
- morog 8y ago38. Eveyone spent 4 months inside their grandmother (as an egg inside their mothers fetus)
- geetfun 8y agoWife and I were just talking about this and how this is a great example of how decisions made in one generation can have consequences that span multiple generations (eg. Eggs, where one’s family immigrated to, etc)
- trm42 8y ago35. This has been going for a few years already but now I start to see some results: posing people for photography. I know people which are quite good at it naturally, but at least for me it's a lot harder than learning a new programming language. Learning something in which you're completely out of your comfort zone is even more rewarding.
- LocalMan 8y ago70.17 years: Last big thing was the programming language Go, a few years ago. The last thing was differing opinions of Maimonides and Yehuda Halevi on primeval substances with regard to Creation Ex Nihilo. The very last thing was that the apartment next door is vacant and available for rent. The very very most recent thing is that I feel like answering this question.
- mindcrime 8y agoAge: 45 Last thing I learned? Err... well, on Friday I spent some time learning how to deploy tasks to Amazon ECS. I've also spent the last week or so doing a deep dive into OAuth and setting up a CAS server so I can use OAuth + Token Introspection for service-to-service authorization. Additionally, I work with a quite diverse team (in terms of nationality / ethnicity) so I've been leaning on some co-workers to help me learn a few words of Portugese, Spanish, and Tamil here and there.
- squirrelicus 8y ago31. In Java, this code can spin forever if a different thread changes this.done, and it's not a "volatile" member. while(!this.done){ Thread.Sleep(1000); } The more I learn about Java, the more I'm shocked at how mostly-identical it is to C#. Except C# is clearly superior in the details. I expected to find something java did better, but I'm coming up short.
- h2j24 8y agoOne interesting article I read had an interesting point: one thing Java does better is to use type Erasure. This was surprising to me because reified types are often touted as one of the best things about C#. The author's argument was that type erasure made implementing different type systems on the JVM easier, because type erasure isn't as strict, which makes the JVM a more attractive language target than the CRT.
- Canada 8y agoThe average age of those who responded to this post is 38.6 (as of about 6:07pm UTC July 29)
- JoelSanchez 8y ago24, how to create a k8s cluster with kubeadm using cheap VPSs. Also, sea waves are more dangerous than I thought
- Immortalin 8y agoHow are you handling node additions and removals? Terraform?
- JoelSanchez 8y agoYes, I use a modified version of https://github.com/hobby-kube/provisioning https://github.com/hobby-kube/provisioning
- aliencat 8y agoAutoscaler(https://github.com/kubernetes/autoscaler/tree/master/cluster-autoscaler https://github.com/kubernetes/autoscaler/tree/master/cluster...) is a good option too. Works incredibly well at automatically adding/removing nodes based on workload.
- theli0nheart 8y ago31. I just learned how to make soap in Dwarf Fortress.
- gota 8y ago32 (and just learned about Competitive Analysis) but I wanted to say that learning how to make stuff in Dwarf Fortress is always rewarding in a very deep sense. I have no idea why, but every new mechanic mastered seems to multiply the possibilities of fun (and dwarf fortress 'fun' also)
- rhn_mk1 8y agoRealized that browsing second hand shops, flea markets, visiting museums, art galleries, trade shows, have a common theme and still make people happy even when they leave without buying anything.
- zck 8y ago33. Most guitar tabs for The Beatles' Norwegian Wood are wrong -- they have the intro accurate, but it's not the same as the part played under the lyrics. And it's not just that the song is played on a sitar -- even the sitar isn't mirroring the intro to the song through the lyrics. Look at, for example, this tab (https://www.guitartabsexplorer.com/beatles-Tabs/norwegian-wood-tab.php https://www.guitartabsexplorer.com/beatles-Tabs/norwegian-wo...), which explicitly says "Use same guitar pattern under solo voice". Now listen to the song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYs02z35F24 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYs02z35F24), which doesn't use the same pattern under the voice. It's a good accompaniment, but it is just different.
- seanhunter 8y agoMany (and possibly most) guitar (and bass) tabs for songs are (unfortunately) wrong. Likewise very many chord boxes and often the chord names themselves are wrong. There are notable exceptions (eg "Standing in the shadows of Motown" - the transcription of James Jamerson's basslines is genuinely superb). There's really no substitute for listening really closely to music you really like and figuring it out for yourself. I have boxfiles of transcriptions I did and if nothing else, it improves your ear to the extent you get faster and faster not only at doing transcriptions but at learning music generally.
- zck 8y agoThat's hard to get started! It does sound powerful, but it also seems like a daunting task for your average chord strummer, like me.
- blendo 8y agoOver 50. Just read Judith Shklar's The Liberalism of Fear https://philpapers.org/archive/SHKTLO.pdf https://philpapers.org/archive/SHKTLO.pdf, which argues that minimizing fear is a valid political principle: "Every adult should be able to make as many effective decisions without fear or favor about as many aspects of her or his life as is compatible with the like freedom of every other adult." Further, "Apart from prohibiting interference with the freedom of others, liberalism does not have any particular positive doctrines about how people are to conduct their lives or what personal choices they are to make."
- w4tson 8y agoWhat if people’s fears are generated or exaggerated by a unaccountable minority leveraging unregulated tools, mining illegal data mixed with psychology for profit, power or both?
- mie00 8y ago27. Kubernetes cronjobs
- ai_ia 8y ago25. How to deploy a docker based lambda function to compile latex on fly. Currently it compiles tufte class pretty well.
- dmlittle 8y agoI did the very same thing 2 weeks ago! Out of curiosity, were you using the lambci image as a starting point?
- ai_ia 8y agoNo, this one. https://github.com/samoconnor/lambdalatex https://github.com/samoconnor/lambdalatex
- dmlittle 8y agoThey are using lambci as a starting point :) https://github.com/samoconnor/lambdalatex/blob/master/Dockerfile#L1 https://github.com/samoconnor/lambdalatex/blob/master/Docker...
- 1mike12 8y agoI play this game airsoft (like paintball) and I like to go especially on beautiful days like today. It's so much cardio and you don't even notice it. Anyways, this Canadian company makes these really innovative reusable bang grenades and I finally learned how to toss them just right to clear out rooms. In movies the badass hero makes perfect throws without even thinking. But turns out in real life having your gun in your main hand, pulling the thing out with your non dominant hand, pulling a pin, and then getting it throug an opening, while hoping and praying nobody gets the jump on you is really really hard. Before this I would blow myself up, or forget to pull the pin. Oops.
- Spacemolte 8y agoSo true, it really is amazing that you don't even notice the exercise when combining it with something funny/purposeful. I was in a milsim game some years ago, in a room at a military training site with my mate, and suddenly we see something thrown inside the room, and we just know that we gotta get out, so we scramble for the door only to get stuck shoulder to shoulder getting shot in the back by a guy in the window. The "grenade" was a brick .. :)
- potta_coffee 8y agoThe correct way is to have your team cover you and throw with your dominant hand.
- code_devil 8y ago34 1. Learned swimming over the last 4-6 weeks 2. Learning Spanish ( Duolingo / Pimsleur ) 3. Learned to live minimalisicaly for the last 15 months. ( includes international and domestic travel ) PS: I am also constantly learning new technologies in AI/ML/NLP/Alexa/Google Assistant/AWS/GCP etc as I find those fun :)
- rejectedalot 8y ago23 yo Last tech thing: learned how routers work Last non-tech thing: some strategy in technique for amateur cycling racing
- senorsmile 8y agoI'm 34. I learned 5 new words in Hebrew via Anki this morning at 6:30am. I do this every morning as I increase my ability and go towards C1. This doesn't include everything that I learned yesterday evening, per the requirements of the question.
- kregasaurusrex 8y ago24. Learned how IP Routing works while preparing to take the CCNA exam.
- hugo19941994 8y ago24. Learned how to use multiple framebuffers in OpenGL (still working on how to get motion vectors right though).
- ____helga_ 8y agoPasword hackk
- jwilbs 8y ago26. Tech: Scrollama (JavaScript library for scrollytelling).
- foopod 8y ago27 - How to use a Film Camera (but also a lot about photography in general)
- tboyd47 8y agoI'm 33. Replace your timing belt on time.
- the_new_guy_29 8y ago28, how to disassemble an engine in polo 2008.. just not to be ripped off by car mechanic
- jpindar 8y agoNot to get emotionally involved with a product that could be turned off at any time. And that just because a business is more popular and better technically than it's competitors doesn't mean it doesn't have problems behind the scenes. And on a related note, if you don't have something downloaded to your own hard drive, you don't really own it.
- gmemstr 8y ago18. I've been learning a lot about Drupal recently, and it's been really eye opening in terms of what PHP can actually do. I haven't taken a serious look at it in years and frankly writing tests in it has been really odd.
- RickJWagner 8y ago53. I'm learning to play the banjo and solve Rubik's cube. (I can solve it, but still need a cheat-sheet.) I learned to juggle at 50. My plan is to try to stave off mental decline by learning new stuff.
- DuskStar 8y ago24. Why nuclear weapons produce a double flash. I'd read that was a signature of a nuclear detonation (Clancy novels, sue me) but not why. Turns out it's because the shock wave is hot enough in the early stages of the explosion to become opaque, blocking light from escaping. As it expands, the shock wave cools and becomes transparent again, letting the light from the fireball inside escape.
- eonw 8y ago35 - lately i've been learning about arcade machines. how they work, how to fix them, etc. Ive fixed two so far back to perfect working order. My next project is a small repair on a EM(electro mechanical) pinball machine from the 70s, kinda of excited about it.
- HelloFellowDevs 8y ago21. Just started going through the K&R text to learn C, it's definitely helped some aspects about programming that I didn't get in my Java courses. Also doing it exclusively in vim so I can practice typing and making sure I learn a lot of vim and terminal commands.
- Lordarminius 8y agoThat sounds like an investment that will pay off in spades.
- HelloFellowDevs 8y ago> Pay off in spades What do you mean by that phrase? Edit: Never mind, just took the time to search it.
- muminoff 8y ago35. Stoicism.
- scarface74 8y ago44, a former coworker that I would go see once a year at a coding conference just passed. He was 47 and left behind a wife and three young daughters. I learned never to take today for granted and don't put things off for tomorrow with your loved ones. Your job will send flowers to your family and then open up a req for your position. Don't put your job before your family.
- mailarchis 8y ago34. Learning Economics. Reading Principles of Economics by N. Gregory Mankiw . I didn't take a course in Economics while in college and am trying to make up for it and build a better understanding of how the world operates. I finished the Machine Learning specialization offered by UWash on Coursera a few months back, but I am not happy with my grasp on the subject and plan to dive deeper with a project and few books in next few months.
- tjansen 8y ago42, Machine learning. I discovered Coursera for me and worked through a number of courses. People say that learning is getting more difficult as you get older, but so far it is getting easier for me. When I was younger I didn't have the patience to learn something if I had no immediate need for it. There were distractions everywhere. Now it is much easier for me to focus on a single thing.
- mr_t 8y ago24, how my daily habits (sitting, walking, ...) were the root cause of all my aches and how to adjust them to get rid of most aches. Still learning, but so far the results are incredible.
- loco5niner 8y agoInteresting. How did you discover this?
- ninedays 8y ago32. I learned that humans can cry because their pet is dying. I cried because my best friend cat died (14 years R.I.P.) and it felt like it was my cat. I know it sounds stupid but this was a life lesson to me.
- personlurking 8y ago37 - uh, that Spain's Extremadura region introduced, as part of its sex-education curriculum, masturbation workshops for girls and boys over the age of thirteen. https://harpers.org/archive/2015/07/ars-erotica/ https://harpers.org/archive/2015/07/ars-erotica/
- andyjohnson0 8y ago50. Machine learning.
- kirankn 8y ago41. Connecting GatsbyJS to Wordpress. Awesome software, both of them. Learning about them now.
- atsushin 8y ago23, Handling asynchronous processing, requests to APIs and unit testing. Organization of code, how to structure projects.
- satsuma 8y ago21. i'm more capable than i give myself credit for, and i need to remember that. some days it feels like all i know is what i don't know
- triplee 8y agoA couple months shy of 40. It's harder to keep open two accounts on the same news site (one for myself, one for a short term gag account) and actually keep them straight without giving away the game. Mentally hard, not technically, since that's just two browsers.
- throwaway435388 8y ago30 --- Today I learned about Bee Venom Therapy: https://www.beeculture.com/bee-venom-therapy/ https://www.beeculture.com/bee-venom-therapy/
- m0ck 8y agoThis thread helped to reduce my inferiority complex from reading HN, when I learnt that most of you are almost twice as old as me (20) and some even older than that :) To answer OP question, I learnt a lot about Spring Test configuration today and how messy it can get at times.
- technological 8y ago29 Recently moved to a new place (rented my own house and moved to a rented apartment), learned that nothing is permanent in life and less the expectations more the happiness
- byebyetech 8y ago41, learned how useful Anki can be. Started using it recently. Also preparing for whiteboard interviews.
- drakonka 8y ago29; the last thing I learned was the importance of sleep, which I've heard about before but never really internalised until now. One of the coolest parts of this that I learned is how in certain stages of sleep you get this stuff called "sleep spindles", the activity of which is associated with memories from your short term memory buffer in the hippocampus being relocated to your long term memory in the cortex. This sleep spindle activity can be measured in pulses in your brain during this stage of sleep, pulsing between the hippocampus and the coretex at a rate of 100-200ms. Upon waking you are left with longer term recall of what you had learned pre-sleep, plus your short term memory buffer in the hippocampus is now free to learn new stuff. Our brain is so exciting!
- awmxex 8y ago29, few seo books (but I think seo for google its like a russian roulette), and some books about trading on forex, but this is roulette too(
- BjoernKW 8y ago39. Recently, I've read Dune again after having read it for the first time some 25 years ago. One notion I came across this time (probably did so back then, too but didn't attach much importance to it) and that particularly resonated with me was this - I'm paraphrasing here: Life is its own tool for ever more efficiently making use of the energy available within a system.
- w4tson 8y ago36 I’m way more distracted than I thought I finished Cal Newport’s Deep Work and even though I thought I could focus when I really needed to I realized that I’m kidding myself and I go to my phone habitually. I’ve also stopped using slack/hipchat during a lot of the work day. When I get to the end of the day and see the hundreds of message counts it’s quite shocking.
- johnmajor 8y ago26, I learned to swim effectively and effortlessly few weeks ago and still learning and practicing. And learned Android Architecture Components, Dependency Injection and Firebase as my profession is android developer.