Ask HN: How old are you (optional) and what was the last thing that you learned? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How old are you (optional) and what was the last thing that you learned?

78 pointsgravy154 comments

Doesn't have to be tech related.

44, 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.

24. 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.

I 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.

So 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 .. :)

The correct way is to have your team cover you and throw with your dominant hand.

33. 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-wo...), which explicitly says "Use same guitar pattern under solo voice". Now listen to the song (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.

Many (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.

That's hard to get started! It does sound powerful, but it also seems like a daunting task for your average chord strummer, like me.

47m, I was reading about installing Kubernetes the hard way, when I learned my 9yo son is a badass sniper in Fortnite.

38. Eveyone spent 4 months inside their grandmother (as an egg inside their mothers fetus)

Wife 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)

26- I learned that my body is not as "unbreakable" as it was ten years ago

If 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

39. I feel the same way as you!

A 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.

Hah - Surprising yep. And dissappointing too :)

29; 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!

Not 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.

46, 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.

I 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.

Just 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?

Undergrad. I never completed my degree so my manager (and his manager) encouraged me to go back to school and finish...especially since they are paying for it.

That's awesome. Good luck in completing your degree.

44 - 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.

55. 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.

Could you provide a link to the course. Id like to check it out.

Not the parent but check out Philosophy Crash Course in YouTube. You can thank me later :D

42, 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.

48. 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.

Oh if you missed this you should check it out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17638067

32. 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.

31. 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.

One 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.

31. I just learned how to make soap in Dwarf Fortress.

32 (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)

49, TIG welding for bicycle frames.

24, how to create a k8s cluster with kubeadm using cheap VPSs. Also, sea waves are more dangerous than I thought

How are you handling node additions and removals? Terraform?

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.

Yes, I use a modified version of https://github.com/hobby-kube/provisioning

53. 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.

70.17 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.

31m, how important air conditioning is to my sanity.

35. 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.

30 - Yesterday, I learned how to make flask (python) web app.

Excellent choice.

24 – 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.

21. 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.

That sounds like an investment that will pay off in spades.

> Pay off in spades

What do you mean by that phrase?

Edit: Never mind, just took the time to search it.

The average age of those who responded to this post is 38.6 (as of about 6:07pm UTC July 29)

Where’s the std deviation? :)

If you're here you're definitely a deviant.

45. Just learned how the vga's modex works after it being a mystery to me for 25 years.

31. Polish. Still in progress and will probably take another couple of years.

39. 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.

I’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.

32 - learned about place-items in css

Age: 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.

34. 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.

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

33, 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.

39. 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.

21. 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

Over 50. Just read Judith Shklar's The Liberalism of Fear 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."

What 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?

31. Germanium transistors perform inconsistently in different temperatures, and not necessarily to a fault.

Great thread subject, btw. This is interesting.

36 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.

24. Learned how to use multiple framebuffers in OpenGL (still working on how to get motion vectors right though).

29 - Learned how antenna tuning works for cellular, LoRa, GPS, etc. Still a dark art and im still a noob at it.

41, learned how useful Anki can be. Started using it recently. Also preparing for whiteboard interviews.

53 - How to change a bike tire and tube

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 :)

34. How to build a HiFi tube amplifier

I've been thinking about stepping up my hobby electronics projects to further my knowledge, building a basic amp and DAC, I'd love to hear more about this.

I Second

35 - 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.

This 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.

A 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.

50. 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. ;-)

28, how to disassemble an engine in polo 2008.. just not to be ripped off by car mechanic

18. 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.

I'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.

23 yo

Last tech thing: learned how routers work

Last non-tech thing: some strategy in technique for amateur cycling racing

21. Last thing I learnt was fixing my Android device's super annoying boot-loop.

I 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.

Nexus 5x? Single core bootloader fix?

26, 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.

Realized 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.

30 --- Today I learned about Bee Venom Therapy:

https://www.beeculture.com/bee-venom-therapy/

24, 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.

Interesting. How did you discover this?

39. Learned (and am still learning) how to brew beer. This is great.

Any good resources?

I 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_JTFx...

This book is pretty commonly sold with starter kits too.

25, learned vim, went from 100% sublime to 100% vim in 6 months.

What are the differences and why do you prefer vim?

As 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.

I 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.

63. 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.

40, yesterday I opened a mechanical keyboard for the first time and learned how to disassemble and fix a cherry (outemu) mechanical switch.

46, and I learned how to use redis sentinel without having to integrate it into your code by leveraging haproxy to handle failover.

56. how to ssh into an AWS instance. Oh the joy!

23, Handling asynchronous processing, requests to APIs and unit testing. Organization of code, how to structure projects.

25. How to deploy a docker based lambda function to compile latex on fly. Currently it compiles tufte class pretty well.

I did the very same thing 2 weeks ago! Out of curiosity, were you using the lambci image as a starting point?

No, this one. https://github.com/samoconnor/lambdalatex

They are using lambci as a starting point :)

https://github.com/samoconnor/lambdalatex/blob/master/Docker...

27. Don't hire painters from Handy.com.

27 - this morning I learned to apply gold leaf to wood. Most recently acquired skill - chip carving wood.

45, yesterday I learned how to fingerpick “don’t think twice, it’s alright” by bob Dylan on the ukulele.

52, currently building a house, finished the roof (ceramic tiles, angled buildout, valley gutters, etc).

41. Connecting GatsbyJS to Wordpress. Awesome software, both of them. Learning about them now.

63 - PowerShell scripting. I think I learn some little thing almost every day.

27 - How to use a Film Camera (but also a lot about photography in general)

24. Learned how IP Routing works while preparing to take the CCNA exam.

42. Ground and tower comms related to pursuing private pilots license.

Private pilots’s license was some of the best money and time I’ve spent on myself in my adult life. Enjoy!

35, yesterday I learned how to play poker (texas hold'em)

Texas hold’em is life :)

I 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.

26. Tech: Scrollama (JavaScript library for scrollytelling).

38 - 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.

And therefore you learned that wisdom can be most obscure.

26, how to make Mexican tortillas from scratch at home

28 - how to layout webpages with flexbox and css grid

32. Journey of a packet from NIC to the application.

54 - Cocoa and Objective-C (on a 2003 G4 iMac).

I'm 33. Replace your timing belt on time.

30 - How to cook a perfect steak at home

41m, Swift protocol-oriented programming

35. Stoicism.

26 - Walking 5 meters on slackline.

22 - How to write an Android app

27. Kubernetes cronjobs

35.

1.5 mount and Buddha's revenge.

50. Machine learning.

40. Apache Spark

33. Apache Arrow

24. Tennis

Why does age matter ? What is the point of asking about age ?

Not 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?

41 - learning to trade options on the stock market.

"learning to trade" says almost nothing, as there are many different strategies that you could be learning. So what did you learn exactly? :-)

I'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.

Can anyone recommend a path to learning about investing?

The book, "The Intelligent Investor". Highly recommended by Warren Buffet and me.

What is your goal? /r/personalfinance on reddit is really informative.

Buy after a crash when market low. Sell before crash when market high. Rinse and repeat.

28 - learning to trade covered calls.

Look into the wheel strategy.

Follow me on reddit, /r/marketgodfathers. I claim to be the best and I can prove it ;)

Why does age matter ? What is the point of asking how old a person is?

Lol they did say optional.

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