Ask HN: What are you learning about? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are you learning about?

17 pointsmezod16 comments

Not necessarily about tech/code, anything is fair game.

Mental health, thanks to The Blindboy Podcast, books on cognitive behavior therapy & transactional analysis, and a counselor who I pay their attention, consideration, and advice on other books to read (I find information from Blindboy and books the most actionable, and a counselor is a helpful reality-check so I don’t get lost in the weeds of exploration at the cost of iterating out of challenges I have some agency about).

Also learning about complexity science, ecology, and human culture over millennia.

Meditate and chant. Look up SGI Buddhism or lookup Jhanas. Very different but both solid pathways.

You’ll learn more than from any book.

I would never have believed it until I tried. You can’t reason yourself into mental health but you can silence and focus yourself into it.

WRT mental health Buddhism has forgotten more than what western science has figured out.

The limits of empathy.

I got into a situation with a friend who I now assume has ADHD. I’d not noticed before, because our circumstances didn’t reveal it. We were just dog owners, and our dogs were friends.

Then I invited her to stay at my beach house for a week, in gratitude for her minding my dog.

While there, she initiated significant renovations, ripping up the carpet, removing the vertical blinds.

But she didn’t finish most of the tasks! 3 weeks later the curtains were only half done and the place was unrentable.

Her response? Start new projects, also incomplete.

I tried to understand through empathy, but I realised I’m not able to imagine what’s going on in her thoughts.

Maybe that’s always the way. I’m thinking empathy is only really possible when you’re sure the other person thinks the same as you.

I’d never recognised the need to calibrate this.

That goes far beyond what can be blamed on ADHD and sounds like she herself has never felt empathy before

Speaking as a person with adhd: The problem here isn't adhd, it's that they felt it was ok to modify your property without consent.

She likely has an empathy deficit disorder, which is typically a component in narcissistic personalities and those with Asperger’s.

To your credit, you recognized your empathy has limits; while having empathy is crucial for functioning socially, so is self preservation.

Fungi and mushrooms! I watched Fantastic Fungi on Netflix this week, bought a bunch of books on the topic, and am super excited to start learning about and cultivating mushrooms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_esotericism

- Tensor calculus, Differential Geometry (and in so doing, also trig, single/mv calc, linear algebra...algebra...)

- Cuda, physically based rendering

- ML

- All things related to home ownership (holy crap there's a lot!)

- How to manage adhd

- Interpersonal and relationship skills

Rails 7 & Hotwire at this moment. I’m excited to be back in Rails after spending five years in JS ecosystem. It feels pretty f* good.

What outstanding problems in web development does Rails 7 solve?

i'd guess the main thing is tight integration with Hotwire, the tech that allegedly allows you to create spa/reactive-like web apps without explicitly writing javascript code.

so, to me, that is to say, the abililty to write spa-like apps... without having to 10x the complexity and brittleness of your app.

alternatives would be react/angular/vue.

other 'simple' alternatives would be htmx/alpine/inertia/etc.

i figure, at least with rails, you have one benevolent (?) dictator saying, "This is the way we're going to do it" - that can be useful, imo.

Laravel tried the same thing and it didn't go over so well, but I'd guess 50% of that blowback was due to The Great TailwindCSS Push of 2020.

Pre-algebra now -> algebra soon.

Decided that I'm going to go study CS this year and realised that I don't remember a thing from HS math.

Behavioral biology. Watching Standford lectures on YT how mono/poligamy, being gay etc. are biology based (different sizes of brain parts, different number of receptors for X etc., animal models, humam studies).

- Taking a course about embedded on edX

- Learning to adapt to a life I don't enjoy

Happy new year!

Was learning rust by doing advent of code over Christmas. Now trying to see if I can write a smart contract for Solana using it.

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