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 .. :)
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Over 50. Just read Judith Shklar's The Liberalism of Fearhttps://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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.