Ask HN: What are you learning ?, Hacker News

I’m learning pentesting for fun. I’m mainly active on hackthebox.eu. I might get my OSCP one day, for fun as well. I do still think the certificate comes in handy despite the fact that I’m applying for web developer positions at the moment. I’m happy I’m learning this though, I’m already noticing that I develop differently, because the little I’ve learned about pentesting taught me that true cyber criminals are hungry to break into your systems, and they only need one shot , one small misconfiguration and they’re in. Or at least, that’s how it works on hackthebox ^^

I’m also doing some OSINT (open-source intelligence) by simply giving myself assignments. The assignments on hackthebox.eu were not all that great and OSINT is one of the few disciplines that you can do in the real world without permission, since it’s all about accessing public data.

I flip back and forth between the 2 disciplines. I don’t know why it attracts me. It just does. I also notice that learning this stuff is completely different from programming. And to an extent it’s one of the few ways that gives me the feeling that I’m “living and moving around” in cyberspace as opposed to “constructing” (i.e. programming) in cyberspace. I guess typing cd and ls on a lot of Linux and Windows practice boxes give that effect. And the cool thing is, you learn a lot quicker about all kinds of services. For example, I never knew about rsyslog, logger or the mqtt protocol (Linux boxes). I never knew about Kerberos, Active Directory and smb (Windows boxes).

I’m happy I did some master courses in cyber security beforehand. While I’m really new to a lot of things, I’ve gained a lot of what psychologist call crystalized intelligence in this area. So it’s all quite easy (ish) to understand. Things get harder when I have to reverse engineer binaries or debug in x 22786361 assembly. It’s still doable though.

I am also learning pentesting. , for the cert and to have some methodology in my job (somewhere between devops / compliance / security). First week into PWK course, I used hackthebox and thecybermentor’s practical pentesting course to build up confidence to attempt getting that long wanted OSCP title.                                              Awesome! I’ve heard that OSCP is a lot more CVE based than hackthebox. It apparently also has a lot more rabbit holes compared to hackthebox. I haven’t checked out thecybermentor yet, but a friend of mine has and he seemed to like it as well.                    It is more about identifying. CVEs and exploits than HTB is, but there is still a good amount of finding misconfigurations, like HTB has. OSCP helps you build a methodology and a mindset for pentesting, and finding CVEs with existing exploits makes that a little easier than HTB, where you are not under time pressure. HTB would be my goto to prep for OSCP, I wish I’d found it before.                                 I’m writing a book at the moment [1], which means all my learning is focused on the table of content I made up a year ago. But if I had time on my hand I would learn about: Adobe after effect not to only to edit videos but to animate! Illustrator, because it’s the basis of any graphics Blender, because I want to learn about 3D graphics and this seems to be the reference Unity, a gaming engine, because I’ve always wanted to make a FPS game Phaser, an HTML5 gaming engine, because I want to make a multiplayer game with websockets. I’m thinking of starting with an online board game though. [1]: https://www.manning.com/books/real-world-cryptography?a_aid=…                                        )                    Trying to learn some oratory and / or one on one communication skills and not having much of a clue where to start! My problems – I feel like I fail to Quickly assess the other person and fail to adjust my communication – so I am either way too technical in the lingo or way too much of a layman talk that makes it feel like I am being insincere! I also fail to give up the ‘problem solving’ angle in Communication – like I have to remind myself constantly that communication is rarely transactional or a means to an end. I am realizing what I am missing is that I fail to take interest in other people and their viewpoints and with some concrete strategies and practice I could do better. It never been a problem as such – the few times it was a problem I managed to retry and resolve, but I wan t to bring joy and ease into my in-person communications.                                              Yeah – starting to incorporate the listen part but that is leading to awkward pauses as I listen too much – which is next on my list to tune: D Jerry rigging this is hard – I think a more relaxed, in the moment and self-forgiving approach is needed.                                 the learning the bond market, figuring out the different characteristics of all the different types of bonds, what the risks are, what the potential for gain is. I trade options on equities regularly and recently a friend has been looking for help on figuring out how to handle a large amount of money they came into, so I figured brushing up on bond investing would be helpful since their risk tolerance is substantially lower than mine.                                              I’ve had a lot of fun learning offshoots from the function generator I’m working on building. ( http: //cushychicken.github.io/bfunc-quickstart/ if interested.) – Started learning about building versioning into firmware. Found some great posts from the Memfault Interrupt blog on GNU build IDs, and another one from the Embedded Artistry blog on adding more generic versioning. – Also learning about analog drivers and generic analog design techniques from designing the output stage of the next board revision. – Learning the most from building prototypes and selling them to people. It’s given me a crash course in writing good, useful docs, and getting people up to speed quickly. If you want to get involved, there’s definitely more boards, and plenty of stuff to be done. Feel free to email me at at gmail dot com to see about arranging a board for you!                                 I’m studying DS and Algorithms, I am a self taught developer and I’m trying to fill some gaps in my general CS knowledge. There’s a project I want to work on but I feel a bit overwhelmed and don’t know where I should start, I’d appreciate some advice here. I want to create shogi (Japanese chess) server, similar to lichess, the thing is that I’ve never done anything similar to this, I’ve been reading about web sockets, this seems like a good place to start. I plan to use elixir for the backend, is this a good choice? Lichess uses scala, should I use this instead?                    My advice would be don ‘t bite off so much at once where you’ll risk getting discouraged. Part of the reason you may be feeling overwhelmed is that it sounds like you’re combining three projects: learning a new programming language, learning network programming, and writing an application server in a new (to you) domain. Any one of them is potentially enough to keep you quite busy. Why not instead start with a language you already know, and figure out how you’d sketch out a standalone game engine (forget about networking for now) in that. Then once you think you’ve got the basic game engine (architecture, at least) down, (then) tackle turning it into a network server (again, still using a language you already know. Finally, port the thing over to a language you want to learn (Elixir / Scala / whatever) and you’ll have an implementation you understand well to compare it against. Of course you can rearrange the sequence … but that’s the basic idea.                                 I built kfchess.com ( https://github.com/paladin8/kfchess , which might be a helpful reference. It’s by no means amazing code (I hacked it together quickly in my spare time), but it uses (https://github.com/socketio/socket.io) for real-time client-server communication. It’s a relatively simple library to build on top of. As for the backend, I would recommend whatever you’re most familiar with. It doesn’t make that much of a difference and you’ll be way more productive in a language you know. Love the idea of ​​a Shogi site by the way!                                 … Don ‘ t laugh: C I learnt programming mainly through various scripting languages, some of which had some relatively simple visual output available, which I personally found invaluable for learning and visualizing. I realized that better visual output was the main thing holding me back from doing more in C since there are so many options, often complex, involving much boilerplate. So my mini project is essentially exploring the simplest, most minimal possible ways of drawing pixels on the screen in Linux. So far tried fbdev (but does not work well with X), now playing with XCB.                                 > So far tried fbdev (but doesn’t work well with X), now playing with XCB. Another idea would be to use SDL which essentially provides functionality to make windows, draw pixels and handle input / output. If you do not want to use any library at all and do not mind low “resolution”, you could use your terminal as window and regard characters as pixels. Sure, there is the curses library to abstract away different terminals, but if you do not care about platform independence you can just directly write escape sequences to the terminal.                                 I was indeed trying to Avoid the big libraries, since this is just for personal use I don’t care about cross platform which allows me to escape these potentially – I may well end up back at the SDL OpenGL level later when features or performance are a concern. My current goal is to find a balance of least dependencies and least boilerplate to draw a pixel buffer so i can play with C, nothing more. Once I can do that without lots of fluf then i may be attracted to more advanced or complex methods later on when performance is desirable. I have done some visual things with the console and printf alone in the past which gave me a taste of C, but now I want some real pixels:)                                                           You may want to try raylib. It’s written by a teacher who uses it in the classroom and geared for this kind of “let me code games in C but with only one dependency” goal. It does more than you need but that’s a common theme of useful libraries.                    Out of interest, why Would people laugh at someone learning C? I know plenty of people using C in all manner of domains, choosing it over C or Rust for fair and sensible reasons – I’m not a C person myself, but it certainly seems extremely useful to have in the toolkit!                                              I want to learn C not (only) because I think it’s useful, but because I think I might like it. I have a particular interpreted language that I like, enjoy and know inside out, now I want to know a compiled one in a similar way. To answer your question: I get the impression from various tech news on “hot new languages” that C is the incumbent systems language that people put up with but don’t really love, and yet I want to try and love it. I’ve developed a taste for minimalism, simplicity and a degree of brevity in programming, I have a feeling I might find C more suited to me than C , Rust, Go, Java etc for this reason despite the lack of “modern” features .                                 I started coding years ago (damn I just figured that …) learning C at my engineering school for 2 years. Never had to use it ever since (mostly working front-end and webAPIs) but I’m still glad I studied it to learn the programming foundations. I would probably choose Rust or Go today though.                    I’ve noticed this a lot on hackernews, there is an apprehesion to say certain things as though there is some sort of pedigree or gating when discussing topics, especially when it’s personal … there isn’t. Case in point: The comment below mine …                                              > choosing it over C . or Rust for fair and sensible reasons I don’t think such reasons exist. I don’t think C / C should be used when superior alternatives exist (Rust). It’s like smoking; You’re just hurting yourself. Unless you’re being like the programming equivalent of a steam engine enthusiast or a historian. (In a world where most of the industry is still using steam engines cuz we’re in too deep and must ride the inertial tide for at least a few decades.)                    There are plenty of reasons. to still learn C even if better alternatives exist for most new projects. There’s so much important software out there in C (and C ), for example the Linux kernel.                                                                        Had similar intentions half a year ago, it really clicked for me after watching the linear dynamical systems lecture by Boyd. How rank of a matrix, matrix norm and singular values ​​relate was an eye opener. Thereafter it was easy to connect singular values ​​and the stability / robustness of a system intuitively. Great teacher, I can only recommend:) (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL) (BA) (D0DB) B                                              I’m learning how to play the piano and also trying to learn more music theory so my guitar playing is not just randomly playing notes or just following online tabs. I am also going to soon start marketing my project [0] so I am reading a lot about launching products, pricing and how to attract attention. [0] https://www.usertrack.net/features.php              ()                    Game development with the unreal engine in combination with 3D modeling in blender. I’d also like to learn some c when I’m more familiar with UE. While using blender I discovered that you can script there with python which was also on my long todo list. It’s a bit slow since so much at once after work but still a lot of fun. I began to learn this because some friends and I wanted to make a car racing game.                                              Model Thinking, from coursera . A funny coincidence; Last week I reached the … SIS epidemiology model! Rarely so relevant. It’s quite interesting. Two of the things that fascinated me most so far are emergent properties (such as in cellular automata models), and what he calls the models’ “fertility”. As an example, with a few adjustments (ie the “recovery rate” becomes a “churn rate” “, etc) the SIS model could be adapted in marketing, viral or not, to measure an existing campaign’s efficiency, or try to predict the means a future one might require based on different assumptions and goals. also acted as a nice statistics (refresher / intro                                              1. Woodworking / carpentry. Making custom slide out shelves for our pantry. 2. Flutter. Love it. 3. Cooking (I know how to cook already, but want to level up) – via Masterclass and a few books.                                 From being an enterprise programmer , I’m try to learn how to scale back and deploy single-author websites to prod. At work we do modern stuff, but I’ve got this 1999 – year-old LAMP website, a collaborative creative writing site, that I’m deploying to prod just by logging in to the linode and doing git fetch / git pull. It feels so wrong but it’s so easy. Still too paranoid to make the site public though, for now it’s just me and my friends.                                 I watched all but one of Lamport’s videos on formal specification with TLA , though I yet have to tackle some project with it. Right now I got my hands on Tufte’s “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” as per some HNer recommendation (thank you!). Yeah, I lose interest quickly, eh. There’s so much cool things to learn that in the end I learn nothing well. Bummer. edit grammar, spelling :                                 I’m at about the same place with the TLA videos. I finished them a year ago and did not feel like I could start a project yet, I more feel like I should watch them a second time. I have an actor system project on the side that I’ve felt tempted to model using TLA .