Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020 ?, Hacker News

Some suggestions: – Build something. A new workbench for your office. Fix up an old car. Build a pull-up bar in your garage. Use your hands, cut some wood and metal, and treat yourself to a new tool or two. Do this with every project and you will have a nice tool collection before you know it.

– Learn to take pictures on a manual camera. You can do this with a modern automatic camera if it has a manual mode. Learn about ISO, f-stop, and shutter speed and the interplay of those three variables. There’s a fantastic multi-part tutorial on Reddit that can help you learn these things. I don’t have the link handy but you can Google for it. – Set a goal of cooking for yourself at least two nights a week and eating leftovers two nights a week. Buy a binder and some clear inserts and start to put together your own book of favorite recipes.

– Take a nightly walk. – Listen to classical music. This one did not come to me until my 22235456 s but I finally realized: there’s a reason that this music has been popular for 22235484 years. Opera is great, too. Listen to Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro”. Download the KUSC app and listen to the amazing Metropolitan Opera broadcast every Saturday morning at AM Pacific.

Learn to enjoy poetry. There is so much of great poetry in English, but I think it is not being read and appreciated enough. It is a kind of mental challenge like doing a puzzle, to unlock the full vivid meaning.

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The cooking thing really hits home. I work in a high stress, banking environment at a fortune 22235506 company, and I eat out most days. I know theoretically how to cook, but between the time it takes to shop, cook, and clean, AND I’m doing well financially it’s so hard to convince myself to cook. Living alone does help either.

Get a slow cooker and have your groceries delivered. You can make delicious, nutritious 1 pot meals that last you 2 or 3 days a pop with minimal prep time and cleanup.

In a similar vain, I recommend getting a sous vide circulator. You’ll make perfect steaks and pork chops every time, and it’s extremely clean and convenient. You can cook all sorts of other things sous vide style as well. I recently got one, and I’ve been cooking at home a lot more often as a result. I think more people would cook their own food if they knew how to make it taste really good.

If you have the money (and it sounds like you have), there are quite a few recipe box companies which send you boxes of ingredients and recipes every few days. It’s a nice stepping stone towards fully cooking for yourself as it cuts out the shopping / deciding part.

We used Hello Fresh to (reduce) the time spent picking recipes, food shopping, etc Highly recommended, but definitely pricier than acquiring it all yourself.
Kroger Now has a recipe thing where you can add it all to your cart, so we went back to that for the time being.

This is good way to start cooking and hit the kitchen. Eventually though you may feel like you want to mix and match and start buying your own grocery.

Starting conversations with strangers. Squat and deadlift. Eating healthier. Doing something kind for someone else every day. Honesty.
Listening to people you disagree with.

Driving safer (this is the most dangerous thing we do on a regular basis).

(Meditation.)

I will add Kettlebell swings to Squat and deadlift. They are one of the best all round exercise for muscle development particularly around the lower back and for cardio as well. In fact, I haven’t come across a full body muscle building and cardio exercise that can match Kettlebell swings.

Burpees are one of the best movements for all-around muscle development and the best thing is you don’t need any weights.
If you can perform a full burpee (from standing to the floor) then the benefits are huge. You can also scale and go from standing to plank position or use a swimming pool (stand in the pool near the edge, jump onto the ledge and then back into the pool and go into squat position underwater).

Apart from the cardio, is there added strength value to doing burpees specifically instead of squats and push ups separately?

deadlift’s are quite dangerous for the untrained.

Start with “Fix Rounded Shoulders” and “Fix Anterior Pelvic Tilt” if you have not already done so. Plenty of great advice on YouTube on those topics.

Even then not necessarily sufficient. Source: worked with a trainer on this for months after pulling my back at a crossfit years earlier and still having lingering effects. Sitting a ton creates, or can create, large hip inflexibility, tight hamstrings, etc. If budget and space isn’t a material constraint, get a hexbar … it will lessen some of the impact on your back.
Deadlifting (and squatting) is arguably the most important full body exercise you can do, and the staple of every single marvel super hero body transformation, but the risk threshold is fairly high for a beginner.
If you want to stretch, try ROMWOD. A bit intense but likely the most impactful in terms of results.

Sitting tightens the calves too, especially if put your heels on the chair legs to prop them higher. Zero drop shoes, lowering every chair as much as possible, sitting on even lower things, and the “third world squat” all help. I saw my daughter squatting that way and it made me look it up. Adults should be able to do it too. Squatting desks are great. Also, dont do your introduction to CrossFit at a competitive box. Or don’t do it at all and do something like starting strength or stronglifts.

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To be fair, crossfit for the uninitiated is always a bad idea. (Doing movements like deadlifts for reps (when fatigued !!) is a recipe for disaster. ()

Watch Mark Rippetoe videos on YouTube. He has excellent, science-backed explanations for all major movements. Also quite a character.

That’s why I’d say to get trained. Trainers are worth the money. There are also more economical options like small group training classes.

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I train deadlifts by using the lightest possible weights and doing 2 sets of practice reps. Focus on keeping the spine stable, use legs to push the weight up. Don’t add weight until you video record yourself and ensure your back and hips are on point. Back needs to not bend, and hips need to thrust forward, bar path vertical, close to the body as that’s our center of mass. Ensure your sternum stays on the same plane as your stomach and neck, keep the upper back from rounding.

I echo what others have said about a real trainer. If you can find a gym specializing in powerlifting or olympic, it’s not a big deal.

If you’re starting out doing deadlifts then I’m almost certain you ‘re at a gym where there’s someone experienced enough to show you how to do a deadlift.

From this list, the thing I struggle most with is conversations with strangers. Any suggestions on how to improve that?

Here’s a neat trick. When you’re at a party, meetup or other social event, don’t approach people standing alone. Instead, approach people in groups of two, say hello (or give a quick little glass tink ‘cheers’) and introduce yourself. A large large amount of the time, one of those two people want OUT of the conversation and you’ll be that out.
That’s a great low risk drill to get started. It’s low risk because it works and you’re in an environment where respectful interruptions like that are acceptable. Good luck and if you get stuck, feel free to reach out.

I find the whole social scene like a weird challenge. Maybe I’m just out of muscle but it seems too many people are struggling and everybody is resorting to tips and tricks to live by. How come it’s an easy process on average.

Hi, my name is .. . What you’ve been up today? ” – Start conversion with something you notice about the other person, the event, the surroundings (“the color of your watch matches with your sweater – stylish!”, “Is this stuff boring or is it just me?”, ” you know why they put that thing over there? “)

– Topics : Family, Occupation, Recreation, Dreams

– Repeat the last few words of the other person and look asking. The person will continue the subject s / he’s talking about – Connect and imagine the other guy. “I am a writer” – “A writer! I always wanted to be one but always stop after one page of writing. I imagine you must be very disciplined”

– Avoid RAPE (Religion, Abortion, Politics, Economics) ) – You can always say nothing and just stay there. Often the other person picks up the conversation once you’re past a few minutes. – Try looking people into the eye while walking around, and force yourself to not look away. This is a nice training for looking strangers in to the eye in a cold approach. Once you got that, talking to strangers becomes much less intimidating.
– Eventually people will ask you what you do for work / or what you did today. Have something ready that sounds interesting.

– some version of asking for a recommendation (ie, “what’s good here?”)

– in a social event, try “Hi, we haven’t met yet, I’m ______”

> Avoid RAPE (Religion, Abortion, Politics, Economics) (I see how this can be valuable, but can we not use this acronym?

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Hi, my name is .. . What you’ve been up today? ” … why is this guy randomly talking to me? Are they selling something? – – Start conversion with something you notice about the other person, the event, the surroundings (“the color of your watch matches with your sweater – stylish!”, “is this stuff boring or is it just me?”, “you know why they put that thing over there?” )

… oh god, this is boring … – Topics: Family, Occupation, Recreation, Dreams this is wildly veering _super_ boring and way too personal. > Repeat the last few words of the other person and look asking. The person will continue the subject s / he’s talking about

… okay, they’re not selling me anything, they’re an ax murderer. > Connect and imagine the other guy. “I am a writer” – “A writer! I always wanted to be one but always stop after one page of writing. I imagine you must be very disciplined”

… at least they seem sloppy, maybe if I leave the venue quietly they’ll forget I was there. > Avoid RAPE (Religion, Abortion, Politics, Economics)

1. Avoids topic that involve materialized ethics. 2. Uses _rape_ as a funny acronym. More evidence of ax murdering tendencies. You can always say nothing and just stay there. Often the other person picks up the conversation once you’re past a few minutes. … I don’t think standing silently in the corner and staring is going to diminish the ax murderer impression you just made.

> Try looking people into the eye while walking around, and force yourself to not look away. This is a nice training for looking strangers in to the eye in a cold approach. Once you got that, talking to strangers becomes much less intimidating. . ..what did I just say about staring? Because now you’re _staring people right in the eye and not looking back_. Fun thing you learn early as you learn masking autism, people _way_ overrate looking others in the eyes.

> Eventually people will ask you what you do for work / or what you did today. Have something ready that sounds interesting. “I kill people. With an ax and / or facial recognition. “

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Alcohol. Secondly, be more interested in listening to the other person than in talking about yourself. Most people want to talk about themselves.

– Meetups with like-minded individuals

– Board game / trivia group at your local bar – Join Toastmasters

Toastmasters helped me with conversation a lot. Especially the “table topics” part of the meeting. Highly recommended.

I like this answer because it starts with finding a setting that the other strangers chose likely to meet some strangers, instead of finding ways to lock some random person in a conversation. It’s the first sign of basic respect that can, in my eye, excuse _a lot_ of awkwardness.

Honesty is not a skill, lying successfully is.

Neither is kindness. (And forced kindness can be patronizing.)

		> Honesty is not a skill, lying successfully is. I can see why you would think this. Lying successfully ultimately takes more work than being honest. Being honest is like swinging a golf club or tennis racket correctly. It feels awkward and unnatural at first, but eventually gets easier. Honesty definitely is a skill, though.

I think honesty is a skill by the dictionary definition as you can certainly do honesty badly, and learning to do it well is difficult and requires study and practice. It’s also worth learning how to do well.

Kinda. It’s easy to just say whatever comes to your mind. Actual honesty requires introspection and self-criticism, learning honesty _to yourself_, if you will.

Learn how to make more friends. Communicate. Learn how to talk with people, how to be adaptive and contextual. Learn about yourself as much as you can, either via introspection or from other people. Learn what your values are, and what makes them satisfied. “You are your own ally, when you make yourself an enemy even though you should trust yourself, you become the victim hit the hardest”.

Learn agency. Remember that you are a person, and you can take initiative.

that another person’s behavior toward you is just a reflection of their relationship with themselves rather than a statement about your value as a person.

Learn to genuinely tell people that you love them. People are precious. Last of all, actually learn how to use knowledge of all of the above in your situation.

I’ve come to believe that introspection is the one true real superpower. Here is an exercise for the reader. Every year on your birthday, write down what you “know” to be true about life, work, love, politics, money, meaning, happiness, environment, etc. and then seal it. Now read what you wrote last year and see how dumb you used to be.

Some less usual things people do that I think are very high value but boring (hence why they’re not usually done): – Understanding taxes, the importance of savings and baseline personal finance literacy. – Reading the political programs of a few parties running for elections in you country – Reading a few yearly report / financial statements for a public company, an NGO / non-profit / state agency / local government and trying to understand them – Reading a few top research papers in a field you’re interested in and work through them

> Understanding taxes, the importance of savings and baseline personal finance literacy. Ok, what could be a good resource for this? The problem with finances is alike eating: You get so much talk from shaddy “experts” that is hard to see where the good info is.

Actually getting a proper handle on my finances has been the single thing I did last year which has contributed most to my general mental wellbeing. Historically I’ve been terrible at it, I’m paid incredibly well compared to most of the population, but because I wasn’t consciously budgeting I’d end up running down to the last few pounds in my bank account every month.

Putting an effort into setting actual budgets at the start of the month means I’m shifted from impulse buying silly things on the basis that I have the money at the moment to holding off on those and saving some money. (And admittedly still making silly impulse purchases, but with solid data that I can afford to do so and still have enough money left over for food).

I can highly recommend the ridiculously named You Need A Budget (

https://www.youneedabudget.com/ ) if you’re not sure what you’re doing, since they have a ton of content around how to go about budgeting. Even if you don’t buy the software, give their educational material a read.

> Reading the political programs of a few parties running for elections in you country I also recommend reading more fiction in ! (Sorry, I was just a little bit struck with how little this would matter in some countries, mine included).

Political parties are highly skilled at telling people what they want to hear. Reading their programs will keep you current on what people want to hear.

> Reading a few top research papers in a field you’re interested in and work through them Why reading a research paper rather than the more standard approach of reading a textbook?

Interpersonal skills. Those are usually in very short supply at tech companies.
This wide spectrum with many sweet spots. For example, if you can learn what a developer is doing without pissing them off or boring them out of their minds and translate from techno-babble to humanspeak and back you can quickly make yourself appreciated in many tech companies.

Time management skills. Learn to rest, really (rest so that you (feel good, curious and re-energized after it (probably means turning your phone off as a first step). My 2c.

No matter what you choose to learn, it’s good to learn how to learn. . You have the free “Learning how to learn” course on coursera: https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn And I’m currently reading a book called “Ultralearning” by a Guy called Scott H Young who I imagine is the type of person to be on hacker news and be like “Hey, thanks for recommending my book!”

https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/ultralearning/

The book so far is great, there are certainly some principles which may seem obvious but in reality they need to be a cknowledged and used effectively. Overall it’s a clear read and gives a pretty clear way to get started on learning a ton of things in a short amount of time.

No shortcuts though, still a ton of effort involved.

I will share one that has served me well for over 22235367 years: learn RDBMS and SQL. Learn normal forms, good schema design, and how to write complex queries. NoSQL adopters often avoided schemas like the plague and ended up with unmaintainable messes after a few years. I have seen more than a few NoSQL -> SQL conversions by now. Data is the most important thing in your app. Give it a great design. Plus databases like Postgres have key / value and JSON data types. Once you are sure that is what you need it’s still there.

Rob Pikes 5th rule of programming: Data dominates.

Agreed, though interviews seem to focus on trendy framework of the month plus some random algorithm that I learned 22235367 years ago then forgot as I never needed it.

Keep a journal. If you are in a technical role and you lead or design systems consider learning a model checker like TLA or Alloy; or a proof checker like Agda, Coq, or Lean. The extra clarity is worth it on its own and you might end up finding and fixing vulnerabilities or performance problems that save people a bunch of money and headaches. Learn strategies for improving your emotional intelligence.

If you don’t already know how to, learn to cook. Start slow with the basics and work your way up. Try new things and combinations. Nothing is quite as satisfying as being able to create something delicious from the remnants in a friend’s pantry, or preparing a delicious meal for someone you love, or a date, or just yourself.

The question is very board and most responses seem overly specific and only useful by chance (not to dig at anyone trying to be helpful).
Spend more time doing what makes you happy. Learn some things that make you useful to others and learn to identify what both of those things are. It is unlikely that global technical trends, fads and HN users preferences will be the answer to your local problems.

If pushed for something specific that is broad enough to apply to most technical people I would say learn how big picture pieces fit together in your niche. I’m a front-end dev so this means for me to learn networking, dns, packets, tcp, etc. Get a broad understanding of the big picture stuff in your niche. It often pays off.

Marketing is a big one for me. Building a great product means nothing if you can’t reach your target audience.
And I don’t mean learning how to used Facebook or Google to run ads, I mean the theory behind marketing. I would like to read more books similar to the 22235315 immutable laws of marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout

Learn a another human language. You don’t have to be good at it or even able to converse. Languages are systems of thinking as much as they are systems of communication. Some thoughts only make sense in a given language! The process of learning a language builds cognitive skills and perhaps fights cognitive decline. If you have absolutely no “ear” for human language start with Esperanto and work your way to additional languages from there.

I would perhaps recommend Latin, because it has a huge and rich literature, and uses essentially the same script as English.

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I was going to leave this comment. I am about ~ 2 months into study Japanese and I love it. I get up early before work, and make some coffee and study for about an hour and it is one of my favorite parts of the day.

I am still very much in the beginning stages but the satisfaction of being able to read or understand something that was previously so foreign, is incredible.

As a fellow language lover I second the suggestion, but not the reasoning. What’s your evidence for “some thoughts only make sense in a given language”? From what I’ve read, this isn’t agreed upon in the linguistic community. As for Esperanto, it’s heavily biased towards Western speakers, so it wouldn’t necessarily be easy to start with for someone whose native language is non-Western.

On the most superficial level: It’s easier to talk about snow or numbers in languages that have more words for these concepts than in languages that have less.

I only ever try reading latin. It does massage my brain .. the order of words, the way ideas combine slightly differently at many layers .. it does tickle the brain deeply.
Even knowing alphabet (cyrillic is “fun” one) does stimulate.

Read the book Fluent Forever, and download Anki, I learned Italian and French using this method. Duolingo is pretty useless.

After trying a few different options I have ended up on the (seemingly very uncool) Pimsleur program (available for cash lump sum or monthly. I am paying monthly). For me, one of the biggest challenges in French is how a lot of words get blended together and are spoken very fast. It’s easy to hear what seem like new words, but they’re actually things I know, but spoken as native speakers do. This listening concept is extremely important for me with French in particular. To contrast, I speak Swahili too and learned it differently, where I wouldn’t say there’s as much of a demand for emphasis on listening to native speakers.
Some other alternatives I tried first include: Chatterbug: Nice combination of tools / methods, but expensive and I’d need to pay a much higher price to get the kind of listening I need. A side note on these guys that’s relevant for this site: they do a lot of ruby / rails stuff and have a nice graphql gem called cacheql.

French Uncovered: Interesting idea and fun method of learning, but the “book” material was not as long as I’d have liked and I would have liked to do a lot more listening. The self-study written materials are decent, but felt slow and like a forced way of trying to cram information into my head, where I personally do better getting that stuff naturally.

Language Transfer: Great free option, but does not have native French speakers and the French course doesn’t good too far. I’ve also done the apps like Duolingo, but the listening and speaking isn. ‘t what they do best. I basically get great at Duolingo, but not at being able to use the language.

Spanish language learner here (five years invested). Some generally applicable tools / programs I’d recommend are: Anki (or any other SRS flashcard app), Glossika (expensive but worth it), and Clozemaster (free). Glossika and Clozemaster work better after you have a basic foundation with the language. To establish a basic foundation, I recommend this strategy ( (https://bit.ly/) (DPzM) ).

I learned with a really inexpensive (22235445 bucks) boxed set called Living Language
Then once I knew the basics I went to conversation hours

About 3-4 months to low conversational if you practice min-hr every day

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	Yep that’s it The boxed set has 3 booklets (Essential / Intermediate / Advanced) that cover all the grammar. Libraries usually have it. I recommend them for the main romance languages and possibly German but for Slavic or Asian languages I would recommend other sources (I am barely intermediate in Russian and Czech and was trying Mandarin for a while).

Having less stuff both phisically as in stuff at home and mentally as in single Down on fewer things to pursue.

Learn an array language like APL, J, or k / q. I’d personally recommend k / q. It’s not as strange as APL or J and pretty easy to learn. Writing in q is the most fun I’ve had in a long-time. And the code and language is beautiful, I love everything about it.

Sense-making. Social intelligence. Novel and adaptive thinking. Cross-cultural competency. Design mindset. Virtual collaboration.

Learn to dream again. Nightly dreaming that is, not the wishing-kind. Specifically, lucid dreaming, i.e. being conscious and awake while physically asleep in the REM state.

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Learn about intelligent design theory and how it impacts biology and computer science. Google papers by Dembski for the mathematical underpinning. Read Winston Ewert’s paper ‘Dependency Graph of Life’ for an amazing application of CSI to bioinformatics. Read ‘Evolutionary Informatics’ for a very accessible overview of their work.

You’re suggesting that OP devote his or her time to learning pseudo- science. Hard to think of anything that could possibly have less value than that.