Ask HN: What Are You Learning?

• screen-hopper

  5 111 0.0 C

  Smart KVM switch

Just the github repo at the moment, specifically the "How to make the device" page[0]. I had to search on youtube to learn what a breadboard is. I watched this one[1].

Do you (or anyone else) have any suggestions for hands-on resources? I have Practical Electronics for Inventors, but you don't build anything until Chapter 7 (Page 551). I learn better when I'm making things.

[0]: https://github.com/jfedor2/screen-hopper/blob/master/HARDWAR...

• gol

  1 3 4.7 Haskell

  Haskell implementation of Conways' Game of Life. (by jezen)

I read Understanding the 4 Rules of Simple Design by Corey Haines yesterday evening.

It's a short book, so you can get through it in one sitting. The advice is mostly about OOP design, and how to shuffle things around and invent arbitrary constraints in order to make the code more testable. I found the advice fairly… underwhelming.

I decided to implement Conway's Game of Life myself (though not with OOP) as the author asserted the advice transcends implementation languages and paradigms.

My implementation isn't amazing either, but I'm not convinced by the advice in the book.

Here's my implementation.

https://github.com/jezen/gol

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• Unwrap

  87 2,268 0.0 Swift

  Learn Swift interactively on your iPhone.

Happy too! So my main resource is Hacking With Swift (https://www.hackingwithswift.com), specifically the 100 days of SwiftUI Course. It takes you over Swift and SwiftUI. I've paired this with the official Swift site (https://www.swift.org) so I can dig into the language more, and Apple Documentation where appropriate to get used to using the tools.

In terms of finding it, it was a bit of a shot in the dark. I did some poking around and this popped up the most, specifically because I was looking for iOS specific materials. I'm sure if you want to make cross platform apps there's probably a whole host of great resources!

• stat_rethinking_2024

  3 707 6.9 R

+1 for the Rethinking Statistics book by McElreath. I recently took the 2024 edition of the self-paced course https://github.com/rmcelreath/stat_rethinking_2024 and the lectures on youtube are amazing. He's not just teaching stats, but how to do science!

Another, more basic, book on Bayesian stats is: https://allendowney.github.io/ThinkBayes2/ The author uses the grid approximation for everything, so there is no need to get into Stan or other framework.

Myself, I'm still trying to (re)learn frequentist stuff properly (will post a separate comment about that), but the deeper I go the more convinced I am that it is total crap, and my desire to convert to the church of Bayes increases...

• InkChatGPT

  1 6 8.5 Python

  Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) LLM app

I'm learning LLM at the moment, RAG particularly. [1]

I ended up built InkChatGPT as my learning project and it was huge fun. It is an AI Agent that could help learning from multiple documents and you can chat with it, thank Chat PDF GPT.

I use LangChain as LLM framework to simplify the backend, and using Streamlit as front end UI and deployment. Using OpenAI `gpt-3.5-turbo` model, Use HuggingFace embeddings to generate embeddings for the document chunks with `all-MiniLM-L6-v2` model.

To be honest, coming from Mobile development background, learning about ML and reading about LLM models, prompt tuning and various techniques really opens my mind, but the vast information and knowing how to start is difficult.

[1] InkChatGPT: https://github.com/vinhnx/InkChatGPT

• selkokortti

  1 4 6.8 Python

  Generate Anki flashcards from Andrew's Selkouutiset Archive. Contributions welcome!

  

Finnish, mostly. I moved to Finland a few years ago and have been making slow but consistent progress along the vectors I care about ever since. I just wish language learning didn't take so much time.

I've built some little tools for the task, which ended up teaching me enough about modern development that I could enter back into software as a career without too much hassle. There were no good Anki frequency list decks, so I made https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1331009943 and later https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1149950470 .

These in turn led me to devour a book on the inner workings of SQLite and web dev, because I needed some way to scrape Tatoeba without losing my data every time. Eventually I got good enough to start reading the 'clear Finnish's news, but then I realized YLE.fi didn't seem to have an easy way for me to scrape all previous news articles, so I built https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/selkouutiset-archive/ as an excuse to get a little deeper into Hugo and also learn some stuff about Git modules, systemd timers, doing things on a Raspberry Pi, doing things in GCP...

... And finally today I made the first lurching version prototype of a flashcard generator for that news archive, at https://github.com/Selkouutiset-Archive/selkokortti . I guess I just keep stringing the tools and interests I have together to make bigger and bigger things. Maybe that's all a career/vocation really is at the end of the day.

I've also been learning a lot about QEMU and virtualization. That's mostly for work. I make software that runs on trains.

• TrinityCore

  39 9,062 9.9 C++

  TrinityCore Open Source MMO Framework (master = 10.2.6.54358, 3.3.5 = 3.3.5a.12340, wotlk_classic = 3.4.3.54261, cata classic = 4.4.0.54027)

  

You could take a look at TrinityCore[1] and adjacent projects! Best of luck!

[1] https://github.com/TrinityCore/TrinityCore

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

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• eev

  1 68 8.6 Emacs Lisp

  a tool for automating almost everything (with Emacs)

• nixos-config

  5 535 8.6 Nix

  My Personal Nix, NixOS and Nix-Darwin System Configuration Flake (by MatthiasBenaets)

• nixos-eris

  1 2 8.5 Lua

  My attempt at a reproducible OS using NixOS

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