
Ask HN: How old are you (optional) and what was the last thing that you learned? - gravy
Doesn&#x27;t have to be tech related.
======
scarface74
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.

------
DuskStar
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.

------
1mike12
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.

~~~
Spacemolte
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 .. :)

------
zck
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...](https://www.guitartabsexplorer.com/beatles-Tabs/norwegian-wood-
tab.php)), which explicitly says "Use same guitar pattern under solo voice".
Now listen to the song
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYs02z35F24](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.

~~~
seanhunter
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.

~~~
zck
That's hard to get started! It does sound powerful, but it also seems like a
daunting task for your average chord strummer, like me.

------
DEADBEEFC0FFEE
47m, I was reading about installing Kubernetes the hard way, when I learned my
9yo son is a badass sniper in Fortnite.

------
morog
38\. Eveyone spent 4 months inside their grandmother (as an egg inside their
mothers fetus)

~~~
geetfun
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)

------
Raed667
26- I learned that my body is not as "unbreakable" as it was ten years ago

~~~
flashgordon
39\. I feel the same way as you!

~~~
sunstone
A forty year old body takes twice as long to heal as a 20 year old body :( I
learned this quite some time ago but it still seems surprising.

~~~
flashgordon
Hah - Surprising yep. And dissappointing too :)

------
drakonka
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!

------
jpindar
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.

------
vidanay
46, I took Discrete Math I & II this past spring. It wasn't easy. Last math
class I has was (failed) Calculus I in 1989 and (failed) again in 1990.

I got a B+ and an A- this time, but I probably put in 30 hours per week
studying and doing homework.

~~~
hiram112
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?

~~~
vidanay
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.

~~~
tudelo
That's awesome. Good luck in completing your degree.

------
benjohnson
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.

------
fbomb
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.

~~~
srik
Could you provide a link to the course. Id like to check it out.

~~~
tucaz
Not the parent but check out Philosophy Crash Course in YouTube. You can thank
me later :D

------
tjansen
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.

------
wastholm
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.

~~~
52-6F-62
Oh if you missed this you should check it out
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17638067](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17638067)

------
ninedays
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.

------
squirrelicus
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.

~~~
h2j24
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.

------
theli0nheart
31\. I just learned how to make soap in Dwarf Fortress.

~~~
gota
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)

------
blue_tongue
49, TIG welding for bicycle frames.

------
JoelSanchez
24, how to create a k8s cluster with kubeadm using cheap VPSs. Also, sea waves
are more dangerous than I thought

~~~
Immortalin
How are you handling node additions and removals? Terraform?

~~~
aliencat
Autoscaler([https://github.com/kubernetes/autoscaler/tree/master/cluster...](https://github.com/kubernetes/autoscaler/tree/master/cluster-
autoscaler)) is a good option too. Works incredibly well at automatically
adding/removing nodes based on workload.

------
RickJWagner
53\. I'm learning to play the banjo and solve Rubik's cube. (I can solve it,
but still need a cheat-sheet.)

I learned to juggle at 50. My plan is to try to stave off mental decline by
learning new stuff.

------
LocalMan
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.

------
markatkinson
31m, how important air conditioning is to my sanity.

------
trm42
35\. This has been going for a few years already but now I start to see some
results: posing people for photography.

I know people which are quite good at it naturally, but at least for me it's a
lot harder than learning a new programming language.

Learning something in which you're completely out of your comfort zone is even
more rewarding.

------
deven88
30 - Yesterday, I learned how to make flask (python) web app.

~~~
scottydelta
Excellent choice.

------
DecoPerson
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.

------
HelloFellowDevs
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.

~~~
Lordarminius
That sounds like an investment that will pay off in spades.

~~~
HelloFellowDevs
> Pay off in spades

What do you mean by that phrase?

Edit: Never mind, just took the time to search it.

------
Canada
The average age of those who responded to this post is 38.6 (as of about
6:07pm UTC July 29)

~~~
tucaz
Where’s the std deviation? :)

~~~
sunstone
If you're here you're definitely a deviant.

------
pan69
45\. Just learned how the vga's modex works after it being a mystery to me for
25 years.

------
sawmurai
31\. Polish. Still in progress and will probably take another couple of years.

------
hellisothers
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.

~~~
tucaz
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.

------
stefanjudis
32 - learned about place-items in css

------
mindcrime
Age: 45

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.

------
mailarchis
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.

------
technological
29

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

------
dkersten
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.

------
BjoernKW
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.

------
satsuma
21\. i'm more capable than i give myself credit for, and i need to remember
that. some days it feels like all i know is what i don't know

------
blendo
Over 50. Just read Judith Shklar's _The Liberalism of Fear_
[https://philpapers.org/archive/SHKTLO.pdf](https://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."

~~~
w4tson
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?

------
52-6F-62
31\. Germanium transistors perform inconsistently in different temperatures,
and not necessarily to a fault.

Great thread subject, btw. This is interesting.

------
w4tson
36 I’m way more distracted than I thought

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.

------
hugo19941994
24\. Learned how to use multiple framebuffers in OpenGL (still working on how
to get motion vectors right though).

------
dazhbog
29 - Learned how antenna tuning works for cellular, LoRa, GPS, etc. Still a
dark art and im still a noob at it.

------
byebyetech
41, learned how useful Anki can be. Started using it recently. Also preparing
for whiteboard interviews.

------
DanielBMarkham
53 - How to change a bike tire and tube

------
code_devil
34

1\. Learned swimming over the last 4-6 weeks

2\. Learning Spanish ( Duolingo / Pimsleur )

3\. Learned to live minimalisicaly for the last 15 months. ( includes
international and domestic travel )

PS: I am also constantly learning new technologies in AI/ML/NLP/Alexa/Google
Assistant/AWS/GCP etc as I find those fun :)

------
gaspoweredcat
34\. How to build a HiFi tube amplifier

~~~
jwbensley
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.

~~~
52-6F-62
I Second

------
eonw
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.

------
m0ck
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.

------
triplee
A couple months shy of 40.

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.

------
BerislavLopac
50\. The very last thing I learned is that the language which gave us the
original word for orange is now using the English word for it (yesterday).

The last completely new thing (for me) I learned was how to write a "hello
world" program in Rust. ;-)

------
the_new_guy_29
28, how to disassemble an engine in polo 2008.. just not to be ripped off by
car mechanic

------
gmemstr
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.

------
senorsmile
I'm 34. I learned 5 new words in Hebrew via Anki this morning at 6:30am. I do
this every morning as I increase my ability and go towards C1.

This doesn't include everything that I learned yesterday evening, per the
requirements of the question.

------
rejectedalot
23 yo

Last tech thing: learned how routers work

Last non-tech thing: some strategy in technique for amateur cycling racing

------
abhiminator
21\. Last thing I learnt was fixing my Android device's super annoying boot-
loop.

~~~
kregasaurusrex
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.

------
johnmajor
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.

------
rhn_mk1
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.

------
throwaway435388
30 --- Today I learned about Bee Venom Therapy:

[https://www.beeculture.com/bee-venom-
therapy/](https://www.beeculture.com/bee-venom-therapy/)

------
mr_t
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.

~~~
loco5niner
Interesting. How did you discover this?

------
mookid8000
39\. Learned (and am still learning) how to brew beer. This is great.

~~~
jakidud
Any good resources?

~~~
rufius
I learned to brew many years ago and have always liked this book:

How To Brew: Everything You Need to Know to Brew Great Beer Every Time
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/1938469356/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_JTFx...](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1938469356/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_JTFxBbB9D5154)

This book is pretty commonly sold with starter kits too.

------
mohitmun
25, learned vim, went from 100% sublime to 100% vim in 6 months.

~~~
jakidud
What are the differences and why do you prefer vim?

~~~
jwilbs
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.

------
jimholcomb
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.

------
jarfil
40, yesterday I opened a mechanical keyboard for the first time and learned
how to disassemble and fix a cherry (outemu) mechanical switch.

------
nasalgoat
46, and I learned how to use redis sentinel without having to integrate it
into your code by leveraging haproxy to handle failover.

------
I_complete_me
56\. how to ssh into an AWS instance. Oh the joy!

------
atsushin
23, Handling asynchronous processing, requests to APIs and unit testing.
Organization of code, how to structure projects.

------
ai_ia
25\. How to deploy a docker based lambda function to compile latex on fly.
Currently it compiles tufte class pretty well.

~~~
dmlittle
I did the very same thing 2 weeks ago! Out of curiosity, were you using the
lambci image as a starting point?

~~~
ai_ia
No, this one.
[https://github.com/samoconnor/lambdalatex](https://github.com/samoconnor/lambdalatex)

~~~
dmlittle
They are using lambci as a starting point :)

[https://github.com/samoconnor/lambdalatex/blob/master/Docker...](https://github.com/samoconnor/lambdalatex/blob/master/Dockerfile#L1)

------
cm2012
27\. Don't hire painters from Handy.com.

------
shriphani
27 - this morning I learned to apply gold leaf to wood. Most recently acquired
skill - chip carving wood.

------
antoniorosado
45, yesterday I learned how to fingerpick “don’t think twice, it’s alright” by
bob Dylan on the ukulele.

------
Yetanfou
52, currently building a house, finished the roof (ceramic tiles, angled
buildout, valley gutters, etc).

------
kirankn
41\. Connecting GatsbyJS to Wordpress. Awesome software, both of them.
Learning about them now.

------
KentGeek
63 - PowerShell scripting. I think I learn some little thing almost every day.

------
foopod
27 - How to use a Film Camera (but also a lot about photography in general)

------
kregasaurusrex
24\. Learned how IP Routing works while preparing to take the CCNA exam.

------
TylerJewell
42\. Ground and tower comms related to pursuing private pilots license.

~~~
hellisothers
Private pilots’s license was some of the best money and time I’ve spent on
myself in my adult life. Enjoy!

------
HugoDaniel
35, yesterday I learned how to play poker (texas hold'em)

~~~
antoniorosado
Texas hold’em is life :)

~~~
majewsky
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.

------
jwilbs
26\. Tech: Scrollama (JavaScript library for scrollytelling).

------
boomboomboomboo
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.

~~~
LocalMan
And therefore you learned that wisdom can be most obscure.

------
lecarore
26, how to make Mexican tortillas from scratch at home

------
makeupsomething
28 - how to layout webpages with flexbox and css grid

------
double_h
32\. Journey of a packet from NIC to the application.

------
tonyedgecombe
54 - Cocoa and Objective-C (on a 2003 G4 iMac).

------
tboyd47
I'm 33. Replace your timing belt on time.

------
kahlonel
30 - How to cook a perfect steak at home

------
cerberusss
41m, Swift protocol-oriented programming

------
muminoff
35\. Stoicism.

------
Scea91
26 - Walking 5 meters on slackline.

------
unimpressive
22 - How to write an Android app

------
mie00
27\. Kubernetes cronjobs

------
minikomi
35.

1.5 mount and Buddha's revenge.

------
andyjohnson0
50\. Machine learning.

------
Lunatic666
40\. Apache Spark

------
malux85
33\. Apache Arrow

------
iKlsR
24\. Tennis

------
boxhead852b
Why does age matter ? What is the point of asking about age ?

~~~
nift
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?

------
zigzaggy
41 - learning to trade options on the stock market.

~~~
kaybe
Can anyone recommend a path to learning about investing?

~~~
sunstone
The book, "The Intelligent Investor". Highly recommended by Warren Buffet and
me.

------
boxhead852b
Why does age matter ? What is the point of asking how old a person is?

~~~
jonnismash
Lol they did say optional.

