<story><title>Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?</title><text>What are some skills (technical or not) you think someone should consider acquiring in 2020?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>tnel77</author><text>What blows my mind is how much I took my ability to cook for granted. So many people my age (millennial) can barely cook anything. I have friends who eat out every single meal of every single day. People give me weird looks when every single workday I have the same answer to “you wanna go out and get some lunch?” “Nope. I have leftovers!”</text></item><item><author>chrissnell</author><text>Some suggestions:&lt;p&gt;- 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.&lt;p&gt;- 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&amp;#x27;s a fantastic multi-part tutorial on Reddit that can help you learn these things. I don&amp;#x27;t have the link handy but you can Google for it.&lt;p&gt;- 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.&lt;p&gt;- Take a nightly walk.&lt;p&gt;- Listen to classical music. This one didn&amp;#x27;t come to me until my 40s but I finally realized: there&amp;#x27;s a reason that this music has been popular for 300 years. Opera is great, too. Listen to Mozart&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;The Marriage of Figaro&amp;quot;.  Download the KUSC app and listen to the amazing Metropolitan Opera broadcast every Saturday morning at 10 AM Pacific.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yibg</author><text>I used to eat out almost every meal as well. It wasn&amp;#x27;t because I didn&amp;#x27;t know how to cook, and I even like cooking. The economics (monetary and time) just didn&amp;#x27;t work out for one person. I can&amp;#x27;t buy in bulk (at least not fresh produce) because there is only one of me, so the cost is about the same as eating out. It also takes me a while to cook, clean etc, which takes more time than just eating out some where or getting takeout.&lt;p&gt;However, when I&amp;#x27;m in a relationship, we tend to cook a lot more. The economics works out better, lower incremental cost of 2 vs 1 at home but double the cost (nearly) eating out. Also with 2 people cooking &amp;#x2F; cleaning, the time it takes for 1 person reduces quite a bit.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?</title><text>What are some skills (technical or not) you think someone should consider acquiring in 2020?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>tnel77</author><text>What blows my mind is how much I took my ability to cook for granted. So many people my age (millennial) can barely cook anything. I have friends who eat out every single meal of every single day. People give me weird looks when every single workday I have the same answer to “you wanna go out and get some lunch?” “Nope. I have leftovers!”</text></item><item><author>chrissnell</author><text>Some suggestions:&lt;p&gt;- 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.&lt;p&gt;- 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&amp;#x27;s a fantastic multi-part tutorial on Reddit that can help you learn these things. I don&amp;#x27;t have the link handy but you can Google for it.&lt;p&gt;- 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.&lt;p&gt;- Take a nightly walk.&lt;p&gt;- Listen to classical music. This one didn&amp;#x27;t come to me until my 40s but I finally realized: there&amp;#x27;s a reason that this music has been popular for 300 years. Opera is great, too. Listen to Mozart&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;The Marriage of Figaro&amp;quot;.  Download the KUSC app and listen to the amazing Metropolitan Opera broadcast every Saturday morning at 10 AM Pacific.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>geddy</author><text>Funny thing about those people is they constantly complain about how expensive everything is, yet they spend frivolous amounts of money on what&amp;#x27;s probably the highest marked up item: food. Meal prep for a week for ~$75 and you&amp;#x27;re set. It would cost probably 4 times that (at least, depending on where you eat) to eat out, not to mention you don&amp;#x27;t know how it was prepared, and it&amp;#x27;s probably wildly unhealthy compared to if you just cooked it at home.&lt;p&gt;Take 2-3 hours on Sundays and cook some food. It&amp;#x27;s not hard.</text></comment>