<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>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>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></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>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>billfruit</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;Also reading fiction, though how exactly it helps one is beyond me, but it offers glimpses into other worlds. For example I read recently &amp;#x27;The French Lieutenant&amp;#x27;s Woman&amp;#x27;, I doubt its richness of detail, and evocation of place and time, etc can ever be captured in a film or even a miniseries, and on top of it is choc-full of tid-bits of information.</text></comment>