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Comment by backpropaganda | Hacker News Reader

The main bottleneck to learning new skills is access to good feedback from experts or coaches, not time.

This is why I am learning tech stuff at light speed but music theory is painfully slow. I have experts everywhere at work who can point me in the right direction and give feedback but when learning stuff totally on my own it can be hard to work out what I should even work on or if I am aproching something in the right way.

When I first started teaching myself programming I wasted ages on pointless things that didn't get me anywhere.

Makes me wonder if there would be value in a cheaper form of university where instead of going through the whole process you just get access to experts you can talk to and ask your dumb questions.

I know there are a lot of places on the internet where you can ask questions but they tend to cater to experts only because most people don't like answering beginner questions that get asked 100 times unless they are paid to.

I really wish there was a platform to find top experts and ask them questions. Surprisingly enough, Twitch is one such channel. Jonathan Blow streams there some times, and I've asked him a lot of questions to which he gives detailed responses, because the question and answer is useful for all the viewers, and not a waste of his time, because it gives them a way to connect to their fans. Twitch is not meant for this though, and for instance, has no easy way to refer people to questions already answered, etc. But I think such a platform (video stream + text questions) with some modifications can provide this type of platform we're looking for.

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