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Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?

#161

Post by mkl »

arvinsim wrote: post #18
lsiebert wrote: post #7

How to do various knots comes to mind. Square knot, A sheet bend, clove and trucker's hitch, prusik, the alpine butterfly knot, and bowlines can all be learned rather quickly, then practiced so they can be remembered easily. http://paracord550milspec.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/How...

I remember learning these before but due to not finding any use case for them, I already forgot how to do them properly. Only thing I regularly tie nowadays are my shoelaces. EDIT: Grammar

> Only thing I regularly tie nowadays are my shoelaces.

For that, in much less than an hour, you can learn the Ian Knot: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknot.htm

It makes shoelace tying very fast and secure (the GIF at the top is how long it actually takes!).

Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?

#162

Post by bigwavedave »

lisper wrote: post #120
kqr wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarly, Excusez-moi; parlez-vous Anglais? is how you get a French person to speak English.

Je ne parle pas Francais. :-(

That's why the parent told you how to ask in french if a person speaks English ;).

Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?

#163

Post by eps »

kqr wrote: post #105
lisper wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always try to learn how to say, "I'm sorry, I don't speak X" in language X. When I was in Japan I got an unbelievable amount of leverage out of being able to say, "Sumi masen, Nihon-go hanasei masen" which, of course, means "I don't speak Japanese" in Japanese. The local's faces would light up and often they would respond in Japanese despite the fact that I had just told them that I don't speak Japanese.

Similarly, Excusez-moi; parlez-vous Anglais? is how you get a French person to speak English.

The full handshake sequence is usually longer that this.

They will first reply with "Non", often coupled with a wounded look.

Then you have to start speaking in a very broken French, ideally with a monstrous accent (though this comes naturally).

And only then they will suddenly re-discover their long forgotten English skills, which will turn out to be quite decent.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?

#165

Post by blaerk »

devnonymous wrote: post #59

A lot of devtools and configuration oddities can be learnt in an hour or less. One can become a fairly proficient/well informed user of any of these. The $VALUE for any/all of these are huge ! * keyboard shortcuts for your preferred UIs * vim (/ your preferred $EDITOR) * tmux * make * readline * strace * gdb * valrind * tcpdump * wireshark * basic bash * all sort of server configs: - nginx - apache - postfix - ldap -…

This will also ease communication and working with sysadmins. Everybody wins!

Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?

#166

Post by muzani »

bArray wrote: post #104

Do nothing. Seriously. Allow yourself to become bored and you'll find your brain has suddenly got time to work on all the problems you mentally shelved. There's a good reason why a good number of ideas happen in the shower.

We call that meditation these days.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?

#167

Post by Double_a_92 »

bArray wrote: post #104

Do nothing. Seriously. Allow yourself to become bored and you'll find your brain has suddenly got time to work on all the problems you mentally shelved. There's a good reason why a good number of ideas happen in the shower.

I find it difficult to ever feel bored. I could look out of the window for hours and find infinitely many details to entertain me. Almost as if there is a positive offset to my "exitement" level... On the other hand regular activities (e.g. eating in a restaurant) start stressing me out too much, so those things become less enjoyable. Is this fixable?

Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?

#170

Post by leokennis »

swiley wrote: post #79
aliceryhl wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple transformations can easily become complex to do with regex, so I've started using vim macros instead.

Regex don’t do transformations? All they can do is match strings.

If I have a list of names I’d like to reverse:

John Smith > Smith, John Anna Peterson > Peterson, Anna

I can write:

(.) (.)

And replace with:

\2, \1

Not sure if that’s part of some “official” regex spec but it works more or less everywhere.

(Of course if it was an actual list of names I’d have to be a lot more intelligent with double names etc.)

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