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Ask HN: What things have richly rewarded the time invested in mastering them?

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Re: Ask HN: What things have richly rewarded the time invested in mastering them?

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are social animals that thrive in groups, not as lone individuals. This requires certain social behaviors.

Modern technology has made a mockery of the days when it took an entire family's labor just to raise an acre or two of crops.

I'm talking about the hundreds of thousands of years we spent as tribes of hunter gatherers. We still carry much of the social needs and behaviors formed in that landscape.

Re: Ask HN: What things have richly rewarded the time invested in mastering them?

#202
post #199

Investing. Read a few solid, no BS books by people like Bernstein. Realize that there is a ton of BS out there. Develop your own investing strategy and execute it yourself. In the end you save money, get some financial security and stop asking yourself “do I know what i’m doing?”

Suggestions would be appreciated.

Re: Ask HN: What things have richly rewarded the time invested in mastering them?

#203
post #191

Readline —- I’m sometimes amazed at the number of relatively seasoned developers who don’t know simple commands like ctrl-r. This one really pays off because almost all shells and repls like ipython or the mysql client implement it. Sample cheat sheet: https://readline.kablamo.org/emacs.html You don’t have to learn it all, but mastering the basics like moving to the end/beginning on the line, moving/deleting by word,…

If you're a vi user, edit ~/.inputrc and add: set editing-mode vi set keymap vi-command This changes readline behavior from emacs to vi. This, along with "set -o vi" in bash, are really handy (though can be frustrating for others if you ever share a keyboard pair programming).

In Zsh, it will set the editing mode to whatever your $EDITOR is set to. So if $EDITOR == vim, readline will be set to vim mode.

I’m a vim person, but I feel like the modal workflow does not work well at all in a shell.

Re: Ask HN: What things have richly rewarded the time invested in mastering them?

#204
post #199

Investing. Read a few solid, no BS books by people like Bernstein. Realize that there is a ton of BS out there. Develop your own investing strategy and execute it yourself. In the end you save money, get some financial security and stop asking yourself “do I know what i’m doing?”

How long did it take you to learn ? And can you really beat the index funds, as a layman investor, and how big is the difference ?

Re: Ask HN: What things have richly rewarded the time invested in mastering them?

#205
post #199

Investing. Read a few solid, no BS books by people like Bernstein. Realize that there is a ton of BS out there. Develop your own investing strategy and execute it yourself. In the end you save money, get some financial security and stop asking yourself “do I know what i’m doing?”

Especially if you're young! Just regularly saving a small amount of your earnings and regularly putting it into a broad-based, low-cost index fund can make a huge difference in your wealth over time. Compound interest for the win.

Re: Ask HN: What things have richly rewarded the time invested in mastering them?

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are social animals that thrive in groups, not as lone individuals. This requires certain social behaviors.

Modern technology has made a mockery of the days when it took an entire family's labor just to raise an acre or two of crops.

Modern technology is also completely dependent on stable society of individuals working together in mostly amicable fashion.

Re: Ask HN: What things have richly rewarded the time invested in mastering them?

#209

Computer Science degree. Sure, lots of us "learnt" programming in our bedrooms or whatever by doing our own thing and messing about in whatever language. I went into my compsci degree arrogantly thinking that I pretty much knew how to code already so please just give me the bit of paper saying I have the degree and I'll be on my way thanks very much. I was very wrong. Although I was pretty good at the coding (or at l…

If you can't invest in a studie it also helps a lot to skip searching how to do things in a specific language. You are much better off by searching for solutions. For example: 'how to create modular programs' will give you more valuable results than 'how to create a website in PHP'.

Things like dependency injection work the same in most languages so it's more helpfull to understand what it solves than how to solve it in language [x]

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