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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?

#301

Post by colechristensen »

bronco21016 wrote: post #97
colechristensen wrote: post #78

How to cook eggs. Pick two or three styles of egg and spend an hour (and a few dozen eggs) preparing them over and over keeping notes on the conditions and outcomes of each generation.

I purchased “The Food Lab” by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt and it completely changed things for me. He spends an extensive amount of time in the book describing techniques and tools in a very hackerish kind of way that finally taught me to cook at a level closer to my wife who spent her earlier years working in restaurant kitchens. Cooking eggs, in any variation, is discussed at length in the book and it’s well worth the read.

Other good books in this vein are Ratio by Michael Ruhlman and On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee

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

#302

Post by borumpilot »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #188

If you've been married for a while, learn who your spouse is now . (I mean in a good way, by taking an hour to rediscover what his/her hopes and dreams are, what interests they've gained / lost, etc.) He/she is probably a pretty different person than the one you married. It's easy to overlook that.

Absolutely fantastic advice.

Source: married for 30 years and practicing this since we found out we needed to after years of ignorance.

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

#303

Post by mertnesvat »

psychoslave wrote: post #299

Meditation. Seriously. Take time to focus on your focus. For me, it's a really hard exercise, and before I really started to practice it daily, I always had this a priori that spending time on "doing nothing" was just a waste of time. I couldn't have been more wrong, of course. I still feel like I have much progress to do, but now I understand how practicing the art of focusing on focus (aka "concentrate on here and…

Ohh Boy, I feel relate to your explanation a lot. After heavy gaming and diagnosed with ADHD. I started to think a lot about how we focus how our attention span various to the content. And it became obvious that we're losing long focus ability which is really hard to improve.

For that there's really nice book called Stillness is the Key from Ryan Holiday and Chop wood and Carry Water they're perfect examples to teach how precious focus and stillness is.

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

#304

Post by eeZah7Ux »

fellow_human wrote: post #225
hombre_fatal wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find Sam Harris' Waking Up guided meditation lessons the most useful (can find it on mobile app stores, the 30+ lessons are free and start off short and simple). Until those, I thought meditation was inherently coupled with eastern mystic bullshit with zero benefits for anyone who didn't want to buy into a bunch of other baggage. He has a book by the same name as the mobile app. The first chapter (read out loud her…

Interesting that other cultural practices are dismissed as mystic bullshit by default, until a white man introduces it. That makes it more trustworthy other white people.

Whitewhashing indeed. But harris is not just a random white guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Harris#Reception

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

#306

Post by leonlag »

tarsinge wrote: post #261
taneq wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you use a computer in any way in the course of your job or daily life, touch typing is the single biggest improvement in productivity and quality of life that you can make. It is SO much faster and easier than hunt and peck.

Second this. Also more specific but if you are french the keyboard layout is not great for programming (because []{}';. are not straightforward). I’m more happy since I switched to QWERTY layout for programming. Since I touch type I can easily switch depending on the task.

This is also the case for the german(qwertz) layout because whoever designed it gave zero fucks about people that use it to program. I have been much faster since switching to qwerty. The only issue is umlaute(ä,ü,ö,ß) but I just use compose key(caps lock in my case) + a,u,o,ss to type those.

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

#307

Post by peteforde »

jes5199 wrote: post #17
peteforde wrote: post #8

There's a growing realization that you can completely side-step the need for Single-Page App frameworks like React using websockets and the morphdom library. Projects like StimulusReflex (Rails) and LiveView (Phoenix) allow developers to build complex, reactive modern apps faster and easier by rejecting the need to even have client state. https://github.com/hopsoft/stimulus_reflex https://github.com/phoenixframework/…

neat! Of course, this makes me want to run React serverside...

Whatever floats your boat, I guess.

I don't understand why some folks are determined to see everything through a React lens. It makes sense for Facebook, which is why they made it. If you're doing CRUD, you are just torching your productivity.

Here's an example of tabular data, sorted, paged and filtered in 115 LOC including templates:

https://expo-pjf.herokuapp.com/demos/tabular

No transpiling, no API endpoints, no Redux.

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

#308

Post by borumpilot »

How to fight and take a punch.

People are capable of taking much more punishment then they think. With an hour of practice, you can overcome the initial fear and act much more rational when push comes to shove.

I understand that this is not just "intense concentration" while sitting behind your desk, but that is exactly the point of learning, get out of your bubble.

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

#309

Post by eginhard »

unicornmama wrote: post #282
unglaublich wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switzerland makes it very interesting to follow your advice: you can deposit into a 'third pillar bank-account' which your local bank helps you invest in predetermined portfolios, and the investment will be tax-deductible.

I don’t invest in pillar 3 because the banks charge a medieval 1-2% management fee.

VIAC is a great alternative. It's cheaper than traditional banks and allows a higher share of investment in equities: https://viac.ch/en/

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

#310

Post by eterps »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #176

How to cook for yourself, really, really good food. I no longer crave restaurant food, and all of the really important things I learned about cooking take just the time to read it, hear about it and then try it. All without any special hardware. A few examples: 1. Cooking jasmine rice: rinse it first, 1 c. water to 1 c. rice ratio. Bring to boil, turn down heat to lowest setting. Leave lid /the entire time/. Fluff th…

You can improve on this by adding recipes to your Anki app so that you'll remember them after a while. It is really nice to be able to recall recipes (both the ingredients and weights/ratios) when you are working in the kitchen or grocery shopping.
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