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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?

#311

Post by patrickk »

tempestn wrote: post #144

How, and why, to invest in a simple portfolio of index funds. Split between equity and fixed income based on your risk tolerance, and diversify equities globally. This will give you a low-cost, set-and-forget investment portfolio that you can add to over time without ever having to worry about what you should buy or what the market might do. Just add to it regularly over time, and end up with solid retirement savings…

Reddit FIRE is also worth reading: https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/

Also JL Collins' book "The Simple Path to Wealth" is well worth a read, on the same topic. If you don't want to get it, this talk covers the basics: https://youtu.be/T71ibcZAX3I

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

#312

Post by almog »

unlinked_dll wrote: post #28

How to properly wrap cables. A/V and cable techs are super anal about this and it takes just a few minutes to learn, it will change your life. Cables should never be coiled in the same direction. It creates kinks when unwound and make it extremely likely for knots to form (ever leave your headphones in your pocket?). If a cable isn't being installed permanently it should be "wrapped" using a technique called "over-un…

The principle that induce this technique is that every time you create a loop in one direction of a cable, you twist the cable, the exact same twist that would have occurred if you held a cable with both hands and twisted one side (as if you were squeezing water out of wet cloth.

This technique as well as figure 8 with I use on guylines (when hiking with my tarp), create a counter clockwise twist for every clockwise twist, thus eliminating the tension that causes cables/guylines/ropes to eventually tangle up.

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

#313

Post by JackFr »

galfarragem wrote: post #267
unlinked_dll wrote: post #28

How to properly wrap cables. A/V and cable techs are super anal about this and it takes just a few minutes to learn, it will change your life. Cables should never be coiled in the same direction. It creates kinks when unwound and make it extremely likely for knots to form (ever leave your headphones in your pocket?). If a cable isn't being installed permanently it should be "wrapped" using a technique called "over-un…

I learnt this while working in trades. Working with trades people or handymans will teach you a lot of practical skills that are useful in daily life.

Face the wheelbarrow the direction you want to go before you fill it.

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

#314

Post by eterps »

coltnz wrote: post #89

Logical fallacies - how not to think. Kelly criterion - what can you afford to invest. Polya's problem solving method. Salary negotiation skills. Rich Hickey's Hammock driven development (for non programmers too). No Limit Holdem Poker flop and turn odds calculation.

> Logical fallacies - how not to think.

Does anyone know a good app or website that drills you in recognizing logical fallacies from realistic examples/scenarios?

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

#315

Post by ivanhoe »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #277
ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wondered why in English the constant and the letter π pronounced as /paɪ/ when the Greek letter is obviously /pi/. It really grinds my gears, there's no pie in π! Does Enlgish routinely localize foreign alphabet names? If so, it's bad practice. I believe no one in the world learns English alphabet pronouncing it arbitrary, and not as /ˈeɪ/ /ˈbiː/ /ˈsiː/.

Just a wild guess, but perhaps it's part of a vowel shift either in modern Greek, or modern English. I know UK (bee-ta) and USA (bay-ta) pronounce Beta differently but am slightly ashamed to say I don't know how modern Greeks pronounce it. I understand it's derived from Hebrew's Beth, though? Language is a constant curiosity.

In Greek letter β is actual pronounced like Vee-ta and in words it's read like latin V (Babylon is pronounced like Vah-vee-lon).

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

#316

Post by dangus »

patricius wrote: post #280
PeterStuer wrote: post #220

Skills are gained through practice. To get good at non-trivial skills requires more than an hour. Knowledge is gained through insights. While a full understanding and implications of an insight can take a lifetime, an insight can be triggered in under an hour. Now which insights are most valuable? That is always going to be personal and relative. But one of the insights that touches all people and is almost universal…

Great suggestion. Also, might I recommend The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous. Half the book is about money in general, not just Bitcoin. Very well written. https://saifedean.com/the-book/

I couldn’t think of a worse suggestion for a typical person looking for money management skills.

Sure, half the book isn’t about bitcoin, but half of it is, and that’s a problem for the 99% of people that will and should never interact with Bitcoin.

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

#317

Post by PeterStuer »

taffer wrote: post #297
PeterStuer wrote: post #220

Skills are gained through practice. To get good at non-trivial skills requires more than an hour. Knowledge is gained through insights. While a full understanding and implications of an insight can take a lifetime, an insight can be triggered in under an hour. Now which insights are most valuable? That is always going to be personal and relative. But one of the insights that touches all people and is almost universal…

> Here is a decent and easy starter in under an hour. > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bE8i-4HpKlM It should be mentioned that the video presents a fringe theory (MMT) that is highly controversial among economists. I would recommend the Khan Academy series on banking and money as an alternative, even though it is longer than an hour: https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core-fi...

While the short video series is indeed also criticizing the traditional econo 101 money account (I'll leave it to the discretion of the viewer whether that critique is deserved or not), it does also address and explain the traditional views in a concise and accesible way in under an hour.

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

#318

Post by henryaj »

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.

No, the 'mystic bullshit' is very real in e.g. vipassana (for example, anything about "vibrations") regardless of the race of the speaker

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

#319

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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