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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?

#361

Post by arethuza »

koolba wrote: post #353
majortennis wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

compound interest is where the bank say's its 3.5% interest but if you do the math you're paying 180% for a house. I don't have any idea how that became acceptable/the norm.

This is a good example why one should understand compound interest. Through in a payment schedule and amortization as well. The bank is giving you $X to buy the house. You’re paying off a piece of it each month (your mortgage payment). Part of that goes to the interest on the loan, the rest goes to principal. The interest each month is based upon on the remaining principal. That means your payment starts off being mo…

"Part of that goes to the interest on the loan, the rest goes to principal."

That's only one kind of mortgage though - for a while there were mortgages available in the UK where you only payed the interest on the principal but you also payed into a separate saving scheme with the idea that when the latter matured it would pay off the former.

No idea if these are still available, but for a while in the early 1990s you used to get a very hard sell on them - we had one for a five years or so. In reality they are a terrible idea as you are paying interest on a non-decreasing principal which is a shockingly bad idea and then there is the risk of the saving scheme performance as well.

Edit: Of course you got a hard sell on them as they were clearly a terrible idea from the borrowers perspective but were far more profitable than a normal mortgage for the lender.

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

#362

Post by bildung »

majortennis wrote: post #354
epanchin wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to adjust for inflation.

inflations a big scam too, stop printing bloody money

The printing of US dollars in the last decade had zero effect on inflation.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi

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

#363

Post by patricius »

dangus wrote: post #316
patricius wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wouldn't say it's much about money management skills. It is an explanation about the money phenomenon and its properties. But okay, it's probably not something you can read in an hour.

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

#364

Post by pge »

citilife wrote: post #32

Learn how to read quarterly earnings (and other financial documents). It's amazing how simply it is to see if a company is making money / losing money and how that'll impact your view of the world. For instance, Uber as it is today, is going out of or dramatically changing its business. Might not see that from all the hype, might not see it from all the user, but the terms sheet doesn't quarterly earnings doesn't lie…

I might start even simpler than that - learning how to understand the three basic financial statements (income statement, balance sheet, cash flow) and how they interrelate. This is super helpful in any job and in managing personal finance because understanding the statements provides a framework for understanding the dynamics of money (for example, understanding depreciation reminds you that the new car you just bought is declining in value, while the interest on your car loan is an expense).

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

#365

Post by galfarragem »

scarejunba wrote: post #180
kqr wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on this?

Sure. Let’s say you have some mundane task: you’ve got some number of people with varying dietary restrictions and they want to go to dinner together. You don’t know which places can accommodate you. Don’t do it yourself. Just ship the info over to someone you pay $25 to do the work. You can then use the time more productively. Eventually, you can see the MTurk / Upwork folks as just slow executing programs. For some…

I suspect that when you master delegation you improve productivity by an order of magnitude. It's a game changer.

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

#366

Post by dmartinez »

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…

I would argue that an even more insightful view of money is to go one level up to “wealth”. Paul Graham covers it nicely: http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

Skip down to the “Money is not wealth” section.

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

#367

Post by bluesign »

PeterStuer wrote: post #317
taffer wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I agree they explain basic concepts in an easy and accessible way, but there are a lot of missing pieces intentionally omitted.

I don't know how many times refers 'creation of money by banks', but it was the essential point for sure, and totally wrong one. Rest of the video all depends on this.

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

#368

Post by JoeAltmaier »

daodedickinson wrote: post #356

Well... um... if someone wants to love me you could definitely maybe get me to fall in love with you in an hour of conversation.

There's actually a technique for this!

Two people stand about 4' apart, and take turns asking personal questions. Start simple and ramp up, like from "What is your favorite color?" to "Who did you like better, your Mother or your Father?". Move to "Have you had a friend pass away, and how did that affect you?", "Are you happy with your life?" and so on.

Try to answer truthfully, and pay close attention to your partner's body language, facial changes, voice quality. Empathize silently using the same.

After 10 minutes, normal folks feel a closer bond. Unreasonably closer.

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

#369

Post by soVeryTired »

citilife wrote: post #32

Learn how to read quarterly earnings (and other financial documents). It's amazing how simply it is to see if a company is making money / losing money and how that'll impact your view of the world. For instance, Uber as it is today, is going out of or dramatically changing its business. Might not see that from all the hype, might not see it from all the user, but the terms sheet doesn't quarterly earnings doesn't lie…

> but the terms sheet doesn't quarterly earnings doesn't lie

There's an old saying that "profit is an opinion". It's harder to lie about revenue, but profit and loss can be adjusted by any number of accounting tricks that are perfectly 'legitimate'. Even auditors can miss the less-legitimate tricks.

A company might want to seem less profitable for for tax-reasons or because it's in a profit-sharing agreement (see Holywood Accounting). Or it might want to seem more profitiable to seem more stable (see Carillion and Interserve in the UK).

Reading a quarterly account does give a certain perspective on the health of a company, but quarterlies can be spun agressively by the company too.

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

#370

Post by aasasd »

samfar90 wrote: post #81
smaddox wrote: post #12

Mindfulness meditation. Sitting with your thoughts and emotions, experiencing them, and understanding them, rather than avoiding them or distracting yourself from them can have a dramatic effect on your life. And 10 minutes a day for a week can get you far enough to see some real benefits, like reduced stress and increased awareness of unhelpful thought patterns.

I don't want to sound ridiculous, but I've gotten the same benefits that you seem to describe (I have never tried mindfulness) since I started to smoke weed.

Weed does open the eyes to how much more relaxed you can be, both emotionally and physically: turns out that normally I have muscles tense that I never even knew about.

After that, you begin listening to your body and the brain more, and to track the state of them both instead of taking it for granted. That's how the way to ‘mindfulness’ starts. You learn that the two states are in a feedback loop: if you're tense, you get angry and anxious, which gets you more tense. To break the loop, you could of course hit a blunt, but that's not always an option, or at least not always the best one. Alternatively, you can take some time to free the brain from being hung up on the worries and to free the body from being contorted by tenseness.

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