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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?

#381

Post by nxpnsv »

tempestn wrote: post #153
nxpnsv wrote: post #70

I would suggest learning juggling a basic 3 ball cascade. It’s great for training concentration and coordination, and also quite addictive.

I learned this back in the early 2000's because I moved to a new city, didn't have a cellphone, and was waiting for my landline and internet to be hooked up. So I literally knew no one and had no contact with the outside world. Then, seriously, I happened to find a set of juggling balls in the back of the closet of the room I was renting—the previous tenant must have forgotten them there. With literally nothing else…

That rings true, I spent a weekend in the 90s to teach myself. I taught a bunch of people to juggle since - usually with an instructor an hour to reach something like juggling is achievable.

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

#382

Post by nothis »

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.

Wow. Rest assured, I still consider these cultural practices mystic bullshit.

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

#383

Post by username90 »

Double_a_92 wrote: post #167
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?

Nothing strange, you just spend more time processing information than average people.

My mental model is that any point the brain is dividing its resources between execution of current events and processing old events. If it spends too much time processing old events then it has no resources over to properly execute in the now.

When this happens some people just drop the unprocessed tasks from the queue to free up resources while others (like me and you) starts experiencing immense stress forcing us to drop what we are currently doing instead.

One way is not the other, sometimes I wish that I could execute better in the now but sometimes others wish that their brains didn't automatically drop important experiences without properly processing them first.

How to fix this? One way is ADD medication, increasing your dopamine forces your brain to focus on the now and drop old packets. It helps me execute better but I definitely become less creative and have a harder time remembering what I did when I took them. I might feel more creative when I'm on them, but most of those thoughts will be gone without a trace since they weren't properly processed.

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

#384

Post by gambiting »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #201
dwoozle wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cooking is great but you cannot learn it in an hour.

Sure you can. If you said 10 minutes I'd agree. But if you can learn a bit about programming in an hour, you can learn enough cooking in an hour to make a yummy meal. The simplest example is a pork steak. Throw it on the skillet and wait awhile. Turn it over and wait awhile. You now have a pork steak. It's delicious.

That's not cooking, that's following instructions. It's like saying that you can learn programming by opening Visual Studio, clicking "new console project", typing in printf("hello world\n"); in between the braces and hitting play is "programming". It kind of is, but you've learnt nothing.

With the pork steak how long is "wait awhile"? 10 seconds? 60 seconds? 10 minutes? All of those yield completely different results, and only once you've had plenty of experience cooking pork steaks, you will be able to judge what "wait awhile" is. Also you missed adding some salt and pepper to the steak - without those it just tastes like....unseasoned meat. Which is ok if that's what you want, but I doubt many people do. But you need to somehow know that salt and pepper are things that you would normally add to a pork steak, but not cinammon or sugar.

I think the only way to "learn" cooking is repetition, repetition and repetition. Not going to do a lot of that in an hour unfortunately.

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

#385

Post by salex89 »

schindlabua wrote: post #333
dwoozle wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cooking is great but you cannot learn it in an hour.

Seriously. I moved out of home with 0 cooking skills and after a few years of having to feed myself I feel like I'm becoming just average. It's amazing how many variables there are to control when doing even the most basic task like sautéing onions: Sautéing in oil allows you to really crank the heat, using butter you have to be more careful. Cutting in larger chunks is great for some dishes and bad for others. The w…

I actually don't have too much experience in cooking, but with every meal I make I get better. Cooking is not programming. Some of the best meals I actually made were made without precise measurements, just by gut, sometimes in a hurry. Sure, I might have measured things by the gram the first time I made them, but on next attempt the closest 20g or 30g is more than enough. Oven 45 minutes? Sure, but it looks brown already and it has only been 35, just pull it out.

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

#386

Post by ken »

SPBS wrote: post #117
mantap wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite knots to add to your list are adjustable grip hitch (AGH), siberian hitch, and zeppelin bend. The AGH is super easy to tie and very versatile. The Siberian is useful for tying a rope around a static object such as a pole or a tree. Bends are rarely useful for me since I rarely need to join two ropes together, but if you are going to learn a bend, you might as well learn the most beautiful one.

Yeah I think the zeppelin bend is the greatest knot ever, extremely secure and 100% jam proof (jam proof means the knot is easily untied even after extreme loads). I can’t think of any other bend that has those two properties, usually it’s one or the other

Two interlocked bowlines will get you this.

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

#387

Post by maccard »

sjapkee wrote: post #292
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.

>Mindfulness meditation Absolutely useless thing which for some reason is shoved into each thread.

Rather than dismissing the parents comment, would you tell us why you find it useless and add to the discussion?

Personally I found mindfulness to be helpful in unwinding, and I've found that my concentration levels are generally higher than they were before I started using it. It may not be the most efficient technique, but it's been a benefit for many people, me included.

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

#388

Post by jermaustin1 »

arethuza wrote: post #361
koolba wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

These are still around and pushed pretty heavily, but they are primarily for "Buy to Let" mortgages in my research. And offer an astounding TERRIBLE rate on top of the astoundingly terrible concept.

That said, the interest is a great write off for a landlord, especially if they are personally the originator of the loan to their holding company.

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

#389

Post by movedx »

> What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?

All the answers to this thread, once they've built up.

Given enough time there would be about an hour of reading and contemplation to be had, and in that time a good deal of advice would be received that can later be acted upon.

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

#390

Post by unityByFreedom »

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.

Mindfulness is easier than getting weed. You can be mindful of your breathing for 5 seconds, right now. That's all it is, you just sit there letting thoughts come and go, trying to bring focus back to your breathing for 20 minutes. IMO it's better than coffee for acquiring focus and lasts the whole day.
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