Setup and learn how to use Anki to practice spaced repetition. Going forward you can now decide what you would like to remember (so long as you are willing to spend 5-15 mins a day reviewing)! People's names, that command you always look up, your credit card number, interesting statistics (e.g number of passenger miles per death for bicycles vs cars vs planes) foundational facts in your field that will allow you to ponder and recognize them over and over (e.g multivariate Gaussian distribution).
Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
561–570 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#562Earlier 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…
> Sure you could. But you’re forgetting that you’re living in the house (or renting it out...) while you’re paying it off.
Not just that, but definitely do the math on the monthly payments.
In my case (in Chicago), my minimum monthly mortgage payment was half the monthly rent I had been paying, for a significantly nicer and larger place. Just had to get past the down-payment hurdle.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think a seriously overlooked application of this principle is in nutrition and dieting. Over- or under- eating by a small percentage of your required intake might not have a discernible effect immediately but really adds up over time, both for weight loss and gain.
You’re talking addition and subtraction, compounding deals with multiplication.
To reap the benefits of compound interest (in your favor), you need to stick to a plan. You can't dump your investment portfolio after 5 years. It's these small, daily decisions that add up over time. So while the output is multiplicative, the necessary input is only linear.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#564Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's super useful if you're on the phone, having to spell out a list of letters, e.g. a postcode
If the other side also knows NATO alphabet. There are too many uncommon words for the average helpdesk operator
The other side will either know the NATO alphabet or be able to understand it anyway. It was designed to be interpreted and used by non English speakers, since most of NATO doesn't/didn't speak English. I've used it dozens of times, zero errors.
It's really good enough to be considered a sort of spoken language Golay code.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#565Learn how to use Google Search effectively. It's a "language" we use every day. Mastering its few features can make any search so much more effective and precise: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433
wow that's handy!
By using these techniques Google thinks that I am a bot and after 3 queries I have to fill CAPTCHA.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#566SQL is a good fit for one hour I think. Not « valuable » for work but interesting for stimulating other parts of your brain, which can have interesting side effects: - juggling (3 balls). Great for arms and hand coordination and trusting your left hand. - drumming (common patterns). Good gateway to music production.
SELECT
INSERT
UPDATE
DELETE
If you're going to write software for a living, learning those three simple commands well can save you so much future pain. Just do it.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#567Binary Search. (And its antithesis, exponential growth.) In my opinion it is the single most important piece of computer science insight with the constraint that you only have less than an hour. I often use binary search as a sort of thought experiment into whether something is "obvious" or not. As a child, I would say exponential growth is the one thing that I developed no intuition for between the age of 1–11. Even…
I'm currently teaching my child binary search.
She thinks we're just having fun playing "Guess Who?"
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#568How 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…
So let us proceed to the real challenge: christmas lights. How can you avoid the guaranteed swearing the following year?
Careful coiling and then securing the coils with string in 3-4 places workes well for me. Coiling should be done while paying heed to the cable's preferred direction, if there is any tension it does not work well.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#569Earlier quoted context omitted.
As much as I dislike seemingly knee-jerk contrary statements against “known-good” knowledge, I feel that there is an important point here: aggressively attempting to compound interest is a poor use of time when you only have, say, hundreds of dollars. Better to focus on compound interest “in the background” while optimizing for growing capital or income-generating skills.
This is so true. I invested what little money I had to spare in music. Everything I made with it went back in. The return is more than I would have gotten from interest or things like stocks and bonds. ~2% is great if you're doing okay financially and have a good career. It's useless if you have any marketable skill that would benefit from spending what you can spare on tools or services. A pair of good mixing headph…
Can I ask how you're making that money back? Gigs? An album?
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#570Earlier quoted context omitted.
Similarly, Excusez-moi; parlez-vous Anglais? is how you get a French person to speak English.
The full handshake sequence is usually longer that this. They will first reply with "Non", often coupled with a wounded look. Then you have to start speaking in a very broken French, ideally with a monstrous accent (though this comes naturally). And only then they will suddenly re-discover their long forgotten English skills, which will turn out to be quite decent.
Exactly this. There is a crossover point where their pain of listening to your horrible French exceeds their enjoyment of watching you suffer, and that's when they let you off the hook.
In Paris in the summer this crossover point is higher since I think they're pissed they are stuck in the city for the summer dealing with tourists rather than frolicking in the countryside.