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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?

#801

Post by ryan_lane »

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…

Taking a single hour cooking class will drastically up your game. Ideally you'd take more than one, but in most cities you can find classes like:

* Knife skills * Overview of cooking methods * One-pot meals * Quick meals

You can also usually find classes specific to cooking methods.

I highly recommend a knife skills class, as it'll cut your prep times down considerably, which makes cooking a lot more enjoyable.

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

#802

Post by kevinyun »

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…

If there's a Robinhood for index fund investing, I am in. I think a lot of retail investors (myself included) lack a mainstream resource that pushes for stock diversification investments, having to resort to manual research.

I know Robinhood and supports this, but a centralized platform dedicated to index and mutual funds that focuses on them out of the box might make sense.

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

#803

Post by swframe2 »

georgewsinger wrote: post #583

Reading a syntax overview to the Wolfram Programming Language: https://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/Syntax.html This will allow you to program in the (in my opinion: extremely underrated) language that WolframAlpha is built over. WPL is more concise than any other LISP, and has extremely powerful visualization capabilities built in. In fact everything is built in. You almost never need to import a library to…

I tried the Syntax guide. I found

https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/wolfram/

to be easier to learn.

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

#804

Post by jmcqk6 »

kevinyun wrote: post #802
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…

If there's a Robinhood for index fund investing, I am in. I think a lot of retail investors (myself included) lack a mainstream resource that pushes for stock diversification investments, having to resort to manual research. I know Robinhood and supports this, but a centralized platform dedicated to index and mutual funds that focuses on them out of the box might make sense.

Betterment does this, with auto-rebalancing when things get out of balance. There are other services that do this as well (wealthfront is one).

If you're just interested in index funds themselves, then take a look at vanguard.

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

#805

Post by joecool1029 »

Learning basic regex (regular expressions) will save literal days (maybe weeks) of time when editing code, text, or searching/organizing anything. I can't think of a single skill more useful on a computer.

While regex turns pretty hard fast, the basics can be picked up within an hour, or at least the ability to know what to reference when something needs to be done.

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

#806

Post by jobigoud »

shoo wrote: post #69

For the lame definition of valuable: if you are not in the practise of negotiating, try to negotiate in more situations and see what happens! Attempting to negotiate will not harm your situation when dealing with another party making you a genuine offer. Even if you are a very mediocre negotiator, you might be able to easily eg obtain a somewhat higher salary when starting a job versus just accepting a given offer if…

> Attempting to negotiate will not harm your situation when dealing with another party making you a genuine offer.

I'm not sure what you are basing this on. I can say for certain that it's not true for me. Maybe it's only true in some negotiation contexts.

I sometimes sell stuff on the Internet. I put in a price and say this is firm. Many, many times, people contact me, and the first thing they do is try to negotiate the price down. I instantly blacklist them. I'm not here for the hassle. Either you are interested or not. So yes, if you are dealing with me, and you are truly interested, negotiating will harm your situation.

Also, I hate negotiating with a passion. I find it promotes double speak and adds uncertainty. Pick a price and stick with it, don't change the contract midway. If I can negotiate the price down, I won't really consider it a win. Instead, you will loose my trust. Why didn't you put in the true offer in the first place? It makes me feels that if I hadn't negotiated, you would have silently robbed me. I will thus assume you are still silently robbing me, as I'm not here to spend my time negotiating further down.

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

#807

Post by james_kim2 »

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…

Cooking is a great skill to have but I would say it takes more than an hour to actually be good at it. Just my opinion!

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

#808

Post by ghaff »

ryan_lane wrote: post #801
schindlabua wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Taking a single hour cooking class will drastically up your game. Ideally you'd take more than one, but in most cities you can find classes like: * Knife skills * Overview of cooking methods * One-pot meals * Quick meals You can also usually find classes specific to cooking methods. I highly recommend a knife skills class, as it'll cut your prep times down considerably, which makes cooking a lot more enjoyable.

As someone who cooks a fair bit, I tend to agree that someone could go from how to boil an egg and incrementally add things like organizational skills, knife sharpening, simple sautes, etc. in useful one hour chunks. You can't learn to cook in any meaningful way in an hour, but it's definitely a skill that you can usefully develop on a skill-by-skill/recipe-by-recipe basis pretty effectively.

I'm not sure how many cooking classes are aimed at rank beginners but there are tons of videos these days. It might even be useful to subscribe to something like Cooks Illustrated for a more structured approach rather than wading into YouTube.

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

#809

Post by 0xffff2 »

criddell wrote: post #585
RobertRoberts wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watch this, incredibly simple method that made me actually like omelettes. (I hated them growing up) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s10etP1p2bU "Really good" is subjective. It's the very notion something is possible and that you can do it that I see as valuable. Practice makes perfect, nothing can be perfect the first time you learn it.

You might be interested in this video then: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5__zptEU9vE The guy in the video tried to replicate Pepin's omelette and documented his progress. Pepin even responded to the video.

To summarize for those who can't/don't want to watch both videos: Just because world renowned chef Jacques Pepin makes an omelet look easy, doesn't mean it is.

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

#810

Post by 0xffff2 »

RobertRoberts wrote: post #212
Pandabob wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I second this as a worthy skill to have, but there aren't many dishes you can become really good at making just in an hour. At least anecdotally, just the process of learning to make a great french omelette is pretty brutal.

Watch this, incredibly simple method that made me actually like omelettes. (I hated them growing up) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s10etP1p2bU "Really good" is subjective. It's the very notion something is possible and that you can do it that I see as valuable. Practice makes perfect, nothing can be perfect the first time you learn it.

Pepin himself starts out his video by saying that the omelet is the dish that he would judge a chef by, implying that it demonstrates all of the skills of the chef. I'm not sure how this is supposed to demonstrate that you can learn to cook in an hour.
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