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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?

#21
Learning that learning takes more than an hour, no matter the domain. You said it yourself: "A lot of what hackers do takes years of building knowledge upon knowledge". Understanding a skill takes time, energy, and discipline to improve is all you can do.

Everything else is simply spending an hour "doing something". If you keep the "something" to a smaller set of "things", then maybe you can learn something over several one hour sessions.

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

#22

Git. It has few commands and can be rapidly learned in one hour, mastering commands such as Git fetch Git pull Git commit Git push Git merge Git log

Although it is important to know how they can be used in the CLI, I find that I using a GUI speeds up my workflow.

I would just settle for understanding how they work rather than dive deep into the CLI syntax intricacies

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

#24

There's a growing realization that you can completely side-step the need for Single-Page App frameworks like React using websockets and the morphdom library. Projects like StimulusReflex (Rails) and LiveView (Phoenix) allow developers to build complex, reactive modern apps faster and easier by rejecting the need to even have client state. https://github.com/hopsoft/stimulus_reflex https://github.com/phoenixframework/…

Seems like cool stuff. Unfortunately, both of the StimulusReflex demos (Heroku apps) are giving errors right now. Maybe somebody hit a quota!

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

#26
If you're going overseas, learn a little bit of the local language.

  1. Hello
  2. Goodbye
  3. Please
  4. Thank you
  5. Me
  6. You
  7. Him/her
  8. This
  9. That
  10. Here
  11. There
  12. Do you have this?
  13. Where is this?
  14. How much money is that?
  15. Where is the toilet?
  16. Digits (0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9)
You'll be surprised how much of the language you pick up naturally just by memorising some basic words and using them.

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

#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-under". Hard to describe in text, so here's a video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpuutP6Df84

Personally I disagree with his method, what I do is do the "over" loop by placing my palm over the cable, and on the under loop, put your palm under the loop. Then when you pull the loop to your fixed hand, you always keep your palm down when laying it. Very quick way, eventually becomes fast with practice. Also useful to unroll kinks from the cable when you wrap it, and always tie the bastard off because if one end falls through you'll get knots.

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

#30

Regular expressions fall into this category. While they might take longer to master, you should know the basics after an hour. I've been surprised at how often people convert long lists line-by-line. You can sometimes take what was a multiple-hour task and complete it with a handful of cryptic characters.

Yes, regular expression. Saves me from lines of substr, split, join, etc.
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