The Cyrillic script is fairly easy to learn and will let you phonetically read a bunch of languages (Ukrainian, Russian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Mongolian, and Serbian to name a few.) Each language has a few unique letters and pronunciation can vary slightly, but for the most part they are the same.
Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
61–70 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#62Go through your expenses and identify waste. Even if you’d don’t keep a budget check your credit card statements etc. cancel unrequited subscriptions, haggle utility bills, refinance loans, etc.
But looking at my credit card statement gives me anxiety.
Yes that’s a big problem. Not sure on the solution to that, but over time you get used to it. Just think of it like any other math exercise.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#63How to do various knots comes to mind. Square knot, A sheet bend, clove and trucker's hitch, prusik, the alpine butterfly knot, and bowlines can all be learned rather quickly, then practiced so they can be remembered easily. http://paracord550milspec.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/How...
This ties in to how I like to say the rope may be one of the greatest inventions of mankind.
I find myself unravelling mentally when it comes to remembering knots and the like
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#64Basics of presentation skills like
- Using voice, body and mimics properly
- Not putting lots of text on slides and just reading them
- Using bullets instead of paragraphs
- Tell a story and use a less formal more friendly style (not always but applies to majority of technical presentations)
A nice video about the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vB2pl1QbY3I
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#65There'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/…
I made similar functionality for Django a few years ago called Sniper. You write all your dom modification code as an Ajax request handler. In his handler you yield out a sequence of dom modification objects and sniper handles the rest. I couldn’t understand why this wasn’t a more popular approach.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#66If you have even a small amount of math talent, you should be able to grasp the key ideas in Bayes's Rule that quickly iff you read https://arbital.com/p/bayes_rule_guide .
The biconditional is a pretty strong claim here (especially considering that you yourself have written well-regarded introductions to this topic).
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#67Hirigana Or Hangul
Hiragana and Katakana.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#68If 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.
This really is good advice. I’ve found a little goes a long way in improving your experience.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#69For 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 you're not aware that negotiation is possible/expected.
(This doesn't work in all situations, some employment markets are highly regulated and don't have market rates, negotiation is more likely to produce better results if you are in a stronger negotiating position...)
If you have an hour, read https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
If you have a few hours, read through the book "getting to yes"
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#70I would suggest learning juggling a basic 3 ball cascade. It’s great for training concentration and coordination, and also quite addictive.