Double unders.
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?
#72How a blockchain works.
They said valuable haha, a solution on a decade long quest to find a problem isn’t really valuable.
Maybe bitcoin and crypto are not valuable... but the mathematical ideas of blockchain are, after the bubble dies they'll just become boring pieces of crucial infrastructure that sit in the background but they'll be there, it's the only way to ensure data auditing and integrity, and sooner or later people will be ok with paying 10x or 100x storage and compute costs for auditable integrity.
It's just that the real deal insight behind blockchain is not sexy and not something that's easy to make money from...
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#73Git. 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
I wonder what % of HN readers don't already know Git.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#74Advanced Google Search syntax + the Ngram Viewer.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#75The 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_script
IPA is also amazingly useful if you want to learn another language or even just learn to say someone's name correctly.
Having a notation for sounds helps you to understand and speak foreign languages, because you can think of what someone is saying in IPA and not in some flawed English transcription.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
They said valuable haha, a solution on a decade long quest to find a problem isn’t really valuable.
Maybe bitcoin and crypto are not valuable... but the mathematical ideas of blockchain are, after the bubble dies they'll just become boring pieces of crucial infrastructure that sit in the background but they'll be there, it's the only way to ensure data auditing and integrity, and sooner or later people will be ok with paying 10x or 100x storage and compute costs for auditable integrity. It's just that the real deal…
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Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#77There'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/…
Your mind will be furtherly blown when you realize this has been working for decades in JavaServerFaces!
Excited for jsf, asp.net, Wt and UniGui. Full circle is complete.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#78How to cook eggs.
Pick two or three styles of egg and spend an hour (and a few dozen eggs) preparing them over and over keeping notes on the conditions and outcomes of each generation.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#79Regular 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.
Simple transformations can easily become complex to do with regex, so I've started using vim macros instead.
Regex don’t do transformations? All they can do is match strings.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#80Learn how to read quarterly earnings (and other financial documents). It's amazing how simply it is to see if a company is making money / losing money and how that'll impact your view of the world. For instance, Uber as it is today, is going out of or dramatically changing its business. Might not see that from all the hype, might not see it from all the user, but the terms sheet doesn't quarterly earnings doesn't lie…
Losses, for years, are true for many successful and still around tech businesses.
Twitter is just one example. They didn't turn a profit until 2018.
I wouldn't write off Uber just because they're burning cash. Often this is done to secure markets by undercutting competitor pricing, or, aggressive R&D for future growth. Both of these tactics show losses for months, if not years, before things come to fruition.