People think touch typing takes a long time to learn, and getting good does take a while, but it only takes about an hour to memorize the alphanumerics and which finger types what well enough to break the hunt and peck looking at the keyboard cycle forever. Once the cycle is broken just typing casually is enough to eventually achieve mastery. It's only that one or two hours that really suck, and then that week or so of being kind of mediocre that keeps people stuck in the suboptimal local maxima of not touch typing.
Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
121–130 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#122How to frame your photos, as in where to point the camera at. Most family members could skip a level or five of they had the patience to internalise a 15 minutes YouTube video.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#123The 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
I'd like to tag on Hangul (Korean script). It might not take an hour, but you can definitely learn in less than a day.
The script was created to be simple. As the inventor, King Sejong said: "A wise man can acquaint himself with them (the letters of Hangul) before the morning is over; a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days."
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#124Learn how to use deals site to save a ton of money: https://slickdeals.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=9 I can't overstate how much money you will save by simply setting up alerts on sites like SlickDeals and learning the basic lingo like YMMV, B&M, PM etc... At the very least learn about the TofuVic's purchase point for toilet paper so you don't waste money wiping your ass.
It's weird that they forbid any user from Europe because of data privacy law.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#125AWK.
The hour I spent learning AWK way back when must have saved me a few days, cumulatively, on mundane data munging tasks over the years.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Transformation by substitution is part of most dialects of regex, in the form of capturing groups.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#127Mindfulness meditation. Sitting with your thoughts and emotions, experiencing them, and understanding them, rather than avoiding them or distracting yourself from them can have a dramatic effect on your life. And 10 minutes a day for a week can get you far enough to see some real benefits, like reduced stress and increased awareness of unhelpful thought patterns.
I don't want to sound ridiculous, but I've gotten the same benefits that you seem to describe (I have never tried mindfulness) since I started to smoke weed.
>since I started to smoke weed.
There are some similarities in the effect, yes. But the problems with weed is it's effect is temporary and it messes up your awareness. Also you can not do in in many public places. Should I mention that certain types of meditation make you even more intoxicated? :)
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#128There'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/…
Cool!
Is there such thing for Flask? For Node?
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#129Nutrition. An essential life skill.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#130How 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.
I purchased “The Food Lab” by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt and it completely changed things for me. He spends an extensive amount of time in the book describing techniques and tools in a very hackerish kind of way that finally taught me to cook at a level closer to my wife who spent her earlier years working in restaurant kitchens. Cooking eggs, in any variation, is discussed at length in the book and it’s well worth the read.
"Cooking for Geeks" is another newcomer-friendly resource in the same vein.