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

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181–190 of 1001 posts

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

#181

How 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.

Eggs are interestingly one of the hardest to do in cooking. So it seems like something you can do in a few minutes, but not really.

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

#182
Funninly I just went for the Wim Hoff fundamentals course yesterday and it fits the description very accurately.

You can learn it online by watching the video or downloading the app and shouldn't take more than an hour. But preferable do the cold exposure part of it with somone around.

The breathing technique by itself is still great though

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

#183
post #121

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…

I combined learning touch typing with switching to Dvorak[1] about 15 years ago.

Doing both together increased the time being annoyingly slow at typing, but it's so rewarding for the gain in comfort. (I don't touch type on Qwerty, but of course with some translating to Dvorak I can pretend.)

https://www.typingclub.com/dvorak is out a good place to start. Don't rearrange the keys on the keyboard! You're not going to look at them anyway.

[1] Nowadays there is also Coleman and variants. I still recommend Dvorak, but at the point someone is deciding between the two it's not worth an online debate.

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

#185
post #121

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…

I learned to touch type via https://www.keybr.com/ - Careful, you can get addicted to this site!

All other software felt like a much bigger grind, with fixed lessons that didn't fit my shortcomings. keybr adapts to your own typing, I made tremendous progress in just a few days.

I still use it a lot but also like to mix it in with https://zty.pe/ - fun little game.

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

#186
post #49

Binary Search. (And its antithesis, exponential growth.) In my opinion it is the single most important piece of computer science insight with the constraint that you only have less than an hour. I often use binary search as a sort of thought experiment into whether something is "obvious" or not. As a child, I would say exponential growth is the one thing that I developed no intuition for between the age of 1–11. Even…

This is the first thing I talk about when someone asks me what computer science teaches a person and how it relates to real world. It covers a practical example and lets you touch on topics like algorithmic complexity. And it takes 5 minutes to explain. So I fill the rest of the time by demonstrating a simple sorting algorithm on paper and I finish off by drawing a simple maze and solving it with breadth first search…

Since you mentioned sorting 'on paper', here's the sorting algorithm you'd use as a human sorting papers :)

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-manual-sorting-algori...

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

#187

Sales. If you only have 1 hour to learn anything, learn sales. That's a skill that can come handy in many areas of life, not only in business.

Where would you start? I’m in the “learning sales stage” of my career and have stumbled on Sandler sales training. I’ve talked to a really excellent sandler trainer (link down below). The gist of what I discovered is that I must learn new habits when making sales calls (i.e more listening, better questioning, resist making assumptions). None of these things take an hour. However here is a YouTube video by the Sandler Trainer I talked to. It will take you less than an hour to watch and you could learn something. https://youtu.be/I4qrQz8h0AM

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

#188
If you've been married for a while, learn who your spouse is now. (I mean in a good way, by taking an hour to rediscover what his/her hopes and dreams are, what interests they've gained / lost, etc.)

He/she is probably a pretty different person than the one you married. It's easy to overlook that.

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

#189

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-un…

> 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.

You mean like this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uy3axdxDdKs

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

#190
post #7

How 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...

I remember learning these before but due to not finding any use case for them, I already forgot how to do them properly. Only thing I regularly tie nowadays are my shoelaces. EDIT: Grammar

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