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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?

#331

Post by jeltz »

swiley wrote: post #79
aliceryhl wrote: post #41

Earlier 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.

Almost. All regular expressions do is match strings and find the starts and ends of whole matches and match groups. And this is an important distinction since match group support adds quite a bit of complexity to the theory behind regular expressions and also increases their usefulness by quite a bit.

Regular expression libraries then often can use these boundaries, for the whole match and for groups, for transform the string (e.g. replacing what was matched by a group with some other content).

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

#332

Post by throwawaylolx »

dangus wrote: post #316
patricius wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great suggestion. Also, might I recommend The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous. Half the book is about money in general, not just Bitcoin. Very well written. https://saifedean.com/the-book/

I couldn’t think of a worse suggestion for a typical person looking for money management skills. Sure, half the book isn’t about bitcoin, but half of it is , and that’s a problem for the 99% of people that will and should never interact with Bitcoin.

It's also a highly opinionated book, which is another problem for many readers.

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

#333

Post by schindlabua »

dwoozle wrote: post #197
RobertRoberts wrote: post #176

How to cook for yourself, really, really good food. I no longer crave restaurant food, and all of the really important things I learned about cooking take just the time to read it, hear about it and then try it. All without any special hardware. A few examples: 1. Cooking jasmine rice: rinse it first, 1 c. water to 1 c. rice ratio. Bring to boil, turn down heat to lowest setting. Leave lid /the entire time/. Fluff th…

Cooking is great but you cannot learn it in an hour.

Seriously. I moved out of home with 0 cooking skills and after a few years of having to feed myself I feel like I'm becoming just average. It's amazing how many variables there are to control when doing even the most basic task like sautéing onions:

Sautéing in oil allows you to really crank the heat, using butter you have to be more careful. Cutting in larger chunks is great for some dishes and bad for others. The whole timing thing is probably the hardest to nail, going easy on the heat allows you to get in some other prepwork while the onions are doing their thing, but you also don't want to spend hours cooking so you want to crank it to the point where your prep and the onions will be done at the same time.

How far do you take the onions? How far do you take them if you want to throw in more veggies into the same pan? When do you add spices if you want them to get a bit toasty aswell? And sautéing large amounts of onion (1kg+) is a whole different calculus.

Cooking is this endless fractal of problems to solve and optimize. Kinda like programming innit.

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

#334

Post by Symbiote »

ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #243
Symbiote wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Half of Cyrillic is learned by the average HN reader if you tell them to think Greek rather than Latin. "P" is an "r" sound (rho), "П" is a "p" (pi), etc.

I always wondered why in English the constant and the letter π pronounced as /paɪ/ when the Greek letter is obviously /pi/. It really grinds my gears, there's no pie in π! Does Enlgish routinely localize foreign alphabet names? If so, it's bad practice. I believe no one in the world learns English alphabet pronouncing it arbitrary, and not as /ˈeɪ/ /ˈbiː/ /ˈsiː/.

It's only Greek (as far as I know), and because of the history of teaching Ancient Greek in schools in Britain. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_Ancient_Greek...

Note that the Latin alphabet is pronounced inconsistently all across Europe. I'm sure any 14 year old can precisely spell their name out loud in English, since they're going to be examined on it, but later in life people forget the difference between their own language and English, especially the vowels.

For example when speaking English, I find Danish people will mix up E and I if I spell a word with English pronunciation, and Danish people speaking English will often use the Danish pronunciation of J, K, Q, Y (roughly yoll, co, coo, oo).

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

#335

Post by dangus »

throwawaylolx wrote: post #332
dangus wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn’t think of a worse suggestion for a typical person looking for money management skills. Sure, half the book isn’t about bitcoin, but half of it is , and that’s a problem for the 99% of people that will and should never interact with Bitcoin.

It's also a highly opinionated book, which is another problem for many readers.

Yeah, found that out from Goodreads as well. Most people think the middle 1/3 of the book is nonsense.

Most people should read more of a “home economics 101” type of book or cheat sheet. Most people don’t need to know how the global economy works.

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

#336

Post by bionsystem »

tempestn wrote: post #144

How, and why, to invest in a simple portfolio of index funds. Split between equity and fixed income based on your risk tolerance, and diversify equities globally. This will give you a low-cost, set-and-forget investment portfolio that you can add to over time without ever having to worry about what you should buy or what the market might do. Just add to it regularly over time, and end up with solid retirement savings…

I would be very careful with financial advice in general and "set and forget" strategies are definitely among them. There is some controversy with ETF based allocation strategies (see Michael Burry's recent claims) that may or may not be valid, but in general I don't think there is any shortcut for financial education such as "just buy diversified ETFs" (and this applies to many other fields as well).

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

#337

Post by cmstoken »

sjapkee wrote: post #292
smaddox wrote: post #12

Mindfulness 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.

>Mindfulness meditation Absolutely useless thing which for some reason is shoved into each thread.

This will help: https://samharris.org/how-to-meditate/

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

#338

Post by koliber »

Understanding compound interest thoroughly.

Compound interest is probably the most powerful "force" governing out lives.

It is crucial when borrowing money, especially for longer terms.

It is crucial when saving and investing.

It is crucial in self-development, where a tiny 5% improvement in some area of your life per year can mean that you are twice as good at something in 15 years.

It is important when evaluating any kinds of improvements in personal life or in business.

The trick is that the percentage never sounds like much. The number of years always sounds like a lot. Nonetheless, the years WILL pass whether you want them to or not, and what tiny life choices you make throughout have a huge impact on where you will be in the future.

Being aware of that does not take much. An hour of intense concentration should be enough to get this insight. Of course, this depends on your age and math background. However, I feel confident saying the above as this to the Hacker News audience, as the above requires nothing more than an imagination and the ability to add and multiply by decimals.

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

#339

Post by fbn79 »

I think one great and simple skill would be use Google more efficiently. This will give you better access to global knowledge so better generic problem solving abilities. See a complete list of google operator https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/
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