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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?

#431

Post by GistNoesis »

Two hind-sights for an hour :

- Learn how to fall.

In skateboarding : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hundbrub8iQ

In a more general way, it can be enlightening because it is a fundamental learning principle. When confronted to something new, you will make mistakes, what you need to learn is not how to avoid mistakes but how to avoid catastrophic failures (i.e. how to reduce the cost of mistakes).

It's learning how to fail safely so that you can do more cycles and let exponential growth due to iterated processes settle.

- Learn to spot cycles.

A cycle is a sequence of actions that can be repeated. Ideally cycles would repeat indefinitely but usually they have side effects. Characterize the cycles : timescale, resources created and consumed, compare the value relatively to the values at the same instant of the previous cycles. Is it good or bad ? How frequently can it be repeated ? Can I do every part of the cycle on my own ? How can it be optimized ? And for almost cycles : How to close the loop.

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

#432

Post by collyw »

henryaj wrote: post #318
fellow_human wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that other cultural practices are dismissed as mystic bullshit by default, until a white man introduces it. That makes it more trustworthy other white people.

No, the 'mystic bullshit' is very real in e.g. vipassana (for example, anything about "vibrations") regardless of the race of the speaker

The positive effects (for most people) are also very real as well, in spite of the "mystic bullshit".

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

#434

Post by jbverschoor »

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…

3. Don't store eggs in the fridge, and don't frikking wash them!

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

#435

Post by haddr »

Read Schopenhauer „The Art of Being Right: 38 Ways to Win an Argument”. It’s a short read, but mind opening if you’re new to the subject. If it seems too long then just read some shortened version. If you still have some time after that then go to “list of cognitive biases” Wikipedia entry and continue there.

I believe it is crucial to understand what tricks others are using in arguments. And also what’s our cognitive limits and logical fallacies when trying to understand the world.

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

#436

Post by throwaway744678 »

majortennis wrote: post #344
koliber wrote: post #338

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 a…

compound interest is where the bank say's its 3.5% interest but if you do the math you're paying 180% for a house. I don't have any idea how that became acceptable/the norm.

Depending on your country, the law may require the bank to actually print the total cost of the loan on the contract as well. You'd have a better argument with revolving credits, the rates of which are generally much more predatory.

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

#437

Post by apexalpha »

bionsystem wrote: post #336
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).

I don't know, for people who neither have the time, skill or will to invest individual companies' performance a low-cost, very broad ETF is pretty universally excepted as your best bet.

This doesn't mean there is no risk.

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

#438

Post by collyw »

jeltz wrote: post #326
aeternum wrote: post #11

Regular 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.

Can you really learn regex in one hour? I learned them so long time ago and in a gradual way that I have no idea how long it would take if you focus on it, but I feel like it would be more than an hour since I think most people would need to play around quite a bit to really grasp them.

There is a way of thinking when you deal with regexes that took me a while to get.

Reading the first chapter of ORiley's Mastering Regular Expressions was what made me get it and that was maybe an hours worth of time.

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

#439

Post by joshspankit »

learnstats2 wrote: post #410

On the contrary, it has taken me years to unlearn compound interest. When you start with relatively little, compound interest is relatively very unhelpful - it compounds wealth and benefits people who have started with something more than you. Twice as good at nothing is still nothing.

As much as I dislike seemingly knee-jerk contrary statements against “known-good” knowledge, I feel that there is an important point here: aggressively attempting to compound interest is a poor use of time when you only have, say, hundreds of dollars. Better to focus on compound interest “in the background” while optimizing for growing capital or income-generating skills.
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