fishing knots
Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
791–800 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#792How 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…
You mentioned cooking jasmine rice using a 1:1 ratio of water to rice, but rice generally can't be cooked using a linear ratio like this. As you increase the amount of rice being cooked, and change the size/shape of the cooking vessel, more of the water will be lost as steam. It's easiest to use a rice cooker, which will allow you more flexibility with regards to how much water/rice you used, but if you don't have a…
As I understand, cooking rice usually has a constant amount of water lost to steam. You need to have a rough idea of how much water your rice actually needs to absorb and how much is lost to steam. In my experience with my setup, rice usually requires an equal volume of water and 1 lost 1 cup of water to steam. So 1 cup of water requires 2 cups of water, 2 cups of rice requires 3 cups of water, etc.
So y = x + 1 where y is the cups of water and x is the cups of rice. 1 is the number of cups lost as steam.
Each time you open the lid you lose steam, so you may have to take that into account. I use a rice cooker and don't open the lid so I don't worry about that though.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#793You can learn tailoring in an hour.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#794Keyboard shortcuts.
Entirely changed my computing experience once I stopped using a mouse for everything except graphic design-related tasks. You can learn most of the big ones for your most used apps in an hour, keep a cheat sheet nearby yr PC in case you forget some. Like cooking its an easy skill to build quickly if you're a knowledge worker since you're always in front of a computer anyway.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#795There's a book called Mathemagics with chapters which take about an hour to read which will teach you how to remember numbers and do mental arithmetic
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#796How 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…
This is so important. I don't know if you can "learn to cook" in an hour, but you can probably drive to the store, buy some vegetables, come home, and make a great salad with an awesome homemade vinaigrette dressing in less than an hour. I try to eat fairly healthy, but having a salad that's easy to make that I actually crave (oh no, I've turned into an old person) most days at lunch is amazing. It's fast, and I have…
If I only had an hour, i'd focus on a simple intros of really fundamental techniques kinda like the OP indicated, and not necessarily cooking everything in that time.
Knife skills. Keep them sharp. Mise en place. The importance of salt and pepper. Searing techniques for cooking meat and how not to do it. Roasting vegetables 101. The basics of finishing pastas and reducing sauces. The fact that you can make your own dressing in no time.
You can probably cover all of that quickly and in enough time to ask the right questions moving forward and begin your jorney - IF you had a curriculum. If it's self study it takes longer to figure out what you don't know :) For me it all started with "why does my Grilled Cheese suck? This should be easy" and it's been all downhill.
The Food Lab by Kenji Lopez-Alt was a big window into this for me because of the approach around time and temperature, and the book takes you through all of this stuff by section.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#797Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always try to learn how to say, "I'm sorry, I don't speak X" in language X. When I was in Japan I got an unbelievable amount of leverage out of being able to say, "Sumi masen, Nihon-go hanasei masen" which, of course, means "I don't speak Japanese" in Japanese. The local's faces would light up and often they would respond in Japanese despite the fact that I had just told them that I don't speak Japanese.
I had a year of French at school, and my teacher kept saying all year that no matter how much or little we learn from his classes and exercises, as long as we are able to say "I don't speak language X, do you speak language Y?", everything would be so much easier when dealing with strangers in foreign countries. It also helps a lot to add a "please" and "thank you". This piece of advice helped a lot in both Germany,…
It doesn't always work though… I just had an issue with a Spanish airline (of all things I would assume all their employees would have to speak some English), where the session expired, the online payment went through but the ticket reservation didn't. I called the number and asked if Se habla Inglès o Francès? and no, I had to use my broken Spanish to sort it out. The lady was very helpful though.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#798Do nothing. Seriously. Allow yourself to become bored and you'll find your brain has suddenly got time to work on all the problems you mentally shelved. There's a good reason why a good number of ideas happen in the shower.
We call that meditation these days.
Although there are forms of "do nothing" meditation (which are, ironically, very easy to get wrong), most forms of meditation are precise ways to train attention and awareness. Quite different from the kind of "do nothing" where your mind wanders mindlessly into boredom.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#799How 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…
+1 I did stage work when I was younger and this was one of the most valuable things I took away from it.
Over-under is good for long, thick, delicate cables (e.g. mic/guitar cables). For shorter, thinner cables (e.g. USB cables) I use this technique: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXMG917XsvU
I have done it so much I can now do it quickly without looking at my hands, so I just automatically do it before putting a cable away or in my bag.
I now never have to detangle birds nests of cables. Over the course of the ~15 years I have been practicing responsible cable storage, that must add up to a lot of time.
Re: Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
#800If you're going overseas, learn a little bit of the local language. 1. Hello 2. Goodbye 3. Please 4. Thank you 5. Me 6. You 7. Him/her 8. This 9. That 10. Here 11. There 12. Do you have this? 13. Where is this? 14. How much money is that? 15. Where is the toilet? 16. Digits (0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9) You'll be surprised how much of the language you pick up naturally just by memorising some basic words and using them.
> 8. This 9. That
Now I wonder if there are some languages that don't differentiate between these two.