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What Is the Most Valuable Thing You Can Learn in One Hour?

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Re: What Is the Most Valuable Thing You Can Learn in One Hour?

#111
post #8

Basic First Aid (CPR etc)

I would consider CPR to be an invaluable thing to learn. Unfortunately, at least where I live (North Carolina, USA), there do not seem to be any free classes. Available classes range in price from $84 to $126 in price, depending on what's included in the class (basic CPR, basic plus pediatric CPR, CPR with other first aid instruction, etc.).

Re: What Is the Most Valuable Thing You Can Learn in One Hour?

#112
post #20

Compound interest. Simply starting early in some boring find/investment and not obsessing over daily stock prices will do wonders for one’s health and finances

I always hear this but the theory of compound interest has little to do with stock investing. Not all stocks pay dividends. Most actually do not. And betting on a general YoY rise in stock prices into retirement is not the same thing as compound interest.

But given that a company can choose to stop paying a dividend whenever they want, by your standard dividend-paying stocks also have nothing to do with compound interest.

Re: What Is the Most Valuable Thing You Can Learn in One Hour?

#113
post #60
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watch bon appetit on youtube for an hour. It's fun and you may find yourself thinking about cooking more for fun rather than a chore afterwards.

Whether cooking is fun or a chore is, I think, directly related to how much stress the rest of your life is causing you. If you’re extremely busy holding down multiple jobs just to pay the bills and feed your kids, then it’s hard not to see cooking as a chore. A person in such a situation is going to get very impatient trying to watch most cooking videos which tend to waste a lot of time talking about things unrelate…

Home food prep takes a lot of time, quite a bit of skill, and a ton of knowledge, for the whole process, not just the cooking itself, especially if you want the supposed health benefits and savings it grants.

1) Shopping. What's a good price on X? Meal planning's a factor and takes time, and you've gotta already have some notion of what's cheap right now for that, or else much better cooking skills to be able to make something with whatever you happen to pick up, in which case you also need to be a good judge of how much of each thing to pick up to cover meals for a given period of time. All this also takes time.

2) The actual cooking. Obviously. Takes time, takes skill, takes schedule stability if you don't want to end up with a bunch of "well shit, I guess we're ordering delivery pizza again" days.

3) Cleaning. Even if you're great about clean-as-you-go while also trying to watch kids or whatever, is your spouse? Uh huh. And cleaning as you go is another skill in the cooking department, gotta know when you're done with things, when you have minute to wash a pot without ruining anything, how to prep your ingredients and space and in what order for maximum effect (being other-than-awesome at this adds quite a bit of time to your cooking process). How to clean various things requires a little knowledge and experience, too.

(Of course it can be super cheap and incredibly easy and low-time-commitment if you can convince your family to be OK with rice-cooker rice, beans, and steamed whatever-frozen-veggie-was-on-sale for every dinner. Good luck.)

Re: What Is the Most Valuable Thing You Can Learn in One Hour?

#115
post #64

Vim. I think it can be in the list as well. It takes a long time to properly learn. But one hours is defiantly enough to get to know the main Vim bindings, to be as productive as in other editors. In the end it makes you super productive.

Serious question: I keep seeing Vim thrown up and down like it's the holy grail. I've been using VS Code for two years maybe now, and I don't see how Vim could help me be a better/more productive coder. What am I missing?

vim has its roots in a time when ed was widely used on teletype style user interfaces. The idea was that you didn't have a continuously-updating screen, so conservation of keystrokes and screen updates was very important.

It just so happens that this paradigm (which is a much-maligned word!) is still useful today.

You interact with text in a couple of different ways, which vim maps onto "modes". You type in text, you select text, and you transform text. Insert mode, where you type in text, is how most editors work these days.

Let's look at an example, I hope I can do this justice:

You've been asked to refactor and update some code. In vim, you open up the right file and you hit '}' a few times to jump down "paragraphs" to get to the right spot to add your code. You hit 'i' to enter insert mode, then type in the extra class methods or whatever you need. Once done typing, you hit escape to exit insert mode. Now you have to remove some methods, so you type '/' to search, followed by the method name, then hit enter until you find the right part of the code. You hit '^' to go to the beginning of the line, then you hit 'd}'. That's the combination of an action 'd' and movement '}'. That removes up to the next blank line. Now you need to update places within this file that reference that method, and update them to the new method you added. You type ':%s/productComponent/productExponent/gc' which is a search and replace, 'g'lobally with 'c'onfirmation. Once the changes are made, you type ':wq' to write the file and exit out of vim. Your consulting firm charge the client $50,000.

And your hands didn't leave the keyboard to mess with the mouse.

Think of vim like a computer game where you have to learn a bunch of moves, or a simulator where you have to learn a lot of key combos to control a spaceship or aeroplane.

I hope that helped, I don't advocate trying to jump in and replace vscode with vim immediately. But definitely install vim and try some tutorials and experiment with your normal workflows to see if you feel it is a good match to your keyboard usage/style.

Re: What Is the Most Valuable Thing You Can Learn in One Hour?

#118
post #37
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically speaking, you're very wrong. There's no better place you could've put your money than the s&p.

I’m saying a positive ROI is not the same thing as compound interest. An asset that rises in value like $SPY is not in of itself an example of compound interest.

This feels like a semantics back and forth. Call it compound growth then. It's the same concept. This applies to all yielding assets. You can call it divs / buybacks for stocks and interest for bonds, but it's the same thing / effect.

Re: What Is the Most Valuable Thing You Can Learn in One Hour?

#119

Taking this also as a bit of an Ask HN: Easily the Tiny Habits habit formation regime created by Stanford researcher BJ Fogg. A lot of the addictive design patterns you see in apps like Snapchat, Instagram, etc. are built off his research. Quite nefarious use of psychology for advertising/“engagement”, but the plus side is you can use the same strategies to build habits you want to build. Step 1: Consider the habit y…

In my case the flossing problem was solved by trying out certain rubber sticks made for that purpose. They're MUCH more convenient to use than the classic dental floss and make the whole process quicker, to a degree it took me almost no effort to consistently do it every day.

My flossing tip is Gum's Butlerweave dental floss. My dentist recommended it to be about 7 years ago. I had been flossing twice a day for years with OK results using some dental floss on a stick thing, but I still got a talking to by the dentist because my gums we're not in great shaoe. He pulled out some Butlerweave and showed how to floss for real, and now my dentist appointments are quite boring.

Re: What Is the Most Valuable Thing You Can Learn in One Hour?

#120
post #84

Really apologizing sincerely when you make a mistake.

Being able to admit to yourself that you made a mistake, that it was an accident, and that you will not hate yourself, that's important.

Being able to say to others, "oh, sorry, my mistake, I assumed something incorrectly." Or "I admit I wasn't paying enough attention to what you were saying, I'll put my phone/game/video down and listen better now, please continue." Those are really powerful: you're admitting that you aren't perfect, and that the people you are with are OK with that, and that everyone is comfortable with admitting mistakes to help each other grow.

Better to start at home and be able to help your romantic relationship. Then you can work on making your workplace the kind of environment where people help each other rather than shoot each other down.

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