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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?

#121

Post by thekyle »

Insanity wrote: post #74
Moodles wrote: post #10

First aid is good. Also general investing in index funds like VTSAX and VTIAX. It is so simple, yet most people I run into on a regular basis just save their money in a checking account earning 0.01% APY. Follow the reddit personal finance flowchart. Learn about Roth and HSAs and ESPP and the benefits of diversification. We’re literally talking about multiples of your net-worth over your life if you invest compared t…

Not USA, but if you have a KBC in your country (a Belgian bank, but you'll find them in other EU countries) they offer a quite easy way to start investing in index funds. Essentially, each time you use your debit card, they round up the amount you owe the shop, and put that in a special account. For each 10 euro in that account - they invest it. So for example, let's say I go to the shops and pay 9.30 for groceries.…

In the U.S. there is a company called Stash that does this.

https://www.stashinvest.com/

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

#123

Post by Keloo »

fbnlsr wrote: post #64
timvisee wrote: post #34

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?

> I keep seeing Vim thrown up and down like it's the holy grail.

It's not. People tend to be religious about their choices, you can achieve the same result in any editor. Also most likely the bottleneck in your productivity is not the speed at which you manipulate text.

Anyway I will highlight few things that I consider great about vim.

1. It's more about consistency. (vim shortcuts are used in a lot of other places, ex: linux commands like `less`, `screen` etc.., tmux or other pane manager, etc..) When you learn linux you start to get a feeling about it, at some point you enter a command you somehow magically know the shortcuts to navigate/close/search inside there, Vim feels like a complementary thing to the whole linux environment knowledge.

2. It is everywhere! You need 0 time to prepare your work environment if you switch your job/workstation, and you also don't need to exit the remote machine/datacenter to write your stuff. You basically ssh into the machine[s]/datacenter and there you go, at the end of you day you just detach from the session, go home, and next day attach back and continue, all the commands, fancy log searches, processes monitoring, everything is there still running and waiting for you.

P.S. I also use VS Code sometimes especially for pet projects.

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

#124

Post by criddell »

xwdv wrote: post #99
criddell wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always skeptical of this claim (and yes I do know vim fairly well). Programming isn't that much typing. For every burst of typing there's probably an equally long or longer lull where you are leaning back and looking at the screen or sketching something out on paper. If your productivity is limited by how fast you can type then you are either a far, far better programmer than most people or your skills are being…

Vim commands are more than just typing. It’s searching, deleting, replacing, selecting, moving entire lines of code. I can get to any location in a massive codebase within seconds . I can drop the cursor to any character I see damn near instantly. I can construct entire macros on the fly and repeat them endlessly until I’m satisfied and destroy repetitive tasks. I can move entire sections of code to anywhere else I p…

You say it's more than just typing but then you go on to describe a bunch of stuff that's essentially just typing.

I think just about any modern programmer's editor can do all the things you describe. I work most of the day in Visual Studio and I know it can do all that.

For programming I think vim is handicapped somewhat because it doesn't "understand" what it's working on.

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

#126

Post by benji-york »

shantly wrote: post #98
atonse wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how I explain VIM to people (although I used to use it full time, I now use Atom with the VIM plugin): Most of what programmers do is a lot of navigation and text manipulation correct? In normal scenarios, what keys are available to us to do that? Just the arrow keys and modifiers (Ctrl, Alt, Command). But what if we had essentially the entire keyboard available to us for either text manipulation or navigatio…

> Most of what programmers do is a lot of navigation and text manipulation correct? Possibly I'm a terrible programmer, but most of what I do is thinking and looking shit up. Entering or modifying code, and navigating non-linearly within one file is like... a couple percent of what I do on an average day? Maybe 5% tops? Some days it may get as high as 20% of my time. Maybe. [EDIT] add "communicating", broadly, to the…

Yes and no. Feedback cycles are important. It's better for a test to fail than to notice a bug in production. It's also better for you to be able to get that thought from your head to the file in 3 seconds instead of 10.

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

#128

Post by Marsymars »

riffraff wrote: post #6
ForHackernews wrote: post #5

I will tell you from experience that one cannot learn "cooking" in a single hour, any more than one can learn "music" in an hour.

I agree 100%, but I would say: it is possible to learn _something useful_ about cooking in 1 hour (e.g. how to chop vegetables, or how to cook a steak). I am doubtful it is possible to have the same experience with music, although maybe one can learn things like "what is a canon".

> I agree 100%, but I would say: it is possible to learn _something useful_ about cooking in 1 hour (e.g. how to chop vegetables, or how to cook a steak).

Yes, I recently took a knife skills class with a some friends. Technically ran a couple hours and $60, but well worth the expense.

You could presumably figure out the same stuff by watching online videos, but the social experience and getting immediate feedback on physical skills was nice.

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

#129

Post by mathieubordere »

seisvelas wrote: post #116
mathieubordere wrote: post #106

using `Ctrl + r` in your shell, I just hope someone reading this doesn't know it yet :-)

I worked for years as a sysadmin grepping through history because I'm just learning this from you. Thanks!

That is heart-warming news!

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

#130

Post by bluntfang »

Insanity wrote: post #68
nkrisc wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is more valuable than it might seem. I'd wager many people couldn't even sit still for an hour in a room by themselves with nothing but their own thoughts.

Does it count if you lie awake in bed for an hour unable to sleep because of rumination? Because in that case, I'm sure plenty of people do it at some point. But what helps me is taking walks. You're alone with your thoughts, but the act of walking through nature is stimulating for more positive thinking, from my experience anyway.

>Does it count if you lie awake in bed for an hour unable to sleep because of rumination?

That sounds like a good start. Learning how to let go of ruminating thoughts is still a struggle for me, but when it happens it will change your life.

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