Ask HN: What are some skills you have that are worth learning?

Still trying to "master" this skill, but "learning" how to observe, learn, shift through the noise, and apply that knowledge in a reasonable turnaround time.

First and foremost get a thermometer, until you can trust you experience, cook meat with a thermometer. You will get better results. I am color blind so I use a thermometer to this day.

Then start with the basics, as they translate between meat and most non-starch vegetables:

Learn to fry. Learn to grill. Learn to broil. learn to roast. learn to stew.

breading and frying a mushroom is no different than breading and frying a chicken strip other than some temp adjustments and length of time. Frying is not the healthiest but it can be offset some with better healthier oil. That being said, it covers up a multitude of food sins. As log as you let fried food drain and dry it's hard to mess it up.

Second learn the 5 basic tastes salt, sweet, bitter, sour, and umami and how they blend. Sweet and salty blend, sweet and sour blend to tart, sweet and bitter cancel each other to brine. Sweet will dominate umami, salty will enhance umami, bitter and sour will compound each other. Once you know these it is really easy to taste ingredients and know if they will go together. It also gives you the knowledge of how to undue over flavoring. If it's too sour you can usually offset with sweet to get it to tart. If it is too bitter you can usually balance it with salty and sweet to mute it.

Learn to make a starch, take your pick noodles, rice, potatoes etc. Then learn to enhance them with your 5 basic tastes.

Learn to make 3-4 vegetables, green beans, broccoli, squash are all really safe and hard to get wrong. They can be bland without enough salt but are pretty safe, they still don't really taste bad if you overcook them.

So basically learn to cook meat, a starch and some vegetables and flavor it, you would be surprised how far you can get with a steak, salt and pepper (salty, bitter, umami). Same with a piece of chicken, a lemon, salt and pepper (sour, salty, bitter). Stick to your basic ingredients for flavor, salt, pepper, sugar, lemon, msg or soy sauce (but remember soy sauce brings salty and umami in one package), should cover the basic flavors. Once you have this you can taste other ingreedients and know how they will blend into a flavor profile. Take the chicken example what if we reduce the lemon and pepper and add mustard. Mustard brings both sour and bitter. I honestly never tried it, but I know I could make it into a dish that taste good.

Most vegetables can be treated like meat when seasoning, starches not so much stick to salty and umami for now with starches.

Once you are comfortable with that, learn to use butter creams, eggs and cheeses in dishes particularly your starches.

Once you are comfortable with that expand on spices and learn how to make a mirepoix and the Cajun variant. You would be surprised how much this mix enhances even the most simple dish. This is where you level up, people will talk about how good you cook when you get to this basic level of cooking. At this point you will have the knowledge to decide if you want to keep going or if you are comfortable with your skills. You will be able to create a decent meal no matter the ingredients you have on hand at this point. From here it is really if you want to get into more nuanced disciplines of cooking e.g bread baking, BBQ, sous vide, etc.

If you get your meat to temp without overcooking, have a good handle on the basic tastes, can make a handful of vegetables and a starch, you will have a good foundation. This can be achieved in 2-3 months of cooking at least 2 times a week.

I have done some private development on salience models and use them informally with spreadsheets. DeMesquita expands on them with his predictioneers model, which there are a few repo's of code for.

To understand salience models, I think people need a background in traditional negotiation so that they can have the tools to apply to the model once they develop it. It's the why behind the model. Negotiation overlaps with organizational psychology and business strategy, and these days, political tactics as well, but for someone who doesn't have a background in this and who are the sort of person who still tells recruiters and hiring managers their current/last salary, it's not useful to throw them into the deep end.

I am a HN lurker. study biology. far from the tech world. but I love following. far from everything on HN I understand in depth. however, I find a community of people interested in the situation of the world, so although my field of study is far from the usual insight perceived in this community, 0s and 1s are not that far from the line of thought in molecular biology with genetic backwards engineering of DNA ┌(・。・)┘

In the majority of human evolution (I'm vegan, and doing just fine :))