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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?

#231

Post by tudorw »

samfar90 wrote: post #81
smaddox wrote: post #12

Mindfulness meditation. Sitting with your thoughts and emotions, experiencing them, and understanding them, rather than avoiding them or distracting yourself from them can have a dramatic effect on your life. And 10 minutes a day for a week can get you far enough to see some real benefits, like reduced stress and increased awareness of unhelpful thought patterns.

I don't want to sound ridiculous, but I've gotten the same benefits that you seem to describe (I have never tried mindfulness) since I started to smoke weed.

Mindfulness is a lot cheaper :)

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

#232

Post by ehecatl »

scandox wrote: post #209

Credibility of sources. I learned this in 40 minutes of a medieval history class. It is simply the constant habit of asking: Who is speaking? Why are they speaking? What have they to gain or lose from speaking? What have I to gain or lose from believing/disbelieving what is said? I actually by instinct tend to believe people are mostly speaking in good faith so this is a great corrective for me. Also I have a habit o…

And "To whom are they speaking"?

What you are giving a succinct overview of is Aristotle's _Ars Rhetorica_ Cracking read, BTW.

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

#233

Post by kqr »

scarejunba wrote: post #180
kqr wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on this?

Sure. Let’s say you have some mundane task: you’ve got some number of people with varying dietary restrictions and they want to go to dinner together. You don’t know which places can accommodate you. Don’t do it yourself. Just ship the info over to someone you pay $25 to do the work. You can then use the time more productively. Eventually, you can see the MTurk / Upwork folks as just slow executing programs. For some…

This sounds great. How can I trust the quality of the output?

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

#234

Post by alpaca128 »

xouse wrote: post #121

People think touch typing takes a long time to learn, and getting good does take a while, but it only takes about an hour to memorize the alphanumerics and which finger types what well enough to break the hunt and peck looking at the keyboard cycle forever. Once the cycle is broken just typing casually is enough to eventually achieve mastery. It's only that one or two hours that really suck, and then that week or so…

Most people really could learn touch typing in less than an hour, I experienced this myself. If you type at a decent speed you already know the symbol position already either way, so all that's left is going for more consistent and controlled finger movements.

I easily increased my typing speed by 10WM in a single day just by doing that switch, and I think this is one of the most significant improvements regular computer users can get basically for free.

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

#235

Post by Grue3 »

lisper wrote: post #85
geowwy wrote: post #26

If 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.

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.

FYI, "hanaseimasen" is not a correct negative of "hanasu", it should be "hanashimasen". Also an easy way to say you don't understand anything is "wakaranai".

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

#236

Post by psv1 »

fellow_human wrote: post #225
hombre_fatal wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find Sam Harris' Waking Up guided meditation lessons the most useful (can find it on mobile app stores, the 30+ lessons are free and start off short and simple). Until those, I thought meditation was inherently coupled with eastern mystic bullshit with zero benefits for anyone who didn't want to buy into a bunch of other baggage. He has a book by the same name as the mobile app. The first chapter (read out loud her…

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.

This is has nothing to do with "cultural practices" or the skin color of whoever introduced it. It's more about answering the question "Is the evidence in favor of this practice strong enough to try it for a while?".

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

#237

Post by zacym »

escanda wrote: post #38
peteforde wrote: post #8

There's a growing realization that you can completely side-step the need for Single-Page App frameworks like React using websockets and the morphdom library. Projects like StimulusReflex (Rails) and LiveView (Phoenix) allow developers to build complex, reactive modern apps faster and easier by rejecting the need to even have client state. https://github.com/hopsoft/stimulus_reflex https://github.com/phoenixframework/…

Your mind will be furtherly blown when you realize this has been working for decades in JavaServerFaces!

Don't forget GWT!

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

#239

Post by Ensorceled »

derpherpsson wrote: post #192
Waterluvian wrote: post #43

Learn NATO phonetic alphabet while in traffic. Keep a reference card in your car's visor and then read out loud every license plate you see.

WHY

So you’re not saying “no, not bee, DEE” the rest of your life.

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

#240

Post by arcticbull »

nnq wrote: post #72
arcticbull wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They said valuable haha, a solution on a decade long quest to find a problem isn’t really valuable.

Maybe bitcoin and crypto are not valuable... but the mathematical ideas of blockchain are, after the bubble dies they'll just become boring pieces of crucial infrastructure that sit in the background but they'll be there, it's the only way to ensure data auditing and integrity, and sooner or later people will be ok with paying 10x or 100x storage and compute costs for auditable integrity. It's just that the real deal…

> ...after the bubble dies they'll just become boring pieces of crucial infrastructure that sit in the background

Well if the value is Merkle trees we can just say that ;)

> ... it's the only way to ensure data auditing and integrity

It isn't.

> ... and sooner or later people will be ok with paying 10x or 100x storage and compute costs for auditable integrity.

They won't.

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