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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?

#311

Post by BenjiWiebe »

tcoff91 wrote: post #275
OGWhales wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to learn vim, thanks to this thread. How do I "drop the cursor to any character I see damn near instantly." I'm digging moving things around quickly and all that. But I don't know how to get my cursor where I want it quickly.

First of all, I recommend that you turn on relative line numbers AND also normal line numbers. This means that the line the cursor is on will show the absolute line number, but lines above and below will show how many lines away they are from the current line. :set relativenumber :set number This makes it really easy to get to the line you are looking at. You look at the relative line number, see it's 9 lines above,…

I use vim exclusively for programming and general text editing, and I didn't know about relative line numbers! Thanks a lot, I think that's going to be in my .vimrc!

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

#312

Post by treeman79 »

Pivot tables in Excel.

Manager came to me and showed me this spreadsheet he spent 2 weeks making. ( he was very proud ).

I asked why he didn’t use a pivot table. He’d never heard of them.

60 seconds later I had recreated his report from scratch.

I’m a programmer and I still use them to try out ideas before going to code.

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

#314

Post by treeman79 »

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.

https://vim-adventures.com/

Fun way to get used to vim

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

#315

Post by santa_boy »

For me in 2019, it is learning to get started to write and just write.

Ideas to long form content that is fully developed, fully formed and fully proofchecked content is an extremely laborious process.

PG had a tweet out once ... just write ... publish or not publish is secondary. (something like that). I tried to implement and do that now.

Just beginning to write can be learned easily in an hour and the return on effort is, IMHO, fantastic. It can commercially be pretty useful but the mental clarity itself makes it worth it.

The second is meditation ... read The Mind Illuminated ... just the first stage (the author lays out a lot of progressive experience). Jump straight to the first stage chapter and just do it and repeat! I don't even try to progress further in practice ... it's pretty tough! The first stage is itself worth it.

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

#316

Post by stjohnswarts »

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 use vs code with the vim plugin and it's a happy medium. It's certainly not Vim but it suffices.

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

#317

Post by stjohnswarts »

KlayySOC wrote: post #300
hombre_fatal wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

imo, the best parts of Vim are its shortcuts which is why I am happy with only Vim-like keybindings in other apps and don't need them to impl the whole kitchen sink. For example, right now, how do you make a blank line above your cursor and move your cursor there? Do you maybe go ctrl-a to move the cursor to the front of the current line, carriage return to move the current line own, then press up-arrow to move your…

Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't ctrla+a select all text? To add a newline above, I just press home and enter. For newline below end and enter. The keys are right next to each other. Vim doesn't seem more convenient for this case

more things are available from the home row than with typical windows editor keystrokes; less pinky and more big 3 finger locations than in your typical windows editor keyboard shortcuts as well. Also once you get the basics down you can learn more powerful keystroke combinations than you ever imagined on windows text editors.

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

#318

Post by yesenadam »

OGWhales wrote: post #165
nordsieck wrote: post #149

IMO, the single most important thing I've ever learned is: try to be effective when you're communicating. I used to feel an obligation to correct other people if they had false beliefs. This was not an endearing trait, and even worse, I was never particularly successful at convincing the other people. One day, I read a passage from "How to make friends and influence people". It said something along the lines of: "The…

My dad gave me very similar advice growing up, as I love for things to be factually correct. To me, it didn't bother me if someone corrected me. However, most people don't appreciate it and it isn't worth upsetting them 90% of the time. This is something I didn't understand. Another thing he told me was not to be a know it all. One example would be when people said something and I had learned before, instead of dimin…

>when people said something and I had learned before, instead of diminishing their statement by saying I knew that, I should say something like "wow that's cool"

Sure, "I know that" isn't great either, but hopefully there's some way of dealing with that situation (which happens constantly in everyday conversation) without lying like that. Seems like manipulating the other person to me, not treating them as a person just like you. Imagine the roles swapped. Would you want the other person to pretend and be condescending, or to be honest? Saying "Wow that's cool" when you don't at all mean it, an honest, real conversation can never get started.

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

#319

Post by yesenadam »

theatraine wrote: post #282
GnarfGnarf wrote: post #277

Here it is: when your wife/girlfriend comes to you with a problem, she is not looking for you to propose a solution. She will work out the problem herself. She just needs you to be a sounding board. Listen and nod. Be patient. Pay attention. Shut up unless you are asked a direct question. This is the secret to a successful relationship. (Married thirty-three years)

I have never understood this and this very issue has caused trouble in my romantic relationships. Here's my thought process: why would someone talk about something if they don't want input? It seems like a waste of time. Where's the gap in my thinking? Is there some way I can mentally reframe my thought process so that I 1) Don't immediately try to solve the problem and 2) Don't get annoyed at my significant other fo…

You could try reading Deborah Tannen's classic You Just Don't Understand. I used to recommend it to everyone in a relationship I met! It's about different communication styles of men and women (and a lot more). Her previous book That's Not What I Meant! was about different communication styles of different cultures, but everyone was so interested in the gender chapter she wrote a great book about that. Epic insights on every page.

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

#320

Post by yesenadam »

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'm a jazz musician, and I think a bad piano teacher. I basically teach everything in one hour - how to read music, basic chords (triads, and with all kinds of 5ths and 7ths), cycle of 5ths, basic harmony - then tell people now they have to find great musicians they love and learn from them. (So much easier with the internet than when I was a kid) Sometimes I give them a list of people to check out. Of course, you have to practice that stuff for years until it's like breathing, but the basic theory can be presented in under an hour. You learn from years of listening to the music, transcribing solos and playing them, and playing with other people.
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