Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

851–860 of 1001 posts

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

#851

Post by mpwoz »

filoleg wrote: post #845
RobertRoberts wrote: post #176

How to cook for yourself, really, really good food. I no longer crave restaurant food, and all of the really important things I learned about cooking take just the time to read it, hear about it and then try it. All without any special hardware. A few examples: 1. Cooking jasmine rice: rinse it first, 1 c. water to 1 c. rice ratio. Bring to boil, turn down heat to lowest setting. Leave lid /the entire time/. Fluff th…

4. tsp = teaspoon or tablespoon?

Teaspoon. "Tbsb" is usually used as abbreviation for tablespoon

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

#852

Post by groby_b »

WillDaSilva wrote: post #546
RobertRoberts wrote: post #176

How to cook for yourself, really, really good food. I no longer crave restaurant food, and all of the really important things I learned about cooking take just the time to read it, hear about it and then try it. All without any special hardware. A few examples: 1. Cooking jasmine rice: rinse it first, 1 c. water to 1 c. rice ratio. Bring to boil, turn down heat to lowest setting. Leave lid /the entire time/. Fluff th…

You mentioned cooking jasmine rice using a 1:1 ratio of water to rice, but rice generally can't be cooked using a linear ratio like this. As you increase the amount of rice being cooked, and change the size/shape of the cooking vessel, more of the water will be lost as steam. It's easiest to use a rice cooker, which will allow you more flexibility with regards to how much water/rice you used, but if you don't have a…

Given ordinary cookware, and picking a pot that's not completely out of proportion to the rice, the 1:1 works just fine. You don't lose steam (well, not much) because the lid stays on. Takes 20 minutes, pretty much without fail.

Yes, you can get more complex. Maybe it even produces better rice. But the secret to homecooked meals is - for most people - simplicity :)

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

#853

Post by azdavis »

greggman2 wrote: post #257
Grue3 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

they weren't wrong. hanasemasen = can't speak hanashimasen = don't speak It's arguably more proper to say "nihongo ga hanasemasen" (I can't speak Japanese) than "nihongo wo hanashimasen" (I don't speak Japanese). The first is a statement of my personal abilities. The second could easily be a statement of my attitude. "nihongo ga hanasemasu kedo nihongo o hanshimasen" (I can speak Japanese but I don't speak Japanese)…

> For whatever reason I've never heard wakaremasen (can't understand) but only don't understand (wakarimasen).

One of my teachers explained to me that "wakaru" (to understand) already has the implicit meaning of "able to" in the word itself, so you should never use the potential form. Searches[1][2] for "分かる 可能形" seem to agree.

[1]: https://hinative.com/ja/questions/2884450

[2]: https://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail/q14...

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

#854

Post by johnlbevan2 »

csours wrote: post #545
johnlbevan2 wrote: post #373

Learn how to ask a question. Think of all the times you've seen poorly worded questions on Stack Overflow, in support tickets, etc. Think of the power that being able to get answers to your questions has. Most of us are good at asking questions where we're working within our comfort zones, but struggle when we're on unfamiliar territory (e.g. I'll ask a better question if I have some issue with my code than I would i…

A valuable resource I've used for myself and for people who ask me questions: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Great resource - thanks for sharing

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

#855

Post by XaspR8d »

JshWright wrote: post #735
ken wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> CPR/Choking/First Aid course is probably close to an hour. What can you teach in only an hour? I work with some people who teach basic first aid, and the shortest course any of them does is 4.5 hours.

Step 0: Tell a specific person to call 911, or do it yourself if you're alone. If the person isn't responding and doesn't appear to be breathing, move them to a hard, flat surface (if possible). Put your hands one on top of the other (both palms facing down) and interlock your fingers. Place your hands in the center of the chest (at approximately the level of the nipples) and push hard and fast, letting the chest rec…

Step 0 is the really high-yield tip here because it applies in so many emergencies. The natural shout of "someone call 911" is so often less effective: even if folks aren't halted by outright shock or confusion, their disorganization and/or assumption that somebody else will do it introduces miscommunications and delay. Nearly everyone takes to direct, simple instructions much better and faster.

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

#856

Post by Izkata »

enraged_camel wrote: post #283
agungsukma wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, regular expression. Saves me from lines of substr, split, join, etc.

Eh, I always use substr, split and so on if possible. They make the code way easier to read than with a regex.

It really depends on what you're doing, and at least being aware of what regex can do will help with deciding which is better for a given situation.

For example, I remember once replacing a buggy 3-4 lines of python based on split/etc with a single regex: match all \d+ (it was for extracting IDs from a user-input string)

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

#857

Post by Jeff_Brown »

throw1234651234 wrote: post #733
Jeff_Brown wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I learned the basics of the Variant library (which provides open sum types) for Haskell yesterday in about 90 minutes. It was awesome.

Because you already knew Haskell and you knew what open sum types are. You learned some semantics.

All true. I would only add that learning "mere semantics" in many cases allows you to use a powerful new tool.

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

#858

Post by JoshuaDavid »

glofish wrote: post #847
ryanschneider wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a seriously overlooked application of this principle is in nutrition and dieting. Over- or under- eating by a small percentage of your required intake might not have a discernible effect immediately but really adds up over time, both for weight loss and gain.

It is not how it works at all. The fallacy here is that a human body is a machine with well-defined intake and output. How would one even know what is "exactly" the right amount? Over a year we consume 1 million calories. If one were just 0.1% off of systematically eating more (or less) than required then according to your model one would end up being 200 pounds fatter or 200 pounds leaner ... do you think that anyon…

0.1% of 1 million calories is 1000 calories, which corresponds to about 0.3 pounds. If someone gains or loses 10 pounds in a year, that means they were around 35000 calories away from equilibrium throughout the year, which is more like 3-5%.

So a 5% calorie deficit or surplus would have a fairly small effect during a single year, but over a decade or a lifetime the effect is huge.

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

#859

Post by pjmorris »

WillDaSilva wrote: post #546
RobertRoberts wrote: post #176

How to cook for yourself, really, really good food. I no longer crave restaurant food, and all of the really important things I learned about cooking take just the time to read it, hear about it and then try it. All without any special hardware. A few examples: 1. Cooking jasmine rice: rinse it first, 1 c. water to 1 c. rice ratio. Bring to boil, turn down heat to lowest setting. Leave lid /the entire time/. Fluff th…

You mentioned cooking jasmine rice using a 1:1 ratio of water to rice, but rice generally can't be cooked using a linear ratio like this. As you increase the amount of rice being cooked, and change the size/shape of the cooking vessel, more of the water will be lost as steam. It's easiest to use a rice cooker, which will allow you more flexibility with regards to how much water/rice you used, but if you don't have a…

The rice cooker is easiest, but there's another scheme: use an abundance of water and cook the rice like spaghetti. I learned the technique from a Lynne Rossetto Kasper cookbook, and it's never failed me.

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

#860

Post by scienthusiast »

You can learn the method of loci (also known as "art of memory"), a very efficient memory technique that unlocks the potential to remember things you never dreamt of remembering, like a long list of digits. The steps of memorizing are: - choose a journey of specific locations to look at that you already know (like going around the place you live, look at your bed, then your desk, then at the door of your room, etc) - at every location you visualize a mental picture, whose components code for the information you want to remember

When you want to retrieve the info, go through the journey, find the pictures, and decode them into the info you want.

Obviously, the thing that requires some work is the code. A simple code for numbers would be to assign to every digit to a consonant sound, and make words with those consonants, filling gaps with free/non coding vowels. For example (I'm French and adapted my French code here, so this code might be unadapted for the frequency of English consonants, but you may change it as you see fit): - 0 to Z/soft S (zero starts with z) - 1 to L (they look like) - 2 to N (2 vertical bars in 'n') - 3 to M (3 vertical bars in 'm') - 4 to R (four ends with r) - 5 to V (five ends with v) - 6 to S (six ends with a S sound) - 7 to T (7 looks like a reversed t) - 8 to Sh/Ch (eight contains an H, which is pronounced with a sh) - 9 to B (b looks like a reversed 9)

Now, you can use this consonants (actually, consonants sounds rather than the letters) to form words that are easy to visualize. 94 could be a BeeR, 30 a MaZe, 18 a LeaSH, and so on. You can also combine the words in some ways to remember more info per location.

Memory athletes spend a lot of time training their journeys and codes and stuff to achieve some amazing/unbelivable performances (http://world-memory-statistics.com/disciplines.php), but it's an extremely gratifying skill that develops really fast. If you have aphantasia or a hard time orienting yourself though, it's probably not for you, but I would estimate that at least 95% of people can develop a seemingly amazing memory with this method.

Post reply on HN