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

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

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A lot of what hackers do takes years of building knowledge upon knowledge. That's also true for physicists, marketers, salespeople, managers, etc.

Are there any quick wins that 30 ~ 60 minutes of intense concentration can generate?

For example an average person, if focused, can learn to read (but not understand) Korean decently in under an hour.

A person can also learn a few guitar chords and possibly play a carefully-chosen song in that time.

But those aren't valuable skills in themselves.

Do you know of any simple + valuable wins in your area of interest?

("valuable" intentionally left vague)

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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 the rice (look this up) when done. (about 12-15 min of cooking)

2. Baking a cake: (any square pan yellow cake) Read how baking powder actually works, then you realize you need to mix and bake quickly. Letting it sit before baking will make a flatter cake. Also, stick a butter knife in the middle to test when it's done, if it comes out with batter stuck on it, it needs a few more minutes.

3. Eggs: When frying, scrambling, put the eggs in warm water before cracking to make them room temperature first. They cook better this way.

4. Chocolate syrup: 1 c. water, 1 c. cocoa power, 1 c. sugar, 1/2 tsp vanilla, 1/2 tsp salt. Blend it in a blender. (sealed container works best, as it's messy) Better than store bought, super cheap, use organic if you like...

etc...

Why is this valuable? Because I am no longer tempted to waste money at restaurants any more, or buy unique expensive organic products (because I can make them now). I feel incredibly free and liberated that I get food at home that tastes better than what is at a restaurant now. (for about 90% of the stuff I like)

Also, I can teach my kids, and they start life with these skills. Great question, way too many things to write down...

Cooking is great but you cannot learn it in an hour.

Sure you can. If you said 10 minutes I'd agree. But if you can learn a bit about programming in an hour, you can learn enough cooking in an hour to make a yummy meal.

The simplest example is a pork steak. Throw it on the skillet and wait awhile. Turn it over and wait awhile. You now have a pork steak. It's delicious.

That's not cooking, that's following instructions. It's like saying that you can learn programming by opening Visual Studio, clicking "new console project", typing in printf("hello world\n"); in between the braces and hitting play is "programming". It kind of is, but you've learnt nothing.

With the pork steak how long is "wait awhile"? 10 seconds? 60 seconds? 10 minutes? All of those yield completely different results, and only once you've had plenty of experience cooking pork steaks, you will be able to judge what "wait awhile" is. Also you missed adding some salt and pepper to the steak - without those it just tastes like....unseasoned meat. Which is ok if that's what you want, but I doubt many people do. But you need to somehow know that salt and pepper are things that you would normally add to a pork steak, but not cinammon or sugar.

I think the only way to "learn" cooking is repetition, repetition and repetition. Not going to do a lot of that in an hour unfortunately.

Whoa, that took me back. That's literally how I learned programming when I was 13 or so. (I'm completely serious; I begged my mom for a copy of Visual Studio off of ebay. It was called Visual C++ 6.0 back then, or something. Nehe legacy tutorials were the shit! https://nehe.gamedev.net/)

I think everyone learns differently. The first thing you'll learn is that as long as you're standing next to the skillet, it's very hard to cook a pork steak too long. It'll always end up delicious.

I taught all my kids how to cook. You are right, you can't learn _everything_ about cooking. But you can learn one meal you really like.

I pick a new one I want to perfect every few months, look up recipes and try them out over and over until I get it the way I want. (you have to eat anyways) And after doing this for years, I am always told I should open a restaurant. (but that is silly hard work, and everyone can cook)

Seriously. I moved out of home with 0 cooking skills and after a few years of having to feed myself I feel like I'm becoming just average. It's amazing how many variables there are to control when doing even the most basic task like sautéing onions:

Sautéing in oil allows you to really crank the heat, using butter you have to be more careful. Cutting in larger chunks is great for some dishes and bad for others. The whole timing thing is probably the hardest to nail, going easy on the heat allows you to get in some other prepwork while the onions are doing their thing, but you also don't want to spend hours cooking so you want to crank it to the point where your prep and the onions will be done at the same time.

How far do you take the onions? How far do you take them if you want to throw in more veggies into the same pan? When do you add spices if you want them to get a bit toasty aswell? And sautéing large amounts of onion (1kg+) is a whole different calculus.

Cooking is this endless fractal of problems to solve and optimize. Kinda like programming innit.

I actually don't have too much experience in cooking, but with every meal I make I get better. Cooking is not programming. Some of the best meals I actually made were made without precise measurements, just by gut, sometimes in a hurry. Sure, I might have measured things by the gram the first time I made them, but on next attempt the closest 20g or 30g is more than enough. Oven 45 minutes? Sure, but it looks brown already and it has only been 35, just pull it out.

Taking a single hour cooking class will drastically up your game. Ideally you'd take more than one, but in most cities you can find classes like:

* Knife skills * Overview of cooking methods * One-pot meals * Quick meals

You can also usually find classes specific to cooking methods.

I highly recommend a knife skills class, as it'll cut your prep times down considerably, which makes cooking a lot more enjoyable.

As someone who cooks a fair bit, I tend to agree that someone could go from how to boil an egg and incrementally add things like organizational skills, knife sharpening, simple sautes, etc. in useful one hour chunks. You can't learn to cook in any meaningful way in an hour, but it's definitely a skill that you can usefully develop on a skill-by-skill/recipe-by-recipe basis pretty effectively.

I'm not sure how many cooking classes are aimed at rank beginners but there are tons of videos these days. It might even be useful to subscribe to something like Cooks Illustrated for a more structured approach rather than wading into YouTube.

Cooking is a skill one can develop their entire life, like most skills. But in my opinion it's perfectly achievable to go from zero to one or even a few basic meals in an hour. Even more so if you have a slow cooker and follow a recipe.

Except you have to go to the store to buy ingredients, and then you have to have the right utensils (you mention slow cooker).

It's not really an hour and doesn't meet the criteria.

I second this as a worthy skill to have, but there aren't many dishes you can become really good at making just in an hour. At least anecdotally, just the process of learning to make a great french omelette is pretty brutal.

Watch this, incredibly simple method that made me actually like omelettes. (I hated them growing up)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s10etP1p2bU

"Really good" is subjective. It's the very notion something is possible and that you can do it that I see as valuable. Practice makes perfect, nothing can be perfect the first time you learn it.

As a side-note: you should not use metal utensils with non-stick (teflon) pans.

You might be interested in this video then: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5__zptEU9vE

The guy in the video tried to replicate Pepin's omelette and documented his progress. Pepin even responded to the video.

To summarize for those who can't/don't want to watch both videos: Just because world renowned chef Jacques Pepin makes an omelet look easy, doesn't mean it is.

My experience was that it made me look at omelette cooking in a totally new light. My omelettes aren't perfect, but I actually like them now. And my wife (who loves them) approves of the new technique. (I use cast iron and don't get the exact results, but they are greatly improved)

Pepin himself starts out his video by saying that the omelet is the dish that he would judge a chef by, implying that it demonstrates all of the skills of the chef. I'm not sure how this is supposed to demonstrate that you can learn to cook in an hour.

I wouldn't say "learn to cook in an hour", but I would say it gives you the confidence that you /can/ cook, and even learn to make just one thing good enough for just you. (an actual achievable goal)

This video with Gordon Ramsay is just as good. These two videos together will teach you basically everything you need to make scrambled eggs and omelettes.

https://youtu.be/PUP7U5vTMM0

Binging with Babish has a great series on basic dishes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBGoJUxxRqU

He covers the American omelette which is my go-to. Usually with spinach, red bell pepper, red onion and sometimes mushroom filling. Often with some old cheddar and they are monstrously simple to make mediocre and not too difficult to make very well.

I'm a big fan of Babish! I'd also recommend the Bon Appetit Youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/BonAppetitDotCom and Chef John from Food Wishes https://www.youtube.com/user/foodwishes

food wishes is single handedly the most valuable cooking resource I have ever come across. cannot recommend enough.

Nice I’ll definitely take a look. Thanks.

It's Alive from Bon Appetit is a really good serie. And Brad Leone is amazing

I would die for Claire from the Bon Appetit test kitchen

I do love Chef John and Babish. I personally love America's Test Kitchen

I agree, and it's pretty easy to get started. My pallet is pretty easily amused, so take this with a grain of salt, but there all kinds of fun optimization problems and achievements to unlock with cooking.

For example, given the random contents of a refrigerator, make some sort of meal out of what is available. For example, I recently had a cabbage and an onion and some chicken left over. With a little ginger paste and some soy sauce I was able to make a pretty decent stirfry.

Another example is tortilla chips. I bought some tortillas from 7-eleven and tried frying them up in oil to make tortilla chips. This is fun because there are a lot of parameters to play with to try to get the perfect chip (oil type, quantity, time).

Making more involved recipies are fun too, but there is a good amount of pleasure to be found in the mundane. I also eat a lot of Jack in the Box, so I've got no high horse in this fight.

Second the tortilla chips. I used to fry them in a pan but I figured out how to get decent results in a microwave.

My go-to is to spread butter on them then nuke them.

Two weeks ago I went to Costa Rica and did a horseback/boat/hiking tour and there was a shack high in the mountains where we stopped and the guide made lunch. I was delighted to find that one of the three foods provided was fried tortillas. I insisted on helping. Frying tortilla chips in soybean oil in a wok on a wood fire in the cloud forest with no electricity or running water is a little different than nuking in the kitchen, but once you have the knack for it, it's pretty easy to pull off.

You never know when your weird cooking skills are going to come in handy!

Yep, I think this is a natural tendency to someone who has /tried/ to cook over a period of time. And doesn't mind eating leftovers repurposed. I find myself doing almost exactly what you described, only my chips came out terrible and I have not since tried again. (I have made my own "dorito" flavoring though of plain chips, and you can make some neat combinations)

Marksweep says:"My pallet is pretty easily amused"

I'm fairly certain it is your palate, rather than your pallet, that is amused! (although the visual image conjured by your verbal construction is very amusing.)

I knew I was going to regret not double checking the spelling on that, haha.

You can improve on this by adding recipes to your Anki app so that you'll remember them after a while. It is really nice to be able to recall recipes (both the ingredients and weights/ratios) when you are working in the kitchen or grocery shopping.

Related: Some great tips and ways to think about cooking as you would other skills: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/25770528. Examples of some good tips from there...

When using a new ingredient, try it in something you're already familiar with, so you can isolate that ingredient, rather than introducing it in a completely new recipe where you can't easily tell what impact that ingredient has vs others in the recipe.

Think about how to setup your kitchen - is it better to have all your spice containers in a group with one another, where they all look similar, or to put them alongside the items you use them with (tumeric with your basmati rice, nutmeg with your pestle & mortar, etc) so that it's easier to find everything you need for a recipe.

That cookbook looks interesting. I have run into scientific cookbooks before and understanding why and how things work (like caramelizing onions) makes cooking with them easier to get the results you want.

3. Don't store eggs in the fridge, and don't frikking wash them!

Why not wash them?

Eggs have a protective coat. Washing them makes them permeable and subject to taking in bacteria.

For natural unprocessed eggs you're right. But for most eggs in the US and Canada, the coat has been washed off, as indicated by ihodes in sister thread. So refrigeration is important there.

Industrial eggs are washed, but also recoated

This depends on how the eggs are processed prior to you purchasing them, so beware. Cf. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/09/11/336330502/wh...

More specifically, eggs in the US and Canada are legally required to be washed prior to be sold to consumers in retail locations, and thus require refrigeration.

Why not in the fridge?

Maybe the right advice is to just store eggs how you found them in the store. If they were refrigerated, then keep them in your refrigerator - if they were not, then keep them out on the counter.

You aren't from the United States are you? They are already washed when you buy them here so you have to put them in the fridge.

1 & 3 - I had no idea.

My partner really picked up cooking in the last couple of years. We hardly ever go out anymore. Every time we get a craving she says "Yeah, we could go to a crowded restaurant... or I could make it better". Without fail, she does.

I think the secret is, one of the most important aspects of good food is time to table. When you make it at home, you can eat as soon as it's done or rested. Along with the anticipation factor of having worked on it yourself and having the smells fill your home for a while beforehand.

Plus, if you're an introvert who's already burnt out for the day, you don't have to wear pants. Huge points for not having to wear pants.

I’m totally buying the pants argument!

I do most of the cooking at home for my partner. She could cook perfectly well, but I think she's out of practice these days and I don't mind doing it.

It makes ordering or going out more of a treat, too.

Also, your comment made me realize I probably stay in pants too often.

I've cooked all kinds of rice with different utensils under many different circumstances. The one trick I've learned is, yes follow the regular rules (rinse, boil, cook on low), except at the 10 minute mark lift the lid and take a quick peek. If it's too dry add a little water. If it's too wet cook with the lid off until it drys out then put the lid back on. (Of course, a good rice cooker does all that for you.)

I have tried to "fix" rice in the past and I have never succeeded. I am surprised this works for you. I have found that if I measure correctly and turn down heat appropriately my rice comes out the with very little variations.

Sure that's fine until you cook a different rice and then you have to recalibrate. Japanese rice for example requires less water than thai fragrant rice. I just fill up the pot with water from the tap and measure the water amount with my fingers. Sacrilege I know :)

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 rice cooker (or anything that can work as a rice cooker) then I'd recommend the method where you cook the rice in a covered dish in the oven.

Good advice on the water. Similar to how people learn ovens, it helps to learn pans. The best method I've tried so far is a ~2:1 ratio (adjust to desired texture) in a 14" wide, lidded, enameled skillet. I'll try the oven again soon to compare, but that particular pan on a stovetop is hard to beat. Learn your pans.

That is a good point. I have often found the temperatures in recipes to not work great with my combination of pots and pans and need to tweak.

But you only get to the tweak stage after you start trying to cook at all. (a lot of people don't cook much or try to make meals they think are out of their reach)

OP didn't say anything about ratios or scaling, just offered 1c rice as that's generally enough for 2-3 servings at a time. And it just happens that 1c water is generally the right amount for this and is easy to remember.

I wanted to demonstrate that it can be simple, but you are right there are a lot of variables, but I think they are small. The size/type of pot you use may affect water amounts.

But I found it very useful to learn to cook with whatever you have available to you. And then learn to adjust. All of these things take tiny amounts of time and yield great results. (mainly through practice of course)

As I understand, cooking rice usually has a constant amount of water lost to steam. You need to have a rough idea of how much water your rice actually needs to absorb and how much is lost to steam. In my experience with my setup, rice usually requires an equal volume of water and 1 lost 1 cup of water to steam. So 1 cup of water requires 2 cups of water, 2 cups of rice requires 3 cups of water, etc.

So y = x + 1 where y is the cups of water and x is the cups of rice. 1 is the number of cups lost as steam.

Each time you open the lid you lose steam, so you may have to take that into account. I use a rice cooker and don't open the lid so I don't worry about that though.

Water lost to steam heavily depends on style of cooking, or more precisely, in a covered pot, is mostly a linear function of the excess heat beyond that required to bring contents to boiling temperature (steam re-condensation on the lid/sides provides a slight buffer) + a bit lost to empty space in the pot (when opening etc).

Some stoves are hard to regulate so the food is just barely boiling, so it can be hard not to notably lose water.

From experience, the boiling of water in itself is mostly meaningless when cooking, unless you want food extra shredded. You can happily cook at 90℃ or 80℃ if you want, but it will take longer.

Note if cooking risky food: beware of required time at a given temperature to kill pathogens, not forgetting heat transfer takes time especially in solid chunks.

In general, a rice cooker is indispensable and costs about $30. Plus you can walk away from it as it cooks, and you can put things on top of the rice to steam in there as well. (It will impart flavor though, so maybe don’t put greens in there unless you want broccoli-water flavored rice.)

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 :)

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.

I had never heard of cooking rice like pasta before. (going to try it next time I cook rice, thanks!) I think this is a good example of a small piece of knowledge that can possibly have a larger effect.

You can completely use a linear ratio. Google any world class chef's recommendations, they will all recommend a fixed ratio e.g.:

https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-cook-the-perfect...

Rice cooker instructions also use a liner ratio.

Cooking rice isn't rocket science.

you guys are doing it all wrong. take it from us Asian folks. it's called the finger test. the amount of water above the rice should come up to the first line on your finger as you're touching the rice. yes you have to stick your finger in the pot.

having grown up where our main staple was rice, my parents never made burnt or soggy rice. oh and having a rice cooker prob helped as well.

My no. 1 recommendation to any young person learning to cook is to master three things:

1. A good fried rice

2. A good stir fry

3. A good omelet

These three things alone will mean that you'll have substantial, delicious food at the ready. They're incredibly flexible in terms of ingredients and need minimal skill. A stir fry or fried rice can take any vegetables or meats you have at hand, and an omelet can take everything from ham to mushrooms.

Strongly second the first two, strongly oppose the third. Omelettes are far too difficult for a beginning cook. Fritattas on the other hand are trivial (you just pour the eggs/milk into the pan after you've cooked the filling a bit).

You missed the first step in cooking Jasmine rice: Return it to store and buy Basmati rice instead.

This is so important. I don't know if you can "learn to cook" in an hour, but you can probably drive to the store, buy some vegetables, come home, and make a great salad with an awesome homemade vinaigrette dressing in less than an hour. I try to eat fairly healthy, but having a salad that's easy to make that I actually crave (oh no, I've turned into an old person) most days at lunch is amazing. It's fast, and I have great energy all afternoon.

Here's my default dressing: salt & pepper to taste. Bit of lemon juice. Bit of dijon mustard. Balsamic vinegar and EV olive oil. Adjust relative quantities to taste and based on what you have in your salad. Gets rave reviews and could not be simpler. ;-)

I regularly make my own dressing as well! I have a few basic recipes—most are pretty much the same as yours. One I like in the summer especially is a really simple one:

+ 2 parts olive oil

+ 1 part honey (try and make it good wildflower or clover honey)

+ 1 part squeezed lemon juice (add some zest as well if you're feeling energetic—I hate cleaning graters)

+ Salt & pepper to taste

I actually started with a bit of honey and removed it after some experimentation. Figure any time I can avoid adding sugar and like the taste as much or more, I should take advantage. ;-) I'm with you the cleaning graters-- too lazy for that... Depending on what's in the salad, I'll adjust the proportions, or even throw in some turmeric, paprika, or sautéed garlic.

Oh I’ll have to try out those last ideas sometime soon. I can see paprika being great

Smoked paprika especially. :)

I do something similar. Mine is olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and a tsp of really strong mustard. I put mine in a small Tupperware in the fridge, that way I can shake it up easily to mix, and I just add to it as I get low.

I use the exact same technique if I’m trying to keep a batch going.

Having a dishwasher makes using a grater so much less dreadful - perhaps more than any other single kitchen implement. When I had a dishwasher at home we even got a Microplane zester. It's amazing how much flavor and aroma exists in lemon (and other citrus) zest that's not in the juice.

If I only had an hour, i'd focus on a simple intros of really fundamental techniques kinda like the OP indicated, and not necessarily cooking everything in that time.

Knife skills. Keep them sharp. Mise en place. The importance of salt and pepper. Searing techniques for cooking meat and how not to do it. Roasting vegetables 101. The basics of finishing pastas and reducing sauces. The fact that you can make your own dressing in no time.

You can probably cover all of that quickly and in enough time to ask the right questions moving forward and begin your jorney - IF you had a curriculum. If it's self study it takes longer to figure out what you don't know :) For me it all started with "why does my Grilled Cheese suck? This should be easy" and it's been all downhill.

The Food Lab by Kenji Lopez-Alt was a big window into this for me because of the approach around time and temperature, and the book takes you through all of this stuff by section.

Love The Food Lab. (And I think my grilled cheese is pretty decent, at least according to my kids, which is saying something.) ;-) Agree with everything you are saying here, but I'll add that salads often have a bad reputation (I avoided them for years), but I can't think of an easier, healthier, more enjoyable thing to eat, assuming you can get good ingredients.

> Knife skills. Keep them sharp.

Cooking for over 15 years at home and still only learned this recently despite already knowing about it. I had to grind out a chip from one of our knives, and I realised when I was done it was much sharper than I usually get them. I hadn't been doing it quite right all this time.

> Mise en place

Asian wok-based cooking is great for learning this. You don't have time to mess around. It's something I've been trying lately (my frying pan stir-fry was always pathetic so I never made it at home, but now that I have a wok I can do a decent one).

If you haven't read it, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is a great read. I have cooked for years and it was a short, easy read with lots of applicable tidbits. I recently tried out the Salt methods on a check steak and it is significantly better and similar to a strip cut in tenderness and flavor.

Clarifying butter and slower cooking my omelettes has been fantastic, along with salt early in the mixing bowl and letting it sit for a minute.

Happy to see this rose to the top. I mean, knowing about compound interest and how to coil cables is cool and all, but the art of preparing food for oneself and others is by far the most important skill listed in here. As someone once said, “if you don’t know how to cook you’re loosing at life”.

It’s also a relatively easy way to impress a potential romantic partner. Learn how to make a few basic dishes (and perhaps a decent breakfast if you’re optimistic).

I’m years beyond being young and single, but being able to cook and being able to dress yourself (and for the occasion) will set you apart from the crowd.

Even easier syrup: a handful of chocolate chips and cream to cover or milk to %60 height (or a combo— yogurt and sour cream can also be mixed in). Nuke it for thirty seconds, stir up and pour over a cake or ice cream.

Cooking is a great skill to have but I would say it takes more than an hour to actually be good at it. Just my opinion!

Jasmine rice hack - put whatever amount of rice you want in the pot, level it off, place your index finger so it's barely touching the top of the rice and fill with water up to your first knuckle (the first crease on your finger, palm side).

You could call it a hack, but it's also the standard way that lots of asian families make rice if they don't have a rice cooker and how I've done it ever since moving into an apartment and didn't want a bulky machine in limited counter space.

For a comedic take see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45wHe9KdmrQ for How to Cook Perfect Rice by Jo Koy

Very cool, I will have to try this as well as some of the other suggestions. Thanks guys!

> Leave lid /the entire time/.

Leave lid what the entire time? On? Off? Untouched? Steamed-up? Half-on? Cracked? Ajar? Weighed-down?

I'm assuming "on", since I have cooked food before, but then how is there 12-15 min of cooking, 25% variation, if you're emphasizing "the entire time"? If you can't look at it or touch it until after it's done, and you can't tell when it's done by the time because the time varies, then when is done?

I meant my comment as an introduction to the idea. But yes, leave it on. You can peak and test quick, but when I was starting out cooking rice I wasn't careful about the lid and ruined plenty of rice by letting too much steam out.

Yes, time varies, just wanted to layout how simple it can be to learn a useful skill in a short amount of time.

Lids can and should be transparent.

to add on to that... learn how to cut correctly where the blade rests on your curved knuckles. it pays dividends on your cooking making the prep work go very fast.

These are good tips, thank you!

For rice, the rice:water ratio I follow is 1:1.25. I add a teaspoon of olive oil, salt and pepper to taste.

For eggs, I'm going to try running the egg under warm water. One thing I've observed improvement in quality of eggs when mixing it is the material of the bowl (copper provides best results) and how much air you introduce when mixing the eggs.

Try making a meringue, it's fascinating how versatile eggs can be when put through different conditions.

Yes, I follow the same ratio in a rice cooker and it's perfect.

I have tried lots of ratios rice/water, and I think the brand/type of rice, stove and pot properties all greatly affect the results. Not to mention the subject "goal" for the results we all like. (maybe you like your rice wetter/stickier than I do?)

Do you add the oil, salt and pepper before cooking?

That is true, I haven't had the same success with the ratio when using different types of rice and pots. I achieve the desired texture that the people I cook for prefer :)

Yes, I add the oil, salt and pepper before cooking.

3. Just don't put your eggs in the fridge?

Who does this?

Eggs in the USA and Canada are washed before being packaged and sold in grocery stores. This washing eliminates a natural protective coating, which allows bacteria to permeate the shell. This means the eggs now require refrigeration.

Oh, thanks for the education i had no idea.

Eggs to me have always lived next to the flour and sugar in a larder. - The more you know =)

4. tsp = teaspoon or tablespoon?

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

Usually the lower case and capital 'T' is the main difference.

Confusingly also note that UK/US TBsp = 3x tsp (approx 15ml) while Australia is 4 tsp (20ml). It might be relevant for some recipes. I don't know why we are the weird ones this time.

http://wiki.c2.com/?TeaspoonsVsTablespoons

I love cooking and try to only buy foods that I can't make as you say (whether for convenience or lack of skill).

It always surprises me when programmers can't cook. You're just following an algorithm! Sure, the technique takes a little time, but most people can manage. I also think baking suits a logical mind more since it's often more precise with measurements and conditions.

One trick I do is rewrite recipes then print them out. Most start out as wordy fluff. You'll get halfway through a cake recipe and it lists half a dozen things to add to a bowl. I will just rewrite this like: Bowl 1: flour, sugar, baking powder, combine. Bowl 2: oil, egg, whisk. And so on.

Rewriting like this is great for learning and retention and it makes it easier at a glance to not miss anything.

The secret to cooking corn: put the corn in a pot of cold water and set the burner to bring it to a boil. When the water boils the corn is done, and never overcooked. May require some fiddling, but this has always worked for us. Scrambled eggs are similar: creamiest eggs are cooked slowly. Essentially put eggs and cold butter in a cold pan and stir while slowly heating up until they are done.

At some point going to a restaurant is more of a pain in the ass than just cooking a good meal yourself. There are certain times and for certain meals that I don’t feel this way. But most of the time I loathe going to restaurants.

I agree and it's the component I miss the most from working from home. Cooking is great for cultivating mindfulness plus the financial savings and health benefits.

Water to rice ratio = 1 rice to 1.5 water.

Very useful. When I was living solo in Ahmedabad, I used to cook a lot of Khicdi (It is combination of Rice + pulses cooked) which is nutritious, light and very cheap to cook. I must have saved 80% of the money had I been ordering the food from outside.

How to properly wrap cables. A/V and cable techs are super anal about this and it takes just a few minutes to learn, it will change your life.

Cables should never be coiled in the same direction. It creates kinks when unwound and make it extremely likely for knots to form (ever leave your headphones in your pocket?).

If a cable isn't being installed permanently it should be "wrapped" using a technique called "over-under". Hard to describe in text, so here's a video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpuutP6Df84

Personally I disagree with his method, what I do is do the "over" loop by placing my palm over the cable, and on the under loop, put your palm under the loop. Then when you pull the loop to your fixed hand, you always keep your palm down when laying it. Very quick way, eventually becomes fast with practice. Also useful to unroll kinks from the cable when you wrap it, and always tie the bastard off because if one end falls through you'll get knots.

Also known as "figure-eighting." Guys who do stadium setups for televised sports are champion cable figure-eighters.

wrapped cables save lives!

Ugh. Some guys take that technique too far and destroy cabling. I had some teams do this with power cables we rented out and they could take a 50ft coil of 4/0 copper cable and turn it into a kinked, broken mess with that technique and it always messed with our coil process that worked much like other users mentioned.

A lot of teamsters, gaffers, and grips did not like having to carry a 50lb cable further than they had to so many loved they could lay the cable down, pick up one end, and walk with it to the junction in order to lay them. (Temporary power, I mean).

As the one responsible for the department looking after that gear, those figure-eight cables were a nightmare because we'd have the prime experience of re-wrapping them all so that we could store them. That caused a time-pinch when we had to handle intake and loadouts at the same time.

I don't do that work anymore, but it's personal hahaha

I don't think this is the most important thing out of all things you can learn in a full hour, but it is easy enough and not well known enough that I encourage you to keep spreading the message.

My father in law was very surprised when I could just walk away holding one end of the coiled garden hose and it uncoiled itself neatly with no kinks. The trick was, of course, that I was the one who wrapped it this way the day before!

I gotta try this next time I stow an extension cord

Wow. I was super skeptical about this thread and clicked on it "just in case I'm missing something". I was. As a nomadic developer, I'm always coiling my cables and I am always cursing my cables because they get tied up or ruined. Now I know it's me! Thank you!

Oh yeah. I've seen numerous extension cords that just twist into an unrecognizable mess after a few weeks because of internal stress, in the hands of folks who don't know better. My own cords, of similar build quality from similar big-box stores, last decades and still coil and lay like new.

> Personally I disagree with his method, what I do is do the "over" loop by placing my palm over the cable, and on the under loop, put your palm under the loop.

You mean like this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uy3axdxDdKs

Haven't seen the videos, but I was taught the "proper" way of wrapping audio cables when I took an audio recording class, and now I obsessively wrap all my cables that way. So much more useful!

> So much more useful!

The only cables I really deal with are network cables and extension cords and I've always just done the wrap-around-your-palm-and-elbow-method. What am I missing out on?

You are missing out on what the previous comments and links are telling you -- you're twisting your poor cables to death.

It's a long slow death then. I have some cables (extension cords) that are thirty years old and I don't think I've had one fail yet.

> What am I missing out on?

The person who showed me how to do it said, "If you've done it right, you should be able to do this"; and with the coiled microphone cable in one hand, she held one end with her thumb and tossed the rest of the coil outwards. It uncoiled in the air and landed in a straight line, no tangles or knots.

Basically, if you do this: 1) The cables are less likely to be damaged, 2) the cables are a lot more 'weildy': they don't get tangled in interminable knots, and expand very easily. The cables themselves remain looking nice as well, and don't get ugly kinks in them.

Went looking for YouTube video's to demonstrate the throwing of said coiled rope.

This came up, though the technique for coiling looks different:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFokJdx12yo

Suspecting (without trying it), that it might work out as the same type of coiling though.

I’ve been taught this technique as the “roadie wrap”.

I learnt this while working in trades. Working with trades people or handymans will teach you a lot of practical skills that are useful in daily life.

Seconded. I spend a fair bit it time around tradies in my current role and I’ve absorbed a ton of stuff just by osmosis.

Face the wheelbarrow the direction you want to go before you fill it.

Thirded. I worked as a farm hand on a nearby dairy farm through high school, then six years as a mechanic before going to college. As a farm hand, you learn early how to arc weld, or cut steel with an acetylene torch, along simple carpentry and plumbing, as well as mechanical maintenance on equipment. It isn't all just feeding and milking cows. You also learn to deal with shit. Literally tons of it.

I'm willing to bet that cattle ranchers and dairy farmers deal with more bullshit per capita than any other profession.

but they don't even have BAs and PMs...

The principle that induce this technique is that every time you create a loop in one direction of a cable, you twist the cable, the exact same twist that would have occurred if you held a cable with both hands and twisted one side (as if you were squeezing water out of wet cloth.

This technique as well as figure 8 with I use on guylines (when hiking with my tarp), create a counter clockwise twist for every clockwise twist, thus eliminating the tension that causes cables/guylines/ropes to eventually tangle up.

An example of that technique: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PicTsgj5lA

So let us proceed to the real challenge: christmas lights. How can you avoid the guaranteed swearing the following year?

Wrap them around a piece of scrap cardboard.

then cut some 1" slits in it to keep them in place.

Alternatively go buy a few of those orange plastic extension cable wrap things from the electrical aisle at a big box store (either the plastic ones that are flat, or the big circular ones with a handle). I've had them for a decade, and every year I wind up my cords on them, and they always unwind easily the next year.

Careful coiling and then securing the coils with string in 3-4 places workes well for me. Coiling should be done while paying heed to the cable's preferred direction, if there is any tension it does not work well.

Instead of string, I use twist ties, which also come in handy for attaching the lights to things when deploying them.

Rolled up newspapers work well for this too, albeit I doubt a lot of us here get a newspaper delivered everyday anymore

You might be interested in the over-under technique that I use, it does not require either hand let go of the cable, so is very fast.

The is the best video I was able to find that illustrates it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktI0mLAoSTc

This is opening up a can of worms akin to talking about penetrating oils (PB Blaster, WD-40, ATF/Acetone mix). I've always been and over and roll guy short of 50' cables and back in the day when we had analog snakes that were nearly 3" in diameter and 200' that lived in a road case you didn't have any choice but to over/under unless you wanted to see a half dozen guys cry at the end of the night and the beginning of the day.

I’m also a fan of the chain sinnet[0] (or daisy chain) - works really well for storage, including semi rough handling such as tossing in the trunk...

Here is another guide [1].

Note that for longer lines, it is helpful to first fold the line in half to shorten. Also works great for extension cords since both the male/female end are handily together [2].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_sinnet

[1] https://www.animatedknots.com/chain-sinnet-knot

[2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zXG95quOE7Q

For multi-cored cables such as extension leads I would worry about the wear on the cable of all those smallish loops.

For a bit of rope it would be fine, though.

The YouTube video I posted shows how I like to do extension cords. Lots of large , loose loops. Works great.

I think this is my favorite video about how to wrap cables: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kda4DPAn3C4

I have a slightly different method, but the outcome is how I've been wrapping ski ropes my entire life.

>It creates kinks when unwound and make it extremely likely for knots to form

99% sure that's a side benefit not the reason.

The way the audio techs explained it to me was as a method of reducing stress on multi-strand copper inside. i.e. the reason why it unwinds cleaner is because said tension isn't there.

+1 I did stage work when I was younger and this was one of the most valuable things I took away from it.

Over-under is good for long, thick, delicate cables (e.g. mic/guitar cables). For shorter, thinner cables (e.g. USB cables) I use this technique: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXMG917XsvU

I have done it so much I can now do it quickly without looking at my hands, so I just automatically do it before putting a cable away or in my bag.

I now never have to detangle birds nests of cables. Over the course of the ~15 years I have been practicing responsible cable storage, that must add up to a lot of time.

Unless I missed a quick hand maneuver, the storage technique you demonstrate, while result in a neatly coiled cable, doesn't involve a counter clockwise twist for every clockwise one, thus creating tension in the cable. For thin cables (and guylines), the figure 8 coil is a better technique. It is just as fast to perform and each twist in the cable is canceled out by a twist in the other direction thus creating less tension in the sheath, and potentially extend the cable lifetime by introducing less inner breakage points.

Here is an example for how I store guylines attached to my tarp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PicTsgj5lA

If you've been married for a while, learn who your spouse is now. (I mean in a good way, by taking an hour to rediscover what his/her hopes and dreams are, what interests they've gained / lost, etc.)

He/she is probably a pretty different person than the one you married. It's easy to overlook that.

Absolutely fantastic advice.

Source: married for 30 years and practicing this since we found out we needed to after years of ignorance.

I'd say that applies to being together, not necessarily being married. Nowadays, we don't all live in a religious dominant society (anymore) where it is required or normal to marry.

Marriage is not a strictly religious institution.

Very true: My marriage is legal. We didn't actually care if we were married or not, but boy oh boy immigration would rather us be married. So we are. We'd be together nonetheless, marriage was just the means of doing so.

But I think the poster's point was that this advice is basically advice for long-term relationships and really shouldn't be viewed under the light of marriage only. Since many folks don't have to be married to be a family, a good number of folks are skipping that step.

I like that. I've heard people say to always keep dating your partner, but how you said that makes me see that with a different angle.

This is a great start. You should spend an hour a week having a conversation about your shared future, whatever that may mean to you.

I don't think my spouse and I could fill an hour a week with this - plus we would dread the conversation. It sounds like work.

Don't get me wrong, we talk about it. If one of us has thoughts about it, we share at the time or soon after. But it isn't like we lead busy lives or have children or in general, have a lot of upheaval in our lives. We are both over 40, and aren't changing rapidly at this point. There simply isn't that much to discuss.

This is huge. I'm lucky in that my spouse and I talk regularly about everything from daily logistics to existential meaning. I view learning her (and updating her about me) as more of a habit than an event.

I'd say this is also valuable advice for yourself; what are your current dreams? Do you really still want all of the books on your bookshelf? Where do you want to go? Who of your friends haven't you seen, but need to? I find I don't spend enough time on that for myself.

Corollary is to develop an openness toward their continuing evolution, that no one is static, and to expect and support this.

People are very dynamic, we either grow together or apart. My current success at marriage is due to a concerted effort not only to find out what interests my wife but to take an active role in it even if I don't wholesale agree. Then we can have a deeper discussion about it and that shows I care even when I don't agree.

The Marriage Institute has the best relationship technology that I've found:

http://gottman.com

Easy to glean the high level techniques in an hour. eg avoiding the Four Horsemen of relationship killers. But I've been working on my technique for years and feel like I'm just getting started.

CPR/Choking/First Aid course is probably close to an hour.

How to change your own oil - probably lots of other money-saving home and auto DIY things...

Speed reading and memory tricks can be a multiplier on learning other skills.

How to use automation tools like Zapier and IFTTT - again, a force multiplier.

You might be interested in this book https://www.amazon.com/First-20-Hours-Learn-Anything/dp/1591... - the author has a youtube video that covers it pretty well in 15 minutes - similar to 4-Hour chef, too

I would add a few things I learned to improve your memory:

1. Care about the subject

2. Focus on memorizing it: This may seem dumb, but how many times have you forgot where you placed your keys? If all you do is momentarily state to yourself "I set my keys here" when you put them down, it's almost hard to forget.

3. Don't eat white sugar or white flour processed, or other foods that may cause you to loose concentration. (I tested this theory when trying to memorize stuff. Crazy the effect it has)

4. Associate a picture (with an action or something outlandish) with the item. You can take a list of 20 items where most people get only a max of around 4 items, I can memorize the entire thing by making a story with the items. No practice needed, it works the first time for most people. Works for memorizing directions as well. (too long to explain the entire process in a comment)

These are just shortcuts though... (from a few memory courses I took in the past)

Also another trick (without going full formaliser spaced repetition): reread the same thing the next day, and then a week after. Boring but very effective for long term retention.

I would argue you better practice recall than rereading, i.e. put some notes after reading, make an abstract, expand on it with new thoughts next day, in a week etc. Just rereading might be a) boring b) constantly giving you a sense of familiarity, which is not knowledge. When I have to reread something that is not too deep I sense that I have made a mistake first time by not really thinking about the text.

I've always been confused by people talking about losing things like keys/wallet a lot. I take them out of my pockets and put them on a flat surface when I get home which means they are always in one of like 4 different places tops, but in two of them the vast majority of the time (dining table or desk).

Surely there are natural places those things end up?

We have a similar technique, I put my stuff in the same place all the time. But only because I was sick of misplacing them for many years.

I think there are a lot of people that don't have tendencies towards systems/self rules to solve issues like this, so they casually smash through life care free and forget where they put their keys "this time". (based on many people I know)

It isn't a system I developed to remember though, it is just... I put them somewhere sensible where they won't fall behind something or scratch anything etc.

My keys are often in different places, it is just that the list of "sensible" places isn't very large so if I have forgotten checking them all takes practically no time

EDIT: I should say not a system I developed consciously, I do have ADD so my habit of putting things in sensible places generally might be an adaption to that, though if so it happened before I even had keys to lose

We may be mincing words, but when I say "system" I mean "I decided to try and only place my keys in reasonable places, always... and these 4 are the most reasonable."

Where other people may have made no considerations at all where they put stuff.

I feel like "System" is a bit of an extreme term. "Sensible" also means natural. Like, either they go on the kitchen counter, the dining table, or my desk, or occasionally the arms of the couch usually because those are the places that have space to put things like phone/keys/etc when I empty my pockets.

The only considerations are: Is the place convenient (read nearby when I'm likely to be putting things down)? Are they a flat and stable surface?

That's it. I feel like if people don't make those sorts of considerations surely they are just dropping shit on the floor

> I take them out of my pockets and put them on a flat surface when I get home which means they are always in one of like 4 different places tops

Must be nice :)

> 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.

The American Red Cross has Adult CPR/AED/First Aid classes where the classroom portion is only an hour. There's an online component that you have to do beforehand, so the whole class is probably closer to 4 hours, but I think if you took only the classroom part you'd come out with a decent idea of how to perform CPR.

How to call an ambulance, what kind of info to give, how to put people in a safe position, how to determine if they're breathing or not, how to protect yourself when offering first aid to someone else.

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 recoil fully between each compression.

If you're pushing hard enough, you will feel popping and cracking as the bones and cartilage of the rib cage move/dislocate. If you're allowing the chest to recoil back up fully between each compression you really can't push too fast (going too slowly is the far more common failure mode).

There... those are the important bits of adult CPR (for the layperson).

The courses are hours long so that the Red Cross/AHA can justify the fees and sell textbooks.

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.

All accurate but you missed the real step 1, which is arguably the most important - Check for danger. It was drilled into us repeatedly in our course because it's extremely obvious but always easy to forget during a situation.

Our first aid teacher told us a lovely story of a child on his bike who got zapped by a downed power line. The next two family members trying to help him also died because they just rushed in. Not a great day for them.

In other situations, something as simple as pulling the park brake in a traffic accident can save a world of problems. Regardless, don't even get close enough to physically check them if you aren't sure it's safe.

DRSABCD (Doctors ABCD) - Danger, Response, Send for Help, Airways, Breathing, CPR, Defibrillator.

https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtrea...

There are certainly special considerations, but in the vast majority of situations where CPR is necessary, there is no external hazard to worry about, it's just Uncle Jim's diet and lifestyle catching up with him.

Often it's obvious, and checking takes no more than a second or two. It's just important that you do it.

Even if you find Uncle Jim on the floor at home, don't run in assuming a heart problem because maybe he tripped on some water and you'll do the same :) But if he starts choking right in front of you, go to town.

I don't disagree with you, but as someone who walks into a _lot_ of emergency scenes, it's really rare for there to be a hazard to worry about. Is it a thing you should consider? Sure. In reality it doesn't come up often enough to warrant "top billing" in a high level overview of how to do chest compressions.

In any emergency scene, the first thing to do is check for traffic to prevent the victim or yourself from getting run over (sometimes merely because you need to cross the street: while running to provide help in an emergency situation, you're likely to forget looking both ways).

If any one of those emergency scenes was outdoors and you didn't think of this, you're doing it wrong. And even if you've always remembered to do this yourself, it's essential that you explain it to others so they will remember it as the first thing to do.

A broad first aid course will take more than an hour. (The Wilderness First aid courses I've taken are a full weekend.)

However, you can cover a lot of the basic things you're likely to encounter in civilization pretty quickly (if very cursorily). Probably most important is the basic approach to take, things to watch for, blood safety, etc. It's not going to be a real first aid course but a quick familiarization of things to watch for and actions to take. (Cleaning wounds, etc.)

A basic Life Support Course is like 2 hours (maybe 3). Actually did it in the morning then spend the afternoon testing everyone.

A Essenial First Aid at Work course is 8 hours (this is the legal requirement for FAW in the UK)

A Full First Aid at Work is 32 hours.

A EMT-B in the USA (min needed to do, to get on an Amblance) is 50 hours

The basic training for amblance in the UK is about month with a week training in driviong with blue lights

Want to be a Paramedic well that is a 3 year degree

Want to be a Nurse that again is a 3 year degree (and no you can't do one and swap for the other)

Want to be a doctor well that 5 years plus a few more years training on the job.

Ok if you want to get a medical Gas Qual well you looking at about 8 hours or so. Patient and casualty handing are both about 2-3 hours each.

They listed three things, and they're all different.

Choking & CPR in an hour - easily. When I did my course it was a few hours but in a smaller group there'd be no problem covering it in less time. Though to be fair, we did have to read a document and answer a 70 question assessment before being allowed in the room.

First Aid? Probably not. I did a full day course. Here in Australia that includes bandaging for snake bites, what to do for jellyfish (don't pee on it, thanks), how to handle crushing injuries, etc. Apparently in the US they focus more on weapon trauma wounds though we did a bit of that too.

I’m always amazed when the “change your own oil” option comes up in these discussions as it’s a very classic example where having specialized tools s and doing it a lot really speeds you up. And it’s a dirty job without a lot of intellectual interest. Further you can get it done for you in 10 minutes for approaching minimum wage.

Unless you work on your car for fun and have things like a lift sitting around it seems like a fairly useless thing to do yourself.

Agreed. Which brings me to something I learned in an hour (from Ricky Yean's insightful piece on "mindset inequality" [1]) and which I'm still learning recognize in myself -- i.e. the disadvantaging qualities of a poverty mindset.

Quote from article: "Being poor makes you suck at using money as a resource. My time was always cheaper growing up, so I got used to opting to spend time rather than money. I had to fix this way of thinking when we raised our first seed round, but it took quite some time. A simple decision to hire a new employee, for example, took a very long time–to the point that it cost us growth."

When you're raised in poverty or a poor student (like I was), resources are expensive but time is cheap, so the tendency is/was to use my own time to save a couple of bucks here and there.

When you're no longer a poor student, this poverty mindset can actually work against you if you apply it to everything. It can be growth limiting step. When you have money, time is much more precious and and the time/money trade-off looks very different. In many situations, money is "cheaper" than time. One therefore needs to learn how to redeploy that money to access cheaper less expensive resources than time. But if you have a poverty-mindset, you never learn how to do this and hence are at a disadvantage in life, even as you become middle-class or better.

Take oil changes for instance. 5W20 non-synthetic oil costs about $10. An oil change costs about $25 here in Chicago, and can be done in 15 minutes -- and done impeccably. The difference is $15. If I were to do it myself -- without the right tools, plus I don't have a garage and it's really cold outside -- it would take an hour and it would be a sloppy job. $15 is a fraction of what I make per hour, and I figure if I pay someone to do it, I can redeploy that time (plus any number of 1 hour chunks spent on things where I have no competitive advantage) to thinking and cultivating myself or even just relaxing (idleness is crucial to creative thinking), the culmination of which is top-line growth, and I figure I'd make back that $15 (3 times a year = $45/yr) many times over.

It's ok to DIY for fun and for self-enrichment (I admire handy people), but as a universal prescription, it can potentially be a rate limiting step for many people.

Side note: if you're landlord/homeowner however, DIY is very high leverage (vs. paying tradespeople) and one's payback can be huge. One has to make that calculation for oneself.

[1] Silicon Valley founders who grew up poor can’t shake “mindset inequality” https://qz.com/602770/silicon-valley-founders-who-grew-up-po...

I agree with you for most DIY home projects you maximize your own earnings more by paying someone. Mowing the lawn is a great example when I think about my parents refusing to pay someone else despite being able to afford it.

I still think as a landlord there are some things you come out ahead on though. You can learn to fix a sprinkler and do it in an hour (maybe 2 counting home depot run). You'd probably have to pay someone a few hundred dollars for even a basic fix. If you own 50 properties of course this wouldn't make sense, but if you are a first-time homeowner then I'd say do it at least once.

Everyone should have that moment of a broken sprinkler head spraying you straight in the face while you figure out where the water shutoff is.

Absolutely -- most landlords either have to be handy or they have to access to cheap contractors (they "know a guy who knows a guy") to make any money at all on rentals. Otherwise repairs will eat up most of the margin.

I'd be careful with those "impeccable" $25 oil changes. The only time I've ever tried one, they threw out the filter housing along with the old filter, and just "installed" the new filter without the housing. This was immediately before a 400 mile road trip through the middle of nowhere. Good times. Never again.

As with everything YMMV. Oil changes are so commoditized that it is more likely for nothing to happen. I don’t know where you live but 25 is kinda of a standard price in most places I’ve ever had an oil change at.

And then you need to find a place to take your oil.

I do lots of mechanical work on my motorcycle and car. To be honest, I think you're right. Changing oil is a pain. Getting ramps out and driving the car up on it and then taking the oil to autozone is more hassle than it's worth.

However, there are tons of things people should know about their cars and how to change the oil _is_ one of them. You should do it at least once, just to have done it and understand it.

I'd also recommend learning to: replace the serpentine belt, replace cabin and engine air filters, replace a battery, replace head/taillight bulbs, change a tire (including patching it), change your own brake pads and even your own brake rotors (those are real money savers), and probably learning to bleed the brakes, too.

The most complicated thing on that list is rotors. And that only takes like... a breaker bar, 4 sockets, brake cleaner and some caliper grease. Even if someone won't do that, everything else is doable and quick and cheap.

In my experience, multiple places manage to mess up changing my oil in magical ways. It's also an opportunity to do an overall maintenance check under the car.

With that said, if I spent the amount of time working on my career I spent on cars, I would be better off, so you aren't wrong.

Just explaining the reason why I STILL change my own oil, despite realizing the time cost.

Yeap. The oil change franchises pay minimum for a reason. One just removed and lost the oil change plastic door under the car and another forgot to put the cap on which led to me spraying oil on my engine on the highway and a lot of smoke...

Pay a bit more and use a competent mechanic you trust IMO.

Plus you have to get rid of the old oil, which usually requires a trip to a garage type business anyway. So you're not even saving a trip.

Perhaps "being able to change your oil" is actually "knowing how to change your oil" or "why you should change your oil". The knowledge is the power in it, and it compounds into a lot of menial DIY tasks that one may or may not be interested in always doing.

You are right; I probably could have thought of a better example, but the oil-change seemed to apply to more people.

Personally, I'd say I've saved a lot of money learning to fix a sprinkler, replace a ceiling fan, unclog a drain, fix a leaking faucet/pipe, painting the interior of a house, etc - more of the homeowner DIY than the car owner. The equipment needed for these is usually less than the cost of hiring a professional to do them.

These are all things I wish I felt more comfortable doing. When I buy a home, I plan on getting better at all of these, and investing in doing them with my kids while they're young. I'll always remember how much money my most handy friends saved in college while always having the nicest apartments.

THIS. My dad is a mechanic, and so is my father-in-law. They both stare at me, mouths agape, when I tell them I went and gOt mY oIl cHaNgEd.

I calmly explain that $15-$30 is more than worth it to me. It saves me an hour or so of tinkering around, cleaning my own tools, and I really, really HATE grease on my hands. Probably my #1 biggest pet peeve.

I've always been under the impression that for people living in multifamily housing, changing oil yourself isn't an option. It isn't "your" driveway (everyone else parks their car in the same garage), and I've never seen anybody do it. Lease terms might actually prevent oil changes, but I haven't confirmed that any place.

I can add that 3 of 3 multi-family dwelling leases I’ve signed in Texas have a specific prohibition to changing oil.

My lease in the bay area explicitly forbids it. That said, my neighbor does all kinds of work in the carport and no one has narced on him yet.

Without a doubt, CPR.

I'm not so sure. You're probably a lot more likely to actually save someone's life with an abdominal thrust than you are with CPR--outside of some specific scenarios like drowning.

my gf's daughter (age 5) had a cyanotic spell last night (turned blue from being frightened and crying). She straight up stopped breathing. Having the CPR steps drilled in to my head put me on autopilot, which was really reassuring, even though it's been awhile since I last took the class. Thankfully the sternum rub caused a lot of pain and her to start crying (and thus breathing) so I didn't need to call 911.

I’m always curious how people use IFTTT, Zapier or aletrnatives (e.g. Shortcuts on iOS). I’m a developer and I like to automate a lot of the stuff I do, either with bash commands/script or nodejs/python for more complex stuff, and user scripts in the browser. I can’t find a good use-case for IFTTT and I feel like I’m missing out on a big part here. I’m not sure if I’m not thinking about it right, or if it just doesn’t apply to my workflow.

You've probably already optimized most of your painful workflows, but as a developer, you could probably be saving a ton of dev time using your own Zapier integrations.

I use the following workflow all the time for slackbots and prototyping a new feature:

Step 1 Zapier Webhook - Triggers on POST request to hooks.zapier.com/abc123 (Zapier provides this URL for each "Zap" while you are setting it up)

Step 2 Zapier Code Step - (python or javascript) basically a lambda function - parse your incoming POST request and do whatever with it

Step 3 Some sort of Output - send email/slack/sms

Realworld example - I submitted an iOS app that got rejected because of their community management policy - basically I needed to add a way for users to report abusive content. It took me 15 minutes to add this using the above Zap. I probably could have added it to our API in a similar amount of time, but forwarding each report to slack and aggregating them in airtable would have added to this - not to mention building out a web frontend somewhere to see/review them.

We also have a bunch of slackbots to pull stats and run jobs. Zapier enables us to do a lot of "chatops" with less code and more flexibility.

edit - I used to work at Zapier - loved the product before I worked there and still do

Setup and learn how to use Anki to practice spaced repetition. Going forward you can now decide what you would like to remember (so long as you are willing to spend 5-15 mins a day reviewing)! People's names, that command you always look up, your credit card number, interesting statistics (e.g number of passenger miles per death for bicycles vs cars vs planes) foundational facts in your field that will allow you to ponder and recognize them over and over (e.g multivariate Gaussian distribution).

https://apps.ankiweb.net/

Anki is the compound interest of learning. It makes learning far more rigorous and less stressful and makes it possible to remember things years after you've initially memorized it.

There's also Quizlet which is similar but I find it better because you can preview entire pre-built card decks on it which makes it searchable on google

https://quizlet.com

Quizlet is great if you're looking for pre-built decks, as you mentioned. As far as I'm aware, there's no spaced repetition feature, which is the main value in Anki.

Also, one of the values to me in using Anki is creating the cards myself. It allows me to mull things over and decide what part of a fact is important, and how I'd like to recall it.

Relatedly, the value isn't necessarily in reading someone else's study guide before a test, it's in creating your own study guide. That process helps you understand and retain the material far better.

Like you, I used to think that creating my own decks is better than using someone else's.

But then I listened to a podcast episode, by The Learning Scientists, in which they say that research evidence shows that your time is better spent doing only retrieval practice (reviewing flashcards) than creating cards + retrieval practice.

Retrieval practice and spaced repetition (which is what one is doing when reviewing cards with Anki) are the most effective methods for learning for which we have strong evidence, according to the same podcast.

You can pretty easily search for quizlet decks and then import them into Anki so long as you don't need two-way automatic sharing. Google for extensions, depends on Anki version

Maybe be careful putting your credit number into a card in the web service though...

I just realised that, years ago, I have used a paper-based version of Anki technique to massively increase my vocabulary in a foreign language in a very short time span.

Understanding compound interest thoroughly.

Compound interest is probably the most powerful "force" governing out lives.

It is crucial when borrowing money, especially for longer terms.

It is crucial when saving and investing.

It is crucial in self-development, where a tiny 5% improvement in some area of your life per year can mean that you are twice as good at something in 15 years.

It is important when evaluating any kinds of improvements in personal life or in business.

The trick is that the percentage never sounds like much. The number of years always sounds like a lot. Nonetheless, the years WILL pass whether you want them to or not, and what tiny life choices you make throughout have a huge impact on where you will be in the future.

Being aware of that does not take much. An hour of intense concentration should be enough to get this insight. Of course, this depends on your age and math background. However, I feel confident saying the above as this to the Hacker News audience, as the above requires nothing more than an imagination and the ability to add and multiply by decimals.

compound interest is where the bank say's its 3.5% interest but if you do the math you're paying 180% for a house. I don't have any idea how that became acceptable/the norm.

You need to adjust for inflation.

inflations a big scam too, stop printing bloody money

The printing of US dollars in the last decade had zero effect on inflation.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi

But what about wealth distribution?

That is because of how the QE was executed, pouring money directly into the financial markets with negligible impact on the real economy.

In the markets where the money did end up, like the stocks and bonds markets, inflation ran rampant with NASDAQ and S&P history shows.

That isn't inflation. Inflation is about consumables. If the valuation of assets rise, that is actually the opposite: If you sell the asset, the returns can buy you more consumables.

And neither S&P nor NASDAQ had anything resembling rampant gains, BTW:

S&P: https://www.macrotrends.net/2526/sp-500-historical-annual-re...

NASDAQ: https://www.macrotrends.net/1320/nasdaq-historical-chart (you have to click on the "by year" tab).

In neither of these charts a person unaware of QE could identify a trend.

In the last ten years the NASDAQ index went from 2.000 to 8.500 and the S&P500 from 1.000 to over 3.000 in what is generally referred to as the "10 year rally".

Inflation as in the rise in price of a basket of goods is generally used in reference to the consumer price index, but can also be used in reference to stocks, and baskets of those such as the indices.

And before S&P went from 400 to 7000 largely uninterrupted, and NASDAQ from 350 to 7100. But as those are compounding values (i.e. there is not a linear realationship between year n and year n+1, but an exponential one) one can gain more insights from comparisons of the annual returns - that is the reason why I linked those. The annual returns are not unusual, though. Please have a look at them!

If the prices of assets rise, that is appreciation. If stocks or houses appreciate, you can sell them and profit: Your purchasing power rises. If consumables experience inflation, you can not sell them for a profit: They are either immaterial, like services, or can rot, like food. This isn't pedantry, these are different concepts.

At the end of the day, if consumable prices are the same despite having more pieces of paper to buy them, you did not get inflation.

Or maybe real inflation is more like 7% where USD should have been deflating by 4% if left alone. QE is just taxes with an extra step.

How do you discourage hoarding and encourage spending and investment, thus keeping your economy flowing, without inflation?

This is a good example why one should understand compound interest. Through in a payment schedule and amortization as well.

The bank is giving you $X to buy the house. You’re paying off a piece of it each month (your mortgage payment). Part of that goes to the interest on the loan, the rest goes to principal. The interest each month is based upon on the remaining principal. That means your payment starts off being mostly interest and gradually becomes mostly paying off principal.

You could say, “But I can just save the full price and then buy the house with no interest!”. Sure you could. But you’re forgetting that you’re living in the house (or renting it out...) while you’re paying it off.

Just seems like a massive scam thats become the norm. You're paying off interest on the first month, as if you've already had the money for 20 years. They take liberties from day one.

You do already have the money for 20 years - that’s what the lender “pays” for you on day one.

Just as well, you get to start acting like you own the house from day 1.

That is wonderful phrasing on the idea. Thank you.

Why should there be no charge for borrrowing the money for 20 years? That doesn’t make sense, you have had the money for 1 month when you make the first payment, and so you are charged for it.

I don't understand this. You have negotiated to pay a fixed payment per month so why does it matter whether the money is paying off interest or the principal first? The bank didn't force you to get the loan.

It matters to the bank. Also, the interest can be written off against income taxes, which helps people more in practical money left over to use when they are earlier in the amortization, and probably their career.

Bank didn't force me. Society has made it virtually impossible for me to own a property without one. Which seems unfair when a lot of people got their property 35 years before I was born for the equivelant of 2 years salary.

Let's break this down with a simple example: You get a 30yr mortgage for $100,000 at 5%

If you paid $0 on principal your first year, the interest would be $100,000x0.05=$5000

Make it monthly: $5000/12=$416.67 rounded up to $417

On an amortization schedule, the fixed payment is calculated at $537, with $120 going to principal and $417 going to interest on your first payment. Exactly what you would expect to pay. The interest isn't front loaded, it's just the actual accrued interest of what you have borrowed.

When you pay the $120 in principal on your first payment, your debt reduces to $99,880. $99,880x0.05/12=$416 rounded. Therefore, your next payment, still at the fixed rate of $537 is now paying $121 in principal, and $416 in interest.

In short, when you have a large debt, you pay larger interest, when you have a smaller debt, you pay smaller interest. This isn't exploitation, just mathematics.

I conclude that they should just work out the total repayable and be honest and say this is a 70% mortgage. not claim it's 2% but just keep re applying that 2% every month or week or day as they see fit.

Most of the time, the total interest paid is included in the amortization plan. It's also easy to figure out. Using my example, the exact payment was $536.82.

$536.82x12x30=$193,255.20 Total($193,255.20)-Principal($100,000)=TotalInterest($93,255.20) give or take a dollar.

And so according to your desire, you'd want them to say it is a 93% mortgage.

The reason they don't is that interest rates and compounding are typically done annually. You also have the ability to make extra payments sometimes, which can pay it down faster. The faster you pay the debt, the less interest you pay.

For instance, if you win the lotto, receive a life insurance payout, or inheritance, etc and pay off the loan within the first year, it's no longer a 93% mortgage but a 5% one.

To me, it makes more sense to say, you owe $100,000 your first year, or $98,398 your second year, and that you'll be paying 5% interest over that year.

reading some of the replies , I understand a bit better.

Hey, kudos to you for admitting this! I mean that seriously. There are very few folks who actually try to learn and understand things: it appears that you're one of them.

> work out the total repayable

But that depends entirely upon how long you take to repay it. If you pay the loan aggressively up front, you pay less; if you make minimum payments for as long as possible, you pay more.

Lets break this down , 537 per month , 360 months = 193320. Thats 93% not 5%.

It’s 5% per year because you are charged interest on some schedule based on how much you have paid off. 5% is a rate, 93% is a total amount and it only applies if you pay the whole mortgage off at exactly the prescribed rate. Many banks’ mortgage calculators will show you the total amount paid anyway so it’s not like they’re hiding it.

Your point seems to be basically that because you can’t do the maths, the mortgage is misleading. That is maybe a fair argument in some cases with financial products. Investment banks are notorious for obscuring the true cost of deals with complicated maths. However this doesn’t seem like a case of that. If the interest rate is 5% APR and you are free to pay it off as fast or as slowly as you like within some bounds, for example, it is absolutely essential that you understand what a 5% rate means to know how the mortgage works.

edit: not to mention that 5% is already a contrived figure not representative of how the interest is actually applied, designed to make it easier for you to understand what you’re charged. Your interest is probably calculated monthly or daily, not yearly. They could present you a nice hypothetical yearly figure, or a nice just-as-hypothetical 93% three-year figure. What’s the difference? Neither of them are real. Your interest is charged monthly, so they’re equally fake and misleading.

I understand it and i conclude it's a complete racket, along with the whole world

"Part of that goes to the interest on the loan, the rest goes to principal."

That's only one kind of mortgage though - for a while there were mortgages available in the UK where you only payed the interest on the principal but you also payed into a separate saving scheme with the idea that when the latter matured it would pay off the former.

No idea if these are still available, but for a while in the early 1990s you used to get a very hard sell on them - we had one for a five years or so. In reality they are a terrible idea as you are paying interest on a non-decreasing principal which is a shockingly bad idea and then there is the risk of the saving scheme performance as well.

Edit: Of course you got a hard sell on them as they were clearly a terrible idea from the borrowers perspective but were far more profitable than a normal mortgage for the lender.

These are still around and pushed pretty heavily, but they are primarily for "Buy to Let" mortgages in my research. And offer an astounding TERRIBLE rate on top of the astoundingly terrible concept.

That said, the interest is a great write off for a landlord, especially if they are personally the originator of the loan to their holding company.

> Sure you could. But you’re forgetting that you’re living in the house (or renting it out...) while you’re paying it off.

Not just that, but definitely do the math on the monthly payments.

In my case (in Chicago), my minimum monthly mortgage payment was half the monthly rent I had been paying, for a significantly nicer and larger place. Just had to get past the down-payment hurdle.

Considering also the Time Value of Money, a mortgage is really not that bad at all.

I have many reservations and am very critical of the financial system. But the concept of interest on loans is not a "scam'.

The interest in it's simplest form is just a value appreciation of the time value of money [1]. Would you rather have $100 today, or $100 next month? How about $100 today vs $102 next month? Still rather in the today camp? How about $105 next month? That is the interest. It is the value derivative of having the money 'now' vs having the money 'later'.

Where things can get scammy is in the complex type of credit products on offer (tying in all sorts of opaque references to things presented as neutral which are far from), and how things are communicated to the borrower.

Tip: If you are considering a loan, always ask for a full repayment plan showing you which payments are due each month, and the resulting reduction in the amount due (your payment first covers the interest accrued in that month, and only after that covers principal reduction). If there are variables in the loans formula, ask for simulations that cover the most likely evolution scenario, as well as the extremes. Every financial institution has such a payment plan calculator. Long ago I have written one which afaik is still in use today in a non-trivial financial services company.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/timevalueofmoney.asp

Good comment. I sometimes describe borrowing as renting money, where interest is the rent. Its a mathematically interesting construct because, for one thing, the value of the thing you rented goes down with cumulative rent paid. It's kind of a degenerate money cycle if you loan money to someone who uses it to pay you interest on the loan. I suppose only taxes (serving as friction, removing energy) prevent this from being a kind of economic perpetual motion machine! I'd be stunned if this trick wasn't a) very old, and b) have about 1000 modern variations.

I didn't say interest on a loan was a scam I think compound interest on mortgages is. A fixed price interest would make sense like you borrow £100 , you pay back £110. 10% interest. But my understanding on a compound interest mortgage is the bank says something like 2% interest. and they take the £100 and x by 1.02 and just spam ='s on the calculator until the actual interest percentage is like 180%.

You shouldn't have to spend an hour learning how the bank are gnna screw you.

The thing about loans is that they should also be cheaper if you pay them off sooner. I could believe that they should be simple interest instead of compound, but that’ll get to 200% in only a bit longer (50 periods of 2% interest instead of 35), and banks would want higher interest rates on simple interest anyway, making it equal out. Plus, there are many great loan calculators online to use too.

While I appreciate your concern, the problem with what you call 'actual' interest percentage is not what reflects the financial transaction.

As stated above, money has a 'time value'. Getting $100 today has a different value to you than getting $100 somewhere in the future. So to know whether a deal is interesting, I do not just have to know how much I will be getting back in return for my investment, but when. Getting back $180 as a single lump sum payment in a year is different than getting 12 monthly payments of $15 each month for the next year, even though in both cases you will have payed me back $180 looking back.

The interest rate the bank quotes, in your example 2%, is the percentage amount by which your outstanding IOU to them will be increased at the end of the month, before you make your monthly payment.

Now this was an example of a simple fixed interest rate. In practice there are unlimited kinds of formulas that can have variable interest rates over time tied too other things, capped or uncapped, and even then that is just one of the things that goes into a payments plan. So unless you have nailed down all the other factors, comparing just interest percentage A with interest percentage B, typically in the final haggle, tells you little.

This is why I advice always looking at the series of monthly payments that you will have to make over the duration of the loan repayment, and compare these with the series of monthly payments due under a competing proposal.

Banks will screw you over in more ways than you can imagine, but quoting a compound interest rate as opposed to a total amount repaid at the end of contract (which btw is often much longer than the repayment period or even unlimited in time but that is another story) isn't where it is at.

The point that you don't pay the total back at the end resonated with me. I agree holding the money has time value

That's what the 'A' in APR means. It's pretty clear.

If I take out a £100000 loan with an APR of 2% and pay it back in full at the end of the first year, then the total amount I pay back is £102000. Apart from any early repayment charges, the original total term is irrelevant.

When taking out such a large sum, over such a duration for buying your home, the total amount to repay is not the important aspect. It's not like taking out a loan to buy a car or a holiday. You don't have the option of choosing between buying now with a loan, or saving up for a few more months or years to buy without one.

Affordability of the regular repayments over the duration of the loan is the key thing.

There is absolutely no way I would take out a loan of that size with fixed interest in the way you describe. It would be far too expensive, and give the bank too much power.

I'm relying on the fact that I can make large overpayments in order to own my home outright halfway through the original term. That couldn't happen without an annual interest rate. In fact, the most logical thing to do in that situation is to stretch the loan out for as long as possible, so that inflation makes your repayments cheaper.

For a rough example -

Imagine you bought a house for £100K 5 years ago, the interest is such that over 20 years it will cost £150K total (e.g. 3.5% over 25 years).

You have probably paid about 30K, taking about £15K off the capital.

You sell the house for the same amount you bought it. With annual interest, you owe the bank £85K, you give them that, and use the spare 15K for your next home.

With a fixed price, you still owe the bank £120K. You give them the £100K you got from selling the house, and you somehow have to find £20K to pay them the rest.

That last bit made sense to me. I still think it's expensive and the banks have too much power. But you make a good point

Depending on your country, the law may require the bank to actually print the total cost of the loan on the contract as well. You'd have a better argument with revolving credits, the rates of which are generally much more predatory.

If you lend me $X at 3.5%/yr for 30 years and I can earn 7%/yr elsewhere, like by investing in a S&P index tracker. Say there's no minimum payment on your loan, just to keep the math easy. In 30 years, I'm going to owe you 2.8 * X (via 1.035^30). My investment of that $X loan has grown into 7.6 * X (via 1.07^30). After tax, call it 6.5 * X. After I pay you off, I've earned about 3.7 * X.

If the initial loan was $400k on a $500k house, then yeah it sucks that I've payed you $1.1M, a clear overpayment, but I wont be sad because I'm coming out ahead by about $1.5M.

In reality, loans come with minimum payments, so you can't come out quite so far ahead. What this all means is if you can do something better with your money, (e.g. market tracker at 7% on a 3.5% loan), then just pay the minimum and do that better thing with the rest. If you can't (e.g. market tracker at 7% on an 8% loan), then pay it down as fast as you can, or don't take it in the first place unless there are other factors.

The 'rule of 72' is a quick and easy rule of thumb to determine how long an investment doubles, and improve how you think about compound interest. For example it takes approx. 10 years to double an investment at 7%, or 7 years at 10%.

We are currently in a world where it is very difficult to find interest rates >2%. I found a tezos staking pool at approximately 5% recently.

The S&P500 with dividends reinvested has averaged a real (post-inflation) return of 7% annually over the last 100 years or so.

It's currently up 24% YTD.

Noted.

That's fine if you are prepared to take on significant risk - it took six years for the index to recover after the 2007 financial crash. If anyone was looking to retire on their investment then they'd be screwed. At least with a bank your savings are guaranteed.

That's why you take on riskier investments early on and transition to "safer" ones as you reach retirement age (or whenever you're planning to access the money).

I always found this slightly wrong (for a non-outlier case). If you're young and you have some earning/saving power, why would you want that to be risky? Keeping it "safe" in an index fund means that it is compounding longer than the assets you'll get later in life!

The confusion is probably coming from your idea of “risk”. When people say stocks are risky they mean their prices have higher variance. But they also have higher long term growth rates. If you’re young, you have more years left until you will need to sell your investments in retirement. That means you should care less about the short term variance and more about the long term growth rate.

That's why fund balance and risk tolerance is a thing. If you're 55+ and looking to retire that 2008 drop will force you to eat cat food. But if you're 50+ most of your money should be in bonds, holding wealth.

If you're 33 and working in IT, you should be holding stocks and hoarding that fantastic growth (and slowly, over time, scraping the gains off into bonds).

You bank savings are only guaranteed by FDIC to $300k. Chances are they are not giving you an interest rate that will keep up with inflation, either. At best it's not gaining value, and is in all likelihood losing value by tiny amounts as inflation eats away at it.

Holding your age as % of investment in Bonds is a standard I hear alot.

The only problem with that is we are living longer and longer, but wanting to retire earlier... it's really an individual thing, and you have to make sure that whatever you're invested in, you will have the principle + earnings to be able to cover your needs for however long you live.

Keep in mind that costs for elderly care have gone nowhere but sky-high in the past decade or so. It's not crazy to plan on paying 10-25,000/month once you reach your 80s or 90s (or more if inflation rises).

Yes, guaranteed to lose value to inflation over time.

Indeed, keeping the money in a bank would have caused losing the same amount of value over long as the temporary stock crash did.

Only these losses are permanent :-/ whereas the stock market recovered and quadrupled...

This sends the completely wrong message:

It may be true only for the people that have invested ALL their money as a lump sum right before the index crashed (at the worst possible time).

For anybody else, those that say invested in the previous few years into a passive index fund, and continued to invest in the next few years they would have broken even within two years then probably quadrupled their money by today.

Keeping the same amount in a bank would have turned it into 30% less - a decrease similar to what the "crash" would have caused.

The 2007-2008 period was actually the time to invest even more aggressively, if you could stomach it! Historically, those big drops rarely happen. And when they do, they rarely last for long. You have full recovery in a few years. My investments from that time, mostly Total Stock Index funds, like VTSAX, have tripled.

People need to be taught not to be afraid of investing. I know many smart folks, some who are engineers, who were scared of investing until they were in their mid 30's. My dad taught me about investing when I was a teenager. You do this right, you can retire in your 40's or 50's, never have to work again if you don't want to.

You might luck out, maybe hit it rich on startup stock options by joining the next FAANG company. This is unlikely to happen. Investing in the stock market, week after week, year after year, decade after decade... It's almost guaranteed.

> I know many smart folks, some who are engineers, who were scared of investing until they were in their mid 30's.

One of my biggest regrets, coming from a family/socioeconomic group where nobody invested, is not beginning to invest as soon as I had enough disposable income to safely do so (in my mid-20s) instead of in my mid-30s.

Yes! It's too bad none of this is really taught in schools, outside of the occasional "stock market club." It's foundational stuff and people should be educated on it.

You are gaurenteeing a loss of purchasing power by putting your money in the bank. You are only risking a potential loss investing in the S&P, and you have a potential significant upside. It's a no brainer.

Guaranteed to loose value over time. Ever since central banks forced gov fiat currency on us all, we're stuck investing just to save for the future. Back in 1905, most people could save in gold, and very few invested, but now that dollars/euros/yuan saved loose value over time, we're all forced to use equity as a money-substitute for savings.

Risk depends on how long you have until you are going to start pulling on that money. The only people screwed investing wise from 2007 were the people who pulled out. If you can keep a level head, which might preclude some people, investing in stocks is hardly risky. Specifically using index funds, because there is a lot of risk in picking a few stocks.

> The S&P500 with dividends reinvested has averaged a real (post-inflation) return of 7% annually over the last 100 years or so.

TBH I don't think looking at the last hundred years is particularly valuable. Nobody invests over a hundred year timespan. Most importantly, look at a graph of interest rates over the past 40 years. There is a fundamental "new normal" of extremely low rates (or, rather, negative rates for much of the world), making it extremely difficult to earn that 7% without taking on a very large amount of risk.

Look at the bast 10-20 years, it still holds true

That’s only if you need almost no risk. The whole US stock market is definitely risky (it could go down fifty percent or more in a year), but it has averaged significantly over 2%, even after inflation, even in the last few years.

This is also noted. Do you consider the downside risk higher than the potential upside over the next 12 months? I am currently viewing downside risk as a higher probability than the potential upside due to a number of macro issues. Plus Warren Buffet just went to a cash pile.

If your time frame is longer than seven years, then it just about always makes sense to leave your money in the market. Even if the market drops 20% in a crash, the market is up more than 20% now since people started majorly talking about fear of a recession a year ago, so it would’ve been better to put money in then than to avoid the market for fear of recession. There might be a recession in a year, but the market’s gains in that time might be bigger than the drop.

Warren Buffett recommends that the best way for the average person to build wealth is to invest in an S&P 500 index fund. Read some John Bogle and you'll get a good grasp on index investing and you'll learn that "time in the market, beats timing the market." Most people get timing completely wrong and end up selling at lows and buying at highs. You're better off dollar cost averaging and investing money consistently over time.

Berkshire Hathaway (not Warren Buffett) is not who retail investors should be modeling their portfolios on.

If you wanted to model after Berkshire Hathaway, you could just buy shares in them.

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042415/what-average...

"What is the average annual return for the S&P 500? ... roughly 8%"

It's not specific to interest, it works for any compounding percentage, include stock or real estate appreciation.

Of course, past performance is not necessarily indicative of future performance. But as a mental arithmetic trick, the rule of 72 generally works.

In India is between 7 to 8 %, it was even higher a few years ago.

There is this nice book called "The Slight Edge" which builds on this whole idea in general and how it is applicable at every facet of life. It is really an insightful book and atleast you will slightly change about how you think about stuffs.

I'm reading *Atomic Habits right now and the author talks about how building small improvements on top of each other can eventually deliver great gains. The trick seems to be identifying just what it is to work on.

Added to my reading list! Thanks for the suggestion.

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.

But that's not compounding in the sense of compound interest.

Sure it is, if you think about how much harder it is to run at 225 pounds vs at 200 pounds.

Yeah, it's easier to run, but nah, because diminishing returns.

I am pretty sure that only applies to certain people. I stay fairly skinny no matter what, though I do move about a lot.

How old are you? My father was thin until he turned 27. He was never huge, but at 27 he was 170lbs (6'2") and at his peak, around age 65, he was a little over 200. He warned me about that. At 27, I was also 170 lbs (6'2") (I am nearly a clone of my dad), and then slowly gained weight. I briefly ballooned to 215 around age 31, but hammered that back down to 185, but since then it has slowly climbed to 200 (at age 60). I am back down to 196. In my early twenties I could eat a large 'special' pizza by myself in about 45 minutes. Metabolism changes with age. I dearly miss being able to eat anything I wanted at any time with no consequences.

When I was in my mid-20s I could also eat anything I wanted, and a big challenge for me was finding pants that were long enough (36” inseam) but also had a narrow enough waist. This was pre-internet, so the options were limited (I discovered early that Big & Tall stores required you to be both).

Fast-forward 20-ish years, and I’m still just as tall but I don’t have any problem finding pants that fit me. Sigh.

Start lifting :)

45 now.

Nonsense. Eat 4000 calories a day, every day, and lift heavy weights. You will quickly gain lots of weight.

Confirm. Went from 165 lbs running 55km races to 235 lbs with a 1,405 lbs powerlifting total in 5 years. I started this month to reverse the process, going to run a 50 miler next time this year.

So that would be close to double what I usually eat. I doubt I would find that easy, and it would probably involve lots of unhealthy crap.

I think the same applies principles apply as with bigger people saying they can't lose weight. You need to change your habits, and that is hard.

https://thefitness.wiki/faq/why-cant-i-gain-weight/

Adaptive thermogenesis says otherwise.

You’re talking addition and subtraction, compounding deals with multiplication.

To reap the benefits of compound interest (in your favor), you need to stick to a plan. You can't dump your investment portfolio after 5 years. It's these small, daily decisions that add up over time. So while the output is multiplicative, the necessary input is only linear.

Yes but the linear input is not the relevant part. The compounding is.

If you had to put in compounding effort, the compounding output would seem far less intriguing or worthwhile. If investment returns weren't exponential, or required exponential input to receive exponential output, it'd be far less useful of a concept.

Multiplication is just a specific form of addition operations and is easily writable as such.

The word 'add' is overloaded for both mathematical and non-mathematical purposes.

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 anyone can regulate up to 0.1% accuracy to what they actually need?

eating a little more or less has absolutely not discernible effect the body adapts to it.

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.

oops, I sure got my digits wrong

It is exactly how it works, and you're taking "a small percentage" to a ridiculous degree to fallaciously disprove it. Try eating 10% more or less than what you need each day, not 0.1%.

1 billion*

2 - 2.5 million calories a day is normal for people with a normal level of physical activity.

In the US, we tend to use food calories, where 1 Calorie == 1 kilocalorie. The capitalization of Calorie is intended to show the difference in units, but in most written language, often isn't used.

Another question to pile onto this. Maybe you're the right one to ask.

I was always taught that the body uses up its glycogen stores before burning fat. But if that were true even a small calorie deficit would gradually use up our glycogen stores and we'd be walking around without any after that.

Plus before losing any fat you'd have to experience a glycogen crash/wall which most small deficit dieters don't experience.

Very roughly...

Generally what fuel your body burns depends on the intensity of work you are doing, so if you're walking you may be burning 80%+ fat, but if you're running a 10k you may be 80% glycogen.

However, if you eat too many carbs at a meal (beyond what you need in the next few hours), your body needs to get that excess out of your bloodstream, so it will do a combination of: - fill your muscle/liver glycogen stores (limited size) - burn any excess carbs in preferences to stored fat - convert any excess carbs to stored fat

Once it's got rid of the excess carbs from your bloodstream, it will return to burning whatever the normal ratio of fat:carbs is for you.

Consequently, if you always eat too much carbs, you'll gradually pile on the fat, unless you're doing large amounts of training which depletes your muscle/liver glycogen, e.g: elite athletes.

Actually, that IS how it works.

It may not be possible to know or calculate the exact intake and output values, but those values are not needed. Your body gives you cues.

> eating a little more or less has absolutely not discernible effect the body adapts to it.

Yes, the body adapts to it by storing or eliminating fat (among other things).

No, if that was true people would be always over or under the weight as it's impossible to know exactly how much calories the body consumes.

> Yes, the body adapts to it by storing or eliminating fat (among other things).

No, it compensates by changing your metabolic rate mostly. You eat less, you will feel more lethargic, you eat more and you will fill (and be) more active

Compound anything is powerful. Interest is... really slow these days though. Seems to be around 3% return after inflation. And with all the countries taking really high national debt, who's to say it will get better?

The whole compound concept applies very well to startups though. 3% a week adds up.

3% is the high-end of the “consumer” (aka “chump”) interest rates. In fact, since inflation is about 3%, over time your money doesn’t grow. (Though, if you’re earning less than inflation your money is actually decreasing in value, so maintaining is better than that)

I got a 2.9% rate for my car loan and a 3.625 for my house. both pretty close to 3. Are my banks chumps?

The S&P500 with dividends reinvested has averaged a real (post-inflation) return of 7% annually over the last 100 years or so.

100 years isn't really "these days," though.

Not sure what that is supposed to mean. It's ~9 % the last ~5 years.

But only ~4% over the last 20 [0]. If you cherry pick start and end dates, you can make stock market returns look as good or bad as you'd like.

[0] https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio?s=y&t...

Also learn about opportunity cost when spending and saving. It is tied to compound interest in many ways, but also deals with addressing wants vs. needs, and also scoring your wants.

Since really grasping compound interest I've noticed it apply across almost all aspects of life, which is what OP is saying. It shouldn't be reduced to the financial aspect which is probably the better-understood aspect of it.

Think about things like your education, your professional skills, your interests and hobbies, your health, your friendship and (professional) social network, hell, even your kids. Whatever little you put into any of these today will compound over time.

If I set some time apart today to better learn a programming language (or a text editor) I will be more productive with it over the next few years. If I develop a healthy exercise and nutrition regimen in my youth, I'll have less trouble maintaining that as I get older and a better starting point. If I try to go out and meet people then I'll have a large network of contacts to draw from if I'm ever looking for something specific in the future. If I've dabbled with a number of different hobbies in my youth then I'll have all these experiences which shape, and ultimately improve the outcomes that I have when tackling a problem today. And lastly kids: If I spend quality time with my kids in their very early formative years (reading, singing, talking) then by the time they enter school they will already have an above-average level of education and that difference will continue to compound for them in their life.

The underlying concept that applies to much of life is feedback loops. Compound interest is just one example of a feedback loop.

It is true. It is crucial to understand any kind of growth situation which are predominent in life. For instance, one of my friends who is a teacher wanted to explain sustainable development to his highschool students by showing the effect of cutting too much trees if this doesn't match the trees growing rate. He asked me to solve the not so trivial equations with a series and found myself returning to the same maths used for the interest computation.

The way I look at it is compounding just changes the effective interest rate.

Continuous compounding is e^rt. Just subtract straight interest from this and you discover the maximum return of compounding over just collecting interest. Most compounding periods are much less than continuous.

I think this would take less than an hour. ;-)

How to do various knots comes to mind. Square knot, A sheet bend, clove and trucker's hitch, prusik, the alpine butterfly knot, and bowlines can all be learned rather quickly, then practiced so they can be remembered easily.

http://paracord550milspec.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/How...

I remember learning these before but due to not finding any use case for them, I already forgot how to do them properly.

Only thing I regularly tie nowadays are my shoelaces.

EDIT: Grammar

I’ve also learned a number of knots. The only knot I ever really tie is the tautline hitch. The average person cannot string up a piece of rope and remove all slack because all they know is the granny or square knot. This knot is also incredibly simple and versatile. If you are reading this do yourself a favor and learn this over the next 5 minutes. The bolin should also be learned because the tautline hitch cannot be used for rescue purposes.

For the curious, it's bowline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowline

Just so you're aware, the bowline is considered somewhat dangerous because it has a high chance of being tied incorrectly.

The only real advantage it has over a double figure 8 is that it's easier to untie after dynamic cinching.

https://rockandice.com/climb-safe/climb-safe-rethinking-the-...

Interestingly, the bowline and the cat's claw are the same knot, but the cat's claw uses two rope ends rather than one and it's very simple to tie, unlike the tricky bowline.

The bowline has other advantages. It's also much faster to tie than a figure-8 follow-through, for example. I imagine it takes less rope, too.

We use the bowline (without backup) in industry. I've never heard of anyone having an issue with it. Any equipment is dangerous if you set it up halfway, walk away, and forget to finish. That's why you never do anything halfway. That failure mode is not specific to knots, or any particular knot.

> Only thing I regularly tie nowadays are my shoelaces.

For that, in much less than an hour, you can learn the Ian Knot: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknot.htm

It makes shoelace tying very fast and secure (the GIF at the top is how long it actually takes!).

https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/betterbowknot.htm for life

Hm, well that looks much slower, and the Ian Knot never comes undone for me.

Ian's secure knot is great, too.

IIRC it's just "Ian's way of tying a reef/square knot".

Make sure you're not tying a granny and you're golden. If you have problems with long laces, or ones that come undone, then a surgeons knot can help.

I tried Ian's method for a couple of weeks and reverted back, it was too fiddly for me.

Not that it's not a neat knot (repeat that for a tongue twister!), but I chuckled a bit at:

> With practice, I can now tie my shoelaces in about one third of the time of a conventional knot!

So... 1 second instead of 3? Amazing ;)

This ties in to how I like to say the rope may be one of the greatest inventions of mankind.

I find myself unravelling mentally when it comes to remembering knots and the like

That's nothing, you should see what the mathematicians get up to when they try to figure out if two knots are different.

Many of the most useful knots are very easy to learn, there's no need to be afrayed!

My favorite knots to add to your list are adjustable grip hitch (AGH), siberian hitch, and zeppelin bend.

The AGH is super easy to tie and very versatile. The Siberian is useful for tying a rope around a static object such as a pole or a tree. Bends are rarely useful for me since I rarely need to join two ropes together, but if you are going to learn a bend, you might as well learn the most beautiful one.

Yeah I think the zeppelin bend is the greatest knot ever, extremely secure and 100% jam proof (jam proof means the knot is easily untied even after extreme loads). I can’t think of any other bend that has those two properties, usually it’s one or the other

Two interlocked bowlines will get you this.

I like the Alpine Butterfly Bend, https://www.animatedknots.com/alpine-butterfly-bend-knot, mostly because I already know/use the Alpine Butterfly Loop.

> Bends are rarely useful for me since I rarely need to join two ropes together, but if you are going to learn a bend, you might as well learn the most beautiful one.

I'm sure I've used a sheet bend at least three times in the last year in random situations. I haven't used the zeppelin bend, but I would say having an easy-to-learn-and-tie-but-effective knot "in your kit" is quite useful; you never quite know when it will come in handy.

European death knot is much easier to learn than zeppelin bend.

All great Metal band names!

very much agree - I would suggest as a starting point learning a couple basic knot families and then the more important of how to apply them. Keeping it simple - learn a clove hitch, a figure 8, and a bowline (maybe also a sheet bend). Those cover almost all the use cases you will come across without having to remember many knots. Is an alpine/butterfly better than a figure 8 on a bight for a loop in the middle of a rope? yes, of course, but it’s one more thing to remember. If you like knots, learn all the good ones, there’s a knot for every use. But if you just want to have sone practical knowledge that is used rarely, learn just three or four very versatile knots and when to use them.

Also two-half hitches and the taughtline hitch. Ever need to tie a rope to a pole or a tree? Two-half hitches is your friend. It's also really easy to undo.

The problem with knots is that there are so many, and even the most popular ones have serious problems.

For example, everyone recommends bowline, but it's unsafe without securing the working end. Everyone recommends square knot, but it's easy to tie incorrectly (getting a granny knot instead).

Figuring out which knots to learn will take a lot longer than an hour. Here's my list:

Overhand loop, figure eight follow-through, adjustable grip hitch, trucker's hitch, kalmyk loop.

Figure eight bend > square knot.

Add Alpine Butterfly and that's a pretty solid list.

The Ian Knott for tying your shoelaces a little faster

The problem with this is practical use. I so rarely need to knot something securely or in a special way that it doesn't seem worth the time to learn. I can look things up if I find a use.

What practical uses do you use knots for?

Someone close to me taught me how to square knot, so my hoodie-tied-around-my-waist would stop slipping, as I was using a double overhand knot before.

I'd also like to add that learning knots is honestly more of a 5-minute commitment to learn than a 1-hour commitment, but it's definitely still a commitment.

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.

This really is good advice. I’ve found a little goes a long way in improving your experience.

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.

Similarly, Excusez-moi; parlez-vous Anglais? is how you get a French person to speak English.

Je ne parle pas Francais. :-(

That's why the parent told you how to ask in french if a person speaks English ;).

The full handshake sequence is usually longer that this.

They will first reply with "Non", often coupled with a wounded look.

Then you have to start speaking in a very broken French, ideally with a monstrous accent (though this comes naturally).

And only then they will suddenly re-discover their long forgotten English skills, which will turn out to be quite decent.

I agree. The French are clever (and very nice people). They know you’ve just learnt that one phrase in order to unlock their English: you have to work a bit harder. They want to see a bit of pain first.

French mathematics is famous for being written as prose and by extension for being much more instructive than an English equivalent (provided that said mathematics was discovered by a French person).

How does that explain Bourbaki?

What do you mean... Bourbaki is in French.

This is very relevant to my interests. My French doesn't go past "haltingly read newspapers" and "acquire food, shelter, and directions in a French-speaking region", so would any of this prose-heavy mathematics be available in English translation? Are there any particular authors you have in mind?

I can't speak French, so my comment is based on what other mathematicians tell me.

Unfortunately, Grothendieck, Galois and as far as I know, Bourbaki is not fully translated. And unless someone actually spends many years doing it, a lot of it never will be.

I also think Russian is useful, especially to read some old texts from the cold war era. But a lot of the books are translated (but not the papers). Kolmogorov's books and probably quite a few others were translated not very long after they were written.

But, to be honest, I think knowing French and Russian is more of a personal pursuit than a necessity to access the mathematiacs. Galois wrote down very little and his memoirs (written by someone else) should be the interesting historically. Grothendieck should also be interesting, especially to see his unrelenting commitment to translate everything to category theory. However, for almost any topic, somewhere, in English, there would be a good source. Bourbaki was never really "completed" and I am not sure whether it's useful to read those texts (rather than the stuff that was inspired by them).

I can recommend Lawvere's books, especially Conceptual Mathematics since it's even accessible for high school students. My main interest is in category theory and set theory, so it may well not be what you are interested in.

I've also seen really useful stuff in the internet era, like Category Theory for Programmers by Bartosz Milewski.

Parlez-vous [random broken Spanish] parlez-vous [more Spanish]. Merci.

Exactly this. There is a crossover point where their pain of listening to your horrible French exceeds their enjoyment of watching you suffer, and that's when they let you off the hook.

In Paris in the summer this crossover point is higher since I think they're pissed they are stuck in the city for the summer dealing with tourists rather than frolicking in the countryside.

> Then you have to start speaking in a very broken French, ideally with a monstrous accent (though this comes naturally).

I think "Comment apple two" is a great opener for this.

Nice... probably should be "Comma Apple Two" though :)

PS. To clarify for others - It's a bastardized version of "Comment tu t'appelle?" which means "What's your name?" or more precisely "How do you call yourself?"

“Parlez-vous Anglais” will get you nowhere, but “Pas de palais, pas de palais” is how you earn a nightful of drinks by a French guy.

Seriously, don’t learn boring words, we already know someone doesn’t speak French. Learn movie quotes and you’ll kickstart a discussion. Learn awesome movie quotes and you’ll have something to discuss about.

Haha, I wonder if they assumed you were doing something that's very Japanese, namely having much more humility about your skill level than is actually justified. So they just assumed you're perfectly fluent but you were being very Japanese about it.

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).

I read it as something like はなせいません which doesn't match 話せません or 話しません

Wakaremasen would imply that you are incapable of or forbidden from ever understanding. It would be very strange.

I've honestly never heard anyone use ga before hanaseru. It's always been wo that I've heard.

I have asked my Japanese friends about this and they are usually convinced after discussion that "ga" is the correct particle to use here. But "wo" sounds fine.

I think it is very much like "was/were" in English. "If I was to give you a cookie..." / "If I were to give you a cookie..." "were" is "correct" (as though there is such a thing in English), I think, but "was" sounds fine. "Was" looks pretty abrasive in writing but say it out loud and you'll notice that you hear it a lot.

Well, the original wording was "hanasei masen" and I assumed the OP wouldn't know about the potential form at their current level. Potential form when talking about knowing the language doesn't sound right to me, but I can find example sentences using both potential and normal form. In natural language I think normal form would be used. Potential form of "wakaru" is "wakareru" which happens to be a verb with a completely different meaning "to diverge/separate/divide", so I don't think anyone uses it and it makes little sense anyway.

Wakaru doesn't have a potential form because its meaning includes potential. So wakareru is unambigously "separate/split/divide"

Now, I never realized... the interesting thing is both wakaru and wakareru use the same kanji: 分かる分かれる (although there is also 解る or 判る for wakaru)

> I assumed the OP wouldn't know about the potential form at their current level.

You assumed correctly :-) I thought that adding a "sen" suffix to any verb was the only way to negate it. Wakarimas = I understand. Wakarimasen = I don't understand. (Yes, I read Shogun :-) Japanese is apparently much more subtle than I realized.

> 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...

I had a year of French at school, and my teacher kept saying all year that no matter how much or little we learn from his classes and exercises, as long as we are able to say "I don't speak language X, do you speak language Y?", everything would be so much easier when dealing with strangers in foreign countries. It also helps a lot to add a "please" and "thank you".

This piece of advice helped a lot in both Germany, Ukraine, and Russia.

It doesn't always work though… I just had an issue with a Spanish airline (of all things I would assume all their employees would have to speak some English), where the session expired, the online payment went through but the ticket reservation didn't. I called the number and asked if Se habla Inglès o Francès? and no, I had to use my broken Spanish to sort it out. The lady was very helpful though.

Reminds me of the old joke..

A: I'm sorry, I don't speak English.

B: But you just spoke English, how is that?

A: I'd answer this, but like I said, I do not speak English.

Brian Griffin : Hola! Um... me, me llamo es Brian. Ahh, uh, um... Let's see, uh, nosotros queremos ir con ustedes.

Migrant Worker : Hey, that was pretty good, except when you said, "Me llamo es Brian," you don't need the "es", just "me llamo Brian".

Brian Griffin : Oh! So you speak English!

Migrant Worker : No, just that first sentence and this one explaining it.

Brian Griffin : You... you're kidding, right?

Migrant Worker : Que?

In Japan I was at a German language insitute and asked the Japanese guy at the reception if he spoke German. His reply was "Leider nicht"/"Unfortunately not", which I thought was a fantastic reply for this kind of question. Very simple, yet much more sophisticated than a simple "Nein"/"No".

Please don’t learn “I don’t speak X”, this is useless and it kills the interaction. Instead, learn a movie quote. This will get people to joke with you and will start off a discussion, “Where did you learn that” and all.

— “Pas de palais ? Pas de palais” - see here for example: https://youtu.be/ghiMU3seRVM - “Je m’appelle Juste Leblanc” — or even asking for a local celebrity is more fun.

I think this is a terrible idea.

For starters, I can tell you from firsthand experience that saying "I don't speak X" does not "kill the interaction." It is invariably taken as ironically humorous, and a sincere effort to fit into the local culture. I've never had anything but a positive response to it, and I have traveled extensively throughout the world.

Furthermore, putting myself in the listener's shoes, if a foreigner walked up to me and recited a random movie quote in broken English I would be utterly nonplussed. I mean, think about it: a random stranger walks up to you and the first words out of their mouth are, "No palace, no palace." I can't imagine any reaction other than: WTF?

I think people have varying opinions on this. Many of us don't really want to launch people into a phony conversation -- you convince the other person that you understand the language, then they talk for a while, and then they realize that you didn't understand anything they just said. Now your newfound friend thinks you like wasting their time.

This happens all the time in other contexts. "Have you seen movie X?" "mm yeah" "what did you think about the part where <20 minutes of explanation>" "oh you know I didn't actually see the movie I just didn't want to say no". The reason people do this is because they hate saying no, and 50% of the time having seen the movie / heard the song / know the celebrity / is not actually relevant to the anecdote. But when it is, you sure look like an idiot.

I find also 'Excuse me / Pardon me' is extremely useful in the local language.

Agreed! Forgot that one

Excellent list! I'd also recommend adding "What is this?" to the list, and for extra credit, do some research on the vernacular / polite way to address strangers in public ("Excuse me" also works for this in a pinch, although not in all cultures!).

Here in Sweden most people are comfortable speaking English so if you address them politely in English they will probably be more comfortable and less caught off guard than if they have to decipher phrases in broken Swedish, no matter how well meaning.

Still probably a good idea to learn some words so you can read signs.

Norway is much the same. Not only that, but even if you do manage to be understood in Norwegian, you might find that you don't understand the local dialect at all.

The most valuable question to know in every language is, "How do you say <English word> in <your language>, please?"

For example, in Xhosa you ask,"Uthini ngesiXhosa 'to run', nceda?" => The answer is "baleka." :)

I was just in Japan, and really felt my lack of basic language. I picked it up quicker than I expected, but without having someone who knew both English and Japanese it was hard to know if I was getting it right. By the end of the trip I had a few interactions in Japanese and it felt great, I really wish I had learned before going over to get the most out of the knowledge.

A few items to learn I would add to your list:

* Sorry, I do not understand

* May I (take a picture/sit here/...)?

* That was delicious (or simply the word for delicious)

* I only understand {my language}

The reason I mention the last one over simply "I do not understand" is it makes it clear that not only do you not understand, you probably won't understand if they try again. It also lets them know a language you would understand so they can get out a translating app. It was easy enough to translate from English to Japanese up front, but nearly impossible to hear the Japanese, write it out, and translate it to English. So you'll need the native speaker to translate in that direction.

> 8. This 9. That

Now I wonder if there are some languages that don't differentiate between these two.

How, and why, to invest in a simple portfolio of index funds. Split between equity and fixed income based on your risk tolerance, and diversify equities globally. This will give you a low-cost, set-and-forget investment portfolio that you can add to over time without ever having to worry about what you should buy or what the market might do. Just add to it regularly over time, and end up with solid retirement savings. The market and your portfolio will certainly fluctuate, but there is no need to react to these fluctuations—simply rebalance based on your investment plan (say, annually).

Here's a good primer from the Bogleheads forum: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Bogleheads%C2%AE_investing_s...

Jack Bogle did not advocate for adding international equities to a portfolio as a means of diversification. [1]

[1] https://www.morningstar.com/articles/885739/why-jack-bogle-d...

The fact that the Bogleheads forum is a useful source of information doesn't imply that Jack Bogle was right about everything.

... or that the Bogleheads forum is right about everything.

Naturally. Like any forum there are a range of opinions there. I think if most reasonable people take an hour to familiarize themselves with an investment plan based on diversification and cost minimization though, they'll see its merits.

The reasons in the link are fairly ridiculous

Please explain. I found the arguments quite reasonable and presented in a non-dogmatic way.

It's just nationalism

The argument that US businesses are already exposed to international issues anyway is a good. By investing in a US index you are unintentionally diversified

This, and the earlier you start the better.

I think the market needs better, easier portfolio tools for the lay person. Tools that can help coach the user as well

That counts as financial advice; or gets close enough to it that it will probably run afoul of the same problems. Financial advice is all fun and gains until there is a down year and someone loses 10% of their savings. Or worse.

The hard challenge in the field is how to attract customers that are not quite savvy enough to figure out how to open their own brokerage account but not people so clueless as they'll go into old age with a 100% allocation to stocks. The more accessible the higher earning (ie, riskier) options are to unsophisticated the more catastrophic the backlash will be when the bad years arrive.

In a sense the regulatory system evolves to make the cheap-management options harder to find and tailored financial advice easier, because the people who aren't already in the market are going to get eaten alive making rookie allocation errors.

Does it get much easier than target date retirement funds? Vanguard’s TDF basically have no fee at sub 0.1% expense ratios.

Switzerland makes it very interesting to follow your advice: you can deposit into a 'third pillar bank-account' which your local bank helps you invest in predetermined portfolios, and the investment will be tax-deductible.

I don’t invest in pillar 3 because the banks charge a medieval 1-2% management fee.

Damn, that's basically all the interest

VIAC is a great alternative. It's cheaper than traditional banks and allows a higher share of investment in equities: https://viac.ch/en/

For those from Canada - that's a Swiss version of RRSP basically.

Reddit FIRE is also worth reading: https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/

Also JL Collins' book "The Simple Path to Wealth" is well worth a read, on the same topic. If you don't want to get it, this talk covers the basics: https://youtu.be/T71ibcZAX3I

I would be very careful with financial advice in general and "set and forget" strategies are definitely among them. There is some controversy with ETF based allocation strategies (see Michael Burry's recent claims) that may or may not be valid, but in general I don't think there is any shortcut for financial education such as "just buy diversified ETFs" (and this applies to many other fields as well).

I don't know, for people who neither have the time, skill or will to invest individual companies' performance a low-cost, very broad ETF is pretty universally excepted as your best bet.

This doesn't mean there is no risk.

That doesn't change anything. 12 years ago I knew nothing about programming. Does that mean I shouldn't start with some easy language that might turn out not be sufficient as I get more experienced? No. Starting is the hardest part, gaining experience is something that happens during the journey.

I agree; one should educate oneself. That's why my advice was to "learn how and why" rather than to simply do it. The danger with the financial sector is that there is a ton of biased, bad advice out there. So you need to take some care and critically evaluate what you're learning. Having done that myself, I'm a strong believer in low-cost, diversified investing. (Which usually means passive indexes, but the important things are low cost and diversification; occasionally that's not incompatible with active funds.) For most people who don't want personal finance as a hobby, an hour should be enough time to learn why a simple portfolio of low-cost index funds is a solid choice, and then they can confidently stay the course, rather than trying to time the market or pick winners and ending up worse off for it, as many do.

any advice on how to invest in ETFs while in Europe ? Vanguard is not available and local banks charge high management fees.

there are Vanguard ETFs in some European stock exchanges. https://global.vanguard.com/portal/site/home

But Vanguard aside there are loads of low fee ETFs from ishares, amundi lyxor, etc eg https://www.xetra.com/xetra-en/instruments/etf-exchange-trad...

There are many ETFs which can be invested in in Europe. See the screener https://www.justetf.com/de-en/find-etf.html

I don't think you can trade through that site. But apparently Robinhood is launching in UK soon

If there's a Robinhood for index fund investing, I am in. I think a lot of retail investors (myself included) lack a mainstream resource that pushes for stock diversification investments, having to resort to manual research.

I know Robinhood and <insert any other brokerage> supports this, but a centralized platform dedicated to index and mutual funds that focuses on them out of the box might make sense.

Betterment does this, with auto-rebalancing when things get out of balance. There are other services that do this as well (wealthfront is one).

If you're just interested in index funds themselves, then take a look at vanguard.

I would simplify this to: understand the principle of portfolios. And the benefits of them.

Too many people buy just one investment, not understanding they can reduce their financial risks buying several unrelated things. For example, only owning a house. And refusing to buy stocks because of risks.

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.

Both things change how you think temporarily. I think they both do so in such a way that you can identify and emotionally deal with stuff that would otherwise remain unresolved.

I'm sorry, but there is a fine line between dealing with stuff and smoking weed, one of which involves dealing with stuff, and the other postponing dealing with stuff.

That's simply not true. I've dealt with hard stuff in my life (ie very long term relationship went into tough sudden breakup) with weed. It gave me a good perspective on it that holds to this day, it made me close the whole topic completely very quickly (1-2 weeks at max) in a rather pleasant way.

I've set my life priorities with help of weed. They still hold to this day. I've done some of the best decisions on direction of my life with weed. Looking back +-10 years ago, damn those were some fine decisions. Weed gives me, when alone, often semi-constant stream of very creative ideas just popping out of sub-consciousness. I've come up with ideas for startups at least 50x, often to find later somebody is already well into executing it (often in areas I normally don't touch, ie self-belaying machines for climbing, or self-shaping moving wall for climbing - I never ever saw/heard about any of those, but it seems they are quite popular in US).

The rate, amount and depth of those ideas just isn't there when sober. The rate is so high that I sometimes don't manage to record them all.

All this was done alone, just me and my emotions. YMMV, but for my introvertish personality type, it works wonders. There are drawbacks of course, like with everything else. But postponing dealing with issues is more of an alcohol style effect.

Okay, so I won't try to rob you of that experience. I've felt creativity and perspective when doing psychoactive drugs, too.

The rate of good ideas (or rather, the feeling of that, as it is) was called "interpretation madness" by one podcaster.

When you relate alcohol with postponing one's emotions, perhaps this is because you've seen that happen. So have I.

But I've also seen dozens of friends get stuck in their emotional (and educational) development for years because of weed.

Don't forget the hashishins - the drug is literally named after a bunch of assassins who smoked to forget.

Yeah, that's why I mentioned YMMV. I've seen people turn aggressive on weed, but then again they were broken personalities to start with, and alcohol wasn't faring much better. I've witnessed one lady mentioning seeing blood run down the walls during whole trip. Tons of people just giggle with little additional insight. Don't know, maybe mindset thing.

It's a mind altering drug, can be quite powerful, can create (easy to shed) psychical dependence. As we say back home about fire - good servant, bad master.

>But I've also seen dozens of friends get stuck in their emotional (and educational) development for years because of weed.

Weed has different effects on different people. Assuming that weed will have the same effect on everyone is obviously a bad assumption.

There are tons of stories about many different things (gluten, msg, sugar, caffiene, coffee, tea, ice cream, tylenol, etc. etc.) having different effects on different people. Sometimes those differences are completely perceptional, and sometimes they are physical, but the outcomes are definitively different.

It's a deep cognitive bias to ignore this fact.

This statement , "postponing dealing with stuff.", is not true, at least not for everyone. At least in my case and according to several testimonies I read/heard.

I have never been more apt to deal with issues than since I started smoking weed.

I think different people use it differently. Certainly a lot of people use it to postpone dealing with stuff.

I do think it’s possible to use it as a tool to help you deal with stuff though, and I think that’s what the person I was replying to was doing.

>since I started to smoke weed.

There are some similarities in the effect, yes. But the problems with weed is it's effect is temporary and it messes up your awareness. Also you can not do in in many public places. Should I mention that certain types of meditation make you even more intoxicated? :)

I am curious, like what types of meditation ?

I'm sorry I will not give direct answer simply because it should not be taken lightly and without proper atmosphere and an experienced guidance can go out of control.

But if you keep your interest and intention to try experience something different - I'm sure you will find out.

And also, the effects of weed do not appear to be temporary. I still get the benefits (minus the drawbacks) hours and days after the last joint.

That’s fine but doesn’t mean people can’t get benefits from mindfulness! Both could be good

Mindfulness is a lot cheaper :)

Depends. I get better effects from meditation after having just completed a ten day course. But it takes a lot of time to get there and to keep doing it on a daily basis. If you used that time for something that earned you money I doubt it would work out cheaper.

And portable too.

Totally agree with you!

Weed does open the eyes to how much more relaxed you can be, both emotionally and physically: turns out that normally I have muscles tense that I never even knew about.

After that, you begin listening to your body and the brain more, and to track the state of them both instead of taking it for granted. That's how the way to ‘mindfulness’ starts. You learn that the two states are in a feedback loop: if you're tense, you get angry and anxious, which gets you more tense. To break the loop, you could of course hit a blunt, but that's not always an option, or at least not always the best one. Alternatively, you can take some time to free the brain from being hung up on the worries and to free the body from being contorted by tenseness.

Mindfulness is easier than getting weed. You can be mindful of your breathing for 5 seconds, right now. That's all it is, you just sit there letting thoughts come and go, trying to bring focus back to your breathing for 20 minutes. IMO it's better than coffee for acquiring focus and lasts the whole day.

I will try mindfullness some day

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 here) is what first started convincing me that mindfulness was something I should seek out and develop: https://samharris.org/podcasts/chapter-one/

I started doing it while laying in bed before falling asleep. Ended up with a daily morning practice sitting up on my bench.

I upvoted, but I found that it's a bit different from what you describe: It's a technique to stop obsessing about the past and the future.

For example, many people are so focused on planning for the future that it's unhealthy. Mindfulness can help to distract their minds for the unhealthy though pattern.

Either way it's good to work through a few different courses and find something that works. For example MBCT.

Regular expressions fall into this category. While they might take longer to master, you should know the basics after an hour.

I've been surprised at how often people convert long lists line-by-line. You can sometimes take what was a multiple-hour task and complete it with a handful of cryptic characters.

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)

Simple transformations can easily become complex to do with regex, so I've started using vim macros instead.

Regex don’t do transformations? All they can do is match strings.

Transformation by substitution is part of most dialects of regex, in the form of capturing groups.

Regex grouping expressions along with find & replace enable transformations.

If I have a list of names I’d like to reverse:

John Smith > Smith, John Anna Peterson > Peterson, Anna

I can write:

(.) (.)

And replace with:

\2, \1

Not sure if that’s part of some “official” regex spec but it works more or less everywhere.

(Of course if it was an actual list of names I’d have to be a lot more intelligent with double names etc.)

Almost. All regular expressions do is match strings and find the starts and ends of whole matches and match groups. And this is an important distinction since match group support adds quite a bit of complexity to the theory behind regular expressions and also increases their usefulness by quite a bit.

Regular expression libraries then often can use these boundaries, for the whole match and for groups, for transform the string (e.g. replacing what was matched by a group with some other content).

agree...regular expression is like magic to me

I spent an hour learning the basics - wildcards, whitespace, escape symbols and Character ranges are enough for them to be useful.

This always helps me in learning and debugging regex: https://regex101.com/

Can you really learn regex in one hour? I learned them so long time ago and in a gradual way that I have no idea how long it would take if you focus on it, but I feel like it would be more than an hour since I think most people would need to play around quite a bit to really grasp them.

There is a way of thinking when you deal with regexes that took me a while to get.

Reading the first chapter of ORiley's Mastering Regular Expressions was what made me get it and that was maybe an hours worth of time.

I found this site fantastic for improving my RegEx skills - https://regexcrossword.com/. Most people find solving puzzles more fun than reading text books, and the hands-on experience / forcing you to think rather than just read, can really help things stick in your memory.

Haven't done the Regex course, but Gary Bernhardt's https://www.executeprogram.com looks promising and haven't seen it mentioned

Skills are gained through practice. To get good at non-trivial skills requires more than an hour.

Knowledge is gained through insights. While a full understanding and implications of an insight can take a lifetime, an insight can be triggered in under an hour.

Now which insights are most valuable? That is always going to be personal and relative. But one of the insights that touches all people and is almost universally lacking or deeply misunderstood is the insight into money. What is it exactly, where does it come from, who controls it? ...

So that would be my choice. Spend an hour learning about money. Here is a decent and easy starter in under an hour.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bE8i-4HpKlM&list=PLyl80QTKi0...

Great suggestion. Also, might I recommend The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous. Half the book is about money in general, not just Bitcoin. Very well written.

https://saifedean.com/the-book/

I couldn’t think of a worse suggestion for a typical person looking for money management skills.

Sure, half the book isn’t about bitcoin, but half of it is, and that’s a problem for the 99% of people that will and should never interact with Bitcoin.

It's also a highly opinionated book, which is another problem for many readers.

Yeah, found that out from Goodreads as well. Most people think the middle 1/3 of the book is nonsense.

Most people should read more of a “home economics 101” type of book or cheat sheet. Most people don’t need to know how the global economy works.

I think Khan Academy recommended somewhere else in this thread may be a great choice for many people. Sal was a hedge fund analyst before starting his project, and he's a great teacher. I'd note, however, he has a classical liberalism bias, but for the most part he manages to stay reasonably objective.

I wouldn't say it's much about money management skills. It is an explanation about the money phenomenon and its properties. But okay, it's probably not something you can read in an hour.

> Here is a decent and easy starter in under an hour. > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bE8i-4HpKlM

It should be mentioned that the video presents a fringe theory (MMT) that is highly controversial among economists. I would recommend the Khan Academy series on banking and money as an alternative, even though it is longer than an hour: https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core-fi...

While the short video series is indeed also criticizing the traditional econo 101 money account (I'll leave it to the discretion of the viewer whether that critique is deserved or not), it does also address and explain the traditional views in a concise and accesible way in under an hour.

I agree they explain basic concepts in an easy and accessible way, but there are a lot of missing pieces intentionally omitted.

I don't know how many times refers 'creation of money by banks', but it was the essential point for sure, and totally wrong one. Rest of the video all depends on this.

Nobody disputes banks create the majority of the money. The dispute is on whether that amount is bounded (by some multiplier on Central Bank created money) or de-facto unbounded by a multiplier cooperatively controlled by the collective bankers, and probably even more specifically whether the latter has been impacted at all by the Basel accords.

Actually it is disputed, even 5th part of the video tries to address that. (Do banks create money or just credit?)

Which tries to prove that banks create money (not credit) cause money you put on bank is guaranteed by government.

But in reality, (even mentioned shortly on video), it is that your deposit is insured by banks via government.

"If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.", whether you call the duck "credit" or "money".

And beyond the capped consumer risk the financial crisis was prove that the fragility of the interconnected banking system will be fully underwritten 'above and beyond' by the governments if push comes to shove.

I would argue that an even more insightful view of money is to go one level up to “wealth”. Paul Graham covers it nicely: http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

Skip down to the “Money is not wealth” section.

PG's arguments seem cogent enough, until you realize you need to still go up one level, to understand that wealth is power. No, not that wealth gives power, but wealth _is_ power in and of itself.

And power may not be a zero-sum game exactly, but it is close to it

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 of seeking reassurance instead of allowing bad news to register. So again a good corrective.

And "To whom are they speaking"?

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

Is there a good translation available somewhere?

Yes indeed I had neglected the "To whom"...which reminds me how often I think a message is aimed at me (egomania) when in fact it has an audience I am not even aware exists...

Follow the money. If you can't see a person's motivations (esp. a politician), watch the result of their actions and assume that the outcome was their motivation and tell them that. Practically it doesn't matter whether they intended for that outcome to occur or not, because you still have to bear the consequences. If they predict the undesirable outcome, they should alter their behaviour. If the same behaviour repeatedly maps to the same outcome regardless of who is doing it, judge the person on the outcome. Drunk driving laws work like this.

My introduction to this were the excellent books 1421, 1434, and of course, the author's third book, The Lost Empire of Atlantis, which I found every bit as convincing as the first two and really drove home how credulous I'd been when reading them.

The Cyrillic script is fairly easy to learn and will let you phonetically read a bunch of languages (Ukrainian, Russian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Mongolian, and Serbian to name a few.) Each language has a few unique letters and pronunciation can vary slightly, but for the most part they are the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_script

IPA is also amazingly useful if you want to learn another language or even just learn to say someone's name correctly.

Having a notation for sounds helps you to understand and speak foreign languages, because you can think of what someone is saying in IPA and not in some flawed English transcription.

It definitely took me longer than an hour to learn IPA, but aside from that, definitely. I have an amateur interest in linguistics so I picked it up through reading Wikipedia articles on obscure languages, I would say I use it at least once a week.

Very helpful when learning languages that have sounds that aren't in a language you already speak, because your brain tends to map those sounds to similar sounds you already know.

Like how English speakers can't distinguish between French [u] and [ou] (/y/ and /u/ in IPA). Even if you can't hear it you can read about how to articulate it.

What's IPA? Googling that is gonna show a of links for beer.

The International Phonetic Alphabet

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alpha...

Also a little life hack that has served me well for over ten years, and rarely fails me: Wikipedia’s disambiguation page for those hard to Google acronyms. The format will be something like:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_(disambiguation)

If there’s a long list, generally it will be organized by context.

Absolutely. There are a ton of loan words in Russian that suddenly become available to you when you learn to read Cyrillic. Important words, like ресторан and бар (restaurant and bar).

I'd like to tag on Hangul (Korean script). It might not take an hour, but you can definitely learn in less than a day.

The script was created to be simple. As the inventor, King Sejong said: "A wise man can acquaint himself with them (the letters of Hangul) before the morning is over; a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days."

A couple of years ago I saw a cartoon for learning Korean script. Unfortunately I did not save that. It was similar to the cartoon posted by HN user rococode about Cyrillic script down here.

Anybody here knows what I am talking about?

This? http://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/

That's it!

Thank you so much.

Here's a guide to reading Cyrillic with some fun mnemonics and tips: http://i.imgur.com/bCiPTU5.jpg

Beware of Ы though :)

It tends to be hard-to-impossible to pronounce correctly for native English speakers.

Ы-ы-ы... :)

Half of Cyrillic is learned by the average HN reader if you tell them to think Greek rather than Latin.

"P" is an "r" sound (rho), "П" is a "p" (pi), etc.

I always wondered why in English the constant and the letter π pronounced as /paɪ/ when the Greek letter is obviously /pi/. It really grinds my gears, there's no pie in π!

Does Enlgish routinely localize foreign alphabet names? If so, it's bad practice. I believe no one in the world learns English alphabet pronouncing it arbitrary, and not as /ˈeɪ/ /ˈbiː/ /ˈsiː/.

Just a wild guess, but perhaps it's part of a vowel shift either in modern Greek, or modern English.

I know UK (bee-ta) and USA (bay-ta) pronounce Beta differently but am slightly ashamed to say I don't know how modern Greeks pronounce it. I understand it's derived from Hebrew's Beth, though?

Language is a constant curiosity.

In Greek letter β is actual pronounced like Vee-ta and in words it's read like latin V (Babylon is pronounced like Vah-vee-lon).

Modern, Ancient, or both?

"In Ancient Greek, beta represented the voiced bilabial plosive /b/. In Modern Greek, it represents the voiced labiodental fricative /v/."

For centuries, and probably still today, the language taught at school was Ancient Greek -- that's where I learnt the pronunciations. I don't know if pi had a similar change in Greek pronunciation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta

> Does Enlgish routinely localize foreign alphabet names?

All the time. In terms of pronunciation, the English love adding extra vowels and elongating others when pronouncing foreign words, especially names.

A classic example, which even the English are aware of and like to laugh about:

"Una cerveza por favor" will turn into "Ooona cervezaa pour favor"

but that's because English lacks pure long mid vowels ('e' and 'o' are diphthongs in English). But has nothing really to do with op's question.

It's only Greek (as far as I know), and because of the history of teaching Ancient Greek in schools in Britain. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_Ancient_Greek...

Note that the Latin alphabet is pronounced inconsistently all across Europe. I'm sure any 14 year old can precisely spell their name out loud in English, since they're going to be examined on it, but later in life people forget the difference between their own language and English, especially the vowels.

For example when speaking English, I find Danish people will mix up E and I if I spell a word with English pronunciation, and Danish people speaking English will often use the Danish pronunciation of J, K, Q, Y (roughly yoll, co, coo, oo).

It's a result of the Great English Vowel Shift which affected long vowels, and has affected pronunciation of Roman/English letter names (amongst other things) as well (think about the oddness of the name of the letter A in English, for instance) .

Doing the Greek course on Duolingo, I discovered that several of the pronunciations for Greek letters I learned in college are incorrect. In gross terms (I don't really know how to use IPA to be more specific here): beta -> veta, delta -> thelta, for example.

The comments about the Great Vowel Shift are correct, but I would also like to add that in English we already pronounce the Latin letter "P" /pi/, and it would hardly do to have the two pronounced the same way given the importance of ratio in math. So even if we wanted to adopt the Greek pronunciation, we probably wouldn't because of the confusion it would generate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift is why.

Some mnemonics about the subject. Mnemonics made me learn hiragana in 2 hours. Cyrilic in less. http://ryanestrada.com/russian/index.html

Sure, I wasn't able to write and read fluently in 2 hours, but I least I didn't need to take a look on a table anymore.

I started to write my personal notes in cyrilic. It's very fun and kinda cryptographic.

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 if I were talking to a mechanic about a problem with my car, since I don't know the terminology / worry more about appearing ignorant in the latter scenario). However, by taking time to consider what's useful to the mechanic & what I can report as fact vs my opinion, I can ask a cleaner question.

Related, it's also good to learn how to think about things as a collection of dependencies, and how to debug/analyse issues by testing different parts of that dependency graph to isolate variables and narrow down where in that graph an issue must exist. This both helps to ask cleaner questions, provide more background information, and often to resolve issues for yourself.

Start answering questions. You'll automatically learn how to ask questions.

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

Do nothing. Seriously. Allow yourself to become bored and you'll find your brain has suddenly got time to work on all the problems you mentally shelved. There's a good reason why a good number of ideas happen in the shower.

We call that meditation these days.

Although there are forms of "do nothing" meditation (which are, ironically, very easy to get wrong), most forms of meditation are precise ways to train attention and awareness. Quite different from the kind of "do nothing" where your mind wanders mindlessly into boredom.

I find it difficult to ever feel bored. I could look out of the window for hours and find infinitely many details to entertain me. Almost as if there is a positive offset to my "exitement" level... On the other hand regular activities (e.g. eating in a restaurant) start stressing me out too much, so those things become less enjoyable. Is this fixable?

Nothing strange, you just spend more time processing information than average people.

My mental model is that any point the brain is dividing its resources between execution of current events and processing old events. If it spends too much time processing old events then it has no resources over to properly execute in the now.

When this happens some people just drop the unprocessed tasks from the queue to free up resources while others (like me and you) starts experiencing immense stress forcing us to drop what we are currently doing instead.

One way is not the other, sometimes I wish that I could execute better in the now but sometimes others wish that their brains didn't automatically drop important experiences without properly processing them first.

How to fix this? One way is ADD medication, increasing your dopamine forces your brain to focus on the now and drop old packets. It helps me execute better but I definitely become less creative and have a harder time remembering what I did when I took them. I might feel more creative when I'm on them, but most of those thoughts will be gone without a trace since they weren't properly processed.

I have this too, and as the other posted said it might be ADD-related. My mother and sister were both recently diagnosed, I'm meant to find someone but it's been on my todo list for months now... while I look out the window :)

Or you really can't do nothing, do a brain dump. Get a piece of paper and a pen, and write down everything that's on your mind: projects you want to do, things to take care of, people you want to hang out with, errands to run, etc.

Then decide how many of these actually need to be done and when, and organize your next week/month based on this.

Great answer. I'm frequently crushed by the weight of day-to-day things, and only recently identified that it's when I intentionally separate myself from them to the point where I'm literally not sure what to do with myself that I get find inspiration and energy to go and do the really interesting, valuable things.

name checks out.

Most weeks, I take an hour+ long walk around a lake near my neighborhood, no electronics. I find the time helps surface vital things that don't come up day to day.

Going to church as a kid and young adult taught me how to sit and do nothing for an hour or so every Sunday morning.

I distinctly remember one time I was sitting there, mind aimlessly wandering when the solution to a bug I was having in my code on Friday popped into my head. I wanted to go straight into work to fix it!

Learn how to read quarterly earnings (and other financial documents).

It's amazing how simply it is to see if a company is making money / losing money and how that'll impact your view of the world.

For instance, Uber as it is today, is going out of or dramatically changing its business. Might not see that from all the hype, might not see it from all the user, but the terms sheet doesn't quarterly earnings doesn't lie ($1B in losses quarter-over-quarter).

Has helped me (and friends) reduce losses and improve earnings by identifying good / poor investments.

And how to learn it?

I think when I self-taught how to read public corporation financials, I did it just by looking up various definitions over time. There are not very many that matter. I did that when I was quite young, so I'm confident most any adult with even very basic financial literacy can do it in an hour to get started.

So for example, Uber, on Yahoo Finance (fairly simple data presentation):

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/UBER/financials?p=UBER

Columns displaying full fiscal years (you can change that to quarters optionally). And rows showing specific financial information, such as "total revenue" or "gross profit."

There are ~22 rows in a column year in the Yahoo data sets, each displaying different financial data. Of those, maybe a dozen are particularly important for an amateur to know.

So you'd look up the definitions for eg: revenue (sales), cost of revenue, gross profit, operating expenses, SG&A (selling, general and administrative expenses), operating income, income before tax, income tax expense, interest expense, net income. Another that can be useful as a new or amateur investor, is EPS, or earnings per share.

Investopedia is a reasonable option for learning the definitions, although there are numerous sites that will work fine.

Shouldn't take more than an hour to look those up and learn them at a basic level. After a bit of practice, you can scan a multi-year profit & loss (P&L) statement in a minute and have a great idea of how a company is fairing.

A balance sheet can be more complex, although it can similarly be boiled down to a dozen or so things that by far matter the most. You can get the definitions for those things and learn them in under an hour, then practice reading balance sheets.

Then last but not least for an amateur interested in such, would be to acquire practice at scanning through annual and quarterly reports filed by companies with the SEC. They're often obnoxiously long and overflowing with low-value bullshit, however only a small amount of the content tends to matter. I think the best way to keep that under an hour, would be to have someone mark off the segments worth always looking for / looking at in the filings, such that you can learn to jump to those sections to pick out important information. Beyond that, getting good at digesting company SEC filings will take a lot longer than an hour.

I wouldn't attempt to take on all of these things in under an hour, it'd be unreasonable. An hour each to get started however is doable. Starting with the P&L statement.

in an hour

Hilariously, I think most Gen-Xers learned from playing Railroad Tycoon computer game where the detailed score sheet is the three sheet financials. For a short period of time in the late 80s there were plenty of 12 year olds who understood quite a bit about financial statements and what they imply about how a game/business is being run.

I don't know the modern equivalent that motivates a game player to learn to read financials.

Obviously you can/could/do play RRT "just one more turn" all night long until 4am every day just like the Civilization series of games, although actually learning how the numbers interact with each other and in-game behavior probably took one hour spread out over time. None of the concepts are terribly complicated once you memorize the definitions and important ratios.

Honestly you could get a basic start at reading financials, if provided with experienced tutoring, in an hour of clock time while playing RRT.

It was kinda ridiculous half a decade later in high school taking econ class and seeing the dry and boring way they tried to teach reading financials. You could replace an entire multi week unit of the class with perhaps three class periods of playing RRT.

Losses, for years, are true for many successful and still around tech businesses.

Twitter is just one example. They didn't turn a profit until 2018.

I wouldn't write off Uber just because they're burning cash. Often this is done to secure markets by undercutting competitor pricing, or, aggressive R&D for future growth. Both of these tactics show losses for months, if not years, before things come to fruition.

I agree that learning how to read a financial statement is valuable, but you might want to look further than just "is this company making an acccounting profit." Uber's core business is highly profitable, that's why it's valued at $45 billion.

When you're reading a financial statement, look at each business unit's profitability separately, especially if those units are in fact separate businesses. Ubereats is not Uber's bread and butter. Look at cash flow and compare it with investment in growth via R&D and marketing. Look at how much cash the business requires in the form of working capital and on-going maintenance capex vs growth capex.

I would suggest googling Warren Buffett's primer on look through earnings. Greenblatt's "Little Book that Beats the Market" can also be read quickly.

I might start even simpler than that - learning how to understand the three basic financial statements (income statement, balance sheet, cash flow) and how they interrelate. This is super helpful in any job and in managing personal finance because understanding the statements provides a framework for understanding the dynamics of money (for example, understanding depreciation reminds you that the new car you just bought is declining in value, while the interest on your car loan is an expense).

> but the terms sheet doesn't quarterly earnings doesn't lie

There's an old saying that "profit is an opinion". It's harder to lie about revenue, but profit and loss can be adjusted by any number of accounting tricks that are perfectly 'legitimate'. Even auditors can miss the less-legitimate tricks.

A company might want to seem less profitable for for tax-reasons or because it's in a profit-sharing agreement (see Holywood Accounting). Or it might want to seem more profitiable to seem more stable (see Carillion and Interserve in the UK).

Reading a quarterly account does give a certain perspective on the health of a company, but quarterlies can be spun agressively by the company too.

Any recommendations from you side as learning resources?

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 of being kind of mediocre that keeps people stuck in the suboptimal local maxima of not touch typing.

If you use a computer in any way in the course of your job or daily life, touch typing is the single biggest improvement in productivity and quality of life that you can make. It is SO much faster and easier than hunt and peck.

Agreed. Touch typing + learning vim changed the way I work and boosted productivity to another level

I had a conversation with a friend who is an attorney and they blew me away with their off the cuff typing speed. It ended up inspiring me to get better at something I did all day....for someone who’s not sure where to start I’d start with gtypist typespeed or speedpad. Don’t forget about mavis beacon!

Second this.

Also more specific but if you are french the keyboard layout is not great for programming (because []{}';. are not straightforward). I’m more happy since I switched to QWERTY layout for programming. Since I touch type I can easily switch depending on the task.

This is also the case for the german(qwertz) layout because whoever designed it gave zero fucks about people that use it to program. I have been much faster since switching to qwerty. The only issue is umlaute(ä,ü,ö,ß) but I just use compose key(caps lock in my case) + a,u,o,ss to type those.

Just to add that this is not about QWERTY. The portuguese and spanish layouts are QWERTY, but still a pain [1]. Typically the best is to look for the US QWERTY layout or the international layout [2], the ones that have easily accessible brackets.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KeyboardLayout-Portuguese...

[2] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/106058/difference-...

I combined learning touch typing with switching to Dvorak[1] about 15 years ago.

Doing both together increased the time being annoyingly slow at typing, but it's so rewarding for the gain in comfort. (I don't touch type on Qwerty, but of course with some translating to Dvorak I can pretend.)

https://www.typingclub.com/dvorak is out a good place to start. Don't rearrange the keys on the keyboard! You're not going to look at them anyway.

[1] Nowadays there is also Coleman and variants. I still recommend Dvorak, but at the point someone is deciding between the two it's not worth an online debate.

I learned to touch type via https://www.keybr.com/ - Careful, you can get addicted to this site!

All other software felt like a much bigger grind, with fixed lessons that didn't fit my shortcomings. keybr adapts to your own typing, I made tremendous progress in just a few days.

I still use it a lot but also like to mix it in with https://zty.pe/ - fun little game.

I would add an odd perspective on this. I learned to touch type in grade school because the programming teacher covered all the keys with white stickers. The home keys had different colored stickers. And she setup a sheet of the keys on stands at each machine.

Adding stickers to your keyboard takes very little time, and will force you to learn to touch type. Everyone in our class was a typist within a couple weeks, and doing great by the end of the class.

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.

It definitely took me longer than an hour. I had been using the keyboard wrong for over a decade, so it was hard to undo. I did an hour every day for 2 weeks, I think, after which it stuck. I then wrote at 30-60WPM for a while, which was a bit of a pain.

Now I can get up to 100WPM, definitely appreciate that I took on the challenge.

I really need to do this. At one point I got pretty far on https://www.typingclub.com/, but slid back to hunt-and-peck as soon as I stopped it. I'm learning Vim now (which has a similar effect where you get immediately much slower before you get faster), and one of the guides I was reading said not to waste your time with Vim before you can touch type.

That said, Vim is easier because as soon as you understand how to switch in and out of insert mode it works as a regular text editor. Touch typing really brings me to a standstill.

After a few years of also failing like this I combined learning touch typing with switching to Colemak, and that finally made it stick (though ruining me for normal qwerty, but it was worth it). It takes a while though and there will be a really frustrating period when you can’t type either qwerty or Colemak.

I’d even go a step further and learn Dvorak. It’s surprising how much more relaxed your typing becomes vs. Qwerty.

Our school made a concerted effort to have us play touch typing games during our 'computer hour' or whatever it was. It was a great help.

Though by then myself and all my friends were pretty great from playing those old Sierra adventure games. The on-screen action often didn't wait for you to finish typing. So I guess my point is, you can make it fun too if you want.

Binary Search. (And its antithesis, exponential growth.)

In my opinion it is the single most important piece of computer science insight with the constraint that you only have less than an hour.

I often use binary search as a sort of thought experiment into whether something is "obvious" or not. As a child, I would say exponential growth is the one thing that I developed no intuition for between the age of 1–11. Even now, I regard exponentiation as the one really fundamental thing you possibly won't discover or have intuition for on your own and first see it at school (in contrast to addition or multiplication maybe). And even then, you have to accept exponential growth before you start to "understand" it. Maybe if you are Gauss, it's different for you...

Binary search is also a nice way of explaining counting, specifically the combinatorics thereof. You can write down the numbers [0,...,2^n-1] in binary, and then show how when you halve each time with binary search, you actually are just checking the leading bit (and then discarding it). When you have discarded all the bits in that way, then you have found the position you are looking for.

This is the first thing I talk about when someone asks me what computer science teaches a person and how it relates to real world. It covers a practical example and lets you touch on topics like algorithmic complexity. And it takes 5 minutes to explain. So I fill the rest of the time by demonstrating a simple sorting algorithm on paper and I finish off by drawing a simple maze and solving it with breadth first search by marking squares with numbers.

Since you mentioned sorting 'on paper', here's the sorting algorithm you'd use as a human sorting papers :)

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-manual-sorting-algori...

I'm currently teaching my child binary search. She thinks we're just having fun playing "Guess Who?"

Learn how to use Google Search effectively. It's a "language" we use every day. Mastering its few features can make any search so much more effective and precise:

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433

Completely agree. I teach web search to my first year students as a valuable life skill.

wow that's handy!

By using these techniques Google thinks that I am a bot and after 3 queries I have to fill CAPTCHA.

This is an addition to my First Year course that I teach for college students. It's week 1, along with media literacy and evaluating sources. Because they 100% need that week 1 more than what our Title IX policy is.

For those wanting more examples, some probably more nefarious, look into Google dorking.

Here’s an execellent presentation from Blackhat many years ago but is still relevant: https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-05/bh-us-05-lo...

Or even better, use duckduckgo!

interestingly "jaguar speed -car"

returns the speed of a ship called Jaguar, not the animal's

Basics of presentation skills like

- Using voice, body and mimics properly

- Not putting lots of text on slides and just reading them

- Using bullets instead of paragraphs

- Tell a story and use a less formal more friendly style (not always but applies to majority of technical presentations)

A nice video about the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vB2pl1QbY3I

Good call, reminds me to mention Julian Treasure on How to speak so that people will want to listen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIho2S0ZahI

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/phoenix_live_view

I haven't been this excited for a web technology since Rails came out.

neat! Of course, this makes me want to run React serverside...

Whatever floats your boat, I guess.

I don't understand why some folks are determined to see everything through a React lens. It makes sense for Facebook, which is why they made it. If you're doing CRUD, you are just torching your productivity.

Here's an example of tabular data, sorted, paged and filtered in 115 LOC including templates:

https://expo-pjf.herokuapp.com/demos/tabular

No transpiling, no API endpoints, no Redux.

I just think that React components are more readable and more maintainable than erb templates

Seems like cool stuff. Unfortunately, both of the StimulusReflex demos (Heroku apps) are giving errors right now. Maybe somebody hit a quota!

Quota was hit. Temporary: https://expo-pjf.herokuapp.com/

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

Excited for jsf, asp.net, Wt and UniGui. Full circle is complete.

Jose Valim responded to me saying its a fast, simpler, stateless and scalable solution compared to stateful solutions. For an example of stateful Java/ .Net app, I use a site that randomly logs me out, logs me out after inactivity, opening stuff in tabs are hit and miss (older ones let tabs mirror each other in background), normal UI actions has unexplainable pauses.

https://elixirforum.com/t/phoenix-liveview-is-now-live/20889...

Don't forget GWT!

Citation, please.

I can't yet prove that you don't understand what we're doing, but if I failed to communicate the end result, well, that's on me. It's a hard thing to summarize quickly, and I'm working on it all of the time.

I made similar functionality for Django a few years ago called Sniper. You write all your dom modification code as an Ajax request handler. In his handler you yield out a sequence of dom modification objects and sniper handles the rest. I couldn’t understand why this wasn’t a more popular approach.

Do you still use it?

The combination of websockets and morphdom vs Ajax polling and DOM updates is a major leap forward. Check it out!

Cool! Is there such thing for Flask? For Node?

Two suggestions.

1. Research a daily exercise routine that requires no equipment class, or gym, can be finished in 30 minutes and can be done while traveling. The goal should be to increase flexibility and strength, but not necessary build muscle. This stacks the deck in your favor against the main enemy of fitness - failure to do some kind of activity every day.

2. Understand the periodic table. It's one of the most successful mental models in science, and the basic principles can be grasped quickly. The most important division is the columns (groups). The column an element appears in tells you the ratio with which it will combine with other elements to form compounds. From table salt to amino acids, these rules predict elemental compositions of the things in this world you interact with all the time but may only rarely think about. From there, you can predict the products of reactions that you know nothing about. This macroscopic predictability can be explained rigorously through quantum mechanics or heuristically through Lewis theory, depending on how deep you want to go. For simplicity stick to the 8 main groups. The transition metals are a can of worms best opened after grasping the rest of the table.

Your first point reminds me of this talk about consistency in training and why russian wrestlers are supposedly always the best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fbCcWyYthQ

I've been applying this concept 5 days a week to do 20 min of exercise. It's so much easier to do more in the long run by doing it everyday and not going all out exertion.

Spend an hour learning whether you can safely attempt something.

There are two complimentary problems: some people don't realize that they can do something, and will never attempt it because they assume it requires training and skills and materials and time beyond their reach; other people don't realize that they shouldn't do something, because it is dangerous, because it is illegal, because it would require far more resources than they can reasonably devote to the project, because they just aren't good enough.

Regardless of which camp you tend to fall into, spend an hour every now and again determining whether something you're thinking about is feasible. Maybe you discover, "Huh, it's really easy to repair my running toilet, and very little can go wrong in this case". Maybe you discover, "Wow, if I screw up that electrical work I could electrocute myself or burn my house down, and I'd still have to get it inspected in my jurisdiction anyway so I might as well hire someone.". Maybe you discover that your startup idea would require an absurd amount of capital and would probably only ever have razor-thin profit margins at best, maybe you discover you could make a reasonable living self-employed.

This is underrated. Of course I knew most plumbing probably isn't too hard but I never gave it a try until I complained about fixing a leaking tap and a friend showed me how. I bought my own simple tools and have fixed a bunch more in our house by myself (it's just getting to that ~10 year age right now). Here a plumber will charge $150 just to show up.

That really opened things up for me and now I often check things like repairing drywall or replacing a door handle on YouTube. It's a really good way to gauge if you think it's something you can handle.

Logical fallacies - how not to think.

Kelly criterion - what can you afford to invest.

Polya's problem solving method.

Salary negotiation skills.

Rich Hickey's Hammock driven development (for non programmers too).

No Limit Holdem Poker flop and turn odds calculation.

If you play blackjack for money, you can improve your EV significantly by devoting an hour to learning (most of) basic strategy. If you already know basic strategy, you can learn the basics of card counting in an hour. (Actual card counting requires significant practice after you "know" it in order to maintain a correct count under stressful conditions.)

Agreed on learning blackjack. I went to Las Vegas about a month ago and spent the four-hour plane ride trying to memorize some of the pattern in a blackjack strategy chart. I didn't memorize all of the actions for every possible hand combination, but I learned enough to be dangerous (read: enough not to make dumb/obvious mistakes). I ended up quadrupling my money (only a few hundred dollars) and have been playing really well on a blackjack app on my phone.

Practice makes perfect is really the maxim here.

> Logical fallacies - how not to think.

Does anyone know a good app or website that drills you in recognizing logical fallacies from realistic examples/scenarios?

The best resource I have found is a fantastic old book - Straight and Crooked Thinking[1]

[1] http://www.neglectedbooks.com/Straight_and_Crooked_Thinking....

If you have even a small amount of math talent, you should be able to grasp the key ideas in Bayes's Rule that quickly iff you read https://arbital.com/p/bayes_rule_guide.

The biconditional is a pretty strong claim here (especially considering that you yourself have written well-regarded introductions to this topic).

It's spoken tongue-in-cheek, but in fact I don't know of any other intros including all of my own other efforts that I would make that claim about. Writing Bayes intros that actually work and introduce the most critical concepts is hard. Read the Arbital intro and compare others before you assume I'm joking or that the joke is false.

> iff

You're certain there is absolutely no other way? ;)

I know Bayes' rule, so I must have read this article.

No, he just said iff you learned it in an hour then you must have read that article. If it took you longer then you didn't necessarily read it.

A lot of devtools and configuration oddities can be learnt in an hour or less. One can become a fairly proficient/well informed user of any of these. The $VALUE for any/all of these are huge !

  * keyboard shortcuts for your preferred UIs
  * vim (/ your preferred $EDITOR)
  * tmux
  * make
  * readline
  * strace
  * gdb
  * valrind
  * tcpdump
  * wireshark
  * basic bash
  * all sort of server configs:
     - nginx
     - apache
     - postfix
     - ldap
     -...
  * compiling the linux kernel
  * understanding the sysctl tunables
  * pick a binary file format and understand it
  * pick a protocol and understand it
  * man proc 
  * iptables
  ...
  ...

You get the general idea. Personally, I sometimes feel the only reason I am respected by my colleagues is simply because I know a little about a lot.

If you have an hour to spend, don't look for the biggest bang of the buck / the most valuable. Explore something small that you use all the time / wish to understand better but didn't take the time.

This will also ease communication and working with sysadmins. Everybody wins!

Holotropic breathing. Someone in my town offers workshops on Conscious Connected Breathing. I would have never thought that just breathing for an hour would fundamentally change my life, yet here I am. My relationship with deep seated trauma has been completely transformed. Technically the breathing was 2 hours, but it felt like 45 minutes. It feels like I now have access to a powerful drug, and an accessible way of asserting agency over my feelings and body.

This is one of those body upgrades that falls in the same category as Lasik. Tuning your core senses and ways of obtaining your needs tends to ripple throughout everything you experience and do. This breathing upgrade changed everything.

Do you feel like learning this from someone in person was necessary, or could you get most of the benefit from reading or watching a video somewhere? If so, any recommendations?

inducing euphoria via mild hypoxia is not a good idea. The people touting this in the west mostly don't have the qualifications for doing this practice safely.

It wasn't euphoria. It was the realization that the finest intricate details embedded in the way I breathe, reflect my experiences, and my emotional connection to those details is strongly influenced by what I experienced when I was too young to remember. If anything, the way we breathed -- wouldn't cause hypoxia. Despite years of mindfulness meditation, in which I focused on my breath, that experience changed how I fundamentally relate to my breath.

Memorize important phone numbers (eg, close friends and family). Memorize at least one of your credit card numbers.

It's not uncommon to find yourself in a situation without a phone or wallet. Can't tell you how many times a would-be tricky situation was easily resolved by having a particular number in memory.

Those pieces of information have saved me a lot of trouble on several occasions!

I always dial my husband's mobile number by hand, and usually my close friends and family's numbers, too.

Credit card: I try entering the number, expiration and check digits from memory, then check it against the card before submitting the order. When the card number changes (bank decision or mine), I learn the new one by learning the differences - the first four digits are almost always the same, as that's a bank identifier. With AmEx, the variance was only in the last five digits, and was slight.

Don't forget to memorize the security code!

And expiration date!

Learning basic regex (regular expressions) will save literal days (maybe weeks) of time when editing code, text, or searching/organizing anything. I can't think of a single skill more useful on a computer.

While regex turns pretty hard fast, the basics can be picked up within an hour, or at least the ability to know what to reference when something needs to be done.

For the lame definition of valuable: if you are not in the practise of negotiating, try to negotiate in more situations and see what happens! Attempting to negotiate will not harm your situation when dealing with another party making you a genuine offer.

Even if you are a very mediocre negotiator, you might be able to easily eg obtain a somewhat higher salary when starting a job versus just accepting a given offer if you're not aware that negotiation is possible/expected.

(This doesn't work in all situations, some employment markets are highly regulated and don't have market rates, negotiation is more likely to produce better results if you are in a stronger negotiating position...)

If you have an hour, read https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

If you have a few hours, read through the book "getting to yes"

I think "Never split the difference" by Chris Voss is the better book if you can tolerate a bit of bragging.

In your opinion, what does Voss' book do better?

There's also a Farnham Street podcast with Voss: https://fs.blog/2018/01/chris-voss/

It doesn't focus exclusively on "let's make the pie bigger", and it's more hands-on. NStD gives you practical tips, GtY is more of a framework (and maybe an ideology).

Plus, it's also a book on active manipulation (in a wider sense) and an even better when read after "When I say no I feel guilty" which deals with defending against manipulations.

None of them can be read in an hour, nor can they be made a habit in a month.

> Attempting to negotiate will not harm your situation when dealing with another party making you a genuine offer.

I'm not sure what you are basing this on. I can say for certain that it's not true for me. Maybe it's only true in some negotiation contexts.

I sometimes sell stuff on the Internet. I put in a price and say this is firm. Many, many times, people contact me, and the first thing they do is try to negotiate the price down. I instantly blacklist them. I'm not here for the hassle. Either you are interested or not. So yes, if you are dealing with me, and you are truly interested, negotiating will harm your situation.

Also, I hate negotiating with a passion. I find it promotes double speak and adds uncertainty. Pick a price and stick with it, don't change the contract midway. If I can negotiate the price down, I won't really consider it a win. Instead, you will loose my trust. Why didn't you put in the true offer in the first place? It makes me feels that if I hadn't negotiated, you would have silently robbed me. I will thus assume you are still silently robbing me, as I'm not here to spend my time negotiating further down.

Are you using price negotiation as an example or are you reducing negotiation to price? Because these writers will say negotiation is everywhere (in relationships, dating, friendships, corporate politics, getting good customer service, any sort of search for a favorable compromise in any sort of way).

Learn how to sharpen a knife or chisel or axe or other tool. Suddenly every piece of hard steel turns into a tool when you know how to get it sharp.

All you need is some abrasive (e.g. sandpaper at 600 and 2000 grit) and a piece of leather to strop it (optionally some chromium oxide or something for honing compound).

Then you can level it up from there and learn how to heat treat steel (you'll need a blowtorch) and you can make sharp and pointy things in all shapes and sizes.

For example I once needed a very small chisel, so I made one out of a two inch nail. It wasn't great (not hard steel, didn't retain an edge for long), but it got the job done.

Reminds me that my friends are laughing at me that I am having SAFETY knives

You can learn the basics of DJ-ing on digital decks in an hour. However, it can take years of practicing to reach a level of a mediocre DJ who can lead a party with a lot of people you don't know. DJ-ing is a surprisingly difficult underappreciated skill, which can also be very rewarding when you learn it. The decks become your musical instrument on which you can modify the original music as much as you want and glue together pieces in a myriad of possible ways to build one long running non-stop musical track.

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

It's super useful if you're on the phone, having to spell out a list of letters, e.g. a postcode

If the other side also knows NATO alphabet. There are too many uncommon words for the average helpdesk operator

That's an interesting thought that I didn't consider. In a decade or so of using it I've never, anecdotally of course, had a problem.

^---- yes, this is exactly it. Especially since most CSRs you're going to be talking about don't have English as their first language and don't have the same cultural background as you.

That's why the people I know who use it at work don't use it while on the phone with Comcast.

The other side will either know the NATO alphabet or be able to understand it anyway. It was designed to be interpreted and used by non English speakers, since most of NATO doesn't/didn't speak English. I've used it dozens of times, zero errors.

It's really good enough to be considered a sort of spoken language Golay code.

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

If I want to spell out something over the phone, I'm saying:

Hellen, Eve, Lawrence, Lawrence, Ophelia, Wallace, Ophelia, Robert, Lawrence, Donald.

But doesn't it sound so much cooler and so much more badass to say

hotel echo lima lima oscar whiskey oscar romeo lima delta?

Makes the person on the other side of the phone immediately have the kind of respect that one would have for someone who can order air strikes :-D

I’m reminded of an English comedy sketch, one police operator is saying “Tango Whiskey Foxtrot...” on the phone, the detective next to him “Tango.. Tango.. Diet Coke & Fanta”

To which the recipient might be thinking E, E... no wait the first E must have been something else then... ah H, so: H E... slow down a bit... why isn't this person using the same phonetics as the other callers...?

Is that first one an "H" or an "E"? Is that second one an "E" or a "V"?

That's the problem with home-made solutions, across any form of lossy medium (aka static or accents), the home-made replacements are not always distinct enough.

Because life is fleeting and it's neat and what are you doing in traffic anyway?

honestly me reading credentials over phones would probably end up making this a positive roi investment within months. ymmv though.

And no, the credentials don’t warrant a ‘eavesdropping’ threat model, they barely matter at all.

Go through your expenses and identify waste. Even if you’d don’t keep a budget check your credit card statements etc. cancel unrequited subscriptions, haggle utility bills, refinance loans, etc.

But looking at my credit card statement gives me anxiety.

Yes that’s a big problem. Not sure on the solution to that, but over time you get used to it. Just think of it like any other math exercise.

That's the point! Thinking about money should not be a cause of stress in your life. If money is stressful then budget/expense tracking is what you _need_.

Since we got married me and my wife have been tracking every expense down to the penny. The net result has been no fights about money, everything was known and obvious from the records. Every so often we come together, look at the numbers, and decide things. You might decide an expense is worth it, or you might decide an expense is not worth it. Without measurements you cannot make that decision, with measurements you are in control.

Once you are in control money should become a tool, and a source of freedom to spend on what you value.

That means you spend too much. It is good to know such things in advance. Not knowing never makes anything better in the long run.

Meditation.

Seriously.

Take time to focus on your focus. For me, it's a really hard exercise, and before I really started to practice it daily, I always had this a priori that spending time on "doing nothing" was just a waste of time. I couldn't have been more wrong, of course.

I still feel like I have much progress to do, but now I understand how practicing the art of focusing on focus (aka "concentrate on here and now", "mindfulness" and so on) helps to focus on a selected task in general.

Also if you have indeed a [30-60] minutes vacancy window, having a nap is a good option. Especially if you have to solve some mind blowing issue. Trust the power of you unconscious force. I can't put my hand on it right now, but there is an excellent essay by Pointcarré on this topic.

Ohh Boy, I feel relate to your explanation a lot. After heavy gaming and diagnosed with ADHD. I started to think a lot about how we focus how our attention span various to the content. And it became obvious that we're losing long focus ability which is really hard to improve.

For that there's really nice book called Stillness is the Key from Ryan Holiday and Chop wood and Carry Water they're perfect examples to teach how precious focus and stillness is.

Meditation isn’t something to learn within an hour, unfortunately. It took me really much time to actually learn how to meditate but now as I know how to do it it’s awesome.

Well, there is two side of it: - of course, meditation is an art that you don't master in the minute (and that most likely can always be further strengthen); - anyone which has a bit of free time can practice it, all it asks is the will to improve its meditation skill to quickly feel practical benefits.

Funninly I just went for the Wim Hoff fundamentals course yesterday and it fits the description very accurately.

You can learn it online by watching the video or downloading the app and shouldn't take more than an hour. But preferable do the cold exposure part of it with somone around.

The breathing technique by itself is still great though

I had an accident last week and find the Wim Hof breathing tremendously helpful with managing the pain and inflammation.

I highly recommend learning this technique. It's free, you can find plenty of YouTube videos. A "proper session" should take 20 minutes (= until your breath retentions are at least 2 minutes long and you feel the effects).

The cold exposure is also great to experiment with. I find that regular cold exposure, learning to control the gasp reflex and calming yourself down in spite of the feeling of the ice is something very useful to learn and a "skill" that carries over to general pain and stress management.

I am surprised to find this here. I've been practising on and off for the last three years. It's well worth the investment :)

Keyboard shortcuts for Excel + what exactly a Pivot Table is

I laughed at how true the pivot table point is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c

Qualifies at 54 minutes!

Learn how to use deals site to save a ton of money: https://slickdeals.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=9

I can't overstate how much money you will save by simply setting up alerts on sites like SlickDeals and learning the basic lingo like YMMV, B&M, PM etc...

At the very least learn about the TofuVic's purchase point for toilet paper so you don't waste money wiping your ass.

How doesn't that just become a way to buy crap you don't need, or to undo any potential savings you might gain by losing time hawking over a "deals" forum?

It's weird that they forbid any user from Europe because of data privacy law.

This is a weird side-effect of Americans reacting to recent EU GDPR legislation.

For SlickDeals, you might want to use the following URL, as it'll give you 80 items per page (vs. the default of 30):

https://slickdeals.net/forums/filtered/?f=9&perpage=80

Basic social skills. How to make small talk, especially with non-technical people. It's easy to learn, but if you're a hacker then it probably doesn't come naturally and so it must be learned. But you will get enormous leverage out of learning it.

IMO if you're the kind of person who needs to improve on basic social skills, an hour of practice is probably not going to be enough. You also didn't describe how this could be practiced in an hour?

I would start here:

https://www.improveyoursocialskills.com/basic-social-skills-...

Like any other skill, you are not going to master it in an hour. But an hour of study and practice can produce dramatic results.

Read Schopenhauer „The Art of Being Right: 38 Ways to Win an Argument”. It’s a short read, but mind opening if you’re new to the subject. If it seems too long then just read some shortened version. If you still have some time after that then go to “list of cognitive biases” Wikipedia entry and continue there.

I believe it is crucial to understand what tricks others are using in arguments. And also what’s our cognitive limits and logical fallacies when trying to understand the world.

Looking at Amazon reviews of it, one of the commenters says it's a rehashing of the 1896 book "Art of Controversy", available online free (public domain).

A quick search online shows an example of it here:

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/controv...

Does it seem the same to you?

All are in public domain now. Read the one i mentioned as it is shorter read. If you like it then go of the other one.

Learn how to juggle 3 balls.

Not only is this a lot of fun, it will also train your reflexes. It's like having a hidden superpower. The next time you are about to drop something, you'll be amazed how quickly you'll be able to reach and catch (don't try this with sharp objects, obviously).

Lots of resources available on how to start. Here's one: https://youtu.be/x2_j6kMg1co

CSS Grid is very useful, and it's fun:

https://tobireif.com/posts/layout_fun_with_css_grid/

The spec is great for learning Grid:

https://www.w3.org/TR/css-grid-1/

One minute: what a dechoker is and how to use it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkqgexP_NNE

One hour (because as easy as it looks you're gonna have to do it at least 4 times): deboning a chicken: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfY0lrdXar8

I think to match Pepin, I'm gonna have to do it at least 4,000 times.

This is horrible. I'm not even a vegetarian but I can't watch it.

Reading a syntax overview to the Wolfram Programming Language: https://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/Syntax.html

This will allow you to program in the (in my opinion: extremely underrated) language that WolframAlpha is built over. WPL is more concise than any other LISP, and has extremely powerful visualization capabilities built in. In fact everything is built in. You almost never need to import a library to get something done.

And it recently became free software! And it lets you play graphs as sound!

I tried the Syntax guide. I found

https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/wolfram/

to be easier to learn.

Keyboard shortcuts.

Entirely changed my computing experience once I stopped using a mouse for everything except graphic design-related tasks. You can learn most of the big ones for your most used apps in an hour, keep a cheat sheet nearby yr PC in case you forget some. Like cooking its an easy skill to build quickly if you're a knowledge worker since you're always in front of a computer anyway.

How to ask better questions.

Before asking any question, I now ask myself:

* Is this the right person to ask? How likely are they to know the answer? Should I trust their answer?

* Would knowing the answer change my next step?

* Have I spent a reasonable amount of time trying to answer the question myself? Am I depriving myself of an opportunity to learn?

I would suggest learning juggling a basic 3 ball cascade. It’s great for training concentration and coordination, and also quite addictive.

I learned this back in the early 2000's because I moved to a new city, didn't have a cellphone, and was waiting for my landline and internet to be hooked up. So I literally knew no one and had no contact with the outside world. Then, seriously, I happened to find a set of juggling balls in the back of the closet of the room I was renting—the previous tenant must have forgotten them there.

With literally nothing else to do, I taught myself to juggle. Took me longer than an hour, but not all that much longer. (Started with one ball tossing back and forth, then two, before moving to three.)

That rings true, I spent a weekend in the 90s to teach myself. I taught a bunch of people to juggle since - usually with an instructor an hour to reach something like juggling is achievable.

For most people this will take more than an hour to master, but once you get to around five tosses and catches you've figured out the pattern and the rest is just practice.

I have to say, I was skeptical of this whole thread based on the title—what could you really learn in an hour of any true value? Well, it turns out a lot of things. I even added one to the list. Now I know how to properly wrap cables and tie my shoes. Thank you for posting this.

Learn very basic weightlifting, like how to design sets (12 or so light reps to warm up, aim to run out of energy around 8 reps for "production" sets, do about 3 production sets a couple minutes of rest in between). With only an hour, limit to relatively safe machines (LOL at learning olympic squats correctly and safely in only an hour of coaching).

If you need motivation for why human bodies need to lift, "The Barbell Prescription: Strength Training for Life After Forty"

Alternatively you could just read Starting Strength. The only exercise that's difficult in technique is the Power Clean, and you can replace it with Chin-ups. Even Rip does it in his Practical Programming book.

Seriously though, your stabilizers are important and machines do nothing for them.

Its all in what you want to do. The barbell prescription book goes into great detail on medical research on the effects on blood chemistry and general health of the ratio of muscle to fat and so on. For that, it doesn't matter if all the muscle in my body is in my left calf or stabilizers or whatever. On the other hand SS and similar IS vital if you're going to work a blue collar job and lift and install plumbing all day long at a construction site. Another topic is the machines make it virtually impossible to hurt yourself no matter how dumb you are WRT liability insurance reasons, so they're quite safe, whereas everyone doing free weights eventually ends up in the ER self inflicted.

Overall the machines are BOTH a good gateway and a good terminal activity. Wanna move up to free weights, can do! Wanna just have better blood sugar and osteoporosis outcomes for the rest of your live and never move up to free weights, can do!

Free weights do nothing for stabilizers anyway. Run the trig and static engineering numbers. Sine of 10 degrees is about 0.2 so for people starting out, benching 50 pounds with ridiculously bad form only loads the stabilizers (triceps, maybe?) with 10 pounds at 10 degrees off ideal, and even noobs start triceps extensions way more than 10 pounds. And "experts" have perfect form so there's "zero" load. Due to trigonometry you can't work your delts merely by using ridiculously poor form when bicep curling. The whole stabilizer issue is a bro-science thing that requires not running the math or engineering statics vector diagrams.

If stabilizers were not important, one would be able to lift exactly the same free weight as you do on a machine (after practicing form with light weight under supervision for a while). Is that true?

How to frame your photos, as in where to point the camera at. Most family members could skip a level or five of they had the patience to internalise a 15 minutes YouTube video.

How to fight and take a punch.

People are capable of taking much more punishment then they think. With an hour of practice, you can overcome the initial fear and act much more rational when push comes to shove.

I understand that this is not just "intense concentration" while sitting behind your desk, but that is exactly the point of learning, get out of your bubble.

So, what's your advice for practicing this? Ask a friend to punch me in the face for an hour?

I suggest Brazilian Jujitsu. The rolling aspect of training trains you mentally to not to panic and problem solve the situation, deal with pressure, build cardio and relearn how to breathe, and adapt to different body types. Unlike striking martial arts, less worry of CTE.

In regards to what can be learned in an hour, a roll with someone gives you an idea of what it is like to be on the ground with someone in a fight without striking, biting, eye gouging, etc.It is a decent simulation if what would happen when on the ground and the idea that if someone doesn't honor your tap, you can be in big trouble.

I'm not exactly sure how to word it, but my suggestion is privacy related: the implications of publicly sharing information. Why? Because these days, once the cat is out of the bag, oh boy, is it out. I believe this is important for young and old.

Young, because statistically they still have a big life ahead, and realizing this will save them harm, and potentially make them more private about sensitive subjects. I'll hold my breath when my daughter gets in her teenage years. I doubt they'll teach her this at school (it absolutely should be taught though).

Elder, because society has changed so much, and once you're older it is more difficult to keep up (and part of you doesn't want to anymore). Getting on the bandwagon is difficult, and once they do, this part should be an integral part of say "how to use the Internet" (or "how to use your first smartphone"). It could also lead to higher participation of those who are afraid of new technology, thereby leading to more inclusion.

The lesson could have some good examples, could be a workshop, or an open dialogue. Perhaps even a game.

A more advanced lesson two could have a more advanced level of how sharing information privately can become public (by government, blackhats, "freindz", broken cryptography, etc).

I don't know if an adult can do it in an hour, but learning to ride a bike is very useful/freeing.

I have a friend who did learn to ride a bike in an hour. I was extremely surprised, but he is the fastest learner I know so I don't think it's typical.

Frankly it is easy as an adult, even if falling is probably worse.

You would not believe how uncoordinated children are, and how much better you are at using your body a few years after it finishes growing and you've had some time to get used to it.

(I mean, developing proper instincts about stopping and turning can take some time, but just mastering going slow and not falling down isn't too hard.)

Boxing / self-defence.

While you'll have to do a lot of practice to have the moves come fluidly and naturally, you can learn the basic principles of boxing or self defence very quickly if you do a 1-on-1 session with a pro.

Even for myself - someone that does 4-6 hours of boxing a week, it was incredibly valuable getting a couple of 1-on-1 sessions and having my technique scrutinised.

Learn how to make good coffee - Here is for example how to make a great cup of coffee using an Aeropress. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmjPjZZRhNQ&t=252s

Learn the basics of economics - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0

Learn how to journal.

Learn the basics of meditation.

Learn how to learn stuff using flash cards - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzCEJVtED0U - I used this method to learn Finnish (https://mansour.blog/how-to-learn-any-human-language-the-sto...)

Learn how to make good food - making good (amazing) food is surprisingly easy

I wish I had learned -- in fact I wish everybody learned -- labor economics before going to college. That we expect kids to make such a financially momentous decision without having any idea what they're doing is absolutely nuts.

(Maybe read a microeconomics textbook first; labor economics is a specialization of that.)

Couldn't agree more! It's amazing how people can research the best gadget for days but when it comes to taking a mortgage its out of a sudden "I don't have time to research this"

This is not really a tech skill, but it can help you save some time a couple of times a day which you can then spend on other things ;) Relearn how to tie your shoelaces: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WgSwvDkJVxE

I was going to post this same tip. I have been using this method for a few years now and it's great. It takes 15 minutes to learn and then you have to just stick to it to make it quicker.

If you are on a unix system with vim installed, fire up "vimtutor" and learn basic vim usage. At worst you become at least more productive on the de-facto editor installed on most unix systems. Personally I find myself incredibly more productive using vim over most other text editors.

Learning to use a fire extinguisher. It's not hard, but not obvious either. And you don't want to have to figure it out on your own when you actually need it.

I personally had a training course at work, but I guess you can also find videos on the internet.

If you have to work with the linux or mac command line at all as part of your job, 'sed' and 'awk' are 2 commands that will boost your productivity hugely.

Very useful, but one hour might not be enough to get good enough to reach for these commands when you need them, and these skills require some maintenance.

I use sed routinely for string replacement. Don't know how to use it for anything else. I also use grep, find, and wc routinely. For anything more complicated I reach for a full-featured programming language. I never feel like I'm missing anything.

Learning how to solve a Rubik's Cube using the "beginner's method." Maybe not as valuable as you were hoping, but getting the methods down feels good and gives you a new hobby of competing against your own best times.

I remember that I couldn't be bothered to learn the algorithms for the middle layer so I just learnt F2L (First 2 Layers) to solve that part. Never learnt the advanced stuff beyond that though.

I learned how to solve Rubic's cube when I was in high school as some kind of party trick, with the beginner's method. Years later, I still remember the movements and recall them in a short notice. Couple of months ago I attended a conference where companies where giving out swag and gift cards to those who give their contact details or watching a demo. After the demo, they told that if I can solve a Rubic's cube and be one of the first 20 to do it, they will give $25 gift debit card. I solved it in a couple of minutes and got my card and had delicious Buffalo Wings with it, so, definitely worth it :)

How to shuffle cards, especially without needing a surface to do it.

This video did it for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdCia_d1u5c

I'm gonna try this weekend, thanks!

Don't get me wrong, that's neat, but do people often find themselves needing to shuffle cards without having a surface?

Pick up any GNU/BSD tool you use but don't fully understand and read the man page. There is often something valuable that you'll learn in an hour.

Learn to tie the basic knots. 3 to 5 knots will cover 95% of the situations you'll ever encounter. They're easy to learn. When someone tosses you a rope, you have no excuse for not knowing what to do with it.

When someone tosses me a rope I'll toss it to you ;)

Download Vimium and install it in the chrome browser and then learn the shortcuts. It should take less than 30 mins to learn and practice.

https://github.com/philc/vimium/blob/master/README.md

Understand the emotional intelligence matrix. It is almost trivial to learn but since it's not taught in computer science schools, I had to spend a decade learning its' lessons the hard way.

https://positivepsychology.com/emotional-intelligence-framew...

Your performance on all its' disciplines can scientifically be assessed with an emotional intelligence test and given that all organizations consist of people it is very important to get good at it.

For people building websites, learning what the experience is like for your users with old hardware or limited bandwidth. Buy an old used Chromebook (< $100 shipped), and use the bandwidth throttling feature in Chrome's dev tools to ratchet down to low end DSL speeds. See if your site is still usable.

Maybe the basics of "How to Win Friends and Influence People." https://fs.blog/2012/07/how-to-win-friends-and-influence-peo...

Then applying it will take longer though.

Real friends don't let friends read "HtWFaIP".

The key for reading HtWFaIP is to understand and practice sincerity.

"The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made." - Hippolyte Jean Giraudoux

Don't be that person. Cultivating genuine sincerity is part of your own self-respect. If you genuinely do that, you can safely read HtWFaIP.

Soldering is a useful skill that's easy to learn the basics of, and can be done in an hour. You'll need to have bought a basic soldering kit before you get to it though. :)

I agree on this, but even better, stick welding. I learned how to stick-weld in my shower (since it was the only place i could do it without risking of burning down my apartment) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-Ro9VqLwfU

Oh, interesting idea. Recently learned to do gasless MIG welding, as it's pretty easy and the gear is cheap. Similar to stick in that way.

Wanted to learn it a few years ago, but didn't have a suitable place I could do so. Hadn't thought of "in the shower cubicle".

SQL is a good fit for one hour I think.

Not « valuable » for work but interesting for stimulating other parts of your brain, which can have interesting side effects:

- juggling (3 balls). Great for arms and hand coordination and trusting your left hand.

- drumming (common patterns). Good gateway to music production.

SELECT INSERT UPDATE DELETE

If you're going to write software for a living, learning those three simple commands well can save you so much future pain. Just do it.

> Are there any quick wins that 30 ~ 60 minutes of intense concentration can generate?

Well, the _most_ valuable ones were probably taught to you in kindergarten, eg tying ones shoes, writing your name, etc. ;)

I feel like in my profession (AI/Devops/SRE), a lot of knowledge is high risk (you never end up using it) high reward (if you do need it, it's super valuable). Look at those 'things every programmer should know about X' pdfs. They're like 100 pages long and full of obscure stuff programmers don't actually need to know. Similarly, the LDAP for Rocket Scientists book most folks don't need to know, until you're trying to debug and authentication issue, adding a new schema, or trying to speed the system up.

If there is anything truly simple yet valuable, it's probably pretty basic, like 'know your IDE, know your VCS'. And probably kinda meta -- learning about learning. Random ideas:

- An hour running through chapter 10 of the git book can help users understand what git is actually doing

- an hour running through a debugger tutorial on your IDE of choice can make up for a lifetime of printfs

- learn a note taking system like Stanford Notetaking system

I suspect what people really want from this question is more "whats the most valuable thing people haven't yet learned in an hour?" Which kinda depends on the person, no? But I do plenty of interviews, and here's a small idea set:

1. Learn statistics. Virtually nobody knows anything about them. Even AI engineers can't discuss the central limit theorem. I'm still re-learning this stuff but it seems dang useful for discussing how to tune alerts.

2. Learn spreadsheets. With the advent of google docs and shared storage, spreadsheets you make are basically for life. That dramatically changes the cost benefit analysis of planning documents. Learning how to build and reuse them can help in a variety of contexts.

3. Use git for settings and configs, even personal and minor stuff. I have my homedir in git, and that forms a framework for studying settings. Learn a new timesaving vim setting, add it to git and it's mine for life. Add a new shell alias, and it's available on every system I use regularly -- I have a Chef cookbook for setting up my user that includes checking this repo out.

I think one great and simple skill would be use Google more efficiently. This will give you better access to global knowledge so better generic problem solving abilities. See a complete list of google operator https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/

Learn blind typing with 10 fingers, if you were not doing that yet.

Not only will it be a timesaver for the rest of your life, but it allows you to get into flow much easier, where your thoughts stream effortlessly to the screen.

And if you thinking about re-learning how to type anyway, try doing it on an optimised but common layout like Colemak or Dvorak. Basically no extra cost, but even greater savings!

Ugh.

I continue to be skeptical that there's any substantial performance improvement. The published research is obviously ambivalent-at-best. And my anecdotal life experience also make the Dvorak typists look pretty mediocre (including the ones who've been doing it for a decade).

On the other hand, a very real cost is that if you want to pair, or receive coaching from a mentor, or coach someone, or just let a significant other type a quick email on your laptop, that works poorly. Though you could view that as a perk, I suppose. Also keybindings optimized for physical layout on QWERTY will no longer apply to you, which can be inconvenient.

I'm sure that depends on how you define "performance" -- for me, the greatest benefit is in hand comfort, not speed.

Switching between Qwerty and Colemak for any of the reasons you mention has never been a problem for me either. Obviously, going from Colemak to Qwerty is going to be inconvenient for the sole reason that Qwerty is inconvenient, but that's only because you become aware of how much you contort your fingers unnecessarily once you've been typing for a while not doing that.

I agree keybindings can be an issue, though. For me, personally, it's minor compared to everything else, though.

Two hind-sights for an hour :

- Learn how to fall.

In skateboarding : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hundbrub8iQ

In a more general way, it can be enlightening because it is a fundamental learning principle. When confronted to something new, you will make mistakes, what you need to learn is not how to avoid mistakes but how to avoid catastrophic failures (i.e. how to reduce the cost of mistakes).

It's learning how to fail safely so that you can do more cycles and let exponential growth due to iterated processes settle.

- Learn to spot cycles.

A cycle is a sequence of actions that can be repeated. Ideally cycles would repeat indefinitely but usually they have side effects. Characterize the cycles : timescale, resources created and consumed, compare the value relatively to the values at the same instant of the previous cycles. Is it good or bad ? How frequently can it be repeated ? Can I do every part of the cycle on my own ? How can it be optimized ? And for almost cycles : How to close the loop.

Many people think that if they just become successful they will be more happy, but it's actually the other way around. First comes happiness, then comes success. A happy life will be a successful life.

In my experience, this is not true at all. When I had a solid job, I was the happiest person alive. When I was struggling to find a new job, I was the most depressed person alive.

It's not just me, there was a study saying that money correlates to income perfectly - up to $70 000, after which there is no correlation at all.

Unless your definition of "not successful" includes people who make enough money to paying living expenses.

Indeed economy security is one of the corner pillars of success. Think of it as part of the hierarchy of needs. But you can be upper class and still feel miserably, then you think if only my startup takes off I will be happy. But that will only lead to more work, not happiness. It's better to do something you love, be around people you love, etc, which is more likely to lead to success.

Learn how to give and receive feedback, both privately and at work

Too many times do we give feedback to people we both care of (and don't) in a way that hurts the individual rather than help them.

If the aim is to create better relationships with those you care for, then study feedback techniques, so you can deliver it in a constructive, radical candor way.

Useful in personal situations as well as at work.

Read a few chapters in 'a mind for numbers' to understand how learning works in the brain. It will give you an idea about how much effort it takes for your brain to actually learn something, and so will help you plan anything you'll want to learn in the future. In my opinion, they should teach this knowledge in schools everywhere.

CPR. Basic first aid. When your child or spouse is choking, bleeding, or unconscious, you will not care about anything else.

How to cook eggs.

Pick two or three styles of egg and spend an hour (and a few dozen eggs) preparing them over and over keeping notes on the conditions and outcomes of each generation.

I purchased “The Food Lab” by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt and it completely changed things for me. He spends an extensive amount of time in the book describing techniques and tools in a very hackerish kind of way that finally taught me to cook at a level closer to my wife who spent her earlier years working in restaurant kitchens.

Cooking eggs, in any variation, is discussed at length in the book and it’s well worth the read.

"Cooking for Geeks" is another newcomer-friendly resource in the same vein.

Other good books in this vein are Ratio by Michael Ruhlman and On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee

Eggs are interestingly one of the hardest to do in cooking. So it seems like something you can do in a few minutes, but not really.

Basic (office) exercise and stretches. I've gotten old(er) and really wish I'd done those for my neck and shoulders.

It makes such a difference, this and posture. I've had so many injuries and joint problems from not doing this, luckily I've made it a routine in my 30s

It is probably a bit out of context but my car's battery died yesterday. Apparently I left the headlight open and for some reason it did not beep while I was leaving the car.

I learned how to jumpstart a car. Definitely a valuable skill.

How to Solve a Rubik's Cube:

https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-solve-a-rubiks-cube-step-...

The concept of diminishing returns, perhaps, together with the corollary, by which I mean the fact that you can often get easier profits or make progress a lot more easily by switching to some less explored avenue.

Does this apply to PhDs?

I've seen it in a subcomment, but here it goes anyway: to tie your shoes properly. At least avoiding the granny knot [0], and I would suggest using Ian's secure knot [1], too. It's been a life changer for me not to stop all thr time to re-tie my shoes.

[0] https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/grannyknot.htm

[1] https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/secureknot.htm

I use a similar knot derived from the "standard" (bunny) knot, rather than the two-loop knot. You just send the bunny around the tree twice, and you similarly never need to retie your shoes while wearing them.

This is a great and very useful site.

How to cut vegetables.

There's a lot of people with a fear of cooking, but it really is not a magic skill.

There are just a few techniques that need to be learned to get started and those don't need hours and hours to be understood.

Taking value literally, spend an hour learning how salary negotiations for new jobs work and how to ask for & get more. patio11 has written an excellent intro to the topic, and if you're an entry-level Silicon Valley engineer, this is easily worth a cool million ($25k/yr * 40 years) in lifetime earnings.

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

Meditating. You can learn in 5 minutes.

One of the easiest ways is using an app like Calm or HeadSpace.

Alternatively, just sit down wherever you fee comfortable and won't get interrupted for a few minutes, close your eyes, then count your breaths from 1 to 10, then repeat, start from one of you get lost (very common).

Regular meditation practice can help you in many ways, the most valuable to me is the improved ability of staying present, which seems to improve a lot of different aspects of my life.

Git. It has few commands and can be rapidly learned in one hour, mastering commands such as

Git fetch

Git pull

Git commit

Git push

Git merge

Git log

This.

I would add -> understand how git works. The difference between merge and rebase, what Head is, what Tip is, etc.

that's out of 60 minutes time

No, it isn't; you can learn git internals in less the 60 mins. They are really simple. It's people's imagined model of how git works that is complicated so they assume git itself must also be complicated.

I doubt people with no prior dvcs experience can learn git in an hour. The interface is abysmal, it uses multiple terms for the same concepts, it's a mess generally.

Although it is important to know how they can be used in the CLI, I find that I using a GUI speeds up my workflow.

I would just settle for understanding how they work rather than dive deep into the CLI syntax intricacies

If a developer using github, learn the keyboard shortcuts for github.com

? shows a list, 't' shows a directory tree and lets you search for a file.

I wonder what % of HN readers don't already know Git.

Learn to sit "zazen" (seated meditation). Even 30 minutes is enough to convey the basics of posture, breathing technique, and context; actually practice a first meditation for 10 minutes; and briefly discuss afterwards. I received such instruction following my cancer diagnosis about 7 years ago, and have made meditation part of my daily ritual ever since. It's been transformative.

I think the most valuable thing you can learn depends on what you already know.

If person A knows differential equations but not regressions or Python, and person B knows Python but not the other two and Person C knows regressions but not the other two then the most valuable thing they can learn in an hour will be different.

It might also depend on their goals (does person B want to learn data science of websites)

How and why to eat a low carb, high protein/fat diet. Most people are obese because of 20-30 years of marketing around high carb low fat diets.

How to make and follow a budget to save money. Including all of the yearly or even every 10 year expenses that you might have.

How to invest your savings in index funds to become financially independent

How to handle and shoot a firearm to protect yourself and your family

You can grok elementary analysis of algorithms (‘Big-O’) in an hour, and have a thinking tool that is useful once in a while.

I learned docker-compose in roughly one hour. It changed my mind on Docker as adding extra complexity to: docker-ize all the things and update with docker-compose up -d!

I guess this does depend on some prior experience with docker and perhaps on me avoiding docker-compse because I thought it was docker for pros. Instead, it's docker for dummies.

What resource did you use to learn it?

I wanted to start running Home Assistant using Docker (on my main server instead of a dedicated Raspberry Pi with Hass.io) and came across this page [0], search for "Docker Compose", I copied the yaml, ran docker-compose up -d and boom. Shortly afterwards I added mosquitto and sabnzbd to the yaml and all three now update very easily and everything became very portable. Before I was keeping docker commands somewhere in an md file.

Edit, I hope to learn Traefik reverse proxying in one hour next ;)

[0] https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/installation/docker/

Learn an aphorism by heart and think of situations it applies to. Pick something important that you believe in. Then, over time, you'll remember the aphorism in various situations and slowly adopt it as a life value.

Examples:

- Getting what you want will not make you happy.

- It's hard to get what you want. But it's easy to want what you get.

Basic docker commands

  docker ps
  docker inspect
  docker exec
  docker run
  docker build
  docker rm
  ...

Basic understanding of accounting concepts. A successful hacker will presumably find themselves one day staring at a balancesheet of sorts for his/her startup.

e.g. That credit will sometimes increase a balance, sometimes decrease it depending on nature of the account. i.e. it's reversed for say asset versus equity.

Off-topic:

Since you left 'valuable' intentionally vague, I asked myself what the value of a piece of knowledge would be.

So I quickly came up with a simple model. Just take the integral of the value you get from this piece of knowledge over time, I thought. This helps you measure if a one-time payoff of knowledge A is better than the repeated payoff of knowledge B. Then I realized gauging value is more nuanced. How to model the value of things that are less tangible like insurance? The Heimlich maneuver may have a really high value in the case that my friend chokes, but very low value otherwise.

But this kind of knowledge is harder to focus on when we measure our knowledge by some simple value model. Surely you didn't expect an answer to "the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour" to be about what the best kind of insurance you should get?

"Oh, God. I've lost him. And I never told him anything. I just wasn't ready, Marcus. Five minutes would have been enough." --Henry Jones, Sr.

(five minutes, not 30-60!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np4OojYGixI @1:00

Take the meeting with the free financial advisor your credit union provides. Meet with them once a year for an hour.

I just found out that managed money accounts aren't just for people with more than one million dollars anymore, and moving my money this year will likely make me thousands of dollars over the next 30.

Understand what "cost" means to an economist.

To understand cost in economics you'll learn topics like externalities (positive and negative) as well as internalities and their meaning. You'll dive into concepts like opportunity cost as well as fixed vs sunk costs.

Once you get at truly what cost means to an economist you will be so much better informed in making business and personal decisions. In my line of work (software development) so many products and daily decisions hit the sunk cost fallacy of wanting to hang onto projects we are in love with. Other ideas like negative externalities really are the underpinning of understanding why climate change is out of control.

Cost is always oversimplified. Spending some time to understand it deeply and learn the concepts and common language is incredibly valuable.

I'd say basic CPR, you never know

Regular expressions (regexp) can be understood at a pretty impactful level within a solid hour of focus. For all the developers or even just heavy computer users, the ability to find and replace exactly what you're looking for is a game-changer.

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.

One of the most valuable things that I have learned, which you can learn the basics of in 30-60 mins or less, is how to meditate (Vipassana). Basically you sit and close your eyes and focus on the feeling of your breath below the nostrils. When another thought comes into your mind, bring your attention back to the sensation of the breath coming in and out of your nostrils. That's pretty much it. And it is the only thing that was able to treat my panic disorder, and I tried many other things before meditation.

It's also helped me in many other aspects of my life, but mostly because it has help my peace of mind.

Learn the basic techniques and the rationale behind non-violent communication. It is a tool that can make the most difficult, risky discussions in your personal life a lot more constructive and beneficial.

Two quick things from back when TED talks were actually interesting/useful:

1. How to tie your shoes the right way (so the knot doesn't come undone): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAFcV7zuUDA

2. How to dry your hands with a single paper towel (so that you prevent unnecessary waste): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FMBSblpcrc

Lisp: https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/common-lisp/

Spending a little time to learn the tools you're going to use often.

A few examples come to mind. Learn how to type on a keyboard. I feel sorry for my family doctor, slowly typing prescriptions using its two indexes. He could spend an hour to learn the right typing method, and within a few days, he would save time (and money).

An example is using Excel. I'm guilty of this. I always struggle whenever I have to use it (not often, but often enough). I should really spend some time once for all.

Learning that learning takes more than an hour, no matter the domain. You said it yourself: "A lot of what hackers do takes years of building knowledge upon knowledge". Understanding a skill takes time, energy, and discipline to improve is all you can do.

Everything else is simply spending an hour "doing something". If you keep the "something" to a smaller set of "things", then maybe you can learn something over several one hour sessions.

I don't think it's been said which surprises me, but basic programming of course. Programming properly requires a mindset where you are thinking about 'what will happen if this happens?'. A lot of people don't seem to naturally think like that. It can be helpful.

For a more practical example, you can easily start a blog and learn the basics of Wordpress in an hour. A lot of small business owners in particular can really benefit from this.

The NATO spelling alphabet (alpha, bravo, charlie, delta ... yankee, zulu). I learned it through my background in amateur radio, but I've found it to be very useful, even outside my IT career, where I had to convey some precise series of letters over a voice link. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet

In five or ten minutes you can learn make.py[1], a dead-simple alternative to Makefiles.

Those are both examples of "automated build tools". If you do data science, and have even a moderately complex graph of dependencies (i.e. some files need to be built before others can be built), such a tool is an absolute lifesaver.

[1] https://github.com/zwegner/make.py

Read through Farnam Street's list of mental models: https://fs.blog/mental-models/

They won't change your life overnight, but as you read one or more will likely click with some tricky problem you're in the middle of. For me, that was inversion. Flipping things works for digital artists, and it works for thinking about problems.

Learn how to get out of debt!!! https://www.daveramsey.com/blog/how-the-debt-snowball-method...

Step 1: List your debts from smallest to largest regardless of interest rate.

Step 2: Make minimum payments on all your debts except the smallest.

Step 3: Pay as much as possible on your smallest debt.

Step 4: Repeat until each debt is paid in full.

Dave Ramsey had been called out for questionable advice, and it's not something you could change and learn in an hour

Questionable? Meaning different from somebody else' advice? Show me somebody else giving advice for free that has gotten thousands of people out of debt. My guess is his advice is questioned by those who don't show the willpower to follow the steps. When they fail, they criticize the program. What he says here is solid.

edit: I just googled his name. On results page 5, yes five, I found one "advisor" disparaging his advice. And I think that guy's advice was questionable.

You can do all the paperwork you need easily in an hour. If you have any spreadsheet skills you can show in detail when you'll have each loan repaid.

I would challenge you to follow the steps, put it on paper, calculate how much and when. Then show me any fault with that process.

From what I understand, there are two ways to optimize the climb out of debt: optimizing for financial efficiency and optimizing for motivation

Financial efficiency typically calls for paying off the debt with the highest interest first, followed by the next highest, so on and so forth. This minimizes the amount a user has to pay in the long term. However, some people have trouble following this kind of abstract strategy, staying motivated and continuing to pay off their debts.

Dave Ramsey's advice focuses on optimizing for motivation. Pay off the smallest debts first, get those easy wins before tackling the harder debts. In the long term, this might be more expensive for the individual, but for some it is a more effective technique for staying motivated and continuing to pay off their debt.

Ultimately, people should do whatever works for them. Either way is a valid path to becoming debt free

I agree. Ramsey's method motivates people. People who aren't motivated will likely take forever to pay their debts, or fail at it. Ramsey's method promotes some sacrifice now, and reaping benefits later. Delayed gratification...

Honestly, Ansible. I spent a week on Puppet a couple years ago, and was barely making progress. (Disclosure: I'm not a Ruby developer and only have basic understanding of that language).

I picked up Ansible in about one hour and already had a server's setup automated by the end of that hour. Now I automate 99% of everything using Ansible... and it's not much more complicated today than it was when I started.

I think some decades ago I read the manual of gnu make in about an hour. After that is not great at it but can write a Makefile for a simple project.

There's a much simpler Python-based alternative[1] called make.py.

I rely heavily on Makefiles, and only recently learned about make.py. What Makefiles let you do is great, but make syntax is an absolute minefield.

[1] https://github.com/zwegner/make.py

Algorithms are used in nearly every aspect of computing. If you could learn the basic flow of how an algorithm works, that would be very beneficial.

Use Upwork or a similar service to outsource some of your drudge work. Suddenly you'll find that you can accelerate yourself so much more.

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 jobs, some guy in Southeast Asia will do it for $4. Don’t even think about it.

This works across the spectrum: want to clean up formatting in a doc? Ship it over. Want to transcribe a video for captions? Ship it over. Want a quick scraper for a few websites? Ship it over.

The objective is to not be the bottleneck on any task.

Get a quick idea of what the labour looks like. Southeast Asia at $5 is great. Americans at $15 are a waste of time. South Asians at $8 will break even. Eventually, every hour of your time is spent on the time that is special about you.

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

Many of the things are easier to check than to do. And where it isn't, you can have multiple people do the same thing.

And last of all: if you build a working relationship with the guys who do good work you can use them for more work.

I'd be worried that multiple rounds of feedback back and forth would cost more time and money than doing it myself.

Having multiple people do the same thing, and finding people who are quality-oriented and trying to stick to them sounds clever, though.

I never really give feedback. I either keep on or end contracts but I never attempt to coach them into being useful. The cost/benefit isn't there, as you pointed out.

Sometimes, it's just that the question isn't suitable for this method and I just sink the project till I can think of better.

I suspect that when you master delegation you improve productivity by an order of magnitude. It's a game changer.

Any DIY skills, may it be plastering a wall, hanging a mirror, painting a wall, unclogging a waste pipe. Youtube is filled of videos from people that gets your inspiration going, and many things that seemed like a drag are actually both relaxing and enjoyable as you broaden your skill-set, and it will save you tons of money as you become more independent as a human being.

Simple physical penetration testing tactics are easy to learn and apply widely. These skills can be a quick way to have better security awareness, and can be a fun party trick.

For example, many of the techniques listed in this (<1hr) video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnmcRTnTNC8

One of the most valuable things which I learnt was how to tie shoe laces using Ian Knot - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgSwvDkJVxE

Saved me incredible amount of mental harrassment which I used to get when shoe laces used to get unwound which I used to brisk walk.

Life is good after learning it.

Same. Totally worth learning.

I wonder why no one learns to tie it this way? It is less common because it's not as intuitive?

The truth is that you can't learn anything useful in an hour unless you don't know really, really basic things about life.

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.

Well... um... if someone wants to love me you could definitely maybe get me to fall in love with you in an hour of conversation.

There's actually a technique for this!

Two people stand about 4' apart, and take turns asking personal questions. Start simple and ramp up, like from "What is your favorite color?" to "Who did you like better, your Mother or your Father?". Move to "Have you had a friend pass away, and how did that affect you?", "Are you happy with your life?" and so on.

Try to answer truthfully, and pay close attention to your partner's body language, facial changes, voice quality. Empathize silently using the same.

After 10 minutes, normal folks feel a closer bond. Unreasonably closer.

First aid skills, e.g. Heimlich maneuver. You might end up saving someone's life by being able to act calmly and correctly.

The one who down voted, please explain.

I saved my grandmother's life with this. She was embarrassed and didn't want me to. Super weird. She looked all round soft but her diaphragm was surprisingly tough, and it took a couple tries. A year later I learned that I had broken one (maybe two?) of her ribs.

Thank you for the story! I helped my brother who was choking on a cough drop. Didn't use Heimlich, but nevertheless it was a scary experience. I hesitated to which one is the correct move. Edit: As far as I understand, one uses Heimlich if hitting on the back while bent doesn't work.

Learn how to regulate your sympathetic nervous system with diaphragmatic breathing. I know that meditation has been mentioned various times, but breathing as a subset of meditation is useful whilst sat in a meeting or conference, as it's approaching your turn to speak. It has worked wonders for my state of mind before public speaking.

Any good resources you know?

https://www.healthline.com/health/diaphragmatic-breathing

One can vary the pattern to determine what works best for them. For me it's "in for 5, hold for 5, out for 5". As in breathe in slowly over five seconds, hold for five seconds and than exhale over five seconds.

Some years ago, I learned how to tie my shoes from this video https://www.ted.com/talks/terry_moore_how_to_tie_your_shoes. I believe those 3 minutes were among the best time investments I've ever made.

One alternative is to eliminate the problem entirely and get shoes without laces.

Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is knowing not to use it in a fruit salad.

Learning facts are great if you’ve got an hour but really understanding should take time.

I’d say if you have an hour that is free try to be completely independent of thought. No music no podcasts no interacting with(or influenced by) other peopl. Try to be present

Learn how to meditate.

You cannot master meditation within one hour, but you can learn the skills you need to begin your practice.

With six guided sessions of ten minutes each you can be well on your way to a more focused, less anxious, and happier life.

My recommendation would be to find a practitioner near you, or use one of the guided practice apps like Headspace or Calm.

Good luck on your journey.

Fasting... in fact, if you simply stick to just one simple rule which is, eat ONLY when you become hungry, you will reap rewards. Hint: Not everyone needs 3 meals a day.

In order to this, you need to become aware of your body and mind. And for this, you need to learn Meditation which is simply a practice of mindfulness for a set period of time.

I learned morse code in about an hour using: https://morse.withgoogle.com/learn/

It’s a surprisingly good trainer that includes good mnemonics and follows the advice of spaced repetition research. It also covers digits and punctuation too.

Here are a couple that have changed my life:

- Learn the basics of how to meditate. Any of the top guided meditation mobile apps is enough to get started, as is an hour with a teacher.

- Learn to create a WordPress blog. Doing this was the first step on my path to becoming a developer, learning about online marketing and even meeting some of my best friends!

The hour when I learn a lot is when I talk with my grandfather or elder people. They have a lot of knowledge to share.

I see a bunch of vague and non answers to this question. Here is mine: Git rebase + squash

Actually sitting down and understanding what it's about, trying it out and implementing it should be possible within 1 hour without ever having touched it before, and has at least a huge potential to make you way better at Git.

I only have a vague idea about what this does so I may be missing the point.

I only ever saw this as a way to hide the multiple commits that go in the creation of a given piece of code, in order to present a neat commit as if everything was figured out first try. First, I don't like to have too many commits that aren't pushed to the remote repo, if my machine fails, I would loose work, so usually I only have one or two commits unpushed. Secondly, I like to think of the history as containing these previous tries, and sometimes I will realize that the end result has a subtle bug that was introduced somewhere along the line while piling on the feature.

I work mostly on repositories with very few team members (1 to 5).

What am I missing? Why would I destroy history? Is it reversible? Is it just to hide messy progression?

Valuable? Giving a proper blowjob. You can learn it in an hour and make insane amounts of money doing just that.

To be wrong.

Don't identify with your point of view, you are not your opinion and your worth is not defined by its validity.

Negotiation.

Very basic rules you can learn, that will increase your earning potential by over 7 figures throughout your life.

Compound interest is a great call. I'll add: "Never spend your principal."

In fact, people should all read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Richest_Man_in_Babylon

Obviously, it depends on what you already know. Otherwise I would say spend an hour learning addition.

> What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?

All the answers to this thread, once they've built up.

Given enough time there would be about an hour of reading and contemplation to be had, and in that time a good deal of advice would be received that can later be acted upon.

> A person can also learn a few guitar chords and possibly play a carefully-chosen song in that time.

Not true, there are many 4 chord songs. [1]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_Smt1VsoqQ

So many.

But just learning proper guitar form -- holding the strings so you won't hurt your hand with time (your fingertips should be perpendicular to the neck, not flat against it), and so your fingers don't block neighboring strings -- is at least an hour-long job.

How to use a library. The organization of the books, how to look them up by subject or title, the different media available, how to request inter-library loan, and how to ask a librarian for help finding what you are looking for when you aren't sure.

How to use a password manager (and then spending the next 45 minutes changing your passwords).

Learn how people manipulate one another in various contexts (online, in-person, social settings, sales settings etc.). Just being able to pick up on the red flags will help you go along way in terms of making sure you don't get frauded or scammed.

The killer app for education would be a system that can predict this for each person, over and over again.

Given your current knowledge and life experience, what lesson are you best primed to receive, that will result in the highest information transfer, in one hour.

Learn Wim Hof's breathing technique. https://blog.spire.io/2018/05/20/wim-hof-breathing/

Or maybe not: http://www.capradio.org/articles/2017/07/28/breath-holding-m...

Don't do it while driving or near water. Same goes for trying to sleep - avoid this around water too.

As a programmer, learn to use a version control system if you don't already know how.

How to revive someone with narcan

I didn't realize anyone can buy naloxone over the counter!

Basic reverse engineering. Download hopper and hack away. Nothing more hacker than that.

Use Ghidra, because it's free.

Here is what I suggest — Just loose yourself in a dense forest in the early morning for an hour. Walk and reflect on your journey so far. The alone time will help you loosen yourself and know where you stand for real.

Go to featured articles at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page.

Learn something interesting within few minutes everyday.

Meditation. It's a skill that can be learned quickly and teach you to notice not just your constant firehose of thoughts, but the emotions that come with them and which often steer you towards poor decisions.

>A person can also learn a few guitar chords and possibly play a carefully-chosen song in that time.

He can't. He'll know how to play it, but it will require many hours of repetitions to reach enough speed.

maybe spend an hour ... every day!

Basic options trading.

Most people should learn how to use a covered calls strategy to build income outside of owning stock outright.

With a covered call, the idea is to sell/write out of the money call options with a strike price higher than what it is today. You collect this premium while still owning the underlying stock, and if at expiration the shares are lower than the strike price you wrote the option for it expires worthless and you keep the premium. If it expires in the money, then you are "assigned" and you will sell the shares you have at the agreed upon strike price while still keeping the premium.

It's the least risky options strategy, safer than owning stock outright, and can create steady income for you in the form of the options premiums.

"For example an average person, if focused, can learn to read (but not understand) Korean decently in under an hour."

Correct. I also recommend reading 3 books a day to change your life for the better.

* Filing taxes if in the US.

* CPR

* Cooking a couple of meals

History is a pretty much endless well in this regard. Pick some era or focus, and read the major wikipedia articles on it. For example the Franco-Prussian War or the reign of Augustus or the early history of vaccinations.

In 60 minutes, you can pretty much become more educated on about a specific historical event than 95% of people you'll meet.

Your true hourly income (something like days worked * average hours - costs of your job) and then automate/outsource anything worth less than that so you can focus on increasing your income/salary.

Hypothetical -- 240 days / year , 10hr days ("gotta hustle!") , + 2 hours of commuting, +30 mins of preparation you wouldnt do if it werent for your job ==> 3k hours per year.

say you make 90k per year => $30 an hour.

   * Automate healthy meals for $15 per saved hour? Do it.
   * Automate maid services for $25 per saved hour? Do it. 
   * Fix your care in 8 hours when the shop quotes you 3*125 an hour? => Do it.
   * Clip coupons for an hour to save $12? Skip it.

This should be calculated on the "take home" pay not the pre-tax value

+1 This is a fantastic point! I no longer can edit my post though

Sorry, I disagree with many of these, especially if you make the mistake of thinking that the amount you get paid at work applies to your free time. Or at least, these kinds of decisions to outsource a task aren't so clear cut as the above makes it seem.

Also, some (I caveat, some) people who start to think their personal time is "billable" turn into insufferable jerks.

Most people cannot turn a random free hour into extra salary. And if you outsource all the things above, you may end up having learned nothing about how to live or relate and understand normal life.

You're not going to become a billionaire by doing this. Learn to do the things that you should do yourself, and judiciously outsource those that legit save you time and unnecessary mental exhaustion.

Double entry bookkeeping.

Reading scientific articles/papers is something I think has to be learned, but probably possible within an hour. That's a skill I've found use for over and over.

Take 10 minutes and think deeply about the fact that you’re probably wrong about most things. If your immediate instinct is to tell me that I’m wrong, take 20 minutes instead.

And then realize that everyone is wrong all the time so it doesn't matter. You just have to be louder.

The trick is to reduce the number of falsifiable beliefs you hold. It grants you an immense amount of conviction, and can be very effective in the short term, although the price is a crippled perception...

A commendable way to spend the remaining 40 minutes is to reflect on becoming so brave in the face of failure - of being wrong - that you seem almost foolhardy to others. Ideally, you want to be really quite wrong about many different things in myriad interesting ways.

If it is the last hour of your life, learning music is the certainly wise choice given by Socrates. I don't see how it can be different for any other spare hour.

If it was the last hour of my life, I'd spend it making sure that certain people knew that I loved them.

There's a book called Mathemagics with chapters which take about an hour to read which will teach you how to remember numbers and do mental arithmetic

Sales. If you only have 1 hour to learn anything, learn sales. That's a skill that can come handy in many areas of life, not only in business.

Where would you start? I’m in the “learning sales stage” of my career and have stumbled on Sandler sales training. I’ve talked to a really excellent sandler trainer (link down below). The gist of what I discovered is that I must learn new habits when making sales calls (i.e more listening, better questioning, resist making assumptions). None of these things take an hour. However here is a YouTube video by the Sandler Trainer I talked to. It will take you less than an hour to watch and you could learn something. https://youtu.be/I4qrQz8h0AM

How to play poker. It's the advice I'd give my younger self if I could go back in time.

An hour is more than enough to learn the rules and basic strategy.

But why?

Can you please point to some resources?

Sand blasting, esp. soda blasting. You can start with cheap equipment and work up from there. If I had to start from scratch, this would be it.

Pomodoro technique - Takes a few minutes to learn and setup an app. It has helped me be super productive with tasks requiring concentration.

And if you can't abide by a timer, use this to completely lock your screen to force the downtime: https://github.com/felixpalmer/Cherrola

Play frisbee or table tennis for an hour straight. It's surprising how quickly you can go from complete noob to ok with both of those.

How to calm yourself.

Whatever it takes be that meditation, progressive muscle relaxation, yoga...

Learn how to quickly calm yourself when you feel you are becoming upset.

The basics of evolutionary psychology. It is a less bullshit version of psychology. It will help you understand yourself and society.

OTOH... https://xkcd.com/775/

You can learn the principles of good city design / urbanism in about an hour, which could inform your next housing selection.

Can you elaborate? Any good examples?

Considering time in the day and human walking speed, it turns out that if people cannot walk to their destination within 10 minutes, they will opt to drive. So if you are looking for a place to live in the city, be aware of your walking radius (walkscore.com will map it for you)

AWK.

The hour I spent learning AWK way back when must have saved me a few days, cumulatively, on mundane data munging tasks over the years.

The value in doing nothing, just observing with a clear and patient mind.

I believe that has been lost and it's also very important.

learning basic electrician skills for use in power outage/natural disasters. Everything in our world is powered by electricity, nobody knows how to help themselves in creating their own when the power goes off. Use of generator to power their house, basic setup and ops of batteries and solar panels, etc.

Learn how to do rear naked chokehold. You’ll probably use it once in your lifetime, but learning it is worth it.

Self-hypnosis. You can learn the basics in less than an hour and it can be an amplifier for most other things.

Any good pointer on this?

In re: hypnosis in general the books I recommend are: "TRANCE-formations" by Bandler and Grinder, and "Monsters and Magical Sticks: There's No Such Thing as Hypnosis?" by Heller. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/956297.Trance_Formations https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/447454.Monsters_and_Magi...

As for self-hypnosis, you can learn it from a book or a website, but you might also want to check out the people locally who are into hypnosis and self-improvement.

Personally, I get really good results from a very simple induction. It has a lot of names, "Betty Erickson’s Induction", "See, Hear, Feel Induction", "5-4-3-2-1 Induction", and so on. It's easy to remember and reliable. This is a good write-up of the process: https://www.practicalhappiness.co.uk/media/download_gallery/...

That should be enough to get you started.

FWIW, although I'm not a hypnotist I know a lot about it, AMA.

That as you age an hour is extremely valuable. You only have so many. Don't waste them on bullshit.

Personal Finance concepts. There are several books you can read the most essentials chapters in an hour

implementing min max in every language you know. it surprisingly encourages you to both use a ton of language features as well as allowing you to see patterns across all programming languages. this is probably more fun if you build tic tac toe on top of each implementation

Nutrition. An essential life skill.

I can understand the value, but what exactly about nutrition to cover in one hour?

In the area of the U.S. I currently live in - a few common phrases of conversational Spanish.

Any shorthand Roman alphabet. Saves time and offers not insignificant amount of encryption.

Learn to relax, take an hour off.

How to not talk and just listen.

Meditation.

I'm convinced the gist of any given unix command can be nailed in an hour.

How do sympathetic and parasympathetic nerves effects cardiovascular system. Spent less than hour or so to understand them 3 years ago now I think because of that my life is so much different than what could have been.

Consequently, I learned that our breath is so much important than what I really thought. Because of this knowledge, breathing exercises, meditation, Wim Hof breathing method and Cold Therapy made a lot of sense and started using them since then.

Just one question and less than hour research lead to many changes.

It's definitely something to learn, we're learning so things why not little bit more about this sophisticated machinery called body.

PS: Again it's super subjective question so there's also generally what fascinates me most is this variation how different the answer it is to this question.

If we ask this question to the bacterias or viruses the answer wouldn't be so much different I guess or let's make it even fish, dog. Another reason to be a humanist.

I spent the last hour reading this thread, and I learned to tie my shoelaces differently, that Sam Harris has a somewhat pleasant voice in spite of his unpleasant world view, and that beyond juggling, CPR and personal finance, there's really nothing I'd like to learn in just an hour.

Writing a functional component in React, and some uses of it.

Hey downvoter, I learnt that little bit in one hour, and it was pretty useful from the get go in my area of interest.

- How to exercise - How to eat (or better, when to not eat).

Advanced Google Search syntax + the Ngram Viewer.

What's the deal with "an hour"? You have more than "an hour" you have many hours.

Why the extreme time restriction? Not everything is hackathon.

Ray tracing will always get my vote.

You can learn tailoring in an hour.

30~60 minutes is really a vague amount to time to learn something new. Maybe you could learn the basics of trading in that time.

If you’re a freelancer: invoicing

learn how to tie a good knot. Just one. Practice.

I recommend the alpine loop or shoreline hitch.

Redux gave me superpowers.

Salary Negotiation Basics.

Obligatory XKCD:

https://xkcd.com/519/

Read 640 comments on HN

Folding a shirt in 2 seconds. Knowing this method will save you hours of time later.

How to take criticism

the man pages for git

Tactical Breathing :)

Compound interest

How to negotiate.

How to stretch.

Learn to type.

Whether or not Bitcoin should be worth anything.

- SQL

- Quaternion operations

Encryption!

asking open ended questions.

CPR.

Python

I can't be sure that my path to relative success will work for everyone, so take my tips with a pinch of salt. I find though that the steps I've taken below have made me a valuable team member that continues to be sought after for years at a time with teams I have and continue to work with...

1. Learn to drop your ego. This is one of the single biggest things that change the dynamic of your interactions with those around you. It will change the quality of every relationship you have for the better. It will make you more approachable. It will make people want to include you, confide in you and will help them trust you.

2. Meaningful interaction with your peers. Learn to understand things from the point of view of others, and I don't mean just those that think and believe the same as you. I mean those that in some cases think and believe the exact opposite. Become someone valuable to others. Someone they can rely on. Someone they will not go to battle without, and someone they will not leave behind in a firefight. This takes time and effort. Do what you say you're going to do. Be there when you say you're going to be there. Say you're going to be there. Show up. Like Othello, this one you can learn the principles in 10 minutes, but it takes a lifetime to master and takes conscious discipline every day. But like compound interest, it adds up exponentially.

3. Learn to be seen in a way that people respect. People tend to respect those that grant them respect. Don't let their respect or any resulting admiration give you a big head. Your greatest value is being there to serve others.

These were the most difficult ones but are the ones that will catapult your relationships forward. Relationships are the key to your success. I believe they're the key to all of our successes. They're the difference between making it because of sheer dumb luck, and making it because you made a difference to those that have the power to drag you forward and effect positive change in your life. The fun thing about these points is they're all free and you can do them whether you're homeless living on the streets with no money or already earning millions of dollars a year.

... next up, some tangible skills that are valuable... these are likely to cost some money, so unfortunately, they're pretty inaccessible to those that don't have access to resources that will allow them to learn.

4. Right now the market is making a steady and urgent march towards AI and machine learning. If you're not already aware of it, get on board. Maintain discipline enough to learn something every day capitalizing on what you learned yesterday, even if it's the tiniest steps. The few people you can't automate out of a job are the ones that are building the automation and work in areas that benefit the march towards automating all the things. You don't need to learn AI specifically, this is but one niche. Take a look at market trends more than specific things. Especially in our industry tools go in and out of vogue overnight. But trends stick around for the longer haul. The trend towards cloud computing, the trend towards machine learning, the trend towards what will come after which will be related to the problems we cause today developing things we're not capable of fully comprehending until it's too late - which is a trend humanity has proven we fail at since the dawn of time.

5. Learn to apply your skills with massive growth and scalability. Learn how to execute, predictably and reliably. This is what will earn you a great reputation that you can build on for your entire career.

6. Now you've built all that up, if you've done everything right along the way, you're now in the perfect spot to do it all for yourself and earn a billion dollars.

I presently sit between 5 and 6 and hope that my journey into building my own company will allow me to use what I have learned in my career to help drive those behind me forward.

I know Kevin Spacey may not be the greatest role model, all things considered, but he did say one thing that stuck with me.

"If you're lucky enough to do well, it is your responsibility to send the elevator back down."

Regex

vim

Meditation

Hirigana

Hangul

Hiragana and Katakana.

I don't think any of these are something you can learn and remember in one hour.

It's a good start though.

I think you can learn to recognise the base hirigana characters with 95% accuracy in an hour. I had expected it to be much more difficult. I used the app ‘pastel’ I think it will take vastly more time than that to have the fluid instant recognition I have with Latin characters

Humility

Extremely valuable. In an hour you can learn why it's important. Mastering it could take a lifetime.

inductive combinatorics

Basics of a knowledge area!

Winning lottery numbers.

fishing knots

reactjs

to swim

meditation

This post occasioned me to coin "dunning-krugerbait".

If you think you have cooking sussed in an hour, you're doing it very wrong

OP said "learn" not "master"

You can't learn cooking in an hour. Period.

A gate keeping comment like that makes you look ignorant, petulant, and antisocial. Nobody is attacking your knowledge of cooking or your value as a human being.

I don't feel attacked, and my knowledge of food is far from comprehensive, and I certainly didn't intend it as such. I stand by what I said: you can't learn anything about cooking in an hour except what you need to take the next class on cooking. Do that for a few months, or even a few weeks, and you get somewhere. Scope, my friend. Scope.

Depends what you know.

Learn to Torrent, steal from media companies.

Learn to cook another meal, steal from food/delivery businesses.

Learn about DOI's and Sci-Hub and steal from Academia.

Learn how to log into your financial management plan and make a change, steal from the banking sector.

Learn CPR, steal from death.

I would say learn your partner’s erogenous zone.

If only finding a life partner took an hour, too.

https://www.quora.com/Can-you-sum-up-all-of-your-investing-m...

https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-dumbest-psychology-trick...

https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-cool-computer-hacks

https://www.quora.com/What-words-of-wisdom-can-really-make-a...

https://www.quora.com/How-did-China-eradicate-a-large-amount...

Estate planning

Having assets fully owned before a marriage basically exempts you from all socioeconomic gotchas in a divorce, even in “community property” states.

This misconception has occurred primarily because nobody owns anything and instead go into marriages with nothing or a 30-year mortgage. So they are subject to the full whims of the state.

I'd suggest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHO_Model_List_of_Essential_Me...

Probably meditation, pranayama, basic stretching, basic posture, basic self awareness.

certified ethical hackers for hire : https://www.hackerslist.co/

hire a hacker : https://www.hackerslist.co/

https://www.hackerslist.co/

Double unders.

On the contrary, it has taken me years to unlearn compound interest.

When you start with relatively little, compound interest is relatively very unhelpful - it compounds wealth and benefits people who have started with something more than you.

Twice as good at nothing is still nothing.

As much as I dislike seemingly knee-jerk contrary statements against “known-good” knowledge, I feel that there is an important point here: aggressively attempting to compound interest is a poor use of time when you only have, say, hundreds of dollars. Better to focus on compound interest “in the background” while optimizing for growing capital or income-generating skills.

So, essentially: compound interest is something wealthy people are good at because it's useful when you are wealthy. Not because learning about compund interest will make you rich?

I find that most legitimization attempts for wealth end up being circular if followed to their logical conclusions.

Yes, it’s vastly easier even Buffet says so. He only started really using compounding has his core strategy when he already had his first billion (he was 60). Then his fortune doubled a few times in the space of 20 years. People can search YouTube for the interview.

For the vast majority of people, the best thing they can spend time on to improve their financial situation is increasing their hourly wage or salary.

This is so true. I invested what little money I had to spare in music. Everything I made with it went back in. The return is more than I would have gotten from interest or things like stocks and bonds.

~2% is great if you're doing okay financially and have a good career. It's useless if you have any marketable skill that would benefit from spending what you can spare on tools or services. A pair of good mixing headphones in 2017 paid for itself by 2018. It would have only been an extra $2 in a savings account. That investment paid for a MIDI controller that came with Ableton Live Lite. That helped pay for an upgrade to Suite during a sale less than a year later.

All the money I spent on the controller and Suite upgrade would amount to barely $30 a year in savings interest. That's not going to help me with the tiny but still greater income built on those investments.

This is in line with the point of the original comment, which wasn’t just about investing money. That comment mentions self-development but it’s the general principle of reinvesting gains in something that is increasing in value.

In your case you are reinvesting gains from your music career back into your music career which is currently increasing in value. The principle is that this will let your career grow at increasing rates.

Looking back at the comment, I see what you mean. Foiled again by posting before fully waking up.

Can I ask how you're making that money back? Gigs? An album?

Alright, I'll bite. This is such a victimhood mentality and a ridiculous statement.

I wasn't wealthy when I started investing. Hell, the first dollar I put into my long term portfolio was when I was living in my car! I started with ~$200 that I made from doing a collection of odd jobs (mowing lawns, computer repair, moving dirt, etc.). Every extra penny I made went into investing into a moderate portfolio focusing on high yield dividends (4-6%).

As I've grown in my career, got married, etc., I've kept effectively the same principles. I now get great passive income after 10 years of doing this and it's only getting better with each dollar we put in.

It is possible with the right mindset. In an investing group that I'm part of, my story is the norm - not the exception.

>> "It is possible with the right mindset. In an investing group that I'm part of, my story is the norm - not the exception."

Two words: selection bias. That your path worked for you does not mean it's the only wise path for every circumstance. The path of most people around me is their savings get destroyed by surprise medical or repair bills because they were born into poverty and never get a chance to build meaningful savings. So it's better to spend it on something while you have it on things that can't be taken away in a bankruptcy.

Most people (in this context) make the mistake of spending it on drugs, worthless trinkets, junk food, etc. Most aren't encouraged to pursue skills that can pay the bills. Or they're actively discouraged. "Crabs in a bucket" is a real mentality. People I grew up around have it. I had to hide my interest in entrepreneurship just to protect it from sabotage.

I'm glad you were in a situation that enabled your path! It's great that you were able to thrive through early savings. I don't know when you came up, but cheap and functional cars are hard to come by in a post-Cash for Clunkers world and police are more aggressive with the homeless/car-homed. Your path is not as viable in the US in 2019.

> Most people (in this context) make the mistake of spending it on drugs, worthless trinkets, junk food, etc. Most aren't encouraged to pursue skills that can pay the bills. Or they're actively discouraged. "Crabs in a bucket" is a real mentality. People I grew up around have it. I had to hide my interest in entrepreneurship just to protect it from sabotage.

These are the people most in need of the concept of compound interest. If they knew that small steps every day can lead to big outcomes, they would be more inclined to take them.

That's the thing: they do know. They watch rich people earn money doing, from their poverty-clouded perspective, nothing. Learned helplessness is a powerful force. It took me years to break out of it. I can see how wrong it was from the other side, but I also know how useless criticism of people inside it is.

Doing what's kept your head barely above water for years seems safer than putting a few dollars away every month hoping it grows higher than the next thing that fails in your car or house. That's if you can get a bank account at all. Everyone knows someone to ask for the number of a good bankruptcy attorney. That's networking when you're broke and defeated.

Wasn't familiar with the concept of learned helplessness and found this interesting study looking it up [0]

> The mechanism of learned helplessness is now very well-charted biologically, and the original theory got it backward. Passivity in response to shock is not learned. It is the default, unlearned response to prolonged aversive events and it is mediated by the serotonergic activity of the dorsal raphe nucleus, which in turn inhibits escape.

Learning how to help yourself isn't as easy as it seems especially when you barely or don't have the means to do so.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27337390

My family is mentoring a young woman that comes from a broken background (was abused, grew up bouncing between foster families). She's trying to do everything right: finishing her GED, getting a job, etc. In addition to support from my family and a few others, she is in a formal program to learn how to budget, and has always been willing to be proactive in finding ways to better her situation.

But every step along the way, the system is fighting her. Most recently, she's in jeopardy of losing two sources of assistance because she's doing "too well" to qualify. With those gone, she'll likely be making less than she was before she had a job.

Our system (in the United States) is seriously fucked up. All of the various programs try to pass the buck whenever they can. The negative feedback loops are overwhelming.

I'm also familiar with the disincentives people face as they pull themselves out of our welfare system. I know two such people who face similar dilemmas.

and it has been for decades. I was a shift manager at a burger king in the early 90s - nearly 30 years ago. Some of those same issues faced some of the people I worked with. Can't earn "too much" because their assistance would be cut off by a larger percentage than the increase in $ they might earn. This was in the days of sub $4/hr wages for most of the folks there.

Can't schedule Tara for an extra 5 hours because that will be an extra $20, which will put her over $100/week, and her assistance will be cut by $50/week because she earned that extra $20. (paraphrasing the numbers here). It was also costing some of these people $x/day to take a bus to and from work, but that wasn't calculated in their earnings/cutoff calculations.

Truly messed up 30 years ago, messed up today.

Let's take an median household. That's $40,000 in the US. Let's say they save 5% of their post-tax income monthly, and get an amazing rate of 3% APR with no fees.

How much will that compound interest have added after 15 years? Only about $7,000. Not exactly a "big outcome".

That’s pretty privileged of you to say $7,000 is not a big outcome.

To a lot of folks it is. That’s half a down payment for a house in a lot of the US.

As a return for tying up 5% of your income (which is hard to do when you're working with a household budget of ~$625 a week) for 15 years? Yes, that is a tiny outcome. It's especially tiny when you consider that a static 3% APR is absurdly unrealistic.

You could use that same 5% and have a full down payment four years sooner.

To be fair, $7000 in 15 years probably won't get you the house downpayment but... you're right on the privileged part.

I imagine that people actually seeing some progress over time may encourage them to save/contribute a bit more, or to put some money in to somewhat larger CDs or whatnot (even excluding stock stuff). Or... they may be encouraged to contribute a small bit to a 401k if they end up at a job that offers it.

You may $40k/year - having, say, $3k in savings can really change your outlook and susceptibility to otherwise crippling 'emergencies'.

Plus the OTHER 32k they have saved. Over 30 years that is an extra 50,000.

You could save it for 15 and have 37k (7k interest)after 15 years. Or 0. You could save it for 30 and have 126k (54k interest) after 30 years. Or 0.

$56k of earnings in exchange for freezing $70,000 of your income for 30 years? That seems insane if I'm honest.

If it were FU levels of money, or even 100%+ returns, I might think differently. But I can't imagine someone locking away $70k of their earnings for 30 years for only a 70% return.

1) You have your own selection bias as we all do. I'm not ignorant to that. However, many of the folks that have gone through similar transformations don't come from "easy" backgrounds. They had their own tragedies (financially, emotionally, etc.) that they had to overcome. Being born into poverty is an excuse to sidestep responsibility of your own life.

2) An outside can't sabotage your own idea. Only you can sabotage it. Sure, it doesn't make it any easier, but if someone can change your mind on your definition of "success" then you will never achieve it.

3) Yes, people spend money on dumb shit. I was in the same environment. Keeping up with the "jones" was a thing. Succeeding was also looked down upon. You know what is consistent with folks who came into success from those areas? They said f-that, I'm going to make my own path, regardless of what others say. They had mental fortitude.

4) My first car cost $2,000. My second car cost $1,000. Both I saved up and purchased. If police are harrassing you about being homeless in a car, then leave that location. That sounds like a police state (Cali anyone?). And before you say "It's not that simple to just leave!" Yes, yes it is. In order to change my situation, I literally "YOLO'ed" across the country (no job, nothing) in order to get out. Much like many in this investment group, in order to get out of hell, you have to make huge bets.

I live in the USA in 2019. I lived in the USA when I was homeless during the height of the recession. It is easier now than it was then.

> However, many of the folks that have gone through similar transformations don't come from "easy" backgrounds.

You just basically said - Folks that go from A to B come from A. Of course!

You act as if your situation is the worst possible situation. For example, imagine having to take care of a sick parent and 2 kids and a wife. Imagine being addicted to drugs. Imagine having a criminal or drug-dealing record. Imagine having a disability. Imagine being suicidal.

Even if you went through all the terrible things I listed, imagine not having any mental fortitude. Mental fortitude doesn't come easily or at all to a lot of people. This pull yourself up by your bootstraps is a nothing but a shiny pokemon.

I came from poverty and I have everything I wanted now. But I also recognize that 99% of the people that were in poverty with me didn't make it out.

If understanding compound interest and (more generally) feedback loops is important, then so is critical thinking. For example:

> many of the folks that have gone through similar transformations don't come from "easy" backgrounds.

Some simple critical thinking skills and basic logic (often learned in a philosophy course, but not always) would help one understand that this shows only that the statement <it's impossible for any poor person to become wealthy> is false. It certainly says nothing about the idea that <all poor people could become wealthy>.

I'll counter the crap you seem to be getting in this thread:

I think you're catching a lot of crap for being "hurtful", but I don't see it that way. I see you being direct and appreciate your comments in this thread.

A bit of calculation would show that a lot of people have no chance of building "great passive income" in 10 years. They simply do not have enough income to save that much.

"I started with $200" tells us nothing useful.

I can start with $5 and have great passive income if I'm making $100k and wife is making $70k and both of us are capable of saving a good chunk per year.

I can start with $5000 and have little more than extra pocket money after 10 years if my salary is in the $20k to $30k range and I'm capable of saving $100 per lucky moon.

GP is absolutely right, compound interest does not do much if you don't have much. There is nothing ridiculous about it.

Here's something you can learn in less than an hour:

Most retail "investing" is really just skimming money from workers and giving it to shareholders.

Real jobs-and-opportunity-building investing isn't particularly encouraged by the markets. It's much easier to make money with various techniques that rely on the political manipulation of asset prices - like property, stocks, crypto, and corporate image - than by actually doing and making useful things at a reasonable price.

Which is why stock is such a contentious issue in the startup world. The operating rule is that you don't share profit with ordinary workers unless it's unavoidable.

Ideally if you're a funder you don't even share it with founders. That's more challenging to organise and happens less frequently, but if you're a founder it's naive in the extreme to assume you'll be spared any attempts to make it happen.

There is most certainly a category of people who cannot save at all because some combination of life factors lead them up shit creek, but there are plenty of low income people who could do with a lesson or two from Mr. Money Mustache. He has various case studies involving low income people and there are legions of journal entries on his forums where people earning pittances have nevertheless saved enough to be secure. Many have saved enough to retire early.

Nothing is one-size-fits-all of course, but I'd much rather be surrounded by those kinds of 'can-do' types who don't sit around waiting for life to come to them.

Mr. Money Moustache is a terrible example. He (and his wife) had a $200k+ job within a year or two out of college. He is still working. He is making money off his website and as a motivational speaker. He has to spend a significant amount of time managing his investments to ensure that they keep an average of over 4% return.

MMM's lifestyle works well for MMM, because of his circumstances. Those circumstances don't easily carry over to the general populace.

“Coming up at 11, rich people don’t understand why poor people don’t just stop being poor.”

Where I fell off the MMM train, within hours of discovering it, was a post about healthcare costs on the individual market where he wrote about how cheap they could actually be...

- If you had enough money in the bank to cover an extremely high family deductible for a year without it causing serious pain, if something bad happened, AND ALSO

- Two adults either of whom could, in months if not weeks, land a job with decent to excellent pay and a much better family insurance coverage, so there's almost no risk of having to pay that high deductible more than once, worst-case scenario is one of you has to work for a while.

Like yeah, no shit buddy, if you have in demand skills and are already rich health care can be cheap. Stuff's cheaper for the rich, news at 11. Thanks for the advice.

Then what really got me were the people in his comments section (can't recall if he was down there too, but he certainly didn't discourage it) shitting on anyone who even ever so timidly pointed out that this advice was entirely useless—no part of it actionable—for people who were still trying to become FIRE-tier rich, despite its being presented as generally useful advice and a tone of "I don't get why people complain about health care costs, what dummies!" throughout the post.

There are a lot of blogs out there about people retiring early and living off residuals. When I looked closely the people involved were not like “normal” people. One couple were high paid lawyers and the wife could basically freelance a few times a year and make a killing. Another couple moved to Portugal and somehow kept $100k++ remote jobs from companies in NYC. Another was a very high paid Microsoft manager in Seattle.

My father in law is out of touch as well. He talks about maxing out your 401k. He pays he son $15 an hour on 1099 and talks about how he should be saving, impossible. When my wife was making $40k right out of college he preached it as well. If you’re making $40k you can’t put $18.5k into the bank.

Compound interest does require saving or investing, but presumably over the years you learn more, make more and move up. Those that stay in minimum wage jobs for ten years have only themselves to blame. Why would someone have a salary in the $20-30k range after 10 years? Find a new job, go work in an oil field, go learn how to sell cars, become an expert in something! A guy with a squeegee could end up with a car wash empire in ten years; but it takes work and discipline.

Look at the statistics for Asian immigrants — astoundingly successful as a group, many arriving in the country without money or even English. When you see an Asian family all living upstairs in their convenience store with the kids working and studying hard — those kids end up a Harvard. Their parents certainly aren’t buying rent-to-own TVs.

You can literally get promoted to manager at a McDonalds in six months — if you just show up on time have have even a tiny shred of maturity and ambition you can move up, even in the most menial of industries. There is definitely some personal responsibility involved, getting yourself addicted to drugs won’t help. Nor will getting in relationships with toxic people.

What’s ridiculous is that there are people that live their whole life as victims. Either they have a low IQ and are just simple minded, or they make a series of bad decisions again and again. Suggesting that compound interest “doesn’t do much if you don’t have much” —- nobody is saying compound interest alone is going to make you rich; it merely amplifies and helps you create wealth. Perhaps compound interest isn’t the right first step, what it seems like some people really need is some Tony Robbins so they can get themselves out of victim mindset that poisons them for generations. Maybe some Dave Ramsey as a first step to get financially disciplined.

Like one of the earlier posters, I too lived out of my car. I worked menial restaurant jobs, was in extreme debt, no family resources, even some troubles with the law. But barely 10 years from that I ended up working at a FAANG. It’s a long, involved story in which nobody would be interested, however the point is that this idea that people are stuck in their minimum wage fate is just fatalism nonsense. That fatalism is common in Catholic countries — it’s the reason that entrepreneurs were seen as strange in places like Mexico — the idea that you can change your stars is just sacrilege; “god’s will” has been responsible for more generational poverty than almost any other cause. The secular equivalent is the myth that if you are poor, you will always be poor.

Understanding compound interest isn’t just about building wealth, it’s about understanding the consequences of debt. Buying that shiny thing you can’t afford with “easy, low payments,” ends up shackling you to debt.

Please don't discount the fact that--despite popular perception--economic mobility in America is much smaller than in most developed countries. Your rags-to-riches success (while wonderful) is a statistical outlier. The vast majority of studies bear this out. What one starts with (parents' income/wealth) has a massive impact on what one finishes with.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/us/harder-for-americans-t...

Honest question: What's the distribution of savings going into your portfolio in those 10 years?

Quick napkin math doesn't grant you any "great passive income" from "$200" and "extra pennies" for 10 years.

I'm not trying to be rude, but with incomplete data you're sending both the signals you want, as well as completely opposite signals. The latter suggest that in reality you just made a lot of money for the last 5+ years, which completely invalidates what I think you wanted to convey.

> This is such a victimhood mentality and a ridiculous statement.

Do you think you'd say this to the poster's face in an in-person conversation? I find it's too easy to communicate in this way on the Internet, but it appears hurtful and over-the-top. Nasty comments can affect peoples' lives and we rarely see the fallout of how we hurt others in this way. Let's all tread more carefully and be a little nicer to each other.

Calling someone being poor a "victimhood mentality" is possibly one of the most privileged, out of touch things I've seen on HN.

Why don't you go tell all those families on welfare to just go make more money and change their mindset.

It's bad, but please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't really feel inclined to sit by when ignorant prejduce, whether it be racism or classism, happens on HN. Feel free to ban me if you if that's how you want this site to operate.

Nice personal attack. Your anecdote is nice, but is that is all it is.

> In an investing group that I'm part of, my story is the norm - not the exception

That is a hilarious example of selection bias.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Your comment would be fine without the second sentence.

Sure, on an absolute basis, someone who started with more than me will end up with more. But why does that matter to me? I only have my current resources to consider.

We all have some resources at our disposal. Understanding that slowly growing them over time can really add up is helpful regardless of where you start. In fact, I'd argue that knowledge of compounding is more helpful for those with little. Wealthy people aren't in need of more wealth, so the concept is less useful for them.

Habits are hard to break, it’s important to seed good ones.

Saving that $300 puts you in a better place than someone who squanders all of their cash. When I was starting out at work, nothing irritated me more than people bitching about how underpaid and poor they were, who somehow found the cash to burn up their earnings in cigarettes and to be out drinking all weekend.

One of my favorite Charlie Munger speeches seems relevant [1].

> I have a friend who carried a big stack of linen cards about this thick, and when somebody would make a comment that reflected self-pity, he would take out one of the cards, take the top one off the stack and hand it to the person, and the card said, “Your story has touched my heart. Never have I heard of anyone with as many misfortunes as you.

Sure, you might not start with as much as someone else. That doesn't change the effects of compound interest - you can still have have an exponential return.

[1] - https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/2007-usc-law-school-co...

That's quite a concerted way of displaying his complete lack of empathy. Imagine if he put the same effort into bettering humanity rather than chasing wealth and snubbing nose.

Are you really implying that Charlie Munger hasn't bettered humanity? He has given money generously and created wealth for countless people.

It's not lacking empathy. At the end of the day the only thing you can remain control of is your attitude. Are you going to let unfortunate circumstances continue to ruin your life or are you going to do something about it? Charlie developed this thinking when he son died of leukemia at age 9. He was devastated, but he decided it wasn't going to be a drag on the rest of his life.

Philanthropy on that level is generally done to protect one's wealth from taxation, and has little to do with moral compassing, empathy, or generosity.

It's not about displaying empathy, it's about addressing what will actually help the person, and complaining almost certainly won't.

The quote continues: "Well, you can say that’s waggery, but I suggest that every time you find you’re drifting into self-pity—I don’t care what the cause, your child could be dying of cancer, self-pity is not going to improve the situation—just give yourself one of those cards. It’s a ridiculous way to behave and when you avoid it you get a great advantage over everybody else, almost everybody else, because self-pity is a standard condition and yet you can train yourself out of it."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Munger#Wealth_and_phil...

Yep - he's very generous. Many people just seek to vilify someone for having wealth.

Hoarding wealth at that scale -should- be vilified. It's a villainous and immoral position to take given today's level of wealth inequality.

Exactly. People talk about compound interest as of it can make you rich. It can't. It might multiply your wealth by 2 or 3 in a country where the difference between rich and poor is a factor of 100.

So it sounds like it can significantly increase your wealth.

Compound interest works in both directions. Those w/ few resources are at risk of taking on debt -- which can quickly become crippling thanks to compound interest charged by lenders. I'd argue that understanding the perils of compounding interest on debt is even more important than understanding the benefits wrt investment.

[EDIT: PS Apparently Albert Einstein agrees:

>"Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it ... he who doesn't ... pays it."

It's all relative. If $X is a lot to you, k^t * $X is even more. In forty years, the stock market has gone up about 30x, while the dollar has gone up a little below 4x, meaning money invested would have really grown almost 8x. So if you can afford to squirrel away 1/8 of a meaningful amount, then it'll have been be useful to you when you're older.

Sadly, a huge number of people can't do that. If your bills are $1000/mo and you earn $1001/mo, and invest the entire excess, when you're old, you'll have below $8 for every month invested today, which is meaningless compared to your expenses. 8 times nothing is nothing. But if your bills are $1000/mo and you earn $1130/mo and invest the entire excess, it'll entirely pay for a corresponding lifestyle when you're old.

Perhaps a more important lesson in that case is compound interest on debt. If you borrow money from a credit card company, you can get exponentially fucked. The lesson may not be that compound interest gets you wealthy, but it's certainly that compound interest can make you worse than broke.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21582782.

How a blockchain works.

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 insight behind blockchain is not sexy and not something that's easy to make money from...

> ...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.

We're all using blockchain every day when we use Git.

How to interpret your dreams accurately from this paper: https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz. Interpreting dreams accurately = clear directions for personal development / ability to do the work of a therapist for yourself = personal growth.

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