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

[newsbinator]

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)

[RobertRoberts]

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...

[Sileni]

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.

[WillDaSilva]

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.

[MarkSweep]

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.

[Pandabob]

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.

[reubenswartz]

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. ;-)

[puranjay]

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.

[johnlbevan2]

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.

[sunstone]

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.)

[mrzool]

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”.

[dwoozle]

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

[hnick]

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.

[atwebb]

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.

[burmer]

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.

[unlinked_dll]

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.

[kqr]

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!

[almog]

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.

[erikcw]

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

[mikekchar]

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!

[benji-york]

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

[bfirsh]

+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.

[galfarragem]

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.

[anodyne33]

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.

[0-_-0]

> 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

[gwd]

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!

[Wistar]

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

[oeuviz]

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

[gizmo385]

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

[rollulus]

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

[Havoc]

>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.

[the_watcher]

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

[rkagerer]

I gotta try this next time I stow an extension cord

[DoofusOfDeath]

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.

[harrisonjackson]

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

[krosaen]

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/

[koliber]

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.

[lsiebert]

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...

[geowwy]

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.

[tempestn]

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...

[smaddox]

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.

[aeternum]

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.

[PeterStuer]

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...

[scandox]

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.

[keiferski]

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

[johnlbevan2]

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.

[bArray]

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.

[citilife]

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.

[xouse]

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.

[mikorym]

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.

[dougweltman]

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