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Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
1460 points by newsbinator on Nov 20, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 1076 comments
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)




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...


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 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’m totally buying the pants argument!


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.


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)


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.


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)


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.


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 :)


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.)


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.


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!


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.


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)


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.


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.


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


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


Nice I’ll definitely take a look. Thanks.


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)


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


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 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. ;-)


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.


> 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).


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.


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 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.


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. :)


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.


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).


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.


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 :)


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.


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


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.


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.


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.


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 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)


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.


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.

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 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.


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.


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.


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


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.


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.


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


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!


> 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.


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!


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


1 & 3 - I had no idea.


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.


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 =)


Water to rice ratio = 1 rice to 1.5 water.


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


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


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.


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.


Why not in the fridge?


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


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.


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!


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


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.


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.


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


+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


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.


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...


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.


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.


> 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?


> 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.


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.


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


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


wrapped cables save lives!


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.


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.


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


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


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


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


>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.


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


I gotta try this next time I stow an extension cord


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.


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.


Absolutely fantastic advice.

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


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


[flagged]


> The implication being that you just don't communicate between the time you first met and now?

That's not how I meant it. My point is that day-to-day life can be so consistently busy or hectic, that couples can spend way less time together than at first. And when you have kids, grad school, careers, etc., you can end up with a surprisingly long stretch of being more like business partners than soulmates.

There may not be much you can do about diverging interests, or the diminished levels of crazy love-hormones that you had at first. But taking time to really pay attention to each other, and have real emotional vulnerability and care for each other, can be pretty awesome.


My partner and I had several years of couples therapy together, and I can confirm your thesis in thread is spot on, great comments. You have to be able to grow together, live through the parts where that new relationship energy and passion are burning lower than they used to (and not act out destructively because of it, lots of ways to accomplish this, limited only by negotiated boundaries of the relationship), but still be able to check in with each other to ensure each other's needs are being met.

IMHO marriage is about finding a teammate, not a soul mate. It is more of a business partnership than about fairy tales and romance, and I think too many folks don't understand that upfront. TLDR: You are looking for a life cofounder; choose wisely.


After many years and kids you start to take each other for granted. If you are together around your 20's, people might have changed when they are in their 30's. Values might have shifted etc.

I learned this lesson the hard way after my wife told me she was getting a divorce. By then it's too late to fix it.

Talking to each other about practical stuff is still different than asking how you see your life.


Actually, if you are together, you might not have taken changes into account as they happen gradually. What OP meant is a means of an additional self-reflection. Which happens on top of current communication (or lack thereof).

It is also not just that the person you're with changes. You change as well, and you might not be aware of that. I mean, we all age. Society changes, too. For example, we're all running around with a PDA with a bunch of radios these days. We weren't 30 years ago.


The self-reflection part hadn't actually occurred to me, but it makes sense.

When I met my wife, "PDA" meant "public display of affection." I prefer that to my cell phone any day, albeit not with a bunch of radios. Only a HAM operator would be into that kind of thing.


Yeah, for my partner that is also what PDA stands for (both non-native English speakers).

As for the radio comment: cell phones, smartphones, laptops, smartwatches, IoT in general. It all has radios these days. If not merely Bluetooth or WiFi.


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’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.


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.


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.


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.


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


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.


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.


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.


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'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.


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 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?


> 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 :)


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'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.


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

What can you teach in only an hour? I work with some people who teach basic first aid, and the shortest course any of them does is 4.5 hours.


Step 0: Tell a specific person to call 911, or do it yourself if you're alone.

If the person isn't responding and doesn't appear to be breathing, move them to a hard, flat surface (if possible). Put your hands one on top of the other (both palms facing down) and interlock your fingers. Place your hands in the center of the chest (at approximately the level of the nipples) and push hard and fast, letting the chest 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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


> 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 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.


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.


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).


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.


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.


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.


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.


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...


Noted.


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

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


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.


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


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.


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


It is not how it works at all.

The fallacy here is that a human body is a machine with well-defined intake and output.

How would one even know what is "exactly" the right amount?

Over a year we consume 1 million calories. If one were just 0.1% off of systematically eating more (or less) than required then according to your model one would end up being 200 pounds fatter or 200 pounds leaner ... do you think that 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%.


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


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.


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.


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


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


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.


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.


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. ;-)


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.


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.


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.


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.


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


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.


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


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.


"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.


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


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


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.


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.


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.


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


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.


That’s clearly a completely separate issue to how mortgage rates are presented


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.


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.


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


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.


But what about wealth distribution?


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?


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...


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


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


Two interlocked bowlines will get you this.


> 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!


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


> 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!).


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.


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.


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 ;)


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-...


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.


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 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.


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.


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


Figure eight bend > square knot.


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.


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.


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


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


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


The Ian Knott for tying your shoelaces a little faster


If you're going overseas, learn a little bit of the local language.

  1. Hello
  2. Goodbye
  3. Please
  4. Thank you
  5. Me
  6. You
  7. Him/her
  8. This
  9. That
  10. Here
  11. There
  12. Do you have this?
  13. Where is this?
  14. How much money is that?
  15. Where is the toilet?
  16. Digits (0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9)
You'll be surprised how much of the language you pick up naturally just by memorising some basic words and using them.


I always try to learn how to say, "I'm sorry, I don't speak X" in language X. When I was in Japan I got an unbelievable amount of leverage out of being able to say, "Sumi masen, Nihon-go hanasei masen" which, of course, means "I don't speak Japanese" in Japanese. The local's faces would light up and often they would respond in Japanese despite the fact that I had just told them that I don't speak Japanese.


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.


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.


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


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.


How does that explain Bourbaki?


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


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.


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


> 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.


Je ne parle pas Francais. :-(


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


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).


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.


> 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.


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)


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.


> 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 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


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".


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?


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 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.


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." :)


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


> 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...


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.


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.


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.


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


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.


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


Damn, that's basically all the interest


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


This, and the earlier you start the better.


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


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


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.


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.


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


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.


>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? :)


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.


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.


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


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 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!


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.


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.


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.


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


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.


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.


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


I think Harris's perspective is more like, "There's some good stuff here if you ignore the mystic bullshit." That's my take on it, and the message I get behind. I don't care if the person who introduced it happens to be an ethnically Jewish man. Incidentally I have the same take on Western religions, especially the one that I grew up with. I enjoy and appreciate practices from foreign cultures, the "foreign-culture-ness" of something does not lead me to dismiss it. The mystic bullshit part is what I dismiss, in every culture (especially my own).


No, the 'mystic bullshit' is very real in e.g. vipassana (for example, anything about "vibrations") regardless of the race of the speaker


There's definitely 'mystic bullshit' in Vipassana, but it's not the 'vibrations' part (the Vipassana course emphasizes over and over again that the sensations you're supposed to watch for are real, physical sensations - pressure on the skin, temperature, sweat, itching - nothing mystical)


The positive effects (for most people) are also very real as well, in spite of the "mystic bullshit".


Why are vibrations associated with mystic bullshit? I've noticed this too, but I don't understand.


Until neuroscientists began researching meditation, the practice was coupled with various Asian cultural practices and beliefs, some from ancient times. It is reasonable to be doubtful of the efficacy of meditation when the evidence is effectively socio-cultural.

Sam Harris is a neuroscientist, so he has scientific credibility when he promotes meditation as a beneficial practice.


Wow. Rest assured, I still consider these cultural practices mystic bullshit.


What cultural practices are you referring to? Every non-white cultural practice? That would be proving my point.

I never stated there was value in every non-western cultural practice, only that the value that actually does exists is easy to dismiss away as "superstitious beliefs" (or mystic bullshit) until one of the "in-group" convinces us otherwise. No doubt, it's a good thing science now backs up meditative benefits to an individual, but it shows a certain level of arrogance if everyones culture is bullshit or backwards until [insert popular science guy] has confirmed otherwise.


Well, in my OP that you responded to, I used "eastern mystic bullshit" to explain where I was coming from and why I initially rejected meditation. It was always only something I'd hear brought up from a dread-locked vagabonding white guy with a mandala tattoo on his chest and the desperate need for deodorant.

Sam Harris makes the case that you can save the baby (mindfulness) from the bathwater (superstition, etc.) and that these practices were onto something because we share a common human experience.

Why not listen to his first chapter that I linked? I can almost guarantee that you would agree with him. You are just having a knee-jerk reaction to what you think is going on. Harris covers the exact things you think you're trying to point out.

Also, let's drop the skin-color bullshit. I reject all religion and superstition the same way I reject astrology, which is why I need a rationalist approach to have my mind re-opened to some of these ideas like mindfulness which are almost always couched in superstition. Sam Harris is precisely trying to do this and he starts that chapter making the case for it to people like me who immediately cringe at a loaded word "spirituality".


Fair enough, I did probably knee jerk or interpret things in the wrong way. Will give it a go perhaps. I'm currently using the headspace app which I suspect is a similar approach.


Whitewhashing indeed. But harris is not just a random white guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Harris#Reception


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Rather than dismissing the parents comment, would you tell us why you find it useless and add to the discussion?

Personally I found mindfulness to be helpful in unwinding, and I've found that my concentration levels are generally higher than they were before I started using it. It may not be the most efficient technique, but it's been a benefit for many people, me included.


Not GP, but I sympathize with their sentiment. I think I'm generally pretty "mindful", but I've tried meditation probably half a dozen points in my life (each for a week+) and it has never felt like anything but a waste of time to me. I really don't know how to express it in any more detail, it simply didn't feel like I had accomplished anything of value with that time.


I've learned some of the most useful things in my entire life through mindfulness meditation.


1. Have you tried mindfulness meditation? 2. Which type of mindfulness meditation have you tried? 3. Why do you think it is useless when most people find it useful? 4. With what goal did you try the meditation that it seemed useless?

You cannot throw a word "useless" without emphasising the "use".


This will help: https://samharris.org/how-to-meditate/


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.


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.


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


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


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.


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.


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).


Regex grouping expressions along with find & replace enable transformations.


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


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.


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...


> 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.


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.


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.


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...


Is there a good translation available somewhere?


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.


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.


The International Phonetic Alphabet

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


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.


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/.


> 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).


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.


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) .


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.


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 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


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?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift is why.


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


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.


Beware of Ы though :)

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


Ы-ы-ы... :)


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).


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.


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.


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.


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!


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.


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.


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.


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.


> 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.


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).


And how to learn it?


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.


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


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.


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!


Agreed. Touch typing + learning vim changed the way I work and boosted productivity to another level


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.


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-...


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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’d even go a step further and learn Dvorak. It’s surprising how much more relaxed your typing becomes vs. Qwerty.


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


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...


Completely agree. I teach web search to my first year students as a valuable life skill.


interestingly "jaguar speed -car"

returns the speed of a ship called Jaguar, not the animal's


Or even better, use duckduckgo!


wow that's handy!


By using these techniques Google thinks that I am a bot and after 3 queries I have to fill CAPTCHA.


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.


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


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...


Excited for jsf, asp.net, Wt and UniGui. Full circle is complete.


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.


Don't forget GWT!


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/


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.


The combination of websockets and morphdom vs Ajax polling and DOM updates is a major leap forward. Check it out!


Do you still use it?


Cool! Is there such thing for Flask? For Node?


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


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.