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There's an awful lot of negativity here, but as someone who's 55 and has earned a good wage since I was 17, I really wish I had taken investing more seriously from the very beginning. While I knew of compound interest, I really didn't understand it until like a decade ago. If I'd started putting 5% of my money into a target retirement plan from 17, I'd be retired now. As it is I'm not doing badly, but I really wish I'd started earlier.

I'm 55, too. If I'd started studying HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, and Rust at 17, I'd be retired now. Waitaminnit....

Sarcasm aside, target retirement plans wouldn't come along for decades. Investing was very, very different when we were 17. And many of the people who were 55 when we were 17 had just lost a terrifying amount of their life's savings in a stock market crash that made Taleb rich because he'd bet against the market.

It seems extraordinarily unlikely that a 17-year-old today should do exactly what we wish we could have done when we were 17. About the best they can do is follow advice that's now centuries old: make friends, learn skills, live below their means, and, maybe, earn credentials.

Thanks for sharing this article. I wanted to know more about the headband, and the broadcast didn't provide much explanation.

I wrote about Sifan Hassan a couple of months ago and posted my article to HN. If you enjoyed today's Olympic marathon, you might like my essay, too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40740253

I loved Every Frame a Painting, a series of video essays by Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou that they posted on YouTube. They published a postmortem about the series on Medium when they ended Every Frame a Painting seven years ago:

https://medium.com/@tonyszhou/postmortem-1b338537fabc

The postmortem and the series itself received a fair amount of discussion on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15836782

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20942543

On July 3, 2024, they posted the following, along with a trailer, on their YouTube channel:

Coming soon: A limited series featuring new video essays, followed by a short film - The Second.

The Second is a short film starring Paul Sun-Hyung Lee and Ethan Hwang, written and directed by Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou.

The Second will be premiering at Fantasia Int’l Film Festival on July 20th. Followed by a special 45-min talk from Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou, along with a Q&A session.

Cast: Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, Ethan Hwang, Aaron Schwartz, Richard Wes, Colton Royce, Martin Ortega, Sam Osei, Tyrus Hwang

Trailer Music: Sean William

After 6 years of development, Lyx's 2.4 series was released on May 31, 2024. The first Lyx maintenance release, 2.4.1, was July 5, 2024. I'm not involved in the project, so I like to wait for a maintenance release.

An overview of the new features in the 2.4.x series:

https://wiki.lyx.org/LyX/NewInLyX24

I've used Lyx on and off over the years, and I'm impressed with 2.4.1. The last time there was a general discussion about Lyx on HN was four years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24820428

I'm eager to read what others think of the 2.4.x series.

Thank you for reading this essay and for your kind, thoughtful comment. This is different from anything I've written and it took me a long time to get to the point where I felt like I could share it with anyone. It means a lot to me that you enjoyed it.

I've written an 8,000-word essay on my favorite athlete, Sifan Hassan. You may find it interesting if you're a runner, like to watch the Olympics, or can relate to a person who creates extraordinary challenges for herself in order to avoid being bored.

I’m a big fan of MacroFactor. It’s one of my few subscriptions. It’s the only tracker that works for me. The developers make understanding nutrition as simple as possible without pretending it can be oversimplified.

For the past 2.5 years, I've published summaries of each month as it ends, so on 2023-06-30, I published a summary of June 2023. Each post has the following:

- Narrative Introduction; - Podcasts reviews (each review is 25 words or fewer); - Nerdy Software (25 words or fewer on a piece of software I like); - Bougie Products (25 words or fewer on a product I like); - Personal Finance and Investing (advice in 25 words or fewer); - Reading (each review is 25 words or fewer); - A List.

The name of my blog comes from a quote that inspires me: "In music, as in everything, the disappearing moment of experience is the firmest reality." (Benjamin Boretz)

It's hosted on Buttondown: https://newsletter.disappearingmoment.com/archive

Posts that don't fit my monthly format are hosted on Sourcehut (via Hugo):

https://disappearingmoment.com/

My favorite post is about getting to know a song that a friend recommended:

https://disappearingmoment.com/exposure-loss-jacqueline/

I love your blog. It's clear that you care as much about thinking and writing clearly as you do about your tech stack and readers' experience. I hop you continue to publish your ideas on the web. I always learn a lot from your posts.

There are two well researched biographies of Buffett, The Making of an American Capitalist and The Snowball. Your characterization of his investments doesn’t match the narrative in either book.

Has anyone managed to make decent looking org charts using Mermaid or one of the other text-based diagram generators mentioned in this thread? I've been looking for a way to make it easier for the one person we have who is working in HR to update the org chart each time we make a new hire. As bureaucratic as an org chart can be, keeping our up-to-date makes it easier for new people to figure out who everyone else is, and also helps existing staff figure out where newer employees fit in.

It's worth noting that libraries do a lot more than circulate books[0]. For many people, we're the place they use the internet, or where they print things out when they need a printer, or the place where they rent movies, or borrow CDs, or study, or attend programs, or get together with their friends to play videogames or tabletop games. Or even where they learn to use 3D printers: search on libraries and makerspaces.

My point is, libraries need room for a lot more than books. We love books; that's pretty much a prerequisite for becoming a librarian, but we do a lot more for the people in your community, which is why libraries hire architects who understand that libraries fulfill different needs for different people.

[0] http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2014/how-well-are...

Go ahead and take the analogy further still. It's like people who only attend church on Easter and Christmas actively preventing other people from attending church on Sundays. Even the largest libraries have a limited amount of shelf space. If we can't get rid of some of the books that are using that space, we can't add new, appealing, useful books for the people who want to read them.

Do you mean the Mass eBook project described here: https://www.cambridgema.gov/cpl/eLibrary.aspx

Or is this something else the library does on its own?

If you're interested in how libraries are using technology, check out code4lib[0], a community of technologists who work in libraries. Hang out with us on IRC, subscribe to our mailing list (which includes numerous job postings, many of which pay reasonably well[1]), read our peer-reviewed journal, and consider attending our conference. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

I also recommend checking out LibTechWomen[2] and Information Technology and Libraries[3].

[0] http://code4lib.org/ [1] http://jobs.code4lib.org/ [2] http://libtechwomen.tumblr.com/ [3] http://www.ala.org/lita/ital/

I'm a librarian. I became a librarian because I've always loved libraries and always loved books. I haven't met many librarians who didn't have the same formative experience and who don't feel the same way.

Counter to what the post's author implies, almost all librarians hate destroying books[0]. But we have to do it almost every day, because most libraries accept donations and only a very small fraction of these donated books are appropriate for the collection[1]. Many libraries have book sales, or sell donated or weeded books online, either directly or through partners like Better World Books[2]. We quickly learn that some copies of some books, either because of their poor condition or because no one is interested in reading them, have to be recycled or destroyed. It's no fun, but there are no alternatives[3].

As the post's author mentions in the CREW discussion in her post, librarians make an enormous distinction between the 5,000th copy of a book that is held in some library collection somewhere[4] and the last few copies. It's possible that San Francisco Public Library knowingly destroyed the last copy, or one of the last known copies, of a title, or even multiple titles, but I would be surprised if that was a policy rather than a mistake. In general, libraries either have a place to store such copies or can find another library that will add it to its collection and put it into circulation or storage.

[0] http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2013/killing-sir-... [1] By appropriate, I'm talking about the book's physical condition and the likelihood that it will circulate enough to justify processing it and putting it on the shelf, because it is competing for that shelf space with thousands of other donations, plus the ~1M new books per year that we could buy and put on the shelf in its place. [2] http://www.betterworldbooks.com/ [3] Unfortunately, there are only so many places to donate books, and we give away as many as we can, and then some, to places that are interested in receiving donations. [4] https://www.worldcat.org/ is one place we look, though OCLC makes it prohibitively expensive for most small libraries to make their collections available in WorldCat: http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2008/a-useful-amp...

Do you know which libraries are doing this?

It's controversially legal, at best, and probably isn't legal at all, at least in the US.

Internet Archive's Open Library project[0] was doing something like this, and may still be, though I no longer see information about this program on its website. Participating libraries would ship a book to IA/OL, who would then scan it and pack away the original so no one could have access to it. IA/OL uses Adobe DRM software to make a copy of the work available digitally, either directly or through its partner libraries, though to only one person at a time. I've written about this process within the larger context of ebooks and DRM here: http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2012/the-ebook-ca...

As I understand it, one of the precedents for Open Library's process was an allowance made for transitioning from legacy to supported platforms. If a library had an important work on a Betamax tape, and no one had Betamax players, it would be allowed to transfer that information to a VHS tape or a DVD or some other format that people could use, provided the library makes the original unavailable (IIRC, the library may even be expected to destroy the original), and only circulate the newly formatted copy with the restrictions that applied to the previous copy.

If you're interested in this topic and aren't a lawyer, I recommend Complete Copyright[1] by the American Library Association's Carrie Russell, along with anything by Mary Minnow[2].

[0] http://openlibrary.org/ [1] http://www.alastore.ala.org/detail.aspx?ID=2260 (also available at Amazon, etc.) [2] http://blog.librarylaw.com/librarylaw/

Has anyone seen a guide that discusses which browser settings and plugins complement one another? Or which ones to use in different scenarios, e.g., I know what I'm doing, I don't mind if things break on occasion, and I'm willing to spend a lot of time training my plugins (so NoScript and/or RequestPolicy would be recommended) vs. I'm setting up a computer for my parents who aren't tech savvy (so maybe Disconnect or Ghostery, plus....?).

This comes up a fair amount on Hacker News and in http://www.reddit.com/r/Privacy and I've seen plenty of posts and guides like https://prism-break.org/en/ and http://www.logicalincrements.com/firefox/ that just list a bunch of plugins. What I'm looking for is a set of use cases.

What if this is reinforcing an idea that's widely believed, but doesn't actually exist? Here's a story about similarly sensationalized story that preyed on women's insecurities:

http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/newsweek_discovers_doomed...

I'm a big fan of rss2email. Personally, I like doing as much as possible in a single application. Combining email and feeds feels natural to me.

Did you look at Employee Fiduciary:

http://www.employeefiduciary.com/

I haven't looked into it in a while, but if I'd been able to talk my employer into adding/changing vendors this is the vendor I would have chosen. It would be interesting to read your thoughts.

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%22this+isn...

Re: Bringing back points for individual comments

Pros:

* Saves the reader's time. This is incredibly important. I've been here pretty much since the beginning, mostly as a lurker. I've noticed that I used to look forward to the stories with the most comments, because the best comments in those threads were generally very good and generally easy to identify. Now I avoid stories that have received a lot of comments. I just don't have the time to read every comment, and the current ranking system seems too inexact.

* Simple, structural, code-based adjustment. Hacker News has a simple interface, simple rules, and a public code base. Bringing in a dedicated moderator might make some of us happier, but it would also be a tacit admission of defeat. I get the sense that PG would like to exhaust all simple, code-based solutions before getting to that point.

Cons:

* Unintended consequences: chasing after karma. IIRC, this is PG's primary concern about comment scores.

Solutions?

* Maybe it makes more sense to hide karma for individual users than to hide scores on comments. There would still be thresholds of positive karma that would enable users to have certain privileges, but users wouldn't have access to that information. Admittedly, I haven't given this much consideration, so I haven't thought through the consequences.

* Maybe there is another way to make comments easier to scan. This could be done visually, perhaps using color or s simple icon. It might also make sense to offer another sub-HN, kind of like /classic. Personally, I don't rely on HN for news; for me, the value is in the comments. So maybe a /comments sub-HN could feature submissions that generate the best discussions. Defining best might take some doing (highest value average score? highest value single comment?) and would probably require a check or two to prevent users from gaming the system. But for those of us who think HN's value is most closely associated with the value of its comments, it would be great to have an interface that offered a more efficient way to find the most interesting comments.

The music industry, meaning the record labels, may well be dying. If they didn't have a steady revenue stream coming in from easily identifiable licensees -- film, television, radio -- they would likely be in worse shape. I think the record labels are starting to realize they can't rely on individual consumer sales to keep them in business, which is why they're working with Apple, Amazon, Spotify, Rdio, MOG, etc.

If by the music industry you mean musicians, the common understanding seems to be that more and more musicians are relying on revenues from public performance. This works for music because people like to see it performed live and are willing to pay for tickets.

It's not clear how writers will make money. Public performance is probably a reasonable route for David Sedaris and a few others. There are probably a few who can do the Amanda Hocking thing. And the Kickstarter model may work for some.

I purchased a lifetime account when TextDrive put out its initial call for VC200 investors. That was many years ago, and I still feel like I'm treated well on the rare instances I need tech support, even though I'm still using one of TextDrive's original servers. They always encourage me to move to a Joyent Accelerator, and at some point I may, but I don't need much from my shared host and TextDrive/Joyent generally exceeds my expectations. Of course, a lengthy down time would change all that. I hope this serves as a wake up call for them and no one else has to go through what happened to the OP and others on Howe. My sympathies.

USAA is great for insurance. If you qualify, I think it's foolish to go with anyone else. I've used USAA for 20+ years and evaluate its competition every couple of years, but always end up using USAA.

For loans, I go with smaller, local banks. I've found the best rates and service that way, plus it feels good to know my mortgage payments are being put back into my community.

For banking, I use Schwab. I get 2% back on all purchases (I put everything I can on my credit card and pay it off monthly), I get ATM fees refunded, I have free online bill pay, plus Schwab has low fees on the few stock/mutual fund trades I make each year. And it's nice to see all my cash and investments in a single interface, and have access to Schwab's branch offices, a couple of which are near where I live. Many of the advantages Schwab offers are available through USAA, TDAmeritrade, ING, and Scottrade, but none of the others offers everything I need.

A visual cue that indicates when a follow-up comment on a post is from the post's author.

For example, when someone on Hacker News links to a post by Mark Pilgrim, I'd like to be able to scan the comments to see if Mark has contributed to the comment thread.

I think the question is a good one, and I think it's clear you did a fair amount of research before writing your post. There are several other philosophies you could have included but didn't, and the three you chose are the only ones that I believe make sense.

I suggest a broader approach to "The Warren Buffet Berkshire Hathaway model." Buffett is a value investor, and frequently cites other value investors who have started with similar assumptions (based on Benjamin Graham's work) but who don't necessarily place few bets (Buffett credits Philip Fisher, and also Munger, with making him a believer in concentrated portfolios).

The value investors I recommend reading, in addition to Buffett, Graham, Fisher, and Munger, are Martin Whitman, Seth Klarman, and Christopher Browne. Browne's letters and studies are available for free on the Tweedy, Browne website, Klarman's book (Margin of Safety) can be found as a pirated PDF, and Whitman's books are relatively inexpensive (and his letters to shareholders are free). Also, in addition to reading shareholder letters by Buffett and Munger, be sure to check out Lowenstein's Buffett biography (and The Snowball, though it's not nearly as good; Janet Lowe's Munger bio is a waste of paper).

I'm surprised that no one else has mentioned EditGrid. For me, the user experience with EditGrid has always been better than the user experience with Google, and EditGrid has always had more and better features as well. See:

http://www.editgrid.com/tnc/pkchan/EditGrid_v._Google

The thing Excel doesn't do as well as I'd like is Text to Columns, specifically for 13F filings. Many people like to track what major investors are buying and selling and would like to do this directly, from SEC filings, instead of through websites like Gurufocus.

For example, here's the Gurufocus page for Seth Klarman:

http://www.gurufocus.com/ListGuru.php?GuruName=Seth+Klarman

You can also find the data for his investment firm, Baupost Group, at SEC Info:

http://www.secinfo.com/$/SEC/Filing.asp?T=1ZCS7.t61_1wt

Clearly, it's possible to automatically get the data from Baupost's freely available SEC filings (http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1061768/0001061768080...) into a spreadsheet. It's just that Excel seems to make it a lot harder than I'd like.