jonbarker

And ongoing risk of an endemic new virus even after a vaccine is developed. Even though we have flu vaccine, it still takes its toll every year and is probably here to stay.

I draw a big rectangle with a line down the middle. On the left is Assets. On the top right is Liabilities (aka debt, the remaining lease payments for housing, etc). On the bottom right is Equity. This is the number that must compound at an acceptable rate no matter what happens to the market, my income, etc (I'll leave it up to you to decide what rate you want to commit to in the near term). I have found that drawing and redrawing this on paper beats most software approaches. If someone asks, "what if my equity number is negative?" I say take steps to get it to positive. If you get it to 1 dollar, great, your first year ROE is going to be 1000% if you happen to save 10 bucks that year. https://awwapp.com/b/uybcpyttt/

@ghall Is there a planned feature where one might generate a list of the most frequent keywords and market needs to guide one's self study efforts?

The reason is that arguably a traditional search firm is a broker, whereas an aggregator can introduce new efficiencies. This is how disintermediation typically happens. Classic example: travel agents vs expedia.

Can we please call this project "git jobs"?

I can vouch for the addition of meditation and/or yoga to this regimen. No data to back it up other than qualitative reduction of back pain.

Which 30 year period you get to live and work in is what matters most, and the timing of the bad years. Which is why I recommend this calculator: https://firecalc.com/.

Lego not creating minecraft seems like the modern day kodak digital photo story everyone will be studying in a decade or two.

One distinction though, the rubes he targets are generally rubes with some level of power or influence. That's kind of the point.

I enjoyed this article but I find the people rejected by Harvard more interesting than the ones who dropped out. Warren Buffett is on this list. The people who dropped out after all always had an implicit invitation to come back if things didn't work out.

More general purpose problem solving but written by a mathematician and one of the best books I've ever read! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It

Was lucky enough to hang out with him and Marvin Minsky at Marvin's home in 2014, which PHW organized as a seminar. A generally surreal experience. Some things I recall: both had great understated senses of humor. PHW and Marvin even at their ages remained interested in 'figuring things out' but also were fond of laughing at what they didn't understand, or rather maybe where their knowledge gaps were. It was immediately clear why they were friends and colleagues.

There are two types of partners in the MSFT ecosystem: those that build, and those that license. If this is a change to support the partners with product/implementation expertise, then it's a good change. But I think it's too early to tell.

It's not uncommon for up to 1/3 of usage and therefore the bill on VMs in the cloud to be consumed by garbage collection. So if you can rewrite it without a garbage collector, you can save money. A great book on this topic is "The Beast Is Back" by jetbrains. Advocating C++ in that case (written in 2015). If GC makes you more productive, that's good, but at some point rewriting things without GC makes sense.

Montessori uses clear test tube learning devices with beads. Less abstract and more easy to visualize. This is taught in 2nd grade. In your above example, the blank or variable is an empty test tube, the 4 is a tube with 4 beads, and the 9 is a tube with 9 beads.

Also, I was speaking from a leverage standpoint. If someone is worth less than the value of a house, and finances most of it, then they have effectively put their personal balance sheet book value into negative territory, effectively making an ROE calculation very ugly in the near term. The scenario described above is just the effect of leverage, not the fact that said leverage is applied to real estate.

The annual net from the house you live in I guess is arguably the benefit of living in it. Hard to compare that with the dividends produced by an index. The dividends produced by the index can be used to pay rent, for example.

So the author's parents encouraged leverage by subsidizing a down payment on real estate, an asset class which underperforms index funds. The story doesn't seem to end well; it is probably self correcting in the long run.

The reason ads for podcasts don't deserve blocking and are OK is that they are completely opt-in. You have to enter a code or go to a URL in order for the podcaster to get credit.

I don't think he's arguing for apathy, can't think of a less apathetic individual if I tried. I think he's rightly pointing out that batch processing can be more efficient, and optimizing the schedule for such a process is something many people don't consider.

But the biggest of those bond investors is the fed. That's actually how they 'set' rates, by doing open market operations in which they buy and sell bonds of varying maturity dates in order to adjust the supply of money. They never want the yield curve to go inverted because it means the growth prospects for the economy are no longer there.

In general, when longer term bonds have higher yields, this is investors saying "compensate me for the opportunity cost of not being in stocks or riskier assets over that term". What matters is that the yield curve goes up as the maturity date goes out in the future, signaling a healthy outlook for risker assets. If the yield curve inverts, this can be interpreted as investors saying "the longer term outlook for riskier assets like stocks is not good, so I don't need compensation for longer term less risky bonds, just get me out of the market." It is a remarkably reliable indicator of future trouble for stocks.

I believe breakups would drive up the expense ratio which is why Bogle said that it would be damaging to individual investors. Part of the reason why Vanguard is so cheap to operate is because of its size contributing to economies of scale. You can see small variations in the expense ratios now (for example Fidelity is slightly higher cost than Vanguard across most apples to apples comparison funds) for this reason.

The risk is that Vanguard, State Street, and Blackrock, employ small 'governance teams' whose job is to vote on your behalf. Since they don't have an explicit fiduciary duty to the shareholders of the index funds, but do have an implicit one, it can be argued that you don't actually have a vote in how the component companies are run. More here: https://outline.com/njXPEu

A risk is one of the options, which is a breakup of existing funds: "Force giant index funds to spin off their assets into a number of separate entities, each independently managed. Such a drastic step would—and should—face near-insurmountable obstacles, for it would create havoc for index investors and managers alike."

HN readership is definitely skewing mid 30s at this point.

To complicate matters, you really have to decide ahead of time whether the licensing route a la Stephen Key isn't a better or more efficient option if what you are looking to do is just get a product out there and help people. Not a company, yet potentially more impact.

Even worse: "I'm overwhelmed by what I am working on > open HN > scroll > find new technology promising to reduce said overwhelm > start researching said tech > apply new tech to previous overwhelming problem, but get stuck due to lack of familiarity > go back to old tech

Because it's interesting according to this definition: https://www.sfu.ca/~palys/interest.htm . Also the article mentions the mug example (selling a mug for more if you have one than you'd be willing to buy it for) as being a classic behavioral example of loss aversion. I actually thought it was an example of the endowment effect according to behavioral economists.

There's nothing wrong with tracking raw downloads, but for investors who are used to social media in which you 1) target specific people based on their interests with ad-like content that is generated to resemble those interests 2) track every conversion event those specific people do in your funnel, it's a far cry. And of course, those two criteria above are why social media became such a huge business, because that's more efficient than a radio ad, or a download count. I'd argue that these examples of great content are great precisely because the creators can't track their audiences very well. Their audiences have a vote every time they download.