> 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.
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:
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
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:
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:
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)
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.
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.