abc3's comments

> 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...