96-Year-Old Secretary Quietly Amasses Fortune, Then Donates $8.2M - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/06/nyregion/secretary-fortune-donates.html <comment><USER5> Stoics believe that this is more impressive than the lifestyles of rich people. José Mujica was once the president of Uruguay gave 90% of his presidential salary to the charity and driving a very old car. Stuffs like this is more impressive because not everyone can do that.

[0] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Mujica](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Mujica)

<comment><USER6> Obama was known to donate 70% of his salary towards charity.

<comment><USER7> Trump also donated/is donating his salary.

<comment><USER8> I wonder how comes that a comment about Obama has positive kharma, while exactly the same comment about Trump has negative kharma. On this forum, where people seem to appreciate objectivity and correct thinking more than anything. And where it takes 500 kharma to be able to downvote something.

<comment><USER9> "home come"

I said "home comes" for way too long.

Politics is a minefield. In general, people are narrow-minded assholes. HN is no different.

"Politics is the art of marshalling hatred" Charlie Munger

<comment><USER10> That's so sadly cynical & pessimistic. I'm glad there are politicians who don't feel this way, and have optimism and energy to try to build a better future. If everyone gave up, things would be awful compared to what we have now.

Politics is very difficult because people are different and myopic and concerned for themselves, that is true. But that doesn't mean people are assholes or full of hate, we just have different points of view. We're physically incapable of not being self-centered, we don't have a shared consciousness, so that will never change. Politics is the art of navigating many many legitimate and different and opposing points of view. If that turns into meting out hatred, then please please get out of politics.

BTW, here's one actual study suggesting that people in general prefer optimism in politics. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey- cage/wp/2016/08/0...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey- cage/wp/2016/08/01/do-u-s-voters-prefer-optimistic-politicians-heres-what-we- found/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.80214e6cd768)

<comment><USER11> Optimism is a good outlook to maintain in life, but lets not kid ourselves as to the real purpose served by politicking.

 _" Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage."_ \- Ambrose Bierce (The Devil's Dictionary, 1911)

No need to look further than the $50m of political spending in 2017 by FAAG [0] for regulations that would serve their interests like tax reforms, with Google leading the pack with $18m.

[0] [https://www.recode.net/2018/1/23/16919424/apple-amazon- faceb...](https://www.recode.net/2018/1/23/16919424/apple-amazon-facebook- google-uber-trump-white-house-lobbying-immigration-russia)

<comment><USER10> > lets not kid ourselves as to the real purpose served by politicking.

The "real" purpose served by politicking? There's no government at all without politics. Do you want no government, no shared values or resources, no services, no infrastructure, no community? What's your ideal, and why is your ideal good for anyone other than you? (BTW, _any_ answer to that question is political.)

"Politics is a multifaceted word. It has a set of fairly specific meanings that are descriptive and nonjudgmental (such as "the art or science of government" and "political principles"), but often does carry a connotation of dishonest malpractice." [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics)

I have no doubt you can cherry pick some examples of bad politics. That's irrelevant and uninteresting. I have no doubt you can find more examples of rich or famous people saying pessimistic things. Also uninteresting. There are plenty of optimistic quotes as well, and plenty of examples of expenditure on things that help people and generally do good. We spend a lot more than $50m on hospitals and roads and libraries and schools, just to name a few.

"We need to reject any politics that targets people because of race or religion. This isn't a matter of political correctness. It's a matter of understanding what makes us strong." - Barack Obama

"When you get together in a group, it becomes like a family, with the different personalities and the politics that comes with being in a band. It's different than bringing something in by yourself." - Albert Hammond Jr.

"Man is by nature a political animal" - <USER2>

"One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is you end up being governed by your inferiors" - <USER3>

"To err is human. To blame someone else is politics" - Hubert Humphrey

"I like to see myself as a bridge builder, that is me building bridges between people, between races, between cultures, between politics, trying to find common ground." - T. D. Jakes

<comment><USER11> > There's no government at all without politics.

That's a pretty loaded statement that I disagree with because it presupposes that man has only being organizing his affairs for centuries when we both know that mankind has existed for thousands of years.

Anyway, there's a real risk of talking past each other, so I'll be upfront by saying that government can be totally independent of politics -- politics is merely a means to an end and that end is governance.

How did mankind manage its affairs prior to politicking and modern-day electoral contests (democracy)?

Monarchies [0]. What I believe you are arguing for via politicking is representative leadership [1], which only became a thing in the 17th century.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_history_of_the_world](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_history_of_the_world)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_democracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_democracy)

<comment><USER10> > That's a pretty loaded statement that I disagree with because it presupposes > that man has only being organizing his affairs for centuries when we both > know that mankind has existed for thousands of years.

I'm not sure what assumptions you're making here. Governance and politics have both existed for many many millennia, roughly as long as language has existed I'd wager.

> I'll be upfront by saying that government can be totally independent of > politics

I disagree completely. The _definition_ of the word politics is activities associated with governance. That was my point above. You're choosing to focus on a narrow and negative interpretation, and not the primary meaning of the word.

politics:noun

the activities associated with the governance of a country or other area

the activities of governments concerning the political relations between countries.

the academic study of government and the state.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=politics](https://www.google.com/search?q=politics)

> How did mankind manage its affairs prior to politicking?

There is no such thing, and there never was. Politicking is the word for persuading others to join together to achieve things not possible as individuals.

I acknowledge that politicking is sometimes also used to mean grift and power grabbing and other things. But using it that way is a choice, and it doesn't represent all possible politics. In my opinion, it also doesn't represent anything close to a majority of politics either. Most politics that occur are necessary and benign or good, and only a minority are the type you're worried about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What this shows to me is that a life can have a profound impact through long, careful and modest dedication; rhetoric of disruption and youthful riches can be profound too, but we shouldn't lose sight of other possibilities.

<comment><USER13> Absolutely. I love this bit:

> Just before she retired, Mr. Hyams said he saw the 96-year-old Ms. Bloom > trudging out of the subway and headed to work in the middle of a fierce > snowstorm. "I said, 'What are you doing here?' and she said, 'Why, where > should I be?'" he recalled.

It reminds me of a favorite bit from "Zen Flesh, Zen Bones":

> Hyakujo, the Chinese Zen master, used to labor with his pupils even at the > age of eighty, trimming the gardens, cleaning the grounds, and pruning the > trees.

> The pupils felt sorry to see the old teacher working so hard, but they knew > he would not listen to their advice to stop, so they hid away his tools.

> That day the master did not eat. The next day he did not eat, nor the next. > "He may be angry because we have hidden his tools," the pupils surmised. "We > had better put them back."

> The day they did, the teacher worked and ate the same as before. In the > evening he instructed them: "No work, no food."

<comment><USER14> > ... The day they did, the teacher worked and ate the same as before. In the > evening he instructed them: "No work, no food."

Isn't this very contrary to the belief that people shouldn't have to work for their basic necessities?

<comment><USER15> That's a very controversial belief. Most traditional value systems disagree. "He who does not work, shall not eat".

There is also a long-running train of thought that work is essential to the human character and that without it we decay into aimlessness.

<comment><USER16> I think _activity_ is essential to the human character. We are not far from a point where we don't have to work for food and other basic necessities (though, as usual, the future is here but it's not evenly distributed).

We can sort of see it with very rich people. They do stuff even though for many of them their activity adds peanuts to their existing fortune. I'm not talking about the hyper-active, super-ambitious types.

<comment><USER17> Pity they do not do enough of the right things with their influence.

We have enough major world wide problems they could tackle. And I am not just talking about charity - that is just passing the buck at most.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Dilemma for those of us considering donating:

1\. Donate (50) years from now: our investments will grow substantially on a compounded basis, and we'll give much more in dollars, even after adjusting for inflation

2\. Donate now: we'll give much less, but -if donated to the right causes- the beneficiaries will see compounded benefits. E.g. this lady helped educate beneficiaries via college scholarships, and these beneficiaries will benefit from that education throughout their lifetime, from today till (50) years from now, with increased pay. (If a college scholarship seems to necessitate only big donations, and you can't imagine fractional scholarships being useful, imagine smaller donations for buying books for poor kids, etc)

I don't know the answer myself, and sincerely could use debate here.

<comment><USER19> I think a nuance here is that #2 will still hold later, say the 50 years from now that you mention in #1. It will just be other beneficiaries.

<comment><USER18> True. One can make nuanced arguments around #1 as well. What if we were talking about saving kids from preventable fatal diseases by donating vaccines (or donating to research efforts that are developing non-profitable vaccines); those kids won't even be alive in 50 years. Or what if it was something that'd make kids more literate; in 50 years (hopefully!) literacy won't be a problem anymore, and higher education might be massively disrupted by MOOCs, etc.

<comment><USER20> I also think that, when I think of the beneficiaries of the giving as real people and not abstract "lives improved/saved," then "donate now" seems more compelling.

Certainly I could not tell a potential beneficiary to their face that I'm saving the money for the unlikely possibility that I need it myself, but it's fine because if it is too late for them by the time I donate I will probably be able to help someone else just as much or more at that time.

Along that same line of thinking: if my siblings desperately needed financial help and I could afford to give it to them, I would surely not keep the money out of a desire to have more later that I could give to my nieces and nephews.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Compare and contrast with Jeff Bezos: "The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel."

A stunning failure of imagination.

<comment><USER22> Donating $130B to Henry Street Settlement would probably destroy them. When you have that much money, you don't care about deploying it efficiently, you just want to deploy it. You often _can 't_ deploy it efficiently without distorting markets. Rather than more stuff getting done, everything just gets done less efficiently, with everyone along the value chain becoming a highly- paid consultant of dubious value.

It really is _a lot_ easier to deploy $10M in capital than $100B. $10M means that organizations that do good work and otherwise couldn't exist now can exist. $100B just means that everyone working in an area tangentially related to the benefactor's interests takes home fat salaries.

(My wife manages about $180M for a foundation, which is just about the sweet spot: enough to fund several organizations that wouldn't otherwise exist, but not enough to distort markets or incentivize people towards bureaucracy.)

<comment><USER23> > A stunning failure of imagination.

I think the OP meant that $130B could be given to a lot of good causes in small chunks rather than all 130B to one small org.

<comment><USER22> It can't, really, without creating the bureaucracy that leads to all that waste in the first place.

$130B is 13,000 $10M chunks. No single person can find, vet, decide upon, and measure progress for 13,000 small organizations. That means you have to hire a staff to manage and give away the money. A staff means that a.) it's not your imagination that matters b.) money is allocated via horse-trading among the people who have been hired to manage the money and c.) suddenly you have a strong incentive for potential recipients to game the system and focus on making things _look good for donors_ rather than _providing the services to the ultimate beneficiaries_. Organizations that previously were all about the mission become focused on the money, because there's a lot of it available and they're competing with lots of other organizations for it.

<comment><USER24> If he wants to deploy it efficiently, without needing to build a bureaucracy around it, he could do what Buffett is doing: donate it to the Gates Foundation. It's not great if you want vanity projects, but if he really wants to do good then it's hard to think of a better way.

<comment><USER25> Having worked in a mission financed by the Gates foundation I can tell you that a LOT of money leaves between the moment it's donated and the moment it's used in the field.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Anyone inspired by this should look into the Giving what we can idea: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giving_What_We_Can](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giving_What_We_Can)

It's far from easy but they propose to give 10% of earnings. A lot of people who intend to give 'once they're rich' end up with lifestyle creep and never end up giving much and ultimately find it very difficult to make large cuts in their spending. Whereas those who grow up with it and only consider 90% of the extra earnings from promotions of their own, do much better.

<comment><USER27> They have a calculator on their website [0] to compare your wealth ranking in the world with and without donating 10%. I believe for many people in IT it barely makes a difference (whereas for the recipients it's oftentimes life- changing).

[0] [https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/#how-rich- am-i](https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/#how-rich-am-i)

<comment><USER17> And if you cannot donate money, you might be able to donate time and work if you have spare.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is fabulous:

 _After retiring, Ms. Bloom agreed to move to a senior residence mainly because "she wanted to find a good bridge game," said Ms. Bornstein, a retired social worker.

To scout them out, and finally to move into one on the Upper West Side, she insisted on taking the subway, Ms. Bornstein said._

<comment><USER29> Sounds like she knows her priorities and adamantly avoids wasting money and chasing things for reputation's sake. I aspire to be like that.

<comment><USER30> It's because she lived through the Depression.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Just goes to show the effect of putting away money every year, and placing it in assets where the returns will compound over a long period.

<comment><USER32> Especially over a 67 year period! If she saved about $10k (2018 dollars) annually for the first ten years of her working career, got ~4% after inflation, and _never saved another penny_ that would account for ~$1.2 million of the sum by itself.

Buy and hold long term; reinvest dividends folks :-).

<comment><USER33> What if I'm hit by a bus and killed the day before I retire?

<comment><USER34> Not sure what your point is here -- A chance of reaching the future means you shouldn't plan for the future at all, even though statistically most people do survive to retirement age?

<comment><USER35> I think the implication is that _if_ your spend your life toiling for future reward _at the expense of present reward_ , you may lay there on the pavement bleeding out, wishing that you'd taken that vacation you always wanted.

Obviously it's presuming that you're neglecting reasonable gratification in the present, and it's all a spectrum of choices and rewards. But often people talk about financial investment without balancing it with "personal investment". Personal enrichment can pay interest of a sort, too.

<comment><USER32> I think you're maybe being _too_ charitable with djrobstep's comment. It's an inane response to the comment it replies to. Here's the full context:

> > Especially over a 67 year period! If she saved about $10k (2018 dollars) > annually for the first ten years of her working career, got ~4% after > inflation, and never saved another penny that would account for ~$1.2 > million of the sum by itself.

> > Buy and hold long term; reinvest dividends folks :-).

> What if I'm hit by a bus and killed the day before I retire?

It's just not responsive to the original comment and doesn't really bring up anything novel. It might be slightly more reasonable if included your elaborations, but it doesn't, and even then it's totally silly. Saving $10k/yr is not a hardship for most tech workers and does not preclude gratification in the present! $90-100k annually is still several standard deviations above median income.

<comment><USER36> What you, and most people championing the virtues of the slow and steady save, fail to consider is the time value of money (ie why those investments compound so much interest). Money today is worth more than money tomorrow is worth a truck load more than money in 67 years. Combined with the fact that, at least in my opinion, money when I'm young and healthy is also worth multiplicatively more than money post retirement.

I think most young people would rather be, and far better off with, saving that 10k annually you suggest to amassing a down payment on city property or equivalent investment in current quality of life rather than prepping for a lonely future.

<comment><USER32> > What you, and most people championing the virtues of the slow and steady > save, fail to consider is the time value of money (ie why those investments > compound so much interest).

No, we (generally) have not failed to consider it. (I'm sure some have and some haven't, but it isn't an argument that holds much water anyway.)

In fact, I think it means more or less the opposite of what you have taken it to mean.

Time value of money calculations implicitly assume return on investment! If your time value of money calculation gives you a higher value for spending some money vs investing it, your valuation of the spending _must_ be above market returns. It's fine if that is the output of your utility function some of the time, and you do have to make a personal decision about how much to spend vs save. But I would assert that most people should value retiring with non-zero savings, and highly paid tech workers have a lot of disposable income that spending provides minimal value.

No one here is suggesting you should eat cat food and live in a cardboard box to save for the future.

> Money today is worth more than money tomorrow is worth a truck load more > than money in 67 years.

Time value of money is simply making the inverse of the same slow-and-steady statement: investing the money for 67 years will yield massive returns. Your core assumption is that spending the money today will yield above-market returns. And for your first dollars, I agree! Housing, food, clothing, and (some) entertainment give huge value, far above stock-market gains.

> Combined with the fact that, at least in my opinion, money when I'm young > and healthy is also worth multiplicatively more than money post retirement.

"Young and healthy" and "post retirement" are not mutually exclusive, if you save. But they certainly are if you don't — it's hard to be healthy if you can't afford food or housing.

> I think most young people would rather be, and far better off with, saving > that 10k annually you suggest

First, let me be clear that the 10k figure was just for illustrative purposes of compounding at average index return rates and is not a suggestion nor rule of thumb. It's a ton for someone making poverty wages and totally insufficient for someone pulling down $500k.

The general guideline is: save _at least_ 15% of your take-home pay for retirement, starting 40 years before you intend to retire. I think this is even a little optimistic about stock market returns and would encourage saving _at least_ a few percent higher than that.

Note that this recommendation still leaves 80-85% of your take home pay for current spending. We're not arguing about the first 30-50% of your spending on necessities (and some luxuries may be necessary to stay sane and happy), but the marginal value of that 85th percentile spending vs saving.

> to amassing a down payment on city property

Property investment is just one kind of investment. A first property certainly has special properties as far as taxes (at least in the US) and long-term expenses, but is not incompatible with "championing the virtues of slow and steady save." I would agree that saving for a down payment on property makes a lot of sense for many people.

> or equivalent investment in current quality of life rather than prepping for > a lonely future.

The key word here is "investment." Your comparison is against stock market returns, so the quality of life stuff has to be _really_ valuable to justify the lost income.

Why do you think your future will be lonely? If you really like working, great, but many people only work because they need the current income to fund their necessities. There are other avenues for socializing than work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Really shocking part of the story to me was that she retired at 96 years old?!

<comment><USER38> I found that quite odd as well, but I mean if someone loves doing what they're doing and are bringing value to the table, why not? For many elderly people it might be better if they keep working on something, instead of losing all connection to reality just sitting at home.

<comment><USER37> I meant it's crazy impressive. Three of four grandparents I had lived quite long lives, and I witnessed first-person how their once exceptional mental capabilities quickly deteriorated once they've crossed 88-90 years threshold. Being able to still work regularly at that age is just an amazing achievement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I know it's a story about giving, but I find it kid of sad that she didn't enjoy that money more. I can't believe she enjoyed _not_ spending it so much that would have compared to traveling or building something?

Not that giving is bad, I'm sure it felt good, but man waiting until you are in your 90s to have that big effect seems like such an unnecessary delay.

I'm not trolling, just a gut reaction here. Anyone else feel that way?

Maybe it's because I'm an American consumer and consumerism is all I know.

<comment><USER40> > ...but I find it kid of sad that she didn't enjoy that money more.

I think she enjoyed that money tremendously. It's such a great feeling to give and to have the heart to give so generously, wow, what an amazing woman.

<comment><USER39> Alright, fair enough. I can see that too. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> There are are a lot of laudable things in this story, but it seems rather odd to attribute so much of the wealth accumulation to just Ms. Bloom. She had a husband who seems to have had three careers, two of which potentially had very generous pension benefits, and a third that often pays quite well.

<comment><USER42> TFA specifically says the accounts were soleley in _her_ name, she made the investments, and that it's possible he didn't even know about them.

<comment><USER41> Her husband died over a decade ago - the accounts being in just her name is literally proof of nothing, if they maintained separate finances prior to his death in most cases the assets would all be re-titled in her name.

For all we know her husband inherited $10m before he died, and she blew the difference in Vegas one weekend...

My point is that there is a lot of speculation in this article and not much in the way of facts

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The power of compounding interest. If you're 26 years old right now, then you have 70 years to compound your money.

Assuming an average of 7% annual return:

> x * 1.07 ^ 70 = 8200000

> x = 82000 / 114

> x = 72000

Essentially if you sock away $70k at age 26, that's how much you'll have when you're 96

<comment><USER44> I'm a 27 yo with $70k to sock away who's confused by your units.

<comment><USER45> I'm a 21 yo with $70k to sock away who's confused as to getting a solid 7% guaranteed year over year.

But obviously that's not what's stopping us from socking away $70k at 7%.

<comment><USER46> Nothing's guaranteed but the odds are very, very good. If you invest in a diversified index fund like VTI then 7% is a reasonable average growth estimate.

Investing a lump sum is a risk -- you'd cut your fortune nearly in half if you invested in 2008. This isn't an issue for most folks who save over time.

Frankly, the largest thing stopping folks from investing is financial literacy. The second largest thing is probably lack of disposable income.

<comment><USER47> Thank you. Every HN thread about the stock market seems to ignore pr downplay risk. If the stock market was really risk-free everyone would be able to retire a millionaire.

<comment><USER48> At least historically, there is no reason everyone couldn't.

There is no 30 year period in the history of the s&p 500 that returns less than 7% if I remember correctly.

<comment> barry-cotter Just imagine what you'd have gotten out of investing in the German, Russian, Chinese or Rhodesian stock exchanges in 1900. I don't know what happened to people who were heavily invested in the French stock exchange in 1939 but I doubt it was good either. I wouldn't want to be in the South Korean or Japanese stock exchange if North Korea does anything. You may think war is unlikely but so did a lot of people in 1913. The USA may be the safest available what with the oceans to the East and West and the client states to North and South but it's not like a civil war would be unprecedented.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Is it common for secretaries to be working until they are in their 90's?

Because 96 is really old. I am amazed that she didn't quit earlier. In an era where the retirement age is around 60-65 and most tech workers plan to retire by their 40's. It is truly astounding to see someone work well into their mid 90's.

Props to the lady for that!

<comment><USER50> > an era where the retirement age is around 60-65 and most tech workers plan > to retire by their 40's.

Those of us in our 40's—who haven't yet hit the startup lottery—only wish this was a possibility.

<comment><USER32> To pull it off, you have to take high-paying jobs (i.e., not startups) in your 20s, be somewhat frugal, and save a large portion of your salary. The compounding is really significant, but early retirement does not give you a lot of working years for compounding to happen. As they say, the best time to invest is 20 years ago.

If you're interested in discussing or learning more about this topic, the subreddit FinancialIndependence focuses on it.

<comment><USER51> Most of it is just lucky timing. There are a lot of people who do the exact same things but have very different results based on where exactly they fell on the economic cycle. Unless you're in the very lucky cohort who would have been rich in any case, being set by your 40s requires things like timing the housing and stock markets pretty carefully to get the necessary returns.

<comment><USER32> I don't think it's accurate to say "most" of it is lucky market timing. That's certainly a component and if it goes _wrong_ , it can throw off the retirement date by a couple years, but failing to keep your savings to income ratio high enough can throw off your retirement by _four decades_. For early retirement in particular, the compounding effect is smaller and the main factor (IMO) is savings rate.

Sorting people into two cohorts — "would have been rich in any case" and "other" — fails to recognize that people's individual financials fall somewhere on a continuum, and that their actions (i.e., spending) affects how much wealth they can accumulate by their 40s (or phrased alternatively, affects when they can retire).

<comment><USER51> > Sorting people into two cohorts — "would have been rich in any case" and > "other" — fails to recognize that people's individual financials fall > somewhere on a continuum, and that their actions (i.e., spending) affects > how much wealth they can accumulate by their 40s (or phrased alternatively, > affects when they can retire).

That wasn't a point I intended to make. What I was trying to get at is that most of us should not be comparing our returns to people who start wealthy / connected or the few outliers who were e.g. early employees at a high-return startup. That can be useful as a dream goal but it's better to have more realistic expectations.

For the main point, personal habits definitely make a big factor but your ability to maintain those high savings rates is subject to a number of things which you have little to no control over. As an example, graduating in a recession has historically correlated with lower lifetime earnings because starting salaries influenced subsequent wages and a long period languishing in a mediocre job market really cuts into your interest compounding time if your baseline is not substantially over a reasonable cost of living. Similarly, in many areas the housing market has had huge fluctuations and that's a huge impact on your savings rate since it affects both the cost of rent and your time to acquire a down payment if it's more cost effective long-term to own. You do have the option of living in a smaller/less-desirable place, etc. but that often still means things like a longer commute and the numerous costs that entails.

The other side of the luck equation is that many people have factors which make it hard to optimize for investment returns. If you have health issues, your savings rate is going to be much lower. If you have kids or a relative who needs help that will impact your housing, job, travel, etc. choices and cuts into both your absolute savings rate and especially your ability to make long-term optimizations. If you're married to someone who needs to move for job reasons (e.g. everyone in academia), your ability to time the local housing market is severely hampered. If your particular field is not continuously in strong demand (this can be out of your control: tons of laid- off web developers were competing for the same jobs circa 2001) there's going to be time transitioning, retraining, etc. and likely digging into those savings temporarily.

None of this is to say that living frugally is a bad idea or that you'd regret having done so, only that saying you can retire in 20 years is unrealistic for most people and it makes the pitch sound a bit like a scam/cult.

<comment><USER32> Yeah, all good points.

> None of this is to say that living frugally is a bad idea or that you'd > regret having done so, only that saying you can retire in 20 years is > unrealistic for most people and it makes the pitch sound a bit like a > scam/cult.

I don't mean to suggest that everyone, or even most people, can retire in 20 years, and I certainly agree that such a claim is not true. Some highly paid tech workers can, and this forum's readership tends to tilt in that direction.

<comment><USER51> Yeah, I guess I prefer a more positive framing – the person who said that most tech workers plan to retire in their 40s makes it sound like something's wrong if you're not and I prefer a more nuanced message.

I especially like thinking about the meaning of where your money is going – some people spend money on experiences which they like but a lot of it is keep-up-with-the-Jones stuff where e.g. people are paying crazy amounts for housing zoned for the "right" school when paying less and spending more time with their kids will have a much bigger lifetime impact. Someone in that position probably isn't retiring too early in any case but if they have their spending well planned out they're probably going to say that was an acceptable tradeoff for having kids, while the guy living above even considerable means is having a midlife crisis reconsidering hemorrhaging that kind of cash.

<comment><USER32> Totally agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> What strikes me most is that there is a need for benefactors to make sure people can get a proper education.

Locking education for people with a disadvantage in life which is not their own doing is baffling for me. Especially in a developed country... Not everyone can win the parent lottery.

<comment><USER53> Define developed? _Properly_ developed countries such as Norway and Australia have quality public education systems. Sure, parentage always helps with the outcome, but the facilities are there for all children to do well - <USER4> they choose to do so.

These countries also have universal health care.

But I guess it's more important that your ultra rich stay ultra rich, to ensure a proper social divide between them and those unfortunate enough to be born to the poor. (Debating whether to use a snark mark here, landing on not).

<comment><USER54> You could consume the total wealth of the entire Forbes 400 and fund healthcare in the US for eight months. It will cost $45 trillion over the next ten years to fund US healthcare, conservatively - equal to nearly half of all household wealth.

What's your next idea?

<comment> semi-extrinsic Well, talk about a strawman. In the countries we're talking about, you have actual progressive taxation, and every dollar you take home above approx. $100k gets taxed almost 50%. That's not taxing 400 people, it's taxing the 25 million top earners in the US.

<comment><USER55> In Australia the marginal tax rate on $100K is more like 35%. You have to be making several hundred thousand a year to approach the maximum 45% marginal rate. Not sure how it works in Norway...

<comment> semi-extrinsic In Norway, the ~45% maximum marginal rate kicks in at $120k. In Denmark, the ~50% rate cuts in at $75k, while in Sweden (which is the most extreme I know of) the ~60% rate cuts in at $80k.

In all these countries, 10-15% of the population pays the top tax rate.

<comment><USER55> Right. Yeah, with ours you do hit the top bracket (45%) at $180K but the actual percentage of tax across all income (the marginal rate) means that you're still only paying just over 30% at that point ($18,200 free, 19% of $18,200 to $37K, 32.5% of $37K to $87K, and 37% of $87K up to $180K = $54,232, which is about 30.1%). Even by the point you're making a million dollars a year you're still only paying 42% marginal rate, even though you're well into the 45% tax bracket.

I'm generally not super opposed to having a rate as high as 60%, but the point that kicks in with Sweeden's system does seem very low...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> She worked at the same company for 67 years!

That's worth an article itself. How many people have managed that?

</comment><comment><USER57> What a great story! I imagine she must have been profoundly content in life. She had no need to show off her wealth or even to acquire material things beyond what she needed.

</comment><comment><USER58> The manager (not owner) of a local storage facility lives extremely frugally: eats bananas, oatmeal, an apple and sandwich he brings from home. He has a number of stocks he watches daily after he finishes various tasks. He's the prototypical "millionaire next door."

</comment><comment><USER59> Let's not ignore that she was clearly capable of much more than being a secretary, and that she was denied realizing her potential because of her gender.

</comment><comment><USER60> if this is legal, what prevents google from reading emails and investing on the same stocks as one economist that happens to use gmail?

<comment><USER61> per A Random Walk Down Wall Street ([https://www.amazon.com/Random-Walk-Down- Wall-Street/dp/03933...](https://www.amazon.com/Random-Walk-Down-Wall- Street/dp/0393330338)) 99+% of people are best off not picking individual stocks and just investing in index funds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Just looked up the nonprofits 990's and it looks like a decent nonprofit.

I only looked at the three highest paid employees though. I didn't calculate adverting, and company expenses to money sent out to the cause. I never used to be this leary of nonprofits. I guess I'm just getting old, and seen way too many people abusing nonprofit status?

(Waystar takes public information and makes it easy for the user to evaluate a 501c3. Waystar recently made it harder to access the financials, but they are still Free with registration. You can see the last three years usually. Use a throwaway email because they do like to market.)

</comment><comment><USER63> Lawyers aren't known for their stock picking, I wonder if she was piggybacking on insider trading by M&A lawyers.

<comment><USER64> Saving $5000 per year for 75 years compounded annually at 6.2% would net you a little over $8M. An unremarkable return on an unremarkable savings rate.

<comment><USER65> I don't think a 21year old secretary was saving the equivalent of $70k 2018 dollars in 1943.

<comment><USER66> Who said anything about $70k?

<comment><USER50> Andre_Wanglin alluded to it, though $70k was a slight overstatement.

With the effective inflation rate, $5,000 in 1947 was equivalent to $58,035 in 2018.

[https://data.bls.gov/cgi- bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=5000&year1=194...](https://data.bls.gov/cgi- bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=5000&year1=194701&year2=201803)

<comment><USER67> He was using 5k inflation adjusted dollars so starting with ~350 actual $/ year in 1947.

Really, just do the calculation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> This is why I don't have sympathy for chronically poor people in developed countries. Apart from serious disabilities, most poor people actually have high incomes but can't stop spending money every day on luxuries to entertain themselves.

<comment><USER69> > most poor people actually have high incomes

what is your evidence for this? take america as a "developed country"

<comment><USER68> Here are some stats I just looked up for the US:

$7.25 minimum wage

90% of households own a car [1].

In many cities, rent is about 15% of income, and median rent is less than minimum wage [2].

0.64/100000 malnutrition deaths [3].

[1] [https://qz.com/873704/no-car-households-are-becoming-more- co...](https://qz.com/873704/no-car-households-are-becoming-more-common-in- the-us-after-decades-of-decline/)

[2] [https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/02/best-cities-for-cheap- rent.h...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/02/best-cities-for-cheap-rent.html)

[3] [http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of- death/malnutriti...](http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of- death/malnutrition/by-country/)

<comment><USER69> literally none of that meaningfully indicates that "most [american] poor people actually have high incomes".

minimum wage means nothing without considering cost of living which outpaces a 40 hour work week at 7.25 (or even the potentially higher state minimum wage) basically everywhere in the country [1]

as per your article, a) car ownership is dropping, b) a household having a car can mean sharing it with a number of other people c) 90% of households having a car is not relevant to a discussion only about those in poverty and d) in most non-urban environments, having a car is a necessity, not a luxury, if you want to be able to, y'know, get to work and the grocery store [2][3]

sure, some cities are more affordable than others. what percentage of the country lives in those cities? do you expect everyone to move there? if so, do you think those affordable rents will stay affordable? additionally, please explain, in detail, your full plan for moving when you have no savings, and for mitigating the effects of leaving your job, the place you know, as well as all your friends and family who provide a vital safety net in case of emergency.

i literally do not know what you're trying to say with the malnutrition deaths note- do you think that having access to a social safety network in the form of foodstamps means you're not poor or something? lol

[1] [https://www.citylab.com/life/2015/09/mapping-the- difference-...](https://www.citylab.com/life/2015/09/mapping-the-difference- between-minimum-wage-and-cost-of-living/404644/) [2] [https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2018/march/distance- to-...](https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2018/march/distance-to-grocery- stores-and-vehicle-access-influence-food-spending-by-low-income-households-at- convenience-stores/) [3] [https://nhts.ornl.gov/briefs/PovertyBrief.pdf](https://nhts.ornl.gov/briefs/PovertyBrief.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> This is no doubt a very selfless act, however, I don't agree with people of such wealth living in a rent controlled apartment for so many years and denying a genuinely underprivileged person/family the opportunity to live there.

<comment><USER71> The problem is this style of rent control, not her.

<comment><USER70> So you disagree with means-testing social welfare? At all times she had the option to use her substantial wealth and live somewhere that wasn't subsidised.

<comment><USER71> No, I agree with means-testing it. Rent control is not means-tested. That's my problem with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Is it just me or do you get the feeling it's possible her bosses may have been doing inside trades and she just got lucky by a) not knowing what was going on and b) copying the trades?

I love the story either way, it just jumped out to me that she obviously 'beat the market' which typically means you knew something others in the market didn't.

<comment><USER57> Why do you say she "obviously beat the market"?

Estimate that the stock market has returned 7% a year for last 67 years (counting inflation, counting dividends).

Then if she saved $6,300 per year for 67 years, she would have ended up with over $8.2M if she used an indexing strategy (no insider trading necessary).

        rate = 1.07
        num_years = 67
        yearly_savings = 6300  # dollars
        net_worth = 0
        for _ in xrange(num_years):
          net_worth *= rate
          net_worth += yearly_savings
        print '{:,.2f}'.format(net_worth)

        8,284,436.90

If you change it to 6% return, she would have have to save $10,200 a year. I'm sure 90% of the people reading this can save $6,000 - $10,000 a year. All you need is a regular job.

Yes there are some things wrong with this analysis, but the point is: _compound interest_ !!!

(Feel free to post a better analysis, using real data instead of the annualized return. The results shouldn't be substantially different. The returns are adjusted for inflation but the amount of savings per year amount probably should be too. $6K is easy to save today, probably wasn't in 1955. Also probably take into account that fees were higher in 1955 and index funds have gotten better.)

<comment><USER73> That math really doesn't work - $6,300 67 years ago (1951) in today's money would be $61,478.82 ([https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm](https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm)).

She would definitely have to do well in the market, but I wonder what her earnings looked like as well over time - Cleary Gottlieb is a VERY successful law firm. If there was any kind of profit sharing or other incentives, it could have been fairly lucrative. Stock would have been better, but still.

<comment><USER57> Yeah, that's the point I mentioned in "6K is easy to save today but wasn't in 1955".

I'm interested to see an analysis that takes that into account. But I don't think it changes the overall conclusion. I think that starting in 1951, on a secretary's salary, you could have used an indexing strategy to end up with $8.2M. Should be pretty easy to prove or disprove.

One thing I don't know is how much secretaries made back then. Presumably her wages increased a non-neglible amount over time.

<comment><USER72> In 1955 $6k was very much likely over 50% of her yearly income. Agreed, unlikely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Is this technically "insider trading" in as much as she had privileged information to inform her buys, which were not general market exposed?

I think not, they were personal buys from her line bosses, but I'm scratching my head a bit, if this would have been ethical had the buys being made in the office been for clients, and not her direct employers personal benefit.

<comment><USER75> Unless her bosses traded on insider information I don't think it is. I work for a bank and get training in this sort of stuff every three months, but I'm certainly no lawyer so don't take my word for it – I may well be wrong.

<comment><USER76> It's not uncommon for trades to be made in the wake of outsized unusual options trading activity in a stock on the theory that the unusual options activity is made by someone trading on insider knowledge. I'm not a lawyer either but I don't think that qualifies as insider trading.</comment></comment></comment>


No, This Man Invented the Internet (2000) - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/asap/2000/1127/105.html <comment><AUTHOR> Fourteen years have passed, almost to the day, since this was published and Lick is still an obscure figure to the public.</comment>


Free, quality LaTeX templates for nearly anything - <AUTHOR> http://www.latextemplates.com/

<comment><USER2> Dupe: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5262113>

</comment><comment><USER3> I really should check for duplicates before upvoting something..</comment>


Ask PG: The right reason to take investor money - <AUTHOR>

In your "Ramen Profitable" essay you wrote:
Ramen profitable means no more than the definition implies. It does not, for example, imply that you're "bootstrapping" the startup—that you're never going to take money from investors. Empirically that doesn't seem to work very well. Few startups succeed without taking investment.
So the question becomes--when is the right time, and what are the right reasons, to take invesment?  In what situation is taking investment optimizing for success (for a web startup in particular)? <comment><USER2> If you're doing a true startup (meaning a company designed to grow fast, not a consulting company or a niche product company), it's usually a good idea to take investor money. The most basic reason is that it lets you grow faster. Some investors also supply expertise and connections you couldn't buy.

Some times tend to be better to raise money than others. You might not want to raise money when (a) you're in the middle of a big project, or (b) you can't get decent terms.

<comment><USER3> where do you draw the line on niche companies in the definition of a "true startup"? seems like YC has invested in quite a few niche-specific companies.

just curious, don't mean to threadjack too badly or nitpick.

<comment><USER2> Market size, basically. A company making software for, say, cataloguing butterfly collections wouldn't be a startup.

<comment><USER3> so if you have a niche that is sufficiently large or profitable, then its not an issue?

<comment><USER2> Yes, but people probably wouldn't call it a niche market in that case.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mororola's new free Android IDE - <AUTHOR> http://developer.motorola.com/docstools/motodevstudio/

<comment><USER2> I believe the title should be fixed to read "Motorola's", not "Mororola's".

<comment><USER3> I just assumed Scooby Doo typed the title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The good: Obviously the more Ides the better and displays how open Android is.

The bad: Is this the beginning of the fragmentation in the Android space? Probably not...

</comment><comment><USER5> Android seems like a nice guy and all, but could we please get a C++-environment. Current mobile market is way too fragmented imho, iPhones have their ObjC, Nokia has Symbian C++, and now Android has its Java. Nearly impossible to develop anything which would run on all three mentioned easily.

<comment><USER5> I'm sorry for not researching properly before posting. Android seems to have native devkit too.

[http://android- developers.blogspot.com/2009/06/introducing-a...](http://android- developers.blogspot.com/2009/06/introducing-android-15-ndk-release-1.html)

<comment><USER6> The NDK is new, and not that powerful. It's nice if you have some big chunk of legacy C++ you want running underneath an Android app, but you have no access to most of the internals that are also written in C++ (radio, media, hardware, graphics, etc).

You're still going to have to code in Java and talk to the native code through the JNI. You can also download the open source tree and work with the entire native layer, but that's undocumented territory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ironically, there appears to be no version of this for any free, open-source OS, such as Linux, for building apps for the free, open-source Android platform.

</comment><comment><USER8> How is this different from eclipse+ADT?

<comment><USER7> The one from Motorola does not run on Linux.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not this week anyway - <http://ow.ly/ibcK>.

<comment><USER7> Oh, well then I can be optimistic. Thanks.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


We called a secret MI6 phone number (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://kernelmag.dailydot.com/features/report/4903/we-called-a-secret-mi6-phone-number/ <comment><USER2> Running a numbers station out of a phone number seems odd. With radio it's hard to detect who is listening. With a telephone number it should be much easier to figure out who is calling the number.

<comment><USER3> True. I'm guessing there's some unknown circumstance that makes the ease-of- access benefit outweigh any security risks.

It wouldn't surprise me if the number was leaked on purpose. To get people calling the station, to obfuscate the message's actual recipients.

<comment><USER2> I also assumed the intentional leak at first. But the update says the number was then discontinued. Having lots of people calling from other places than the one your spy is in doesn't help.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's up with the black bar at the top of HN? - <AUTHOR> There's a black bar on HN pages, I don't think it was there earlier today.  From view source it looks like it's a 1x1 image called "s.gif".  What's up with that?  Is this a new thing HN does when a famous hacker dies? <comment><USER2> Here's a link to all the comments on HN covering previous questions & answers about the meaning of the "black bar" at the top of the page on HN: [https://www.google.com/search?q=site:https://news.ycombinato...](https://www.google.com/search?q=site:https://news.ycombinator.com+%22black+bar%22)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's in Memoriam of Marvin Minksky, influential computer scientist and AI researcher.</comment>


I Used the Web for a Day Using a Screen Reader - <AUTHOR> https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/12/voiceover-screen-reader-web-apps/ <comment><USER2> 3 Paragraphs into this article on accessibility there's 2 giant... I'm not sure what to call them... ads I guess... that totally break up the article in a way that makes it seem to end. It took me a minute to figure out where the rest of the darn article was. For a magazine about design and an article on accessibility, this seems like a good example of poor design and I can only assume it's not accessible.

That being said, this was an interesting read.

<comment><USER3> Smashing Magazine has become unpracticable with their last redesign. They wanted to focus on paying readers so I hope at least those have a good experience, but I almost totally cut reading it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's time screen reader tech moved towards automatic OCR.

It's a losing battle trying to get every technology and web service to put in all the right aria tags - imagine imgur for example - there is no way you could make those all those animated gifs and mspaint memes properly accessible - instead, a neural network should look at the screen like a human does, and describe it.

The screen reader should say "There is a gif of a squirrel falling off a shelf, and it has a share and an upload button"

<comment><USER5> Facebook automatically creates alt tags for images and describes them with text such as "three people outdoors with a tree." As someone who's blind I found it interesting for five minutes and have not visited Facebook again. I have been totally blind since birth, and I don't think any amount of textual description will make me interested in scrolling through a photo stream. I could see this being different if you lost your sight later in life. OCR in it's current state is a bad idea as a primary way to get information when using a computer. My screen reader allows me to use OCR to find out what's on the screen. It works OK for specific situations such as an inaccessible installer with a couple controls. It falls down if I were to try and use OCR to read Java code.

<comment><USER6> I'm sympathetic to the GP's point. Every time I read about yet another custom GUI toolkit, I want to scream, because I know it might lead to more applications blind people can't use. If screen readers could really see the screen for themselves, instead of having to be spoon-fed accessibility information, then custom toolkits with no accessibility support wouldn't be an issue anymore.

But, as you said, OCR isn't perfect. I'm not surprised that it still has inaccuracies when recognizing code in particular. Also, computer vision takes a lot of computing power. I'm going to be sad if someday it ends up taking a powerful GPU, possibly running on a remote server, to enable a screen reader to do the things that a 90s computer could do without breaking a sweat via programmatic accessibility APIs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm curious if there are any blind programmers who prefer OSX to Windows when it comes to screen reading software. I used to own a Mac and found Voiceover easy to get started with, but not very efficient compared to Jaws for Windows. I'm not sure if this is because I didn't use it enough or if Jaws and possibly NVDA are better for experienced screen reader users who want all the easily accessible shortcuts.

<comment><USER6> Like you, the blind programmers I know generally prefer Windows. As one anecdote, Tyler Spivey was so dissatisfied with the way VoiceOver worked with the terminal that he wrote his own terminal screen reader [1] for the times he had to work in that environment.

[1]: [https://github.com/tspivey/tdsr](https://github.com/tspivey/tdsr)

<comment><USER5> I got the Macbook air 6 years ago because it was the best windows ultrabook you could get at the time. Once WSL came out I rarely used OSX. WSL has drasticaly increased my productivity and basically made Windows 10 a completely new OS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > when using a screen reader, it's almost impossible to listen to music at the > same time as browsing the web!

Not true for Windows screen readers and VoiceOver for iOS. There's a widely implemented feature called audio ducking, where the OS turns down the audio of other applications while the screen reader is speaking. So the music may be quietly in the background, but it's still there. Does Mac not have this feature?

<comment><USER5> ON windows I always manually set the volume of itunes much lower then the system volume. I assume you can do this on OSX. I find this a lot better then using audio ducking. It's jarring to have the music volume increase when I am thinking through a problem instead of doing something on the computer that causes my screen reader to speak.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I tried to read the article about using screen readers with a screen reader! That was a lot of hard work, I am also feeling slightly ashamed that it has taken me so long to give a screen reader a go. I was using ChromeVox and it took me a long time to get it to read the page, it was reading other tabs at first and there was no easy way to control it, even with eyesight.

I think that accessibility can improve considerably with HTML5 and CSS grid. There is no need for pages to be a sea of divs, the document structure can be dome correctly so the page looks good with no styling, then the CSS grid layout engine can be used to make it look pretty for the sighted folk.

I think that document outline is really important, and to ask yourself the question of how you would present something if it was typed up, Word document style or like a formal letter.

There is no excuse for developers to not be using the correct tags, so that means header, main and footer, with articles and asides. The nav tag can be used for anything that is navigation and structured in a list. Pictures with figures and figure captions can be used too. All these elements can be targeted with CSS to be styled, there is no need to have documents have 17 nested divs each of them with many meaningless class tags when there are perfectly good elements to style. You can take a document and get the structure right and then use the elements as a skeleton in SCSS to style it. If structured properly these need not go '17 deep'. I think that if people had div-less and class-less markup and were used to styling it that way with SCSS generating the CSS then it would seem absurd to go to the unmaintainable sea of divs and class tags that passes for normal today.

There does need to be more work done with HTML5 to get the perfect outline, I do use outline tools already but that is a fine art.

Back to the article, the BBC do actually have people that use screen readers, I met one recently and how he used his iphone was a sight to behold, just playing with it more like how Jimi Hendrix played the guitar.

Since the author works for the BBC and with the BBC being so vast he might not know the screen reader community that work there.

I have suggested to people I have worked with that we get an actual partially sighted person to test web pages for accessibility. I got a 'why would you want to do that' attitude. However, I think that this is a service that should be offered to clients.

<comment><USER8> A sea of divs is not a problem if you use role=presentational correctly.

<comment><USER6> Deep nesting of divs is not a problem for the screen readers I'm familiar with; they'll flatten the representation of the page regardless. If a screen reader does have a problem with this, IMO, that's the screen reader's fault, not the web developers. So there's no need to put role="presentation" on all your divs.

To be clear, though, there's another abuse of divs that _is_ a problem: using a div with an onclick event handler and no ARIA role where a simple button would do. Don't do that. I'd suggest using an actual button tag if possible, so you get both keyboard and screen reader accessibility for free. But if that doesn't work with your CSS for whatever reason, at least put role="button" on that div.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is there any screen reader for the web that works more visually with some intelligence?

(and the OCR part could probably easily be matched with the source code to get perfect error correction)</comment>


Ask HN: Is there anything new on e-commerce besides catalogue/cart shopping? - <AUTHOR> During the quarantine I find myself, buying local (in Buenos Aires) from my regular local shops using whatsapp to send them lists of items. And I'm realizing that is a much simpler and pleasant experience that the "traditional" cart and catalogue online experience. Please share your own experience <comment><USER2> I have thought about this for decades. Using web-based HTML forms for transmitting information, whether e-commerce or otherwise, is often overkill. There should be a standardised format for consumers to send basic plain text information such as name, address, etc. over the internet. In many cases using a website to submit such basic information, where every website potentially collects information differently, creates more work for everyone. It is mind- biggling to think of how many people have struggled with brittle web forms and how much time and energy they have wasted. It is sad to think that probably very few of them have ever thought "There must be a better way."

</comment><comment><USER3> In India too, a lot of stay-at-home ladies are increasing selling homemade products via Whatsapp. Plain, simple and fast.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you use slack bots at work? - horizontech-dev I used to work at a place where we had Slack but that was around 4 years ago, bots were getting started. Wondering do you or your team use them? If so, what do you use that mainly for? <comment><AUTHOR> We have a bunch of slack bots for common tasks like resetting passwords and setting up dev environments. I can send a message to the slackbot and spin up a copy of the app with a specific branch running, for example. We also have read only bots that notify when builds fail or something is broken</comment>


Show HN: Top Comment – Guess which comment was most popular [alpha] - <AUTHOR> http://totallytopcomment.com <comment><AUTHOR> Created a quick game mvp during coronavirus quarantine. It's ~2 days work and there may be bugs, but it's a silly concept just for fun. If you see anything noticeably bad or have any suggestions, let me know and I might address them; but it's a silly concept so.. I might not.</comment>


VC Firms Don't Back You, VC Partners Do - <AUTHOR> http://www.hunterwalk.com/2013/04/vc-firms-dont-back-you-vc-partners-do.html

<comment><USER2> Careful. This borders on Guy Kawasaki's Top 10 Mistakes by Entrepreneurs, Item 10: Befriending your VC.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHjgK6p4nrw>

<comment><AUTHOR> I think of it more as creating professional obligation rather than friendship. It's a commitment hack, no?

<comment><USER2> Again, be careful here. There is an easy risk that you will over-estimate how much of a commitment your VC actually has in you.

Guy Kawasaki lists this in his 10 Mistakes too, Item 11: Assuming that your VC will truly add value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I won't argue that a venture capitalist can't be a useful ally, but it's a mistake to overestimate how much assistance they can really provide when you need it most.

Venture capitalists doing their jobs owe their loyalty to limited partners. So long as things are going relatively well or there's reason to believe things are going to go well, their interests are probably aligned with yours. But when they diverge, don't expect disinterested advocacy on your behalf.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, this is a commitment hack meant to strengthen obligation. In most cases, interests are aligned. When they're not, at least you have a foundation to discuss upfront why they're differing.

<comment><USER3> I don't know what a "commitment hack" is. If you're suggesting that entrepreneurs can somehow influence venture capitalists to forget that they have fiduciary duties to their limited partners, and to act in a manner inconsistent with those duties, I think you're expecting too much.

Sometimes entrepreneurs make life more complicated than it really is. A venture capitalist exists to invest money on behalf of limited partners, and to deliver a satisfactory return to those limited partners. To support that end, he or she will provide some non-financial support to the entrepreneurs he or she funds. There are limits to this of course, and an entrepreneur should never assume that this support will be there indefinitely.

When a venture capitalist pulls back his or her support, a discussion about alignment of interests isn't going to be meaningful. If your company isn't doing well (or well enough) or the fund has decided to double down on other investments, a heart-to-heart chat won't change that.

Given that many startups fail, and a small fraction supply the vast majority of a successful fund's returns, entrepreneurs who believe their interests are unlikely to diverge at some point are being far too optimistic.</comment></comment></comment>


Why I Still Use Emacs - <AUTHOR> http://gnuvince.wordpress.com/2012/02/19/why-i-still-use-emacs/ <comment><USER2> I don't even know what features of Emacs I use. I have mental intents, actions, transformations, things I want to do to text, files, buffers, regions .. my conscious mind has been locked out of the tight-loop, the vicious cycle of a synapses being fired and keys chorded. It's all muscle memory. The perfect coupling of an average biological agent, and a bubbly, baroque piece of antique Lisp technology. Together, battling RSI and worse keyboard layouts, we sculpt scratch buffers to all sorts of works, many of adequate quality, but some exquisite.

<comment><USER3> This is poetry.

Yeah, i once gave a emacs introduction in school and people asking me how i do X, Y. I needed to watch my fingers to tell them.. that was a bit confusing ;)

<comment><USER4> I have this problem with (random alphanumeric) passwords. When I needed to input my password on my phone, I actually had to draw a keyboard on a piece of paper and mime typing it, watching which keys my fingers hit and writing down the character.

But I don't get this with Vim. I think it's because Vim is a kind of composable language, so although you don't actually know at the time what you're doing, if someone were to ask you how you deleted half the line so quickly, you can work it out: "f)dt:". I think this is the reason I have trouble learning Emacs: it's not so obvious how commands are composed. There are some chains like C-h which are, but for the most part it feelings like there are just too _many_ pieces. I've given it a good shot, and I'll probably try again, but it just doesn't feel as easy as "'d' to delete".

<comment><USER5> I remember one password that I had committed to muscle memory. I burned my hand one day cooking, and had to have my hand bandaged up for a week (note to self: don't try grabbing the steel handle of a pan at 450°F without a mitt). I couldn't type my password from muscle memory with my hand bandaged. I even knew the phrase that it was based on, but after many tries, I couldn't reproduce the exact set of upper and lowercase letters and letter substitutions that I had used. I eventually had to give up and change out all of my passwords and SSH keys, because I just couldn't recover my own password without my muscle memory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I enjoyed the article, even though I am a VIM fan. Many of the same advantages apply to VIM too.

At the same time I thought it was also like looking into a different culture. "Easy" meaning "copy and paste what a user tells you?" I guess there is a different view of easy.

The disadvantages struck me as rather interesting. I am not entirely sure why you need multithreading in a text editor for example. Perhaps someone could enlighten me as to when this sort of thing would help. Is it about running a compile job in one buffer while editing in another?

I also noticed a big reason to use VIM or EMACS over an IDE that seemed missing and that is that both these editors have tons of features for gracefully editing large numbers of large files. The IDE's I have worked with haven't come close here.

For now I will stick with VIM, which I feel comfortable and confident on. However, seeing folks talk about the benefits of the other is interesting.

<comment><USER7> _I am not entirely sure why you need multithreading in a text editor for example. Perhaps someone could enlighten me as to when this sort of thing would help._

Basically, the lack of multithreading prevents any sort of background processing (unless it can be implemented using an idle hook, which often isn't possible.)

For example, Gnus (a newsreader which can also be used to read mail from a POP or IMAP server) locks up Emacs while it is checking for or fetching new mail. This is quite painful when fetching mail over a slow line or from a slow server, and causes people to do hacks like mirroring their mail onto a local IMAP server from where Gnus can fetch it more quickly. But even then, there is a noticeable pause when the server is accessed.

<comment><USER8> The example you give is the typical Emacs feature Vim zealots like to mock.

If I want to read an email I simply switch to my email client, thus virtually eliminating (almost) all risks of Vim/Emacs crashing.

<comment><USER7> Gnus is an awesome piece of software and having all of Emacs editing capabilities at hand when writing mail is fantastic. I'd use it as my primary mail client if it weren't for the multithreading issue.

Not sure why you'd mock this use of Emacs, after all mails are text and as such very well suited to being composed with a text editor...

<comment><USER9> My MUA (Mutt) can launch any editor you like for composing mail. I use Vim, but it would work equally well with Emacs, nano, or whatever you prefer. Mutt is not alone in this regard.

The point is, you don't have to have embed your MUA inside of your text editor in order to use your editor for composing mail. There's nothing particularly wrong with that approach, but it's not the only way to get that benefit.

<comment><USER10> I agree you don't have to, but if the interaction gets more pervasive, such that the points of interface become many, it can be easier to just implement it in the same environment. If you just want to edit mail in vim, that's one thing, but if you want to be able to use commands in the mail editor to contextually interact with the rest of a mailbox (highlight a URL and search your mailbox for other occurrences of that URL, or add an email address to your address book, to take simple examples), it becomes more like the IDE case. Either you have to implement the IDE in the editor's scripting language (the emacs approach), or you need to call out to a number of special-case Unix tools to implement each of the hooks (the vim approach).

<comment><USER11> I write all my work e-mail in GNU Emacs and use the Emacs VM mailer.

Because it's all inside Emacs, text from other contexts -- code, shells, mailboxes, and compiler and tool output -- can be accurately and quickly pulled into the messages you compose, improving the content and reliability of what you're saying in mail.

For example, if I want to use a complex identifier from a source file I've just looked at, I can autocomplete it (M-. or find-tag) quickly from a substring. I can choose autocompletion suggestions simultaneously from all contexts.

Obviously, copying and pasting regions from those other contexts is much more immediate too.

This is in addition to the advantages of having a familiar and powerful editing tool for formatting, tidying up messages, trimming unnecessary content, etc.

I could, but wouldn't want to, live without it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am a bit annoyed by all these emacs / vim / sublimetext vs. IDEs articles. In an IDE, the editor is a small part of the overall program, and it indeed does often suck compared to the godfathers. But it's such a small part of the actual task of working on software that I'm ok with a few tradeoffs. On the other hand, whoever ever tried to debug java or c++ in emacs, or even worse, debug a single app consisting of php, ruby and javascript in emacs is going to enter a world of pain. A task which is pretty easy to accomplish in Intellij IDEA.

Eclipse makes it pretty easy to keep the muscle memory with its emacs+ mode, which is quite good (it even has ido and M-x). You lose the elisp, but have a real IDE nonetheless.

It's all about the work you need to accomplish, I find myself much more productive with a less capable editor, but a full IDE. And I still use emacs a lot for org-mode, editing config files, writing smaller programs. But emulating full IDE features is just to painful (most of the time).

The only area where Emacs is actually a brilliant IDE is when using SLIME (for Common Lisp and Clojure).

<comment><USER13> > But (the editor is) such a small part of the actual task of working on > software that I'm ok with a few tradeoffs

You have to understand Eclipse and the tools most people use it with evolved together for a long time. That creates this dependency between IDE and toolset - it's more or less impossible to be productive in Java without an IDE. There are, however, languages and technologies that didn't evolve together with IDEs and employ fairly easily hand-editable files instead of overly complicated things no human hand is supposed to touch.

Emacs' brilliance is in how it's built in itself and how one can shape it to its needs. For instance, it took me a couple minutes to configure mine to start with different fontsizes and screen layout in accordance to the size of the monitor I'm using. I cannot imagine the level of insanity I would have to go through to do it on Eclipse.

<comment><USER12> What languages are these though? I switched over to eclipse for C/C++, and these are fairly well integrated in emacs to boot. I just find it more comfortable to write in that in eclipse, and most of the navigation and editing commands I have in emacs work perfectly fine in eclipse with emacs+.

I moved over to intellij for java (of course), php + javascript + html (the ability to debug php and javascript side by side is very nice), and python (although that's one that works pretty well in emacs as well).

I guess I'm biased though because i find the navigation layout and the autocompletion visually much nicer in editors like eclipse, whereas due to my laziness I never configured emacs to be "visual", I still use it inside tmux in a terminal, without graphical widgets.

That said, I'm a happy multiuser, I'm just a bit tired of the emacs over everything, while IDEs have their own intrinsic advantages. Maybe I'm just a discokid, but I like having to click 2 buttons to update my pom.xml rather than going in by hand to edit the xml, or having to figure out if the maven.el file I found somewhere is still usable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I find it interesting that this class of articles has such an appeal to Hacker News readers.

If this were an article about hammers, and how good they are for driving nails, people wouldn't care. If this were an article about saws, and how they are for cutting wood, people wouldn't care.

To me, the article is exactly like the examples above. Take some widely used tool and say what it does. It's common knowledge and I don't care that you use a particular tool exactly the way it's advertised.

Now if this were an article about using hammers for something they were not designed for, of about using saws in creative ways, that might be interesting. It might also be interesting to talk about what you build and how common tools made a difference for your product.

<comment><USER15> Woodworking magazines are full of articles about tools and how they're used. The most interesting pieces are invariably about how the tool changes the user - how Japanese saws change your mental approach to jobholding, or how routers tend to displace other tools and skills.

At a sufficiently high level, any discussion of craft inevitably becomes a matter of philosophy. The tools in a shop tell you about how a woodworker relates to wood; His attitudes shape his tool choices and his tools shape his attitudes.

<comment><USER16> Yep. I spent a weekend with a group of sculptors once, and they were debating the merits of particular drills just as eagerly as we discuss editors. Tools matter when you use them the whole day, every day.

Though still it should be noted that most of programming is thinking, not typing ;-)

<comment><USER17> I imagine that your sculpting friends would also note that most of sculpting is thinking, not physichally shaping a medium.

Why do you think programming would be different?

<comment><USER18> Actually given the image you want to sculpt the rest of the work is 'knocking away the parts that don't belong'. This often takes most of the time in the overall process. There is also the matter of mounting the piece. This can take from zero (for free standing pieces) time to significant amount of time depending on the problem(s) involved. Overall I'd have to say that after 30+ years, doing the work takes more time than thinking up the idea. It's hard to be exact since it depends on hard to quantify things like how you come up with your ideas---many of mine were dreamed up while doing things like kiln watch (someone has to be around when you are burning the wax out of molds for casting bronze). Or when you are just sitting around with other sculptors and bullshitting. Something gets said that leads to an idea etc. Given the way the mind works, it would be hard to say that the thinking process starts 'NOW' and ends 'HERE' leading to time to pick up carving tool etc. Since I long ago came from the art department side of campus, I highly recommend taking some of these courses not just to get those non-major credits, but to give yourself other boxes to think in when you have to think outside the box. Must stop now, beginning to babble :)

<comment><USER17> Are you a professional sculptor?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Excellent article! I agree with all points here. I think one of the most important is "Emacs is easy to configure". You just Google a problem and copy 2 lines in your .emacs. No need to click here and there, then find out you have to do it every time you open the editor etc.

Also one thing that has gone true in the last 15 years (but most devs seem to still ignore it), is that emacs now has a small footprint and starts fast compared to many IDEs.

<comment><USER20> >> _Also one thing that has gone true in the last 15 years (but most devs seem to still ignore it), is that emacs now has a small footprint and starts fast compared to many IDEs._

I have started using emacs recently, coming from Eclipse, and this is the main point that has led me to it. I use a netbook at home with only 2gb of ram, and it absolutely takes forever to open up eclipse (even the most basic 'classic' eclipse install), to the point where I was dreading opening it up to start coding.

Another significant factor is that, when I started learning Scala and then Clojure, I noticed how dependent on the tooling I had become from using Eclipse in Java projects. For languages that do not have a mature set of tools favoring eclipse, than you're left with a really heavy and slow text editor. I noticed it was a terrible trade-off.

When I asked myself 'what programming environment is lightweight but goes beyong syntx highlight?', then it came down to emacs and vi, that I heard of. Since my particular interest was in lerning Clojure, emacs fit like a glove.

I'm still not really that productive, but in the long run I find that I'll gain a lot more from learning to hack in emacs.

<comment><USER21> You might also want to look into running emacs as a daemon, if you haven't already. Since it runs as a server in the background (with a grand total of maybe 30MB used in my case), clients pop up instantly _and_ if there were buffers open on the server from before, they will remain open even if you close the client's window. If you start/close emacs more often, it's definitely a nice thing to have.

      emacs --daemon

clients are called using either

      emacsclient (for either terminal client or gtk/x11 client)
      emacsclient -c (to open a new frame)
      emacsclient -t (to open a frame in the current terminal)

<comment><USER22> Wow, I did not know that emacs could be run in a terminal mode like vim. Thought it was GTK/GUI only. No excuse not to install Evil and give it a shot now.

<comment><USER11> emacs -nw (for "no window") is super simple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Initially I started using emacs for AUCTeX, a great extension for LaTeX. Now it's become almost it's own OS as I can run Matlab (using Matlab mode), and several terminals from it (using ansi-term). If you're using ansi-term, just remember that C-c k is char mode (direct terminal entry), and C-c j is line mode, allowing you to use the power of emacs.

<comment><USER24> A quick question: what do you see as the advantages of ansi-term over shell (M-x shell)?

<comment><USER23> ansi-term in line mode is basically the same as shell, however you still have the option of direct terminal entry with char mode, which is sometimes useful, ie when looking at the command history of a machine you sshed to. ansi-term can also run more programs (ie some graphical programs, man).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think the question for me would be why should I——or anyone for that matter——use Eclipse or Visual Studio instead. Emacs is not an editor, it's a keyboard language used to modify files and run programs. Further, those are editors where extensions and settings are each a separate feature instead of a natural flow of blended editing, reconfiguration, and extending. With Emacs, the question is never about if some editor feature is available or if it can be scripted together. With Emacs, the first and only question is always _How?_ as Emacs will simply turn into anything if only so told.

<comment><USER26> Anyone for that matter? How about people who find Emacs to be archaic with weird key bindings and who don't care to spend half their time fiddling about with lisp scripts. Don't get me wrong, it's an awesome tool and I spend a long time using it - but it's not for everyone and bemusement at why that may be the case is being short sighted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Aw, before I clicked through, I guessed this article was from the 90s - I was sure that vim had taken over the world by now. Goodness gracious, folks, it's 2012!! :-)

In all seriousness, although these are all good points and I'm quite jealous of Emacs' tetris mode, I think you're missing out on one of the best features of Emacs: shell mode. IMO shell mode (or whatever it's called) should easily be at the top of the list. I wish there were a decent analogue to this feature in vim but there really isn't, just a bunch of not-quite-there plugins...

<comment><USER28> How powerful is Emacs shell mode? Vim has a shell "command" (:sh), a pretty damn crappy—well—interface to your box' shell.

<comment><USER24> There are at least three shell modes built in (there are probably more). shell mode (M-x shell) - gives an interface to your system shell, can handle everything except programs like top, you can move around past commands which is a dream. ansi-term - an actual terminal, better for top et al, can switch between terminal mode and emacs buffer mode

eshell - shell implemented in Elisp. have never used it, but i'm sure it's awesome.

Dired mode is also wonderful, navigate to a folder, simple one key commands to do most of the basic shell copy/rename/move commands, with simple searching and all the emacs shortcuts.

<comment><USER29> What makes eshell awesome is mostly that it blurs the lines between bash and elisp, you sort of kind of can use them together. Unfortunately the manual does not do this feature justice as it is largely incomplete. This article is the best i've found.

[http://www.masteringemacs.org/articles/2010/12/13/complete-g...](http://www.masteringemacs.org/articles/2010/12/13/complete- guide-mastering-eshell/)

And of course eshell is just a buffer so you can surf through the output with all the available commands you typically use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why I still use emacs: I've been using it for 10+ years and my fingers and general workflow are very very used to it. I regularly use vim (for quick editing and vimdiff), but keep coming back.

If only emacs had a "project drawer"/"tree drawer" like textmate, then it would be golden. ecb doesn't quite cut it for some reason, I keep reverting to textmate each time I need to get an overview of a huge source tree I'm not familiar with.

<comment><USER31> Try speedbar or sr-speedbar: <http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SrSpeedbar>

<comment><USER30> Neither those nor emacs-nav come close to working and looking the same way the file tree drawer in TextMate (or other IDEs) does. speedbar only shows directories, not files, when I navigate dirs in it.

<comment><USER32> You have to enable file types in the Speedbar cf. [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2220005/how-do-i- enable-S...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2220005/how-do-i-enable- Speedbar-to-display-all-types-of-files) I think you will find that the TextMate tree drawer is a toy compared to the Speedbar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> As a vim user, I had a bet with a coworker (emacs user): we would switch editors for a week, with the goal of learning another tool for our daily work. Every time one of us complained, we would pay the other $1.

I haven't switched back to vim -- that bet stopped back in November.

<comment><USER34> One of the best things that happened to Emacs in recent years, IMO, is the Evil project (see my blog post for an Emacs user's perspective on it: <http://dnquark.com/blog/2012/02/emacs-evil-ecumenicalism/>) -- now you don't have to choose between the power of Emacs an the terseness/efficiency of Vim and modal editing. After installing Evil, I've taken to calling Emacs "my thermonuclear editor".

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I am an GNU Emacs user. The major problems I see are: 1> lack of Multi- threading 2> Support for multiple major modes

The 2nd problem is the biggest I suppose. Present day development deals with chunks of code in different languages, all put in the same file. It just kills me to code Python+JS+HTML in a single file, pathetic support.

<comment><USER36> What env currently supports mixed-mode editing well? They all seem pretty crappy at the moment.

Either way, the code looks/reads a lot cleaner if you include the JavaScript as a separate file referenced from your HTML. Solves 2 problems.

<comment><USER37> Visual studio does HTML + js pretty well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I use emacs and have done for ~ 20 years, but I don't think this article would sell me on it if I didn't already.

An editor is just an editor: an editor with a variety of unrelated crap (text adventure, tetris game, mail reader) bolted on the side is not obviously better, it might just be bloatier. The compelling feature of emacs is its extensibility and self-documenting nature: that Gnus exists is not a big deal, but that you could _invent_ it if it didn't already exist - that's where the magic lies. Emacs is a habitable programming environment.

If HN lets me post links in comments, here's an example from a little while ago showing how I once extended the Gnus email composer to check for missing attachments - [http://ww.telent.net/2003/1/14/_updated_for_elisp_syntax_err...](http://ww.telent.net/2003/1/14/_updated_for_elisp_syntax_error_13_01_52_gmt)

"First off, we didn't need to restart emacs. In fact, we didn't even need to load any files. All of this was done on the fly. Second, we didn't at any point have to read an info manual, fiddle around in the filesystem, or search a web site to get to the documentation for anything. We had a little help from customize to tell us that ispell-message was a suitable function for this hook, but aside from that, all we needed to know was in function and variable docstrings."

<comment><USER39> Spot on. Adding functionality to Emacs is a matter of typing or pasting some elisp and executing it. There exist IDEs where you need to setup and build a project with an XML based config for this purpose :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> There's an interesting Clang autocomplete mode. It is almost great, but falls short a bit for obj-c. If you deal with C/C++ all day, you should definitely check it out:

<https://github.com/brianjcj/auto-complete-clang>

</comment><comment><USER41> I agree to a lot of the arguments, but for me most of them fits better to VIM. I really have nothing against Emacs, but I just happened to start learning VIM, and after that it's been hard to change.

In my university, there's really only some Java and Python we have to learn, at least the first couple of years. Since I like to learn a lot of other stuff, I kind of had to learn an editor. But most of my classmates has never programmed outside eclipse or whatever IDE they use for python. I really don't get how this is going to make us good computer scientist.

<comment><USER22> Here's something related, an oldie but goodie on the effects on learning programming of editors vs ide:

<http://osteele.com/archives/2004/11/ides>

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> tramp is the best feature of emacs. Really handy when I have to edit files on barebones systems that have only vi (not even vim) installed on them!

<comment><USER43> Agree!

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I "still" use emacs because of SLIME. The most pleasant programming environment I have ever used.

</comment><comment><USER45> For common lisp development emacs SLIME is the Best for foreseeable future.

For C++ i would use QT Creator. For scripts such as shell , Python VIM is great.

</comment><comment><USER46> What's the fastest way to get up to speed with emacs if I'm coming from vim?

<comment><USER47> There's viper mode, which enables vi keybindings. A transitional technology.

You don't even have to ever turn it off!

<comment><USER48> I once used that. I remember for extra power and/or hilarity I configured it so that emacs commands were all available in vi "insert mode", so that Esc effectively switched between vi and emacs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Tetris in emacs is too good to give up. If only it had ghost pieces...

</comment><comment><USER50> The writer says he thinks Emacs will evolve and get some IDE-like features, but do you guys think Emacs will keep on evolving? Is development still active or dead like in Vim?

<comment><USER51> Neither Emacs nor Vim is "dead". Both are actively updated.

<comment><USER50> I use Vim, hasn't Vim 7.3 been there for ages?

<comment><USER52> Only a couple of years ago, they increment the point version every few.

<comment><USER51> Vim 7 added a lot of new features. Bram typical does fix releases for a while and then there is fast and furious to the next version. Vim is definitely still being developed.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Match HN comments to their parent game [Phoenix LiveView] - <AUTHOR> https://hn.lddstudios.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Source[0] | MIT licensed

I've had this silly idea for a while, and I decided to try Phoenix for the first time to make this website. If anyone has any suggestions for features, or code review ideas, please let me know.

Impressions: I already love elixir, but I really liked using Phoenix. As usual, if you find problems you need to google around things a little bit more than for more popular frameworks, but overall, just like elixir, development is pretty painless and easy.

On the other hand, deployment took a bit of reading, I'm not gonna lie.

[0]: [https://github.com/ldd/hn_comments_game](https://github.com/ldd/hn_comments_game)</comment>


Command At Sea, a serious World War II tactical game - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgBNg2k1DCc <comment><USER2> This looks interesting but the iMovie zomming in and out made it hard to see what the actual game is like.</comment>