Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: In a single HTML file, an app to encourage my children to invest

roberdam.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 448 posts

Re: Show HN: In a single HTML file, an app to encourage my children to invest

#421

Post by triceratops »

alxmdev wrote: post #110
bilekas wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Financial literacy is a gift, and absolutely omitted from standard education, which is unfortunate. With my tinfoil hat on, I feel like that is by design.

Probably, because everything would collapse if everyone was an "investor" and fewer people did actual work to keep the world going.

If everyone was an "investor" it means they aren't blowing all their spare cash on goods and services. Demand drops and you need fewer people to work to provide said goods and services. It kinda balances out.

Re: Show HN: In a single HTML file, an app to encourage my children to invest

#422

Post by port11 »

aziaziazi wrote: post #315
davsti4 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed - which is disappointing. My firewall shows blocked connections to cdn.tailwindcss.com and unpkg.com

Candid question: why do you block those?

Centralised assets beget cross-domain fingerprinting and tracking. The extension DecentralEyes tackles precisely this problem.

Re: Show HN: In a single HTML file, an app to encourage my children to invest

#423

Post by whatevertrevor »

darkwater wrote: post #405
whatevertrevor wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's so much in life that makes no financial sense that creates meaning. The moment you start having to think sensibly from a financial perspective, is when so many of these things no longer make sense. I get the sentiment, but it implies the opposite of your conclusion. Since so many things make no sense from a financial point of view, the only sensible strategy is to break free of the financial constraints as…

Oh, the FIRE community. If you trained yourself to live looking at the money you need to save to retire, your brain will most likely be wired to that behavior, and breaking free from that will be utterly difficult. On top of that, people with the FIRE mindset have probably by default already a strong (innate? taught?) bias towards enjoying optimizing their life and making it the end goal.

> Oh, the FIRE community.

I think you may be confused, I'm not part of the FIRE community. I'm only taking the statement that "doing meaningful things is not financially sensible" to its logical conclusion, not endorsing any position.

> If you trained yourself to live looking at the money you need to save to retire, your brain will most likely be wired to that behavior, and breaking free from that will be utterly difficult. On top of that, people with the FIRE mindset have probably by default already a strong (innate? taught?) bias towards enjoying optimizing their life and making it the end goal.

So many assumptions and claims without any supporting evidence:

- "FIRE people" train themselves to live looking at money only.

- This wires their brain to that behaviour (left unclear what this actually means in terms of concrete behaviour).

- Breaking free from this behaviour is difficult.

- People with this mindset have a bias towards enjoying optimizing their life, to the point this is their end goal.

- (Implied) This makes their life some combination of sad/bad/meaningless.

I don't really want to even argue against this because the burden of proof for providing any supporting evidence is yours, not mine. I'm not particularly interested in constructing some overarching psychoanalytic theories for a large category of people who I've never even interacted with, but you do you.

Re: Show HN: In a single HTML file, an app to encourage my children to invest

#424

Post by darkwater »

whatevertrevor wrote: post #423
darkwater wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, the FIRE community. If you trained yourself to live looking at the money you need to save to retire, your brain will most likely be wired to that behavior, and breaking free from that will be utterly difficult. On top of that, people with the FIRE mindset have probably by default already a strong (innate? taught?) bias towards enjoying optimizing their life and making it the end goal.

> Oh, the FIRE community. I think you may be confused, I'm not part of the FIRE community. I'm only taking the statement that "doing meaningful things is not financially sensible" to its logical conclusion, not endorsing any position. > If you trained yourself to live looking at the money you need to save to retire, your brain will most likely be wired to that behavior, and breaking free from that will be utterly dif…

Sorry, I wasn't addressing directly at you, even if I was technically answering to you. It was more of an unsolicited rambling about the general topic.

Sorry for that.

Re: Show HN: In a single HTML file, an app to encourage my children to invest

#425

Post by davsti4 »

aziaziazi wrote: post #315
davsti4 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed - which is disappointing. My firewall shows blocked connections to cdn.tailwindcss.com and unpkg.com

Candid question: why do you block those?

One word answer - security.

Any website you visit could have been compromised and serving malicious content. Upon first visit to a website, I block all connections to domains not in the address bar, then go back in and add rules to allow connections as needed. It doesn't address malicious activity by the site directly, like a server compromise, but does limit non-addressed connections, including ones to local addresses.

For example, a compromise of .google.com which leveraged assets/code from .googleusercontent.com wouldn't initially be able to run, unless I added a rule to allow the connection. Likewise, a compromise of *.discord.com that made a connection to localhost:8983, then tried to send that data to someserver.ru would get blocked and logged. Where this can't protect me is if the server sends the mined data back to itself, then forwards that data on using its own connection.

Ad networks sell to anyone. Malicious content can be injected almost anywhere. Its happened before; it'll happen again. This web browsing hygiene has protected me enough times for me to make it my standard practice.

Re: Show HN: In a single HTML file, an app to encourage my children to invest

#426

Post by throw-qqqqq »

sebastiennight wrote: post #339
throw-qqqqq wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The median of those ten numbers is 50. If the count of observations is even, it is usually the arithmetic mean of the two mid-points, so (49+51)/2 in this case. The median does not have to be in the finite set of values. Maybe Wikipedia can explain better than I can: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median

You didn't answer my second question. Yes the median in my example is $50. Thus it would be accurate to say "50% of people in that sample have $50 (or $51)". But not anything further than that middle point. Back to the original post: I'm assuming that "three months of expenses" would be roughly $6,000. The parent post had the median at $500. 1. Given the sheer number of adult Americans (hundreds of millions of observ…

> You didn't answer my second question

I purposely didn’t because strictly that is not a median. Stupid example: median of 1,2,3 is 2 and 67% >= 2 here. We do agree that as N grows, the difference shrinks (to the point of no meaningful difference).

My point was that mathematically there is no contradiction. Let’s say half the population has $200 monthly expenses (3mo is then $600 saved), the median is $600 and it checks out.

That is a stupid assumption though - because who has such low expenses.

> I'm assuming that "three months of expenses" would be roughly $6,000

You then assume that we must be talking about the upper half, but that isn’t given.

We have to make SOME assumptions though, since the statement is underspecified: the OP didn’t specify what 3 months expenses means. It is unlikely that 50% of the US population have the EXACT same expenses, so I assumed an “on average” was missing somewhere which further relaxes the constraints.

I objected to your statement that the math doesn’t check out. There are many ways it could check out.

We came at this with different assumptions. I don’t think we fundamentally disagree and I didn’t mean to bicker.

Re: Show HN: In a single HTML file, an app to encourage my children to invest

#427

Post by B56b »

roberdam wrote: post #29
latexr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is teaching your kids to invest some portion of their money That’s not what the article says. I explicitly quoted the relevant part. It’s not “a portion of their money”, this is not money they had lying around in an envelope that grandma gave them. This father is incentivising the kids to not get what they want for their birthday and instead ask for money with which they’ll do nothing but unrealistically watch…

Kids are 7 and 10 , this is a mini "Marshmallow Test" and they can use their money whenever they want if they find a book or toy they like while they learn how investments work.

Seems more like a "mega" Marshmallow Test. Instead of putting off a snack for 15 minutes they're giving up an entire year of birthday gifts for a reward years into the future.

Re: Show HN: In a single HTML file, an app to encourage my children to invest

#430

Post by hshdhdhehd »

graeme wrote: post #266
bluGill wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investing for retirement at 17 is a bad idea! At 17 you should still be thinking about investing in education - the right education investment today will pay back far more than any other monitory investment. There are of course bad education investments, and some are not willing to study even more (or not able to pass a good education course), in that case retirement might be the best investment you can make, but it…

If you start investing a small amount at age 17 you can build the habit and increase totals later. Saying "I'll do it later when it is rational" often translates to "I won't do it (for a long time)". Which is not rational

Yes. You can make it a 2% contribution at 17 then add another 2% each year, until you hit say 24% at 29 then keep it there.

Then the habit is set up and you just log in to whatever and up the number.

Post reply on HN