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What Is the Most Valuable Thing You Can Learn in One Hour?

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Re: What Is the Most Valuable Thing You Can Learn in One Hour?

#291

Post by marktangotango »

Zelphyr wrote: post #209
OGWhales wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dad gave me very similar advice growing up, as I love for things to be factually correct. To me, it didn't bother me if someone corrected me. However, most people don't appreciate it and it isn't worth upsetting them 90% of the time. This is something I didn't understand. Another thing he told me was not to be a know it all. One example would be when people said something and I had learned before, instead of dimin…

> when people said something and I had learned before, instead of diminishing their statement by saying I knew that I know someone like this. Their reply is always, "I'm not stupid". Clearly they were offended when I told them something they already knew, even though my intentions were to educate rather than offend. But their reply actually always created two offended people because to me, it's obvious I had no ill i…

This is why the whole “man-splaining” thing is weird to me. As a male, I’ve always appreciated people telling me things or explaining things to me, because they at least cared enough to take the time.

Similarly I once watched a woman at work struggle opening a jar. She congratulated me for not offering to do it for her. When in fact I felt like a jerk in that moment for watching her struggle. There’s an odd difference of perspective here I don’t fully understand.

Re: What Is the Most Valuable Thing You Can Learn in One Hour?

#292

Post by BeetleB »

tunesmith wrote: post #229
_se wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically speaking, you're very wrong. There's no better place you could've put your money than the s&p.

A few tidbits to balance in: On average, S&P performance over 40 years is very good. However, if you look at every possible 40-year period so far, some are really good and some are lousy. If you instead ask "What performance would I have gotten in 90% of those cases?" the performance is not as high. Performance over 30 years is naturally worse than over 40 years, and so on. Due to volatility, you generally score bett…

> On average, S&P performance over 40 years is very good. However, if you look at every possible 40-year period so far, some are really good and some are lousy. If you instead ask "What performance would I have gotten in 90% of those cases?" the performance is not as high.

What is "high" for you?

I basically did what you suggest (although stopped at 30 years instead of 40):

http://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2015/Dec/pay-down-mortgage-or-in...

On a 30 year horizon, even the worst 30 years (involving the Great Depression) gained money - equivalent of 4% per year after inflation for a lumped sum investment. For a periodic contribution, it was more like 2%.

Still, the average for the last 30 years is about 7%.

> Due to volatility, you generally score better (in terms of percentage of x-year periods) if you do 70/30 stocks/bonds rather than 100% in stocks. Meaning, you can leverage it to either aim for the same performance with less volatility, or same volatility with greater return.

Can you find me a 30 or 40 year period where 70/30 outperformed the 100/0 case?

If you're close to retirement, putting more money in bonds is beneficial due to the reduced volatility. It still has lower returns.

> For example, I keep pretty good records and have a list of every date/amount of each retirement contribution I've made. I'm able to simulate what my current balance would be if I have immediately put each sum into S&P (by using the adjusted close for that period). It's not as good as the reported S&P average over that period.

How long is that period? As the plots on my page show, you need to be well above 10 years to reduce the effect of volatility. I mean - a 10 year window has been as high as 22% per year and as low as -7%/year (i.e. lost money in the 10 year period). Contrast with a 30 year window: The swing is from 11% to 2% - much more stable. If you're looking at your simulated performance over just a few years, you are essentially looking at noise.

Re: What Is the Most Valuable Thing You Can Learn in One Hour?

#293

Post by BeetleB »

tempsy wrote: post #20
tuesday20 wrote: post #15

Compound interest. Simply starting early in some boring find/investment and not obsessing over daily stock prices will do wonders for one’s health and finances

I always hear this but the theory of compound interest has little to do with stock investing. Not all stocks pay dividends. Most actually do not. And betting on a general YoY rise in stock prices into retirement is not the same thing as compound interest.

> Not all stocks pay dividends. Most actually do not.

Yes, but the historical performance of, say, the S&P 500 has more to do with dividend reinvesting than the actual value of the shares appreciating. If they did not reinvest the dividends, the S&P 500 would not be as attractive as it is.

It's still not compound interest, but it is compounding.

Re: What Is the Most Valuable Thing You Can Learn in One Hour?

#294

Post by ghaff »

BeetleB wrote: post #286
ghaff wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>there's also a backdoor that lets the employee contribute more I'm not sure about backdoors but there is a catchup contribution if you're 50 or over that lets you contribute about another $6K. 401Ks are really this weird little quirk in US tax law that, as I understand the history, came about almost by accident. And they're suboptimal in a lot of ways. Of course, they're now so entrenched as a middle class benefit t…

> Defined benefit plans would be better for a lot of people although they have their own issues--including underfunding and, at least historically, a very strong bias towards long-term employment at a single company. I came to the opposite conclusion: Defined benefit plans tend to be suboptimal. As you mention, underfunding is a problem. In the private sector what protections are there if the fund goes bankrupt becau…

For private pensions, there's the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation which is doubtless not perfect but makes things not entirely at the whim of the original company that created the pension.

Certainly public pensions in particular have been a big issue because of overpromising and underfunding. But, from the perspective of the worker, they do provide a level of (mostly) guaranteed retirement payments that lots of people end up not getting through a 401K. Sure, we can take the attitude as a society that's not our problem but it sort of is.

Personally I will have a somewhat nominal pension through a private employer in addition to savings but I understand why we may issues down the road where many people have nothing besides Social Security as opposed to more common defined benefit pensions as in times past.

Re: What Is the Most Valuable Thing You Can Learn in One Hour?

#295

Post by [deleted] »

icebraining wrote: post #29
ethanbond wrote: post #14

Taking this also as a bit of an Ask HN: Easily the Tiny Habits habit formation regime created by Stanford researcher BJ Fogg. A lot of the addictive design patterns you see in apps like Snapchat, Instagram, etc. are built off his research. Quite nefarious use of psychology for advertising/“engagement”, but the plus side is you can use the same strategies to build habits you want to build. Step 1: Consider the habit y…

Didn't work for me, I simply started forgetting to do the new "habit" after a few days. I guess if it's just after flossing you can add a note next to the toothbrush, but for others that's not practical.

[deleted]

Re: What Is the Most Valuable Thing You Can Learn in One Hour?

#296

Post by [deleted] »

marktangotango wrote: post #291
Zelphyr wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when people said something and I had learned before, instead of diminishing their statement by saying I knew that I know someone like this. Their reply is always, "I'm not stupid". Clearly they were offended when I told them something they already knew, even though my intentions were to educate rather than offend. But their reply actually always created two offended people because to me, it's obvious I had no ill i…

This is why the whole “man-splaining” thing is weird to me. As a male, I’ve always appreciated people telling me things or explaining things to me, because they at least cared enough to take the time. Similarly I once watched a woman at work struggle opening a jar. She congratulated me for not offering to do it for her. When in fact I felt like a jerk in that moment for watching her struggle. There’s an odd differenc…

[deleted]

Re: What Is the Most Valuable Thing You Can Learn in One Hour?

#297

Post by heyoni »

opportune wrote: post #264
nordsieck wrote: post #149

IMO, the single most important thing I've ever learned is: try to be effective when you're communicating. I used to feel an obligation to correct other people if they had false beliefs. This was not an endearing trait, and even worse, I was never particularly successful at convincing the other people. One day, I read a passage from "How to make friends and influence people". It said something along the lines of: "The…

I understand that this is effective, but I don’t understand people’s motivations for doing this unless it is explicitly required to do their job (management, sales). I would rather be thought of by some people (almost always people who I don’t like anyway) as an asshole than become a sycophant. Although I agree that argument for its own sake is not worth it

I mean, even arguing for arguments sake can be a great way to sharpen your views.

Re: What Is the Most Valuable Thing You Can Learn in One Hour?

#299

Post by KlayySOC »

benji-york wrote: post #126
shantly wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of what programmers do is a lot of navigation and text manipulation correct? Possibly I'm a terrible programmer, but most of what I do is thinking and looking shit up. Entering or modifying code, and navigating non-linearly within one file is like... a couple percent of what I do on an average day? Maybe 5% tops? Some days it may get as high as 20% of my time. Maybe. [EDIT] add "communicating", broadly, to the…

Yes and no. Feedback cycles are important. It's better for a test to fail than to notice a bug in production. It's also better for you to be able to get that thought from your head to the file in 3 seconds instead of 10.

Doesn't a modern IDE with context aware autocomplete help more with that than slightly faster text editing? Perhaps it also depends on what kind of development you're doing

Re: What Is the Most Valuable Thing You Can Learn in One Hour?

#300

Post by KlayySOC »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #175
fbnlsr wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: I keep seeing Vim thrown up and down like it's the holy grail. I've been using VS Code for two years maybe now, and I don't see how Vim could help me be a better/more productive coder. What am I missing?

imo, the best parts of Vim are its shortcuts which is why I am happy with only Vim-like keybindings in other apps and don't need them to impl the whole kitchen sink. For example, right now, how do you make a blank line above your cursor and move your cursor there? Do you maybe go ctrl-a to move the cursor to the front of the current line, carriage return to move the current line own, then press up-arrow to move your…

Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't ctrla+a select all text? To add a newline above, I just press home and enter. For newline below end and enter. The keys are right next to each other. Vim doesn't seem more convenient for this case
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