The Nikkei 225 may be below its 1989 peak in price terms but you can’t ignore the dividends which an actual investment in the index would have paid during that period. On a total return basis (if you had reinvested the dividends into the index as you received them) the Nikkei passed its 1989 peak in 2021.
I struggle to understand why an educated crowd like HN routinely forgets dividends when posting any sort of financial charts. Total returns are what matters.
I don’t know how many people in tech you’ve worked with, but the number of other people I’ve interacted with who actually read quarterly reports of publicly traded businesses has been exactly zero.
My point still stands, as the original comment was discussing the risk of loss over 30 years, with no additional investment that was 32 years of the investment being below its peak value.
I must say it looks pretty good, wish I had tried it when I renovated my apartment.
But all the other similar software I tried ultimately were a big disappointment. In my experience, once the design is complicated enough they tend to fail: some objects start to glitch if you move them by a certain amount, I could never get the right angle between walls, etc. It seems to be difficult to implement a way to put robust set of constraints on geometry yet keep the software easy to use by everyone.
Perhaps it works well with more rectangular designs where the walls all have the same thickness though, my place has some weird shapes.
Ultimately I gave up on specialized software and ended up re-drawing everything at scale in Affinity Designer. Of course, it's only 2D and it's basically free-form vector drawing but at least you control everything and it's not too complicated to create your own library of object like windows, doors etc et re-use that. I was very happy with the result.
I tried to use Solvespace for a number of projects, but it seemed like it had essentially ~zero support for parametric repetition (e.g. putting one hole every 15mm), which made it basically useless for any semi-complex project. A home might be easier, as long as you don't have any design features like "put a light socket every 3 feet".
Really well made! The magnet-based propeller is really clever.
I was curious to understand how the depth control worked and the associated blog is very informative. Turns out this is version 4 and he had tried other approaches before. The video makes it look too easy but seems he went into a lot of trouble to keep everything sealed properly.
Vast oversimplification: it's because of chargebacks and fraud. It works kind of like an insurance, someone needs to take the loss at some point and fixed amount doesn't work for that (or would massively hike the fees for cheap sales).
That's why when EU capped the fee "so low" we also massively pushed for 3D secure deployment, so those lower fees would still easily cover it.
Interesting. But aren't the banks responsible for handling chargebacks and fraud, not the credit card processing companies?
My (albeit limited) understanding is that Visa and Mastercard ensure that the debit/credit transactions are securely and quickly occur, but if there are post-transaction issues like fraud or chargeback, then the credit card-issuing bank handles/resolves those issues.
Conversely there's probably a subset of transactions that don't need this sort of "insurance", such as buying groceries. Currently the merchant still has to pay the 2%+ fee in the U.S. but would be nice to have the option for a customer to waive the "insurance" part and benefit from a 2% savings. It's akin to many merchants offering a lower "cash-only" rate.
> My (albeit limited) understanding is that Visa and Mastercard ensure that the debit/credit transactions are securely and quickly occur,
Now in the EU, if online transactions are over a certain amount or flag up as suspicious, we must use 2FA. So I have to stick my card in my card reader and generate an OTP. Works quite well tbh. My other bank sends me a push notification where I approve the payment.
I understand why you don't want to use credit cards too often, but you wrote "we've moved too far [...]". Why do you care whether other people use credit cards?
My bank or creditors don't need to know where I'm shopping or what I'm buying, and they certainly don't need to be selling that information to the highest bidders.
The services credit card companies provide was just pushed a layer deeper to the issuing banks. The EU didn’t magically make the costs of running a payment system disappear, it’s just sleight of hand. They also pushed costs onto consumers in the form of assumed risk consumers take on when making a purchase (thus all the 2fa etc to reduce this burden).
Oh and it goes without saying that rewards programs disappeared entirely (I am not opposed to outlawing “rewards” programs)
That example is interesting. The Japanese word for real estate, 不動産, actually came from French [1], 'immobilier' (real estate, by opposition to what is movable or 'mobile' such as 'meubles' or 'mobilier', i.e. furniture). And of course the French word comes from Latin...
The Japanese would treat the whole combination as a single word (in my experience) and wouldn't analyse the components either (although 'they make sense').
The etymology is often more apparent in Japanese and Chinese thanks to the characters, whereas it's not always easy to see it in other language (unless you speak Latin or Greek..). But this is a borrowed word and in this particular case it's very intuitive to French speakers as immobilier / mobilier / mobile are all common words.
This reminds me of the Gerbils Museum [1], although this one is obviously a real museum for humans visited by penguins, rather than a museum built specifically for penguins.
If you’d like to read Wittgenstein but don’t know where to start I would recommend reading “How to read Wittgenstein” by Ray Monk, as an introduction before moving to “Philosophical Investigation” (rather than starting with his first book, the Tractatus, which is really cryptic). I saw this advice on another HN thread a while ago and for me it was it spot on.
I also read Ray Monk’s bio of Wittgenstein but found it a lot less interesting.
I can’t pretend I understood 100% of his Philosophical Investigations but it definitely made me see things differently. I like his approach to try to “turn unobvious nonsense into obvious nonsense” and show that a lot of the seemingly “natural” ideas we rely on to describe our mental activity rest on very shaky grounds.
I’ll let professional philosophers try to peel apart every nuance of the Investigations. It is a thoroughly enjoyable and approachable—if not chaotich—book for anyone used to reading academic papers in CS, math, or linguistics. The topic is deeply scrutinizing our everyday language, especially language about mental states. He is a very persuasive and poetic writer. Some excerpts:
- To utter a word is to strike a note on the keyboard of the imagination.
359. Could a machine think? ... Well is the human body to be considered such a machine? It surely comes as close as possible to being such a machine.
583. ... And the word “hope” refers to a phenomenon of human life. (A smiling mouth smiles only in a human face.)
Wittgenstein didn’t come come up with the idea of a “private language” but in his Philosophical Investigations he famously argued that the concept itself is nonsense (not via a single logical “proof” but using several thought experiments).
The idea that a private language exists (ie. ‘mentalese’) is taken for granted by a lot of authors. I recently read Stephen Pinker’s book The Language Instinct and he never seemed to doubt the concept for instance.
I have not read Pinker so I don’t have a good idea of what he meant by “mentalese”, but Humboldt was using the concept of “private language” more on the lines of two different people having different “understandings” (for a lack of a better word) for concepts bearing the sama name. For example when I think of a “red apple” I might think of a different thing compared to when you think of a “red apple” on your turn (leaving aside the issue that we still need to settle on what “thing” from the previous sentence actually means).
I must admit that I last read some Wittgenstein about 15 years ago, but even so, I don’t find that this understanding of what a “private language” really means is that far off from his writings. If anything, it completely invalidates the 2000-year old platonic “ideas”, as me and you thinking of different things when presented with the words “red apple” practically means that there is no underlying “red” or “apple” idea behind those concepts. That is something very valuable, Plato’s interpretation being debunked, that is.
>practically means that there is no underlying “red” or “apple” idea behind those concepts. That is something very valuable, Plato’s interpretation being debunked, that is.
This is one of my favorite parts in a fictional book Anathem. The question of syntax and semantics is explored there, and even a solution is suggested.
Other good choices for French are the Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé (1994) developed by CNRS, and the various editions of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française.
