Hacker News Reader

trikonasanaon Kurt Vonnegut, The Art of Fiction No. 64 (1977)

One thing I noticed is how little the interviewer spoke, and when he did, how short his questions were. Vonnegut does the majority of the talking while the interviewer just keeps laying down graceful transitions for him to expand upon. I'm part of a startup that's doing customer discovery, and this seems like a brilliant lesson in interviewing.

trikonasanaon Why did Warren Buffett invest $6B+ in centuries-old Japanese trading houses?

Buffet has been warning about inflation for two decades. He has said repeatedly over the years that one of the best ways to combat inflation is to buy companies that make their money in foreign currency. This would be a big hedge against dollar inflation in that case, which makes sense given how much the US Gov has spent already this year.

A second reason might simply be that he got an amazing deal. An interesting takeaway I got from reading University of Berkshire Hathaway is that people call him to buy their companies, usually not the other way around. It's possible that he got a call from struggling companies and decided it was a good deal.

trikonasanaon Nikola’s founder steps down from board as company faces fraud allegations

I've always been super skeptical of this company namely because of the founder (and their wholly unoriginal name). A look into his background reveals no prior engineering accomplishments let alone experience. His Wikipedia page says he dropped out of college to pursue sales and marketing. Yet, despite his lack of any professional track-record, he is one of the richest people in all of Utah and a member of the Mormon Church. I guess it's too early to tell if the company is fraudulent, but if the founder is, it's usually a tell-tale sign.

trikonasanaon Have the record number of investors in the stock market lost their minds?

Agree. I'm not a CFA, but I do have a masters degree in finance and have studied it fairly closely the past few years. Investing should be thought of in terms of years, at a minimum. You're thinking about it in terms of decades, which I think is even better.

However, I offer up two counter thoughts to consider:

1) You say you don't need the money, but how do you know? There could be a better investment opportunity that comes up or we could go into a prolonged depression. Leaving some money not invested gives you more flexibility to allocate your capital down the road. You'll have lower highs but higher lows, which in the long run is good.

2) I actually do know a lot of people who are investing toady in hopes that there is a V-shaped recovery. This is particularly worrying to me and I can't tell you how many times I've overheard amateur investors at work say things like "the market is at a bottom so now is a good time to invest". These are people who have never invested before and only look at the stock price as the determining factor. Like Howard Marks says, market bottoms don't occur until all hope is lost. I'm not sure we've felt that yet.

trikonasanaon Coronavirus: A third of hospital patients develop dangerous blood clots

Misleading title and misleading article. Better title would be "One of the major complications facing hospitalized coronavirus patients is blood clots".

There is one line that quotes a doctor stating, "He believes the number of critically ill coronavirus patients developing blood clots could be significantly higher than the published data in Europe of up to 30%." No mention of the percentage of cases that require hospitalizations in the first place, let alone any non-anecdotal evidence to back his claim.

I wish we would stop sharing articles that are not backed by any scent of a scientific study or peer review. It leads to fear, like others have pointed out.

trikonasanaon Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it?

https://www.stephendibart.com/blog

I write about finance, technology and design. Recently, I wrote about my experience as an adjunct cyber teacher. So far, the topics have been fairly wide-ranging.

Writing this blog, if nothing else, helps me organize my thoughts on certain topics. It's cool to go back and track the evolution of your writing too.

trikonasanaon US Spaceforce.mil Goes Live

This is mostly a re-alignment of forces and civilian personnel who are already doing the job (of which there are many, across multiple services). There is actually little additional cost here...I think $2B over 5 years...which is a small portion of the $738B defense budget.

trikonasanaon Tesla employees say they took shortcuts, worked through harsh conditions

It’s clear that tesla stories (especially negative ones) = more clicks

At the bottom of auto/EV articles, I frequently see a sentence or two soliciting stories from tesla employees specifically. Often times the article isn’t even about tesla!

I can see disgruntled employees jumping at the chance to share their story with a journalist incentivized to write about it.

trikonasanaon An Iraqi who saved Norway from oil (2009)

Not necessarily, for instance several US states like Texas and Alaska have sovereign wealth funds. Their assets include land (that they sometimes sell) and royalties that they collect on from oil and gas production. So yes, you have the wealthy oil tycoons, but you also have the state benefiting as well.

trikonasanaon Burger King is introducing a vegetarian patty from the start-up Impossible Foods

Most of fiance’s family is vegetarian and when we go out to dinner we make sure to separate the utensils and plates between the veg and non-veg people. They are very sensitive to the scent of meat and consider a utensil that has touched meat to be contaminated. Usually, when we’re at her parents house, we aren't allowed to cook meat (unless her mom is out of town). In short, anything that has been used in the preparation of meat is to be avoided.

trikonasanaon Amazon cargo plane crashes in Texas

Check out The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman too. He talks very highly of the NTSB and their accident investigation reports. The root cause isn’t usually one single error, but a series of mistakes that collectively caused the accident.

trikonasanaon The Path Amazon Rejected

That seems to be the popular opinion (that this is Amazon's fault) but I disagree. Amazon coming to LIC would have been a net benefit for everyone. 25k jobs that pay a minimum wage of $15/hour...who would reject that? Sure they get a $3b tax break, but they would have paid far more than that in state taxes over the long term. The people on the city council did not represent the the best interest of the citizens, instead trying to spin this as a stand against corporate greed. It's too bad they couldn't work this out. I think this will hurt NYC in the long run.

trikonasanaon U.S. Student Debt in ‘Serious Delinquency’ Tops $166B

Not all of them, but a good chunk of them are. A lot of student debt is sold to big banks without the students every really knowing. Banks then package them together and sell them again, allowing themselves to make even more loans. The same people that tanked the economy in 2007-2008, and then got bailed out by the taxpayer, are now the primary debt holders of many student loans. The difference is that people with student loans have no way out. We punish those trying to educate themselves and reward those who exploited uninformed borrowers.

trikonasanaon Howard Marks: Political Reality Meets Economic Reality [pdf]

I always love reading these memos. I discovered Howard Marks listening to a podcast and found him full of wisdom. In respect to this memo, Marks isn't the first big name portfolio manager to mention the growing possibility of capitalism becoming the target of the progressive left. Ray Dalio of Bridgewater has also alluded to it several times. Then again, when you have CEO's in America making 271 times more than the average employee, it's easy to resent the capitalist system.