This is a great paragraph:

> If you want to, you can just decide to shift gears at this point, and no one's going to tell you you can't. You can just decide to be more curious, or more responsible, or more energetic, and no one's going to go look up your college grades and say, "Hey, wait a minute, this person's supposed to be a slacker."

I've often seen people get too attached to an unproductive "identity" instead of looking at things as they are. It's way too common for people to fail once and think they're a failure, rather than thinking that they just failed at that particular time.

By the way, I remember meeting you during the S23 batch and how genuinely excited you were to meet us, young founders who were just getting started. It does seem like you found your people!

I used to use em dashes before they were cool. I actually learned about them when I emailed a guy who's a software engineer at Genius and also writes for The New Yorker and The Atlantic.

I asked him for tips on how to write well and he recommended that I read Steven Pinker's "The Sense of Style", which uses em dashes exhaustively, and explains when and why one should use them.

It also pains me that I can't use them anymore or else people will think an AI did the writing.

vs

I also recommend "The Sense of Style"--knowing how to wield punctuation and grammatical structure is critical for clearly and successfully articulating your ideas--and I use semicolons, colons, and parentheticals heavily (but en dashes and em dashes are great too).

I find that dashes are great for conversational style flowing sentence structure, but sometimes they can become too long and tiring to the reader.

The main issues with other libraries is that they're either:

(a) ugly (b) difficult to use (i.e. having to do things imperatively) (c) not flexible enough

Apache ECharts solve these 3 problems. It's pretty by default, it allows us to mount/calculate the declarative spec for the graphs in the back-end and then only send the desired spec to the front-end so it can render, and it's also extremely flexible to the point we can support everything that traditional BI tools can do.

We've never had to extend the lib to do anything new, everything we need is already there.

Glad to see this great piece of work on top of HN.

* Echarts is about the only dependency in our project that I can upgrade - and be sure it never breaks anything. It is so well-thought in that regard. Upgrading for 3.x to 5.x? Sure! "npm update" and everything just keeps working smoothly. That is so refreshing to see these days. Unbelievable.

* It's both SSR-friendly and SPA-friendly. Being mostly vanilla-js, works seamlessly with both react/vue/apline AND with old-school rails/asp.net/php/whatever. Our app is pretty classic SSR (https://www.jitbit.com/) and I can construct my chart's JSON object on a server using some linq-queries and provide that to echarts.

* ...OR I can give it a reactive object from vue-based SPA. Dun matter, it just works.

* whenever we have to add some workarounds (like, showing hovering labels on a pie chart with a bold percentages or something) - I never have to dig into their sources. Almost anything has already been figured out. Easily googlable and "LLM-able".

I particularly "like" the way they have multiple APIs and inconsistent examples across them. Would it kill you to have the same examples in each?

That being said, i generally like the library but the docs are bad.

for millions of points maybe Canvas rendering is more performant

but for simple charts SVG provides an easier way to get responsive sizing just via CSS without involving JS to re-render

That said, I absolutely love the idea that a blob of JSON living in my database contains everything I need for my visualization. The reality is that not enough other people are willing to put in the effort to learn that syntax, making it somewhat of a selfish tech choice.

Financial literacy itself is quite simple: spend less than you make.

Everything else is an optimization and it’s pretty easy to learn with a few days of research.

I know this is the classical HackerNews type comment, but I honestly can’t understand why it’s so hard when there’s so much information available and so few pre-requisites (almost none) to learn about it.

But the rest is not mere 'optimization'. There is a massive difference between someone who puts their savings into a 0% interest account and sees it eaten away by inflation and in some countries (mine) a wealth tax, and someone who puts the savings as a pre-tax investment in their retirement account, which means you don't pay taxes on your salary, and in some countries (mine) don't pay taxes on the stock returns or on the equity as a wealth tax, and can get a 10% nominal annual return and see your money double >5 times over a 40 year career.

In my country the saver (A) versus the investor (B) who puts $1k in savings or a retirement fund at age 25 and liquidates at age 65 looks like this:

A) Saver: $1k salary is $500 take home pay (50% marginal tax of last bit of income). 0% interest rate at the bank. You pay a 2% effective wealth tax per year. That means $222 is left at age 65. Prices in this time went up by 3% a year, meaning what is left is the equivalent of $68 in today's dollars.

B) investor: $1k salary goes pre-tax into retirement account. You get a 10% return each year, so at 65 you have 45k. You pay no wealth tax or return taxes in the retirement account. You then pay it out as a personal income at a reduced retirement rate of 35%, meaning you have about 30k left. In today's dollars that's about 10k.

So $10000 vs $68. That's not optimization, it's the difference between gaining 10x versus losing 93% of it, or the difference between everything and nothing.

Country of example is NL. Discrepancies are bigger or smaller elsewhere depending on tax policies, but generally the difference will remain orders of magnitude.

I do agree that it's pretty easy to learn.

Wait, what? Under that tax regime, you might as well squirrel away that money under your mattress; you'd at least have the equivalent of $300 left after 40 years.

Apparently there was a ruling by the Dutch supreme court equivalent (the Hoge Raad) last year that if your actual return is lower than the notional return (assumed ~6%), then you're supposed to be taxed on your actual return.

https://www.belastingdienst.nl/wps/wcm/connect/en/income-in-...

Maybe for the quantitatively minded Hacker News audience this is simple. But there are quite many people who have no idea how much they are spending, or sometimes even how much they are spending.

It's easy to forget if you live in tech - or even middle class - bubble, but even the most basic math is very difficult to some fraction of people.

That is the real problem. People need to learn maths before they can learn financial literacy.

Those with it need appropriate teaching, but can end up pretty good at maths.

> Math is taught in every school at every age group and it's around us everywhere.

it is taught everywhere, but I think it is usually badly taught - more commonly badly taught than any other subject.

Step one would be teaching people to write down the balance of all their accounts on 12/31 of each year. Checking, savings, brokerage, and all credit card debt (including current month spending). The difference in that number over two years is your net for the year.

Your gross is going to be approximately what you report on your taxes. In reality it’ll be a bit more but this gives you an upper bound.

Broadly, everybody realises that you will accumulate money if you spend less than you earn. That's not financial literacy though – how do you do that? How do you know how much you are earning, and how much you are spending? How can you figure out how to spend less?

Almost 30% of US adults are level 1 or below on the PIAAC numeracy scale – a level at which you can perform only the most basic arithmetic. It is, for many people, far from "pretty easy" or "quite simple".

It seems like a lot of people don’t make weight loss progress because they never internalize that fact and seem to “fight it” psychologically.

Agreed, although I would note that a large part of addressing the issue of unaffordable housing is for governments to stop actively it worse by forbidding construction.

You're pretty close, you touched on all the major points in your comment. You suggested people not to chase status. But a lot of people spend their whole lives and all the resources at their disposal chasing status. All they understand, want or need is status. They are status chasing people.

You try teaching them not to chase status and it won't work. This is also what makes financial literacy so hard - people have these instincts that don't care about longer term material comfort even a little bit. They're calibrated for a world where "capital" is a stick with a rock tied to it and maybe a nice cave. There are these hang-overs from the old times where people's mind and body are strongly conditioned to only be sensitive to their current social status and they're willing to burn their entire bank account to get it now.

Watching such people up close when they are also intelligent is a fascinating experience. They know that they're not doing financially optimal things. They don't care. They'd eat nails and go without sleep if they thought that would make them look better than their peers. Being poor in 12 months time doesn't register as a threat intellectually or emotionally.

Note that even the people who are good at investing usually cheat by using their emotions in weird ways.

Now there's sound, very good reasons to do this...but the headline issue itself already forces us to deal with more complex issues.

Right there we're into issues like why is it okay to buy some things on debt but not others, how do you evaluate the time value of money etc.

All still relatively simple...but not that simple, and frequently with no obviously correct answers either.

Lan parties were probably the best part of my teenage years.

Also, the terrace part is amazing.

I miss the good old days of playing DotA (the old one) the whole night while drinking coke and eating pizza with friends.

When you explained how you had just reimplemented the CSS spec I was mindblown.

You guys rock. Repaint is amazing.

We've already seen hacky solutions starting to be replaced and that makes me quite happy.

Thanks for reporting it, it helps us understand what people want!

I haven't yet had time to implement it because I was working on the core pieces of functionality, but as a dark mode user I want to get to that soon.