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Ecio78on Hard-won lessons about money and investing

I think I read that MMM was (is?) paying around 250-300$/month for a family of three. So not that much.

Ecio78on Hard-won lessons about money and investing

you are right I'm not native English speaker so thanks for spotting that, I've always used "remote working" or "teleworking" for describing that, but not telecommuting (maybe because commuting means "travelling to work" and tele means "over a distance", so the compound doesn't make too much sense for me, at least if you don't put a negation somewhere :D)

Ecio78on Hard-won lessons about money and investing

if you consider inflation (1.70% in the US,0.60% in Germany) those interests are almost zero.

If you have 1M$ and want to live on that, and you're good enough to live with 25k$/yr, you need to consistently "extract" 2.5% on that capital, that means you need to consistently get 4.2% every year. And this exposes another issue: even if you have a safe investment that can give you 4.2%/yr on average, that's not steady, so if some years are bad (or really bad) you need to eat into the capital. If these happens for too many years in a row, the capital could be reduced enough that you need to get higher earnings to counterbalance that.

I'm not a finance expert so feel free to show me the fallacies of my reasoning!

Ecio78on Hard-won lessons about money and investing

Can you explain a bit your strategy? Something like MMM?

Ecio78on Hard-won lessons about money and investing

That said, my preferred method is to live in a low cost area and work in a high cost area (telecommute).

yes but it also depends how you consider in your calculation the costs of telecommuting (costs of travelling, time lost etc..)

I'm thinking about this right in these days, as I'm living and working in a quite rich but expensive country (Luxembourg) where real estate prices (rent&purchase) have grown a lot in the past years, and are still growing (two digits increase of prices yty), while you have surrounding border areas (Belgium, France, Germany) that are way cheaper (half or even less per square meter) but are located 30-40km away with really congested roads or slow public lines (at least 45min per trip, easy to become 1-2hours in case of accidents or traffic jams)

Ecio78on Hard-won lessons about money and investing

Mr. Money Mustache will probably tell you to move to a different place[1], saving time and money by reducing the commuting time[2] etc..

NB I neither agree nor disagree with his ideas (still have to decide.. :))

[1] http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/09/28/get-rich-with-movi... [2] http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-c...

Ecio78on Show HN: QuaggaJS, a barcode scanner written in JavaScript

when I read "QuaggaJS" before finishing the headline, I thought that it could be a porting of Quagga the routing software[1] to Javascript :)

[1] http://www.nongnu.org/quagga/

Ecio78on The $12 “Gongkai” Phone (2013)

The one that you linked is now showing as 39.99$

Ecio78on New Electric Skateboard Models

semi joke: what about dissipating energy in excess via heat, sound and flames? :)

more seriously: what about having a setting for not fully charging the battery (let's say 80-90%), possibly user configurable, so if you don't risk your life if you forget about it?

and finally a question: how does a Prius work? according to this[1] The amount of electrical energy capable of dissipation is limited by either the capacity of the supply system to absorb this energy or on the state of charge of the battery or capacitors. Effective regenerative braking can only occur if the battery or capacitors are not fully charged. For this reason, it is normal to also incorporate dynamic braking to absorb the excess energy.

Searching online I found this[2] that seems to be not that far from my semi joke :) as a user says "instead of taking that energy and putting into the battery, the engine throws it off as heat." But it's also true that a Prius is way more complex and bigger, so it could have more features put in place compared to a small board like this.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenerative_brake [2] http://priuschat.com/threads/fully-charged-hv-battery-no-reg...

Ecio78on Get Visual Studio Community 2013 for Free

I work in a company that could be labelled as enterprise, thus I think I couldn't use the Community edition. The problem is that I'm not one of the developers (I am a sysadmin), but I had installed the Express edition in the past for example to simply compile some code that I found online (free).

Same happened in my past companies, "real" developers were using full blown VS but I was sometimes doing some small project (not as side project, small = "quick hack that I needed and developers had no time to do that")

If they stop releasing Express edition (that's not clear, I've not searched if Community will superseed Express or if they'll keep both) it will be impossible for me to do so.

Having said that, I think this fully featured Community edition is interesting

Ecio78on Get Visual Studio Community 2013 for Free

Important info:

Q: Who can use Visual Studio Community? A: Here’s how individual developers can use Visual Studio Community: Any individual developer can use Visual Studio Community to create their own free or paid apps.

Here’s how Visual Studio Community can be used in organizations: An unlimited number of users within an organization can use Visual Studio Community for the following scenarios: in a classroom learning environment, for academic research, or for contributing to open source projects. For all other usage scenarios: In non-enterprise organizations, up to 5 users can use Visual Studio Community. In enterprise organizations (meaning those with >250 PCs or > $1 Million US Dollars in annual revenue), no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research, and classroom learning environment scenarios described above.

Ecio78on Letter to Amazon Board from Fired Ad Exec

Actually it seems you are contesting point 2 and 3 of the 5 that were listed, or you think the others are wrong too?

Ecio78on How I Built a Barbecue Restaurant in Brooklyn: The Toll of Owning Your Business

It's true what you are saying (not everyone..) but I am not sure that there's so much creativity in 99% of the food industry. Take NaOH, he makes pretzels, using a very good recipe that he probably doesn't want to change, how much innovation can he put in that? Please note that I'm not critizing or bashing his work,not at all, I've upvoted his posts because I found them very interesting, it's just that I think that when you move to "professional" food production, at some point what you are asked is delivering with consistency, and you have less space for being creative. I like cooking, I am not bad at it, and when I moved to this country (Luxembourg, coming from Italy) I was unemployed and so I was joking with friends saying things like "if I don't find a job I could open a restaurant" but of course it was just a joke, first of all because you should really have worked in that sector before starting to do something on your own, and second because one thing is cooking a good Risotto for your family once a week, another thing is doing it for 10 tables every single day...I think it can become quite repetitive and not enjoyable

Ecio78on MetricsGraphics.js – D3-based library optimized for visualizing time-series data

Some people say that pie charts are bad ;) https://www.stevefenton.co.uk/Content/Pie-Charts-Are-Bad/

Ecio78on Best Free Offline GPS App for Android from HERE

Is it different from the dozen of posts on new Amazon services each time they are released?

Ecio78on If you use a Mac or Android, e-commerce sites may be charging you more

I have used in the past pricenoia.com, it had similar features: Amazon price history, comparison between local Amazon sites and mail notification when price reaches some threshold. I've just checked, and it looks like it has been closed in September :( http://pricenoia.tumblr.com/post/96524879555/pricenoia-shuts...

Ecio78on Putting $10M into UBeam illustrates what is wrong with tech investing

do things that don't scale =/= do things that don't work

Ecio78on Hungary plans new tax on Internet traffic

I am paying 50euro/month for 30Mbit/10Mbit Fiber in Luxembourg :/ In Italy I was paying about 25-30Euro/month for 20Mbit/1Mbit ADSL (and actually 20 was never 20 but more around 12-15..

Ecio78on The story of Stronzo Bestiale and other scientific jokes

Thanks for the info, it's always nice to improve my English knowledge! :)

Ecio78on The story of Stronzo Bestiale and other scientific jokes

Yes and no. "Bestiale" means literally "beastly" as you said but it is often used in Italian to describe something really big (huge etc..), like "ho un sonno bestiale" (I am incredibily asleep) o "ho una fame bestiale" (I am very very hungry - ok in this case "beastly" could make sense as well :)) So I suppose in English you would use Total (or "such as" or anything else?)

Ecio78on What will it take to run a 2-hour marathon?

Not sure if I'm particularly lucky with my PC, but everything is smooth and nice and I really enjoyed the effects on this page, and I appreciate their effort to use more modern technique than a plain static article.

Ecio78on Watch This Tesla Drive Itself at the Press of a Button [video]

Waze[1] is all based on users' feedback and has been acquired by Google in 2013, so I think we'll see this more and more..

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waze

Ecio78on Minipresso – Hand-powered portable espresso machine

I have no idea about the quality of this specific product, but moka =/= espresso; the type of coffee that you do is different, and normally you have specific blend and type of grind for the two (if you go in a dedicated coffee shop)

Disclaimer: I am Italian, and even though I generally don't drink coffee, I've seen/heard enough moka vs espresso arguments (up to the fanboy level ;))

Ecio78on Accidental release of 45L of polio virus solution into the environment – Belgium

I know it very well, as I live in Luxembourg[1] and I have to explain it to everyone I spoke to in my native country, Italy (normal questions are "so, how is it your life in Bruxelles?" "what about your living in Belgium" etc..)

So thanks for your unneeded geography lesson and now if you would be so kind to open the link you'll read why Luxembourgish newspaper were talking about some pesticide in a Belgian lake...

[1] and if we want to be really really precise, the south province of Belgium at the border with Luxembourg and France is called Province of Luxembourg, so we should talk about Province of Luxembourg and Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.

Ecio78on Accidental release of 45L of polio virus solution into the environment – Belgium

It looks like Belgians have some problems with water sources. This is in the news here in Luxembourg http://www.wort.lu/en/luxembourg/pesticide-spill-tap-turned-...

Ecio78on BankAPI

Are you sure it was Fortran and not Cobol? Normally Fortran was used for academic/math (ForTran stands for Formula Translation, Cobol in busines (Cobol stands for COmmon Business-Oriented Language).

Ecio78on Who wrote the text for the Ctrl+Alt+Del dialog in Windows 3.1?

Fast forward to 2014, and we have Exchange crashing the all system with a BSD on purpose as a final solution to recover from a I/O stuck situation: the Microsoft Exchange Replication service (MSExchangeRepl.exe) will detect those failure events and intentionally cause a bugcheck of Windows by terminating the wininit.exe process. [1]

In the article they say it's an improvement, I'm not 100% sure about it

[1] http://blogs.technet.com/b/scottschnoll/archive/2011/04/13/e...

Ecio78on Highcharts – JavaScript charting framework

We used it in my previous companies and our developers were very happy about it. Previously we were using http://www.amcharts.com/ good product (but we switched because at that time amcharts was flash only - I think), but my dev colleagues told me that Highcharts was more powerful.

P.S. at that time (4-5 years ago) it was possible to use Amcharts for free in commercial app but with reduced features (for example you couldn't handle a click on the graph because in the free edition it would open their site) and showing a link in the bottom of the chart. It seems it follows the same rule now according to their download page, so consider it if you want a good free charting library (I used also amMap and it was ok)

Ecio78on Mosh: A replacement for SSH

Check also tmux as screen alternative

Ecio78on Ask HN: How useful are the Cisco CCNA and CCNP networking classes?

I think it could, as always, depend on the quality of the teacher. I am not speaking about Cisco courses, but I recently attended a Microsoft course and the course was provided through recorded material prepared by Microsoft, with a local trainer that could be questioned in case of need (this was due to the fact that I was attending the course in English and the training center was normally organizing it in another language). The Microsoft "recorded" teacher knew his stuff, but the local teacher was not that expert because he was acting as supporting teacher for many many courses (we were 6 people in the class, each one doing a different course: AD, Exchange, SQL Server etc..) So I missed a bit of interaction AND real-life stories that you typically exchange with other students and with the teacher as well. Fortunately the course was paid by my company, but I came back thinking that maybe paying 29$ for a month of Pluralsight would have been a better investment than spending 2000$ for the official MSFT course (even better subscribing for a full year of pluralsight and having the possibilities of having many more additional training videos).

Having said that, for Cisco I'll suggest you to check the Chris Bryant courses available on Udemy [no affiliation], I bought one of them (CCNA) few months ago but just right after I was hired in a non-networking position (and in a company that is not using Cisco) so I never finished it, but the quality seems to be very good and it is confirmed by the number of comments on Udemy and also checking certification forums like Techexam.net. It seems that he also replies to questions inside Udemy, so the interaction is clearly present.