kpommerenke

Flagging this article because you disagree with the data presented or its conclusion seems to violate the spirit of Hacker News.

It is not really surprising that a large group of hedge funds underperformed the S&P500. In fact, William Sharpe made the argument a long time ago: in aggregate, active investors hold the passive portfolio and earn the same return as passive investors before fees, but lower returns after fees. In aggregate, this is always and necessarily true: https://web.stanford.edu/~wfsharpe/art/active/active.htm

Any investment in the S&P500 that was as leveraged as the mentioned leveraged real estate or bond funds would have outperformed both the S&P500 and those two funds. It is easy (though not usually prudent) to create a leveraged investment in the S&P500 by buying it on margin.

Parent says "Pensions are a Ponzi scheme, don't fall for it."

While public pensions like social security have certain features of a Ponzi scheme, they can be sustainable forever, unlike other Ponzi schemes. In fact, they can be more efficient than everyone saving and investing for retirement themselves: https://www.economist.com/news/economics-brief/21727877-fina...

The fundamental value of $1 is $1, since it allows you to pay off $1 of your tax liability to the U.S. government.

Not true: the general trend is that later generations are richer than earlier generations. Just compare yourself to the average person in your country 100 years ago.

59% of eligible voters voted (http://www.electproject.org/2016g). Not great, but much more than 1/3.

There's a South Park episode using that meme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO5sxLapAts

Paul Graham called it "playing house." http://www.paulgraham.com/before.html

This is an invalid comparison: the US government, unlike the Stasi, doesn't pay your neighbors to spy on you, doesn't interrogate your wife and children about you, doesn't bug your home without a good reason, and doesn't even record your calls (only the meta data).

Ideas that you keep in your head and don't execute on are like brain crack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sHCQWjTrJ8

I got a call that I'd be audited, and the letter only arrived a few days later.

No, it's not necessarily true for a currency backed by a state, since the state can force you to pay taxes in that currency, thus creating demand for the currency and underpinning its value.

A market is weak-form efficient if you cannot use past share prices to predict the direction of future price changes. Or in other words, if you can't use past returns to predict future returns. There's no delusion.

Same here: all quotes I got are 70% to 110% more expensive than my current carrier, while excluding uninsured motorist coverage. Doesn't seem like a good selection of participating carriers.

Your statement "Google can't be allowed to copy the content or parts of it without permission of the creator" doesn't take into account that "Publishers can choose whether or not they want their articles to appear in Google News" (from the post).

If you don't want to worry about losing your data in the future, try Chronicle of Life. As a non-profit with an endowment fund, we're probably the safest guardian of your data.

You can already get a daily reminder email and hit reply to save your thoughts. We're currently reworking the website (long overdue), and will add the option to see a previous post in the reminder email by mid October.

According to the Modigliani–Miller theorem, the mix of debt (size of mortgage) and equity (down payment) is only irrelevant in a world without taxes. However, mortgage interest is tax deductible, while rent is not, so their result doesn't apply here.

The flat down payment chart is a coincidence, based on the default values for interest and inflation rates, growth rates and expected returns.

Their porn statistics are questionable: they say "2/3 of men admit to watching porn" and "70% of those men are between the ages of 18-24". This implies that at least 47% of all men are between 18 and 24, which is clearly wrong. Otherwise, good article.

I use it a lot for local development, but wouldn't install it on a production server for security reasons. However, if you run commands in phpMyAdmin, it actually gives you the SQL code for your desired action, which you can then copy and paste to the command line on your production server.

It's draggable for me (on Chrome).

Nice looking website, but where are the standardized testing data?

Thanks for the ideas. Sorry for the slow site response: the database is currently getting hit pretty hard.

The database is getting lots of hits right now, after I posted to Hacker News. There are 5 million rows in the database, so any lookup takes a while, in spite of indexing.

I built this website since I found it difficult to compare public schools based on their test results, since schools have vastly different student populations skewing test results one way or another. By isolating different populations, such as native English speakers vs. others, or students of parents with or without a college education, you can find more relevant information for your situation.

Please let me know what you think about the website.

Exactly: Stay away from North Korea

It has nothing to do with torture. Snowden is, quite reasonably, afraid of going to prison for breaking the law.

Snowden hasn't been tortured, and will certainly not be tortured when he gets back to the US.

The 8% real return is the arithmetic average over the last 80+ years. It's somewhat useful for predicting the expected return over a one-year period. However, what you need for retirement planning and what the IRR formula gives you is the geometric average, which takes into account compounding. The historical real return was only about 6% measured as a geometric average, and there are some reasons to think that it will be lower in the future.

Same problem with subversion. Try http://yoursite/.svn/entries

If you use Apache, you can add the following to prevent the .svn directories from being served: <LocationMatch ".\.svn."> Order allow,deny Deny from all </LocationMatch