so many of your comments are [dead]. why are you on here?
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-4 pts, so already at the bottom. I’d challenge everyone to look at the comment history of the person above. And ask yourselves if this is improving the discourse on HN.
Kill this comment if you’d like, but man, I wish for the old HN.
same here. though, i think bazel is better for DAGs. i wish i could use it for my personal project (in conjunction with, and bootstrapped with nix), but that's a pretty serious tooling investment that I just feel is just going to be a rabbit hole.
> But, field work also brought amazing experiences, I visited the seaside 70+ times over a year, and got an insight into what a time series really means when you cover the tidal and weather and seasonal cycles.
I’m not exactly sure if we share a similar experience, but living on a trail in the Santa Cruz mountains affords me the opportunity to hike the same trails every weekend, year round (or even daily).
I’m not taking measurements, but it’s incredible to witness the effect of seasons on familiar territory just a few miles outside town. The weather changes, the wildlife changes and the air changes (moist to dry and back).
It’s an incredibly special experience to revisit the same place time and time again and witness the impact of … time. I hope you found something else to replace your familiar seaside.
In commentary on the article, a photo gallery of nine images, I didn’t get much out of it. Maybe because it didn’t show much actual change (aside from one side by side 5 years apart, and another one days or weeks apart?).
It is a common myth about these California "droughts." Like anywhere, water fluctuates, but CA is not abnormal in this regard.
And really CA has plenty of water, but the people fight for the farmers for it, and the farmers win. Agriculture is about 80-90% of total use. All of residential, commercial, industrial, baseball fields, golf courses, residential lawns - all make up 10-20% of water use.
So why the constant "drought"-alerts and admonitions to take shorter showers and flush less often? Because every gallon used in your home takes money out of a farmer's pocket. 1 flush ~= two almonds. A shower is ~5-10 almonds. 5 showers is an avocado. If you don't use it, they will - and if you use it, they can't.
I too try for 200g of protein/day, with meat and supplements by shakes. It’s difficult to eat more meat than that, because of how it fills you up, its prep requirements and its cost.
I don’t believe that the average American eats nearly a pound of meat per day. I do believe if the average American ate meat before carbs, we could get there, and all be a lot healthier, though.
For me, processed carbs make me much hungrier, but the kale salad I’m eating right now makes me less hungry.
200g a day? Are you a big guy? I did an experiment in my 20s on building muscle on a plant based diet, and managed to gain 10kg in one year (muscle mass, confirmed by a DEXA scan). Total weight gain was about 16kg. Most of the surplus was water.
I started at 70kg (181cm), so pretty skinny, and without prior resistance training. I ate between 120and 140g of protein per day, without any shakes.
I am aware that these gains would not have continued, but my body obviously had more than enough with 130g to build muscle. I did eat a calorie surplus, but
The latest in body building science recommends 1g of protein per day per 1lb of body mass (or 2.2g per 1kg for metric folks).
> I ate between 120and 140g of protein per day, without any shakes.
How did you do that in a plant based diet? What were your largest sources of protein? (To be clear: I'm doubting that you did it. I am genuinely curious.)
> The latest in body building science recommends 1g of protein per day per 1lb of body mass (or 2.2g per 1kg for metric folks).
I wasn't that serious about the whole thing, but I read somewhere that the benefits decline rapidly after 1.6g/kg bodyweight. That was the reason I didn't do any shakes.
> How did you do that in a plant based diet
Beans and whole grains. I realized that fat intake was limiting my protein access so I cut fat down do between 10 and 20% of energy intake. That means you have to chew down a whole lot of bulgur and beans. I ate about 3000 calories (I do a lot of swimming) and then you only need about 18% of energy from protein to reach 140g. Easy peasy.
I also made my own firm tofu (i was cheap). I could easily eat 200g of tofu a day.
Definitely possible - I used to get 100g easily. Simple example would be some granola (with lots of nuts/seeds) with soya milk for breakfast, big tofu scramble for lunch, poki bowl with lots of veg, edamame and tempeh for dinner.
You could probably just do this with big portions to get to 130 tbh.
This is very true, and something that people pushing keto (myself included) had to learn the hard way.
There are satiety indexes for different foods but they are not universal. I can eat almost unlimited carbs and never feel full. I'll eat multiple plates full of bread or a thousand calories in french fries and then move on to the main course.
6oz of lean meat and some salad and I'm good with 500 or so calories on my plate.
I honestly don't get how potatoes supposedly fill people up. I have made twice baked potatoes before and eaten an easy 2000 calories of them along side thanksgiving dinner.
In contrast right now I'm eating clean and doing a body recomp. Eating clean is super satiating, for me at least!
> I have made twice baked potatoes before and eaten an easy 2000 calories of them along side thanksgiving dinner.
Try plain boiled potatoes. I bet you feel like stopping long before 2000 Calories. Tasty things are tasty and often easy to eat an unhealthy amount of.
This is the thing that makes any conversation about broad categories of food difficult—there’s just a huge range of ways to package those carbs, and people eat a ton of “hyper palatable” foods. A few hundred calories of Smartfood popcorn with a day’s worth of sodium and addicting flavors is quite different in my experience than, say, a few slices of chewy, crusty sourdough bread.
Well, if you've ever cooked down a cabbage or spinach or whatever, you'll see it basically takes up no space whatsoever... so yeah, kale on its own will take a while to fill you up.
Maybe true! I eat a bunch (like the formal term of 1 unit) of kale in my daily salad. That seems to be enough, alongside some Greek yogurt and blueberries to maintain me for a few hours.
Can’t help eating junk carbs when I see them, though.
I'm cursed with having a good wide palate - your salad sounds delightful - but nothing ever seems to make me feel full until it makes me feel Too Full and then I wish I hadn't overeaten. Normal plain satiation, where are you?
I've been cooking more with lentils as well, so many cheap tasty recipes. I've been following this chickpea hack (cooking in microwave for like 5ish) to great success. Microwaving the chickpeas splits them into a crispy texture, then after that it's very flexible to create all kinds of dishes:
My favorite is pan frying them in a hot sauce + aromatics for a quick chickpea rice bowl, I even gotten into the habit of using chickpeas as a chicken replacement for many of my Mexican dishes.
If you're use to the typical American diet, please try cooking more lentils! Very tasty, filling dishes, low on costs and high on nutrients.
chicken 100g/27g of protein
chickpeas 100g/19g of protein
That's a good ratio for something that costs less than a dollar a can compared to chicken.
fwiw at the level of protein i need to eat to build muscle mass (im weight training 3x a week), even that 27 vs 19 difference starts to become a problem.
people don't realize how challenging it is to eat 200g of protein a day, every day, for months, without eating like 3000cal lol
that said, i do eat a lot of plant based protein. i love chickpeas and i also fuck w tofu a lot.
There’s a pretty versatile and tasty milk product called tvoroh in eastern/Central Europe. It has about 18g of protein, and 0-10% fat depending on what you’re buying. So for low fat options it can be as low as 70-90kkal/100g with 18g of protein.
What is the problem of consuming say 80-100% of whey protein? Not all of it has sweeteners.
> What is the problem of consuming say 80-100% of whey protein?
Well, for starters, that'd be completely fucking joyless. And on top of that, meat contains other nutrients that I'd have to account for (which is not hard tbh, but requires a little bit of studying and planning).
> tasty milk product called tvoroh
My gallbladder has never been at 100% and as a result, I have to eat a relatively low fat diet. This is not something a normal person faces. I eat a fair amount of low fat greek yogurt, though. Similar concept.
(I am from Eastern Europe). "Tvorog" / "Творог" is almost identical to commonly available cottage cheese. I buy the latter in big tubs from Costco and eat it almost every day for breakfast (with whatever fruits are on hand, or with raisins and nuts in the worst case).
Yeah, I actually learned how to make it myself, although it requires access to kefir/piimä, or making it yourself first. Once you have it, it’s very easy to make it, although often unnecessary when local eastern shops have it quite cheap.
Not sure about availability in the US, in EU cottage cheese often is sold as much more creamy spread, like Philadelphia cheese.
You may be calling it "quark" then? From a quick search:
"The two most common translations of tvorog are cottage cheese (common in the US) and quark (common in Germany). The process of making these different cheeses is quite similar: you take fermented, acidized or sour milk, and separate the curds from the whey. For cottage cheese, cream is added to the curds before they’re packaged, and for quark, the curds are not overly dried so the curds come out quite soft and creamy. Tvorog, on the other hand, is most often packaged as dry grainy pieces of curd."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzsEqV0Bjcs - that lecture refers a simple formulae to compute protein content from the amount of nitrogen. They count nitrogen in grams, then multiply by 6 to get amount of "available" protein. But, any antinutrients such as cyanides will count as proteins by this calculation.
Lentils contain trypsin inhibitors, which contain inordinate amount of nitrogen that is counted as protein.
While you do not eat these directly after cooking your lentils, you do not eat as much protein as you would think you do.
lentils carb/protein ratio isn't great. you still need to supplement it with protein (whey or pea). i eat a fair amount of lentils, but mostly as a carb source (like white rice). even tofu's ratio isn't good enough. i do eat a lot of tofu though, because i like it
back of the hand math suggests id have to eat a kg of dry lentils a day to reach my protein requirements. that's gotta be what, 2800 cal? edit: 800g of lentils for 200g of protein, 2500 cal.
im just thinking out loud here, but lentils alone wouldn't be adequate for me.
You would just eat more protein dense plant foods like tempeh, extra firm tofu, and seitan which is the most protein dense food.
If the only food in your pantry were seitan, you’d have to eat 260g (960cal) of it to hit 200g protein. It’s not that much food.
Most people haven’t tried it but asian stores may sell it next to tofu as “vegan chicken/beef”. It has a nice texture that you can cube and treat like chicken in a stir fry.
Scale that up to 5000 kcal/day needed for heavy activity (like for an Olympic swimmer) and it still seems like a sufficient, if not excessive, amount of protein: 400g of it. Not even NFL linemen eat that much protein.
> chicken breast is more than twice as "good" ratio wise.
Yes, at more than twice the price for me.
> for the average person's protein intake, yes.
The average person doesn't need that ratio, reaching 60-90g of protein is trivial. That ratio is good for bodybuilding purposes. Now, eating that much tofu, that sucks. Generally, getting 200g of protein sucks, even when you eat protein powder.
I started tracking everything I ate, every single bite.
The average western diet may over consume meat, but I have to work my butt off to hit my protein goals for strength training.
A slice of bacon has 3g of protein. 150 calories though. Eating enough protein through bacon isn't the best of ideas, even if someone is doing a ketogenic diet!
60-80g of protein is about right for a man who has a moderately physical job or who exercises some small amount. 100g is the minimum for putting on muscle and getting stronger.
The average western diet over consumes everything, it could do with less sugar, less processed foods (which are hyper palatable and don't satiate hunger), and more pure protein.
Because American men average around five nine and given the average lean muscle mass needs on that frame size, something within 60-90g (which is a huge range!) will work for most American men.
Like if someone is a 6 foot 10 body builder, they know their needs.
Also the suggested range of g/kg ranges from .8g/kg to 1.2g/kg, which is also a huge range, but that is primarily for building strength, not maintaining.
Given the goals here are "rough guidelines on eating healthy", I'm fine saying most men should aim for 60-90g of lean protein a day. That isn't exactly a hot take.
you don't need to do anything. why try? sit at home and watch tv.
i can hike elevation all day which is great for backpacking, i look great with a shirt off, and i can stand up from the couch without using my hands.
yes, im taking it a bit far at this point, but really that just means eating the average american's protein intake and then a protein shake or two on top
That question is, honestly, kind of stupid. It is akin to asking why eat healthy or why go outside in the sun.
But hey, here we go.
1. Intense physical exercise is the only known way to increase IQ. (Admittedly pure strength training is not the best for this, HIIT workouts are better)
2. Muscle mass is a huge factor in the early death in seniors. Basically people who lack muscle mass are more likely to fall over and fracture something, at which point they are much more likely to die.
3. Lean muscle mass, up to a certain point (e.g. extreme body builders have worse mortality numbers), decreases mortality across the board.
4. I like living w/o pain, and you can choose to either have your joints take the load or your muscles take the load.
5. I enjoy being able to move my body and be active in the world.
6. I'm vain and I like to look good.
> most people don't.
Most people in America die of a heart attack. Most people in America are obese and have troubles moving around. Most people in America don't read books. Most people in America don't enjoy mathematics. Most people in America don't go to art museums.
People should have aspirations to do more than average.
alternatively, Adam executed the superior pricing strategy. had he charged for recurring licenses, would fewer people have signed up? would his subscriptions also be drawing down?
i wouldn't have bought a sub, but i did pay for tailwind premium (and, frankly, didn't use it like i'd've hoped). however, it was a bit of a Kickstarter investment for me. i like Adam's persona, and was happy to see continued investment down this path.
as many a business knows, you need to bring new initiatives to the table over, or accept that your one product carries all your risk.
> alternatively, Adam executed the superior pricing strategy.
I'm not saying it wasn't a good choice at the time.
The problem with lifetime licensing only appears down the road if a company doesn't find a way to expand their offerings.
If you opened a local gym with reasonably priced lifetime memberships you'd probably have an explosion of new customers. You'd then hit a wall where you've saturated the market, can't sell any more memberships, but you have to keep paying employees and rent.
I believe he succeeding in convincing Sam and Ryan to adopt lifetime pricing for their UI course at https://buildui.com/pricing. I've purchased Build UI, and it was an excellent product, but unfortunately it appears to be completely dead for at least a full year now.
Neither the unannounced death of Build UI nor this apparently financial catastrophe for Tailwind bode well for the prospects of lifetime pricing! Although the problem might be more related to the entire market segment (frontend programming and design courses) than to the particular pricing model.
If Build UI was still making content, they would keep getting sales. There are also other ways to implement a "pay once" model that is sustainable, but it involves designing a much more thought out product roadmap and gatekeeping features behind new major versions where you need to pay for an upgraded license.
Jetbrains has done this for decades now with great success and is the standard sales model for most freemium WordPress plugins. Heck, even Adobe had a similar model until they were convinced they could squeeze out even more profit by charging monthly and trapping customers into subscriptions with high cancellation fees (my words, not theirs).
>had he charged for recurring licenses, would fewer people have signed up? would his subscriptions also be drawing down?
History says yes, and no. Much easier to retain periodic payment on a few engaged businesses than to continually look for people willing to make a one time payment. Especially in professional software.
The premium model just doesn't work unless you stay very lean. Workers need to be continually paid, even if you make your entire audience happy once.
As a small business that started with a one-time/upgrade based pricing policy, and moved to a recurring policy, I don't think it is too late for tailwind to do so for future upgrades/improvements. I am saddened that they laid people off before trying. I understand doing that is a leap of faith/risk, but that is what you need to do.
The key thing they need to recognize is that some percentage of their customers are serious businesses that want them to continue developing/maintaining the software, and that these businesses will be supportive as long as the deal is the same for everyone (you can't ask them to pay out of the goodness of their hearts, as then they feel they will be taken advantage of by people who don't pay).
When we switched to a recurring pricing model, I thought it was going to be a disaster. In fact, I got an angry call from exactly one customer (who then remained a customer despite threatening to leave). I got subtly expressed approval/relief from many more.
The book "How to Sell at Margins Higher than Your Competitors" was helpful to me, and might be helpful here as well. The key is to realize that you want to sell to people who really value your product and will pay for it. You don't want to maximize volume, you want to maximize revenue x margin.
You already have an installed base of people who value your product enough to pay for it once, you just have to create a system that enables them to sustain the technology they value in order to get ongoing support/upgrades/fixes/etc. The people who are going to complain on hacker news about recurring pricing aren't the people you want as customers anyway.
If the majority of your customers don't value it that much, then you are pretty cooked. But you may as well find that out directly. If people really don't want to pay for the software, don't waste time creating it for them.
We made the switch about 20 years ago. Since that time, about 70% of our lifetime revenue has come from recurring payments. Had I not had the courage to make the switch, I would be writing now that the business has been an unsustainable mistake, but that would have been false.
>If the majority of your customers don't value it that much, then you are pretty cooked.
cries in gamedev
Sadly my options are to either sell a few thousand copies on pc and deal with complaints on how my game isn't an 80 hour long timesink, or go into mobile and employ all the dark patterns I hate about marketing.
I never found efficiency. For five months I imported and categorized my transactions - from payroll through food. I definitely had reports being generated (using hledger) but the amount of time I invested and the ROI wasn’t there.
Had it been 5m a week, maybe I could’ve done it. But it was 3h/wk - finding transactions, transcoding them with scripts I was maintaining, and breaking down the costs with my wife to understand if Costco purchases were “groceries” or “home”.
I nailed the micro and failed the macro. With two kids, and no desire to invest 150h a year into this, there’s no way I can get this to work.
I imagine AI would be great at:
1. Maintaining scripts to extract and normalize various financial artifacts (PDFs, CSVs, XLSXs) into text files
2. Helping draw insights
But manual effort of:
1. Collecting from various banks, paystubs and investment accounts
The hard part has been to import all the accounts and to categorize the transactions on the 1-2 cards and 1-2 checking accounts that get used a lot. However doing hledger motivated me to simplify things. Either delete cards and accounts. Or barely use them so I can update them once or twice a year. And helps to reduce the number of categories.
I have not made updates for all of 2025 after 3 or 4 years of hledger. ROI diminished once the itch to zero everything wears off and since I have somewhat steady state expenses.
These days, I find it is doable 2-3 times a year. Its a lot of work at one shot but somehow able to catch up so as to review the main spending accounts. The zeroing is what attract me still. I get to see some patterns in my overall spending/categories. And it is side project where there is perceivable concrete progress, so still somewhat easier dopamine.
Simplifying/automating the workflow is a pull. As I type this, I have an idea to stop tracking NW in hledger - it can seem incomplete because money moves from checking to brokerages. That's fine. I only want to see expenses.
Interesting! In a different comment, I took the other side: maybe it’s only worth tracking NW in hledger? Itemizing transactions is heavy duty bookkeeping effort, and I didn’t feel any directional value.
my thinking is that NW does not have to be tracked in a way that the double entries zero out. Every six months, I just open the 3-4 brokerages and banks and make an entry in a spreadsheet for cash/stock/bonds/crypto/others. Where the stocks are mostly ETFs and crypto is less than 5%.
And create a pivot table for totals and %s. And rebalance as needed. This may be too crude for some. But I am only starting to get organized, so this works, esp as you said for directional. Actually this is one of the reasons I have dropped hledger in general.
I just leave notes and comments in the spreadsheet as needed.
The question to ask when tracking to optimize reoccurring bills for home and grocery is if there is even any room you can give anyways.
You'd probably find the easy end actionable changes better by tracking the amount and which food spoiled before eating, or by testing your standard basket item costs at different stores you are willing to go to. But all of this isn't something you need to do continuously. Once you figure it out, you should be good for some period of time.
have a "Costco purchases" sub-category for "groceries". If you ever feel differently, just move it to "home". Your system has to support this though.
I did multiple re-organisations in the last 10+ years.
Maybe the right way to do this is to only track accounts, and no tracking of individual txns?
Importing and tracking 401k contributions and stock dividends across multiple brokerage accounts - and then trying to handle timing differences (money in flight)… oof
For transactions: you spot fraud, mischarges or subs to cancel. Really a watchdog service would be good here. High effort, low return. IMO. (And a bit of tracking around reimbursements)
For savings: helps you keep an eye on where you’re at by forcing you to reconcile.
It’s totally worth it for a low value of invested time. But, it’s not going to be low effort.
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-4 pts, so already at the bottom. I’d challenge everyone to look at the comment history of the person above. And ask yourselves if this is improving the discourse on HN.
Kill this comment if you’d like, but man, I wish for the old HN.
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