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on Gopher (inofficial)
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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML Show HN: Quantifying opportunity cost with a deliberately "simple" web app
rf15 wrote 2 min ago:
It's true, most investors quit right before they're about to win big!
intheitmines wrote 42 min ago:
Crudely, if my aunt had a dick she'd be my uncle.
In terms of feedback:
- need BTC prices pre 2014 to really feel the pain
- The date format for earliest date available is different to the date
format then used in the input below
b0bbi wrote 13 min ago:
You are 100% right about pre-2014 BTC. Any suggestion where to
download trusted prices?
Regarding the date format - it can really cause confusion. Let me
explaine. The "calculator" date format is "YYYY-MM-DD" (ISO 8601).
But the input field's date format adapts based on your device
settings. For better UX.
fragmede wrote 1 hour 31 min ago:
My question is, why would you do that to yourself? Living with regrets
of the past that would never have been, anyway, seems like a recipe for
sadness and despair. Maybe my sense of fun or humor or whatever is off,
but I just don't get doing this to yourself, man. You could have hooked
into them and thought $1,000 is the highest it'll go and sold them all
them. Who knowsâ½
No offense meant. Just my two Satoshis.
b0bbi wrote 54 min ago:
Honestly, it's mostly just dark humor and a bit of financial
"exposure therapy". Sometimes seeing the absurdly huge, multi-million
dollar number makes the regret feel almost comical rather than
actually depressing.
But you are 100% right about the $1k mark. In reality, almost none of
us would have held to the top. We would have sold the moment it
doubled, bought new iphone and felt like geniuses. That's the reality
this calculator conveniently ignores for the sake of the joke!
Appreciate your two Satoshis!
nkrisc wrote 1 hour 38 min ago:
I first heard about bitcoin sometime in college (2007-2011). At the
time I thought about buying a couple just for fun (might have been a
few dollars worth? Canât remember). But I decided it was a waste of
money.
And at the time, it was a complete waste of money. I donât regret it
at all.
Only with knowledge of the future would it have been worthwhile.
But today when I see what cryptocurrency has become, I regret my
decision even less.
There are countless ways I could have made millions if I knew the
future. I donât waste my time regretting those.
jonplackett wrote 1 hour 34 min ago:
I was gonna buy $1000 of bitcoin in 2016 but I couldnât find my
passport to verify my identity with Coinbase and then forgot about
it. Ah well.
b0bbi wrote 1 hour 22 min ago:
would you keep it till today?
rkomorn wrote 1 hour 32 min ago:
Would you have $100k now or would you have sold it when it tripled
to $3000 because that would've felt like a really good return
already, though?
jonplackett wrote 1 hour 23 min ago:
Yeah this is the story I tell myself to make me feel better. I
may well have even more regret! Or thought I was an investment
genius and invested loads more and then sold it at a bad time.
b0bbi wrote 7 min ago:
yeah as Warren Buffett once said: "Our favorite holding period
is forever".
nothrabannosir wrote 1 hour 39 min ago:
> He made a bold claim that one day it might reach $100k per coin. I
remember thinking it sounded unrealistic - and even if it wasn't, I
wasn't going to break my rule.
> ... The opportunity cost came out to tens of millions of dollars.
It doesn't sound, though, like you'd have held until 100k. This
calculation only applies to people who'd have held for some reason;
e.g. just after the conversation, you slipped into a coma and you just
woke up now.
But I usually hear it from people who "could've bought at $2 but
didn't!"
If you didn't buy at $2, you wouldn't have held at $4. If you didn't
buy at $300, you wouldn't have held at $600. Etc.
Me neither fwiw :)
b0bbi wrote 1 hour 18 min ago:
Haha, or maybe the flash drive got lost in the junk at home :)
I would have sold it when I made X2 - good profit.
jbjbjbjb wrote 2 hours 12 min ago:
Most reasonable people will not have enough conviction to make a
serious amount of money even if theyâre right. I think a better
question is how much would you have invested to make $500k/ $1mn (or
whatever a life changing sum is for you) on the investment then you can
consider whether you had the stomach to do that.
b0bbi wrote 1 hour 14 min ago:
By the way, a "Reverse Mode" (calculating the initial stake needed to
hit exactly $1M) is actually a brilliant idea.
But to your underlying point - it's the hard truth. People often act
like they have infinite time and keep putting decisions off for
"later". And then, boom - your peak earning years are behind you,
boom - you're 70. This terminal is basically a receipt for that exact
kind of procrastination.
dvh wrote 2 hours 29 min ago:
Is it $149 or $149000?
b0bbi wrote 2 hours 2 min ago:
if the system wrote $149 this mean $149 or you found a bug. Please
let me know if found a bug.
dvh wrote 1 hour 7 min ago:
It wow 149,000
b0bbi wrote 40 min ago:
149,000 mean 149000
Bishonen88 wrote 2 hours 34 min ago:
hindsight is 20/20. If I'd known that Nvda, Aapl, Amzn etc. would go
up, it's easy to now to regret how much money we'd have. Same thing
with "RSU's" we get at FAANG. I often hear from coworkers that if they
wouldn't have sold them when they got them, they'd be rich right now.
Yes, they would be - but in an alternate universe, they'd have
little/nothing and wouldn't have bought the car/camera/vacation they
got out of the money when they sold the RSUs.
I added something related to this idea to my life-planning app: what if
for projections. I track all my expenses/incomes/investments in my app.
I then can with 1 click run a scenario where I move certain expenses to
investments. I.e. cancelling netflix for 10 years, or xbox gamepass
etc. and seeing what it would actually do to my 10 year projection
(which already accounts for ETFs/Stock with variable return rates
etc.). i.e.:
Exclude Recurring Expenses
Simulate cutting these expenses and investing the savings
Redirecting â¬19.99/month to investments
Then I see black on white what would happen if I get rid of all the
'small' subscriptions, on a visual chart. It's eye opening when one
selects items that add up to a ~100 Euro ++ a month.
b0bbi wrote 2 hours 4 min ago:
I tracked every single daily expense for a few years, until I hit a
point where I realized I already knew exactly where my money was
going and how much I could realistically save. It just comes down to
discipline.
I really appreciate the idea and saved it for potential future
features! My only hesitation is that adding practical projection
tools might make shouldhavebought lose its fun, curious spirit and
turn it into a serious financial app.
Bishonen88 wrote 1 hour 49 min ago:
You're right of course. For me the difference maker is in seeing on
a projection chart that if I just cancel 2x zwift, disney and
netflix, I can save up to:
Savings from Cuts
â¬11,048
â¬60/mo @ 8%
within 10 years. That's HUGE! While the 60 Euro a month seems kind
of irrelevant on its own.
con wrote 2 hours 35 min ago:
Why stop at financial loss? I did [1] - enter your DOB and get a feel
on how you compare to Einstein, Michael Jordan, Steve Jobs and others.
Here's one for 01/01/1990: [1] /?date=1990-01-01
You can subscribe to a calendar and get notified when you are exactly
the age someone was, when they achieved something.
HTML [1]: https://whentheywere.com
HTML [2]: https://whentheywere.com/?date=1990-01-01
endymion-light wrote 2 hours 39 min ago:
This is quite a fun website, what have you used for the backend, i've
been wanting to get more deployments for small web tools but the hug of
death always worries me
b0bbi wrote 1 hour 3 min ago:
I'm unsing Laravel. I think any framework you are familiar with will
do.
I'm using frameworks even for single page application, cuz you never
know how it turned.
I think the danger of "hug of death" is overblown. Hardware gets more
powerful over time, and bandwidth expands. I had a project with about
60k unique users per day, and that traffic lasted for several weeks.
I didn't take any special measures, although I was prepared to switch
to a more powerful server.
I'd be worried about what to do to get to 60k users. :)
renewiltord wrote 2 hours 39 min ago:
Oh good grief. $2.5m. Thatâs pretty funny. Hard to imagine I would
have held through the ride but a pretty penny nonetheless. Not as bad
as my buddy who sold his $200k grant in 2017 to buy a San Jose townhome
that costs exactly the same today hahaha!
b0bbi wrote 1 hour 54 min ago:
Ouch, that San Jose townhome story is actual physical pain.
WELCOME TO REALITY. ITâS EXPENSIVE.
PowerElectronix wrote 3 hours 26 min ago:
The first thing one has to do when analysing past money decisions is to
judge the decision based on the information available at the time.
I too watched from the sidelines as btc, nvda and others went to the
moon. But with the information available at the time, investing in
those was not a sound strategy.
lofties wrote 29 min ago:
Even if I would've bought Nvidia, Bitcoin, or whatever stock... who
is to say I would've had the balls to hold it all the way to whatever
they're at today. I probably would've ended up like the guy who spent
10,000 bitcoin on a pizza.
cs02rm0 wrote 2 hours 40 min ago:
Survivor bias again - these are the few that made it while many
others did not.
b0bbi wrote 3 hours 5 min ago:
It's true.
In my experience, you'll be able to evaluate the correctness of your
actions today in about five years, when you have more data and
results.
hsbauauvhabzb wrote 3 hours 14 min ago:
There are plenty of people that thought WeWork would go to the moon,
too.
eru wrote 3 hours 32 min ago:
Wouldn't this need to know what I actually did instead?
When I use it, it tells me that the form was incomplete. I tried to
figure out how much I regret having bought 0 bitcoin so far.
Perhaps needs a better error message? I think it actually doesn't like
the zero, but prevents it doesn't like incomplete data. Zero is also a
number.
> CAUSALITY_ERROR: You cannot SELL before you BUY. [1] Needs at least a
better error message that short sells aren't supported, instead of
trying to be too clever by half about causality.
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_(finance)
b0bbi wrote 1 hour 3 min ago:
fixed, btw
b0bbi wrote 3 hours 10 min ago:
Thanks for the "zero", it really does matter in a calculator like
this.
Fair point on the shorting - I definitely prioritized retro drama
over actual market mechanics there!
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