masnick

The footer lol

> 2022-2025 Owl Rights Reserved

I can’t recommend Monarch strongly enough. It is a service that aggregates across bank accounts, brokerage, credit cards, etc.

The killer feature for me is that it provides overall money in/money out, with some good visualizations too. This is nontrivial for anyone using multiple credit cards or bank accounts, and is *critical* information for being a responsible adult IMO.

It also has budgeting, investment tracking tools, etc. But these stay out of your way if you just want to look at overall metrics like in/out over time, or net worth.

I showed my financial advisor and he was so impressed he picked up their advisor product (https://www.monarchmoney.com/for-professionals). So I don’t have to pay for a subscription anymore myself!

I strongly believe everyone should use a tool like Monarch for financial situational awareness.

$15 discount via my referral link (but I don’t get anything because my account is paid for via my financial advisor): https://www.monarchmoney.com/referral/b3q5nmkw2r

Seconded. The Yoto is great. It also supports arbitrary MP3 assignment to their NFC cards. It’s all proprietary but has been rock solid over multiple years.

I grew up in a small town in the US before cell phones were ubiquitous.

When we started getting cell phones, the numbers all had the same first six digits. The last four were assigned in order of provisioning.

My friend and I got our phones at nearly the same time, so our numbers were like 555-555-1004 and 555-555-1008.

This came in handy when I was going to visit him years later, and my phone died on the plane. I didn’t have anyone’s cell number memorized other than my parents (555-555-1013) and his thanks to the numeric similarity. (We kept the same phone numbers when we moved away from home.)

In this town, landline phones also all shared the same first six digits. Before cell phones got into the mix in the late 1990s, people could (and did) use 5 digits to represent phone numbers: 3-XXXX where the 3 referred to the first digit of the “exchange code”. The next town was 8-XXXX, etc.

You should take a look at https://fastmail.blog/2018/09/10/access-and-assistance-bill/. They say it doesn’t affect their customers.

I switched from Gmail to Fastmail back in 2013 [1] and haven't looked back.

Fastmail has continued to make significant improvements, while keeping the interface lean and functional.

It seems to me like $3/month is worth it for a service as critical as email.

[1]: https://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/07/19/fastmail/ and discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6069944

I wrote more about my Hugo-based personal knowledge base here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21311156

You can see it at https://maxmasnick.com/kb

Essentially it is a folder of Markdown files with some YAML metadata at the top to define categories. Hugo takes care of rendering the HTML, which is automatically deployed every time I push updates to the ‘master’ branch on GitHub via the GitHub Actions beta. It works pretty well, and allows me to edit on iOS via Working Copy.

I'm only interested in password managers with good desktop, web, and mobile support.

Essentially zero. It's not well-advertised, and I only started it in earnest earlier this year.

My Technical Notes blog (https://tech-notes.maxmasnick.com), which is a similar idea but much more random in content, does get a fair bit of traffic on specific pages, presumably via organic search traffic. (This is the most popular Tech Notes page, which has had 30k views over the last 4 years: https://tech-notes.maxmasnick.com/ipython-notebooks-automati...)

Unfortunately I don't have a good way to reveal the source of my site as there are some things in that git repo that can't be made public.

I too have struggled to find examples of doing more complex things in Hugo. It's such a versatile tool that it's probably pretty hard to document everything in an approachable way.

I may write up how I set up the Hugo portion of the knowledge base as it has worked quite well. If I do, you can subscribe here to make sure you see it: https://masnick.blog/subscribe/

I described this briefly in a reply to the parent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21316442

Yes, unless you have my weird requirement to use an Apache server, I think something like Netlify or GitHub Pages makes way more sense.

It's somewhat convoluted and custom to my specific hosting setup (I use https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net because I want an Apache server so I can use complex redirects). Essentially, the GitHub Action builds the site and then copies it over to NFSN. This is all done in a Docker container.

The only potentially interesting part about this setup is I take advantage of this git feature I didn't know about until I set this up: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-worktree. This lets you essentially check out a branch into a folder in a repo. Hugo can then build the site in to the special folder, and the built site is committed just to that branch. I then push this branch to NFSN, rather than using rsync or scp, which takes a lot longer for small changes compared with sending a git delta over the wire.

I plan to write up a more extensive description of this when GitHub Actions come out of beta. If you want to hear about it when it comes out, you can subscribe to my blog's newsletter: https://masnick.blog/subscribe/

Hi, thanks!

Sorry about the bum link (it's fixed now).

The simple answer is you can download zips of the entire OneNote notebook from the OneDrive web interface.

I have a personal "knowledge base" that is publicly available at https://maxmasnick.com/kb/.

This is partially inspired by Chris Albon's excellent data science technical notes: http://chrisalbon.com.

I find it very helpful to have this kind of information on a public website. It's easy to search myself, quick to edit[^1], and helpful for sharing with others when someone asks me a question.

For notes I don't want to make public, I use OneNote. It's available on every platform, has a documented file format, and the sync works well. Of course, I have some more detailed notes on why I prefer this to other options: https://maxmasnick.com/kb/note-apps/.

[^1]: My whole website is built with https://gohugo.io. I use the GitHub Actions beta to automatically update the public site every time I commit to master. This means I can edit on a computer with a standard text editor, and also on iOS using https://workingcopyapp.com.

For a while now I’ve been using “[email protected]” when signing up for accounts.

I use FastMail for my email hosting, and they allow you to turn on wildcards for any custom domain. I don’t get any spam because it’s at a subdomain — never enable *@mydomain.me because you will get a mountain of spam to admin@, webmaster@, etc.

Anyone interested in this article should also take a look at some of Pearl’s work on causal inference. Here is one article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2836213/

This is new to me too. Thanks, I'll take a look.

Yes, it's got some really nice features but it is a little clunky/complex compared to Zotero. I would try out Papers first before looking at Bookends...Bookends can work great, but it does take some work to set up.

Also, Bookends annoyingly checks to see if you are running the same license on multiple devices on your network, and if you have more than once instance running it forces you to close it down. This may seem superficially reasonable, but for someone with both a desktop and a laptop it's quite annoying. I emailed the developer about it and they didn't seem to get why this was a problem.

zotfile is a must-have for Zotero! Thank you for making it.

Never heard of it before!

Looking at their website, it does seem like Citationsy is somewhere in-between a full-blown reference management application and one-off bibliography creation applications.

What Citationsy does not appear to do is manage inline citations within a Word or Google Docs document. Zotero will let you hit a keyboard shortcut, search for a reference, and insert a citation right in a paragraph (e.g. "(Smith, 2001)") . It then takes care of also adding that citation to the bibliography at the bottom of the document, and keeping the numbering in sync (if your citation style uses numbering).

I would only use a reference manager that has a word processor plugin for inline citation management -- and it doesn't look like Citationsy does.

To quickly build a bibliography, or just get a properly formatted citation for a single paper, I like https://zbib.org (also from Zotero).

Edit: clever, clever, parent poster is the creator of Citationsy. Hello! For more backstory on Citationsy see https://blog.prototypr.io/on-citationsy-4e143bbafc04. Sounds like Cenk has good taste (mentions iA Writer as inspiration). I'll be exploring Citationsy more.

Probably Papers is your best bet at this point.

Zotero will let you send PDFs to/from a tablet with the ZotFile (http://zotfile.com) plugin. This works well if your workflow is (1) find PDF on your computer; (2) read on tablet. But if you want to do anything else -- even choosing a PDF to read from your tablet without touching your computer -- then Zotero won't work. With that said, I know Zotero is working on mobile apps...not sure how far they have come though.

If you're Mac/iOS only, also check out https://www.sonnysoftware.com/bookends/bookends.html.

For anyone who is interested in the different options for reference management, I've been sporadically maintaining a webpage about the various options since 2015: https://maxmasnick.com/projects/reference-managers/

I re-un-recommended Mendeley back in June 2018 when this news first broke. (I was initially too sketched out by Elsevier to recommend Mendeley, and this just confirms these suspicions.)

tl;dr Zotero is a pretty good bet for most people, especially since they added support for citation management in Google Docs at the end of last year (very important for academic writers). PaperPile (https://paperpile.com) and Papers (https://www.papersapp.com) are also worth checking out.