srad1292

Choose an online firm such as Charles Schwab or Fidelity. Find a mutual fund that tracks the S&P 500. Put money in there when you can. If you're young and want to take more risk for a chance at higher returns, you certainly can. But the idea behind the simple S&P 500 mutual fund is that the mutual fund will be comprised of the top 500 companies in the market and so your gains will pretty much match the gains of the market itself. It's a simple way to just put money into the market and get safe returns. You can read "The Little Book of Common Sense Investing" by John Bogle for more details on this. I actually have about an 80/20 split between two funds. The 80 would be towards the S&P 500 and the 20 would be towards the equivalent but for international markets.

Reminds me of one of the "Coding Adventures" videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-iSQQgOd1A

I recently hit the same wall of finding good, freely-available dictionary data. My family and I like to play Quiddler here and there(where you get cards and build words with them) and I wanted to make a Quiddler solver that would take your hand/top card in discard and would give you a list of the best combination of words by total points, by word length with points as a sub sort, and by number of words with points as a sub sort. I found multiple sources of JSON data with inconsistent formatting or missing information. I mainly wanted the list of words and what the word type of each definition was so I could quickly filter out words that didn't have a whitelisted type. I ended up settling with just a Scrabble dictionary which was a list of strings and manually removing words here and there as they came up if they didn't belong. Understandable that the big names in dictionaries spent a lot of resources getting to where they are. That said, it's hard to believe something as fundamental as a record of our language doesn't have an open source and well-organized dataset accessible by API or download.