Hacker News: lhh

New comment by lhh in "My dad could still be alive, but he's not"

lhh — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 04:10:38 +0000

Very sad, for more reasons than one. For pretty much everyone, heart disease is totally preventable now. If you’re over 30, get your ApoB checked (non HDL cholesterol is a proxy), and if it’s high, get a calcium scan on your heart. If you score above zero, get your ApoB down as low as possible (which will probably require drugs - diet barely moves the needle on this for most people). Low ApoB -> no heart disease.

Source: Peter Attia

New comment by lhh in "Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things"

lhh — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 13:44:09 +0000

Titan (about John Rockefeller and the making of Standard Oil) and House of Morgan (about J.P. Morgan, the man and the investment bank, and the making of the modern financial system) were both excellent.

New comment by lhh in "On 17th century "cocaine""

lhh — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 14:26:12 +0000

Interesting, I'd always assumed people snorted the powder because it's not absorbed if consumed orally, but apparently that's not true. Maybe just it's just for the absorption speed? So... if someone drank industrial quantities of coca tea in one go, it'd be a 2-12 hour cocaine high?

New comment by lhh in "On 17th century "cocaine""

lhh — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 14:19:58 +0000

Three friends and I summited Vulcan Misti in Peru (~19k ft) over 2 days with no altitude training. All of us came from sea level, had 2 days to acclimate staying in the town nearby (~7k ft). This was a year out of college, all of us were D3 athletes so reasonably fit but probably not considered elite level fitness.

The altitude impact was no joke, but for whatever reason it affected all of us to different degrees. I just felt a little more winded than usual, had to take my time a bit but was overall fine, whereas one of the group had a rough go of it, needed frequent breaks and vomited a couple times. The other two were somewhere in between.

So I'm sure being fit helps, but it seems there's more to it than that.

New comment by lhh in "On 17th century "cocaine""

lhh — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 23:30:30 +0000

I likewise had it in tea several times hiking in Peru. I personally didn’t notice any effect whatsoever, might as well have been mint tea.

New comment by lhh in "Founder Mode"

lhh — Sun, 01 Sep 2024 21:45:20 +0000

Disappointed that Nigel Pennypinch is missing from the acknowledgements.

SaaS Revenue Forecasting

lhh — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 21:53:56 +0000

Article URL: https://www.modeloptic.com/blog/saas-revenue-forecasting

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39857817

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by lhh in "What I learned selling my company"

lhh — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 03:02:41 +0000

Yes: “Hey, our company is on the market for sale and I thought you might be interested in taking a look before we accept another offer.”

And you can tailor it based on the specifics.

Working with an advisor can sometimes make this easier because they can be more direct and say things like: “Competitor X has made an offer and I know it’d make your life difficult if this asset ended up in their hands, so I wanted to give you an opportunity to take a look first.”

By the way, waiting until you get an offer to start trying to bring in competing ones isn’t great, definitely better to do that as early as you can if you’re serious about selling. You risk pissing off the interested party if you’re making them feel like they’re just being used as leverage and drag things out before giving them an answer.

New comment by lhh in "What I learned selling my company"

lhh — Sun, 14 Jan 2024 22:33:41 +0000

All great points!

If anyone is interested in how things tend to work if you're trying to proactively sell a company (especially a profitable one), I put together a write up a while back: https://www.fivecastfinancial.com/guides/how-selling-a-compa...

(I used to be an M&A advisor - no longer!)

New comment by lhh in "Cognitive ability and miscalibrated financial expectations"

lhh — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 03:47:48 +0000

"If you're an optimist you're probably an idiot" has to be one of the most British hypotheses I've ever heard.

New comment by lhh in "The real “must have” tools for programming"

lhh — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 19:15:42 +0000

Don't underestimate the benefit of exercise on mental performance. Your brain is a physical thing after all, mitochondria and all, and exercise improves its ability to function. Plus you'll feel way better, and probably live better for longer.

New comment by lhh in "Study Suggests Fructose Could Drive Alzheimer's Disease"

lhh — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 21:55:12 +0000

23andme will tell you your APOE genotype, one of the variants of which is a major risk factor for Alzheimer's.

New comment by lhh in "Excel 2.0 – Is there a better visual data model than a grid of cells?"

lhh — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 18:01:54 +0000

I agree that spreadsheets are still extremely useful, and surprisingly difficult to improve upon. Maybe it's because spreadsheets combine a bunch of the primitives used to build many types of applications - tabular data, persistent data, operations on that data (CRUD, per the article), trivial to inspect the data, and can make various views on the data.

It seems to me that quite a few successful software companies boil down to a spreadsheet with enforced structure to the data and codified operations performed on the data specific to the problem domain. CRMs, accounting systems, project management systems, and ordering & inventory management systems are some examples.

Our product focused on financial projection & reporting (https://www.modeloptic.com/) is another example: Excel-like functionality at the core, and since we've constrained the domain and know how different pieces of data relate to each other, we can automate away a lot of the manual labor that'd be needed in completely free-form Excel.

New comment by lhh in "Tell HN: Salary data is for sale"

lhh — Fri, 07 Jan 2022 07:47:41 +0000

Hopefully TransUnion is more respectful of your rights.

New comment by lhh in "Edward Snowden Slams Sam Altman's Worldcoin: 'Don't Catalogue Eyeballs'"

lhh — Tue, 26 Oct 2021 19:41:30 +0000

I really don't understand all the outrage in most of the comments here. Seems to me like they're just trying to launch a new cryptocurrency, they're trying to find a reasonably equitable way to distribute the initial tokens to bootstrap it, and iris-scanning is the best non-centralized, technically and logistically feasible way to identify new unique human entrants that they came up with. The principle of it sounds great to me!

Does the specific mechanism they're attempting to employ raise some concerns? Sure. Instead of the vitriol though, how about some suggestions for a better mechanism?

Trying to tear people down who pretty clearly seem to be making a good faith attempt to make the world a better place is reprehensible in my opinion. What does that say about you?

New comment by lhh in "The Tyranny of Spreadsheets"

lhh — Fri, 23 Jul 2021 01:21:56 +0000

He mentions several times that accountants do their work in Excel, but any account would consider it barbaric to actually try to do transaction-level double-entry bookkeeping in Excel instead of a purpose-built system like QuickBooks/Xero/NetSuite/etc. I think I've also probably seen more broken financial models than logically sound ones in Excel, so the integrity of spreadsheets is oftentimes not even safe in the hands of finance professionals.

Data integrity is definitely a hard problem.

New comment by lhh in "In Defense of Finance"

lhh — Sun, 07 Feb 2021 19:43:02 +0000

These complaints don’t seem to align with reality from what I can tell. The TARP “bailout” was one of the biggest, which taxpayers profited on. The nationalization of Fannie and Freddie was hugely expensive, but I don’t see how that can be called a bailout, since equity holders were wiped out. As the article states, the vast majority of the benefits of such programs come from driving confidence in the functioning of the system so markets don’t freeze up.

Moral hazard is a real thing, but it seems like the government walked the line pretty well during the crisis. What bailouts enriched private citizens at the expense of the public?

Show HN: Modeloptic – Powerful and Intuitive Financial Reporting and Projections

lhh — Fri, 15 Jan 2021 19:21:15 +0000

Article URL: https://www.modeloptic.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25795041

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

SaaS Revenue Forecasting

lhh — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 23:48:14 +0000

Article URL: https://www.modeloptic.com/blog/saas-revenue-forecasting

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25144283

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

SaaS Revenue Forecasting

lhh — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 21:47:58 +0000

Article URL: https://www.modeloptic.com/blog/saas-revenue-forecasting

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25087894

Points: 3

# Comments: 0