I'm surprised by the explanation of the 8 in the "real de a a ocho" because "traders counted gold doubloons on their fingers, skipping their thumbs." (and the link to investopedia has a similar explanation).
But from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doubloon
> Spanish American gold coins were minted in one-half, one, two, four, and eight escudo denominations, with each escudo worth around two Spanish dollars or $2. The two-escudo (or $4 coin) was the "doubloon" or "pistole", and the large eight-escudo (or $16) was a "quadruple pistole"
I think it makes more sense that some time ago it was possible to split some coins in half and quarters, so someone decide to continue the tradition and use base 2 to move up.
But then why didn't they cut it into 10 pieces - https://etc.usf.edu/clipart/40600/40610/pie_01-10a_40610.htm ?
Ever tried cutting a cake? It’s a lot easier to visually judge half of a circle segment. You’d need a compass to get accurate tenths (or fifths) and I imagine it is generally frowned upon if some tenths are a lot smaller than others (happens a lot with cake)
US treasury futures are still priced in 32nds of a dollar increments. Sorry, that's not true, they're quoted in 32nds, but sometimes priced in half-, quarter- or eighth-32nds. One might trade at 105-22.5, which means 105 and 45/64ths.
https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/interest-rates/basics-of-us...
I knew there will be something to hunt minor units.
Japanese yen do have minor units, and they are confusingly called sen (which is a homonym for one thousand)
Now a days they are mostly used for stock prices. But they exist!
Thing is - I'm not a English speaker. But I chat a lot with Claude/ChatGPT - i feel like I'm picking the style from them unintentionally.
Just imagine a prompt: "Hey Claude, go ahead and come up with idea why GnuCash stores numbers as fractions and come up with an article for HN". I actually tried it and god damn thing came up with something very similar :D
Also, did I mention how much it annoys me that the transaction description differs between the CSV and the PDF statement for pretty much all banks I use.
Me, I use plain-text accounting (hledger) that automatically imports the CSVs from my bank and categorizes transactions automatically, and I wrote some quick scripts using Python to import the PDFs from my brokerages and paystubs. It's not automated pulls but I only have a handful of accounts so it's really not a pain to manually pull statements once a month and run the import scripts. It takes me longer to reconcile everything to the penny then it does to do the imports, and it's a whale of a lot faster than manually entering through GNUCash. Plus, it's plain text so all you need is vim, git, and the command line.
The missing piece for me was a mobile app. So trying closing this gap with HandsOnMoney.
But I'll be honest - I'm putting off the statement import as much as I can until my financial anxiety kicks in.
But I used to actually pull the CSV once a week and feed it to GnuCash. It's pretty good at auto-categorization.
Also I simplified my finances to only a couple of checking accounts and only one credit account (for car rentals).
There needs to be a lot of investment in training and safe defaults though. Most people are not ready to automate even a little of their banking like that.
I would even prefer banks had the option to push data to trusted feeds than having open APIs you could call on your own.
I definitely do not support an API for doing financial transactions. That will result in so much hacking and theft.
- people do not trust Plaid and Finicity - data is captive inside of bank portals - each damn CSV has it's own format
But it still beats downloading multiple exports from the bank and importing it manually...
There's also a `Surprisingly written by a human :)` at the bottom.
Article ends with this
Keep up the good work!
Anyone reading this and who is complaining that it's too long and content-light? Respectfully, you really need to check yourselves, you're probably the one with the "internet brain" dopamine or whatever problem. This is NOT an unreasonable amount/style of words for what is said.
Furthermore, it didn't feel LLM-generated to me. Quirky, yes; nothing wrong with that.