9 ms·
Poor Richard's Almanack
- mjd 2y agoWho is this "Franklin" guy he keeps talking about? Franklin Roosevelt?
- mdp2021 2y agoFirst line: > Benjamin Franklin wrote and published Poor Richard's Almanack annually from 1732 to 1758
- mjd 2y agoLike I'm going to believe some guy who doesn't even know how to spell "almanac"
- mdp2021 2y agoI suppose you understand that there is no objective rule to transliterate 'al-manakh' into IE dialects, so I must guess you are joking. Benjamin Franklin, you know: Founding Father [of the USA], signer of the Declaration of Independence and of the Constitution; first postmaster general of the USA; first US ambassador to France; secretary and president of the American Philosophical Society; inventor of the lightning rod and bifocal eyeglasses; founder of the Library Company and the University of Pennsylvania... Polymath, inspirational figure... And surely you know that jokes in these pages make sense only if they fulfill the purpose HN has.
- baruz 2y agoI believe user mjd is Mark J Dominus, ie, Perl-lover. Check the OP.
- mdp2021 2y agoThanks. So, if I may, jumping in like a Lord Flashheart. Well I could not predict it the same way I could not predict Stravinsky doing somersaults on stage.
- madcaptenor 2y agoI knew he was a Perl lover and I've been reading plover.com for at least fifteen years but I had not made that connection.
- tomcam 2y agoLove it! I am observing a moment of silence for your no-doubt plummeting karma scores
- fuzztester 2y agohn karma score be like no one care about em. dey no have value in de real world except for hipsters. eye em oh.
- tomcam 2y agoYou get da wrong spelling brah, it be hipstas
- fuzztester 2y agobe it, reeeely? nope, dope. * * #sorrycudnresistderhyme repeat afta me: we doan need no spellucation!
- tomcam 2y agowe doan need no thot control
- fuzztester 2y ago:) ah said ta repeat afta me, but ya went ahead, bro! ennyway, kudos, n sudos! ah B frum Unix land, you C ...
- fuzztester 2y agomark-jason, imo, you should have said, "some guy who don't' even know how to spell 'almanac' ". that would have made your trick more believable. still, nice try. :)
- chrisco255 2y agoBack in the day when we had paper currency (before Apple Pay), you would find this guy on the most expensive denomination: $100. $100 used to be a lot of money. Benji also printed his own benjis: https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/07/was-benjamin-franklin-the-first-to-incorporate-colored-fiber-into-currency/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/07/was-benjamin-frankli...
- bigstrat2003 2y ago$100 still is a lot of money. It's not as much as it used to be (thanks for nothing, inflation) to be sure. But I would be upset if I lost $100 in a way that I wouldn't be if I lost $1 or even $10.
- ashton314 2y agoThat’s when I made my first million dollars. Back then, that was a lot of money. — Daddy Warbucks, *Annie*
- NathanaelRea 2y agoThe first $100 US note was issued in 1862, adjusting for inflation about $3,000 in 2024.
- 082349872349872 2y agoWho is this "mjd" guy who keeps talking about himself in the third person? Mason-Jominus Dark?
- mjd 2y agoWe prefer DARK MOMINUS.
- 082349872349872 2y agoDon't try to frighten us with your sorcerer's ways, Lord Mominus. Your sad devotion to that ancient religion has not helped you conjure up the stolen data tapes... [but seriously: did you ever figure out whether it was more likely Loki had thought of the goat shtick beforehand or not?]
- knodi123 2y agoBenny Franklin, some ye olde guy who is only famous for his groundbreaking discovery that black clothes make you hotter than white clothes.
- jhbadger 2y agoAlso famous for getting electricity signs wrong, not understanding that electrons existed and had charges that were "negative" according to his definition.
- IncreasePosts 2y agoHe didn't get it wrong - it is entirely arbitrary. Though it might be fair to say that it would be more useful to beginners studying electromagnetism if he had reversed the signs.
- bigstrat2003 2y agoAlso famous for advising young men that if they're gonna have premarital sex, they should bang old women and not young women.
- jppope 2y agoThats just science. Older women are more experienced generally
- elzbardico 2y agoThe downvotes you seem to be getting only confirms that HN average commenter have a very poor sense of humour and take themselves too much seriously.
- krapp 2y agoHumor is for the dregs on Reddit. Hacker News is serious business.
- 2y ago
- silisili 2y agoI'm not sure I've seen someone troll their audience about their own article. Masterful.
- msla 2y agoAnyway, your post is serendipitous: Not very long ago (well, mid-May) I was looking for scans of Poor Richard's Almanack and I found the same things you did: The www.rarebookroom.org site, and its unfortunate UI. Thanks for putting the files up in a more convenient fashion.
- mjd 2y agoI'm glad I could help.
- jmclnx 2y agoNice read, I always wondered some items on the pages seemed "mixed up".
- tomcam 2y ago[flagged]
- HellsMaddy 2y agoI highly recommend The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. His writing style completely transported me to the time and place of early America. He led a truly interesting and inspiring life which I think HN readers would find fascinating. I think he embodied the entrepreneurial spirit.
- riemannzeta 2y agoAgreed. If you consider his habits of: 1) seeding his former apprentices with funding in exchange for a small amount of equity in their new printing ventures, 2) forming non-profit organizations to address public needs (such as subscription libraries, fire departments, and street sweepers) 3) forming groups of like minded tradespeople who were interested in improving themselves and their communities through ventures like 1) and 2) ...then one might even say that Benjamin Franklin was a kind of 18th century YCombinator
- akira2501 2y agoDrinking _after_ work instead of before it.
- paledot 2y ago> forming non-profit organizations to address public needs (such as subscription libraries, fire departments, and street sweepers) I'm curious to know when Y Combinator did this.
- waldrews 2y agohttps://www.ycombinator.com/nonprofits/ https://www.ycombinator.com/nonprofits/ - there hasn't been a 'unicorn scale' non-profit to come out of the program yet, but they're trying...
- mjd 2y agoPossibly relevant to your interests: https://blog.plover.com/2020/12/30/ https://blog.plover.com/2020/12/30/
- 2y ago
- itsthecourier 2y agoUSD 10.84 in 1735 woult be USD851.41 today it seems thats the amount of almanacks he gave his brother's widow, if I computed right https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1735?amount=10.84 https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1735?amount=10.84
- Bluecobra 2y agoI think the original link already includes the conversion w/ inflation. It says that the book retailed for fivepence in 1735 which is ₤10 8s. 4d in today's money. It would be interesting to see the math behind this though. When I tried myself I got £3.63 ($4.66 USD) but that is taking into the account the inflation of the UK pound, not the local Boston pound (https://crowd-media.loc.gov/cm-uploads/resources/colonial_currency.pdf https://crowd-media.loc.gov/cm-uploads/resources/colonial_cu...). Before decimalization, a pound was 240 pence, so fivepence should be 0.02p today (5/240). Here we can find that in 1735 one pound is £181.43 in today's money: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/in... That comes out to £1.81 per pence or £3.63 for 2p. I'm probably wrong but it was an interesting rabbit hole to go down.
- silisili 2y agoFor anyone as confused as I was until I looked it up, s is for shillings, d for pence.
- mjd 2y agoI had tried out that Bank of England page, while I was writing the article, but I decided not to mention it. It wasn't clear to me that £10 in London in 1735 would mean the same thing as £10 in Philadelphia, where hard money was probably much scarcer. So I left it out.
- ralferoo 2y agoIt should be approximately the same in theory - £1 was pegged to the price of silver, although of course there might be local differences in demand causing the price of silver to vary relative to the price of gold. In practice, I think the values should be approximately the same, as significant regional variations would be normalised to speculators moving them around from place to place to make a profit until the demand reached an equilibirium.
- simonw 2y agoSomething I find impressive about Benjamin Franklin is that he was born in 1706, meaning he was 70 years old when he signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776. And after that he went on to be Ambassador to France for 9 years! Traveling to Europe from the USA wasn't exactly an easy route back then.
- kragen 2y agoair baths do wonders for your health
- seanhunter 2y agoOne of my favourite Ben Franklin stories was they were approaching a crucial vote where he didn't have the support he needed. He figured out he needed the vote of a specific person who had always been his enemy.[1] What he did was write the guy a letter saying that he had always wanted to read a particular book that this dude had in his library and ask to borrow it. After borrowing the book he returned it with a courteous letter of thanks and not only did the person support his vote but became his lifelong friend. Ben Franklin explained to others that asking the guy for a favour made all the difference because there was no way his brain could rationalise him doing a favour for someone he didn't like and therefore they became friends. [1] https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/02/20/the-benjamin-franklin-effect-mcraney/ https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/02/20/the-benjamin-frank...
- mjd 2y agoFranklin also said that if you want someone to like you, then you should ask them to do you a small favor because then you'll be indebted to them, and that makes you less threatening. But if you do someone else a favor, they will tend to resent you because then they will be indebted to you. So only do favors for your friends. I love Franklin.
- irthomasthomas 2y agoThat calendar adjustment is interesting. The Julian calendar drifts from the true tropical calendar by 0.00781 days per year or about 1 day every 128 years. The adjustment was 11 days, meaning that 11*128=1408 years had elapsed since the Julian started in 45 BC. Making the year of the reform 1363 AD, not 1752. The council of Nicea is mentioned, but they only noted the calendar problem, they did not try to fix it. If that's the case then we are actually living in the 17th century, around 1677.