Hacker News: Allybag

New comment by Allybag in "Dropping eBPF CPU Cost by About 90% with Memoization (Not AI Gen)"

Allybag — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 03:35:35 +0000

Seems like the 90% faster case is opening the same exact file every single time, which seems like a not super standard use case that will benefit the most from this caching. On an example where you never open the same file twice this will presumably be slightly slower than before, as you’re doing the same thing but writing to a cache. So you can make the headline “Drop performance cost by 90%!” or “Modestly increase performance cost” and be correct but I don’t think either is really a reasonable description of the change.

New comment by Allybag in "The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models"

Allybag — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 22:39:18 +0000

The author is mentioned at the bottom of the article:

“This article was written by Thariq Shihipar, member of technical staff, Anthropic.”

New comment by Allybag in "S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic"

Allybag — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 07:56:19 +0000

Well, it might be a good decision but I think the possibility of Standard and Poor one day being worth trillions of dollars more than if they had included three companies a year or two earlier than when they inevitably join the index is absolutely zero.

New comment by Allybag in "When do we become adults, really?"

Allybag — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 09:29:52 +0000

What about playing chess on a computer?

New comment by Allybag in "AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder"

Allybag — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 14:34:13 +0000

Well how many side projects did you ship last year? I’ve written small programs in the last few months over a weekend that would have taken me a month to do a couple years ago, and they’re better. Not in terms of code quality, but in terms of features I wanted and knew how to implement but couldn’t be bothered, Opus can do in one minute and even if it’s not the optimal implementation it’s completely functional, fine, and costs me almost nothing.

New comment by Allybag in "The Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code (2018)"

Allybag — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:48:50 +0000

If you mean as a percentage of my investment, it’s about 1000%, but I can’t scale up further, so it doesn’t grow exponentially. If I increased my stake tenfold I wouldn’t be making more bets or more money. It’s like with market makers or Renaissance Technology, I’m limited by the market opportunity so the roi or sharpe ratio or whatever don’t really make sense.

New comment by Allybag in "The Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code (2018)"

Allybag — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 11:18:31 +0000

Yep, atm exclusively on Betfair but trying to expand.

New comment by Allybag in "The Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code (2018)"

Allybag — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 11:17:14 +0000

To give some details, the main betting exchange I use is Betfair, a UK betting company part of the same group that own Fanduel, and I place bets for or against outcomes in the last half an hour before the start. For example, you can back a team to win meaning you make a certain amount if the team wins, but you can also lay a team, meaning that if that team doesn’t win (another team wins or it’s a draw) you win that bet, with a payout of inverse the odds. There is no crypto involved, just GBP, and Betfair is a multibillion dollar company paying taxes and subject to the law and the UK regulating bodies. I have a model to predict short term movement in the odds, which is not amazing but enough better than random that it can overcome the fees and spread between the back and lay odds and be profitable.

Any further questions?

New comment by Allybag in "The Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code (2018)"

Allybag — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 13:39:44 +0000

It’s automated, I bet on a betting exchange which has an API, so the bets get placed without any input from me.

As it’s a betting exchange they don’t care if you win or lose as you aren’t winning money from them, but they start to take steeper cuts of your profits if you’re a regular winner above some threshold that a random punter is very unlikely to hit.

New comment by Allybag in "The Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code (2018)"

Allybag — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 09:02:49 +0000

I am a professional automated sports gambler, and I win basically every day, and the handful of losing days I have per quarter are significantly smaller than the average daily win.

If you place enough bets (I make about 15k bets each day that are matched) that have a positive expected value your chances of a losing day become pretty low.

For example, I had a losing day on Christmas Day, but was only able to place about 500 bets as it was such a big holiday that there were almost no events.

New comment by Allybag in "New iMac with M4"

Allybag — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 21:13:34 +0000

I think “regular users” are very unlikely to use any sort of external drive, other than maybe some sort of cloud service.

New comment by Allybag in "Writing a TrueType font renderer"

Allybag — Tue, 02 Jan 2024 06:23:47 +0000

Ah, indeed, sorry about that. I’d missed that part and just remembered him saying they were similar.

New comment by Allybag in "Writing a TrueType font renderer"

Allybag — Mon, 01 Jan 2024 23:44:04 +0000

That’s not really a fair nit at all, he just commented that the two formats were similar, one of them must necessarily have come before the other, but they both exist right now.

New comment by Allybag in "Is Bach the greatest achiever of all time?"

Allybag — Mon, 25 Dec 2023 00:30:26 +0000

You could respond a little less aggressively.

This guy isn’t writing a thesis, he’s posting an internet comment.