<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: FreakLegion</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=FreakLegion</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 17 Apr 2026 09:49:59 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=FreakLegion" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by FreakLegion in "If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Steve Blank the startup whisperer and Steven Blank the economist are two very different people.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 14 Apr 2026 03:20:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47760854</link><dc:creator>FreakLegion</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47760854</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47760854</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by FreakLegion in "Delve removed from Y Combinator"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Because Delve defrauded them.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 04 Apr 2026 09:25:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47637404</link><dc:creator>FreakLegion</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47637404</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47637404</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by FreakLegion in "Show HN: We're building an AI hedge fund"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>SPY is up at least as much as your Claude bot since the Nov 25 2024 start date, but you show it down 3%. If AI is both doing the trading and reporting the results, you...may have a problem.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 04 Apr 2026 08:36:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47637146</link><dc:creator>FreakLegion</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47637146</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47637146</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by FreakLegion in "Delve removed from Y Combinator"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Investors aren't on the hook for the bad behavior of companies they invest in. Quite the opposite: Defrauding investors (and acquirers, and creditors) is commonly the thing that lands people like Elizabeth Holmes in prison.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 04 Apr 2026 08:15:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47637021</link><dc:creator>FreakLegion</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47637021</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47637021</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by FreakLegion in "Astral to Join OpenAI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Reread the comment I replied to:<p><i>> I would stare longingly into the void, wondering if I can ever work another python project after having experienced uv, ruff, and ty.</i><p>You think you're disagreeing with me, but you're agreeing. To wit: The original post is silly, because ty is beta quality and Ruff isn't stable yet either. Your words.<p>These are just tools, Pylint included. Use them, don't use then, make them your whole personality to the point that you feel compelled to defend them when someone on the Internet points out their flaws. Whatever churns your butter.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 20 Mar 2026 05:53:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47450975</link><dc:creator>FreakLegion</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47450975</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47450975</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by FreakLegion in "Astral to Join OpenAI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Ruff is performant but finds about half the issues Pylint does (see <a href="https://github.com/astral-sh/ruff/issues/970" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/astral-sh/ruff/issues/970</a>). Ty is quantitatively the worst of the well-known type checkers (see <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47398023">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47398023</a>). Uv is Astral's only winner.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 19 Mar 2026 20:20:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47445364</link><dc:creator>FreakLegion</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47445364</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47445364</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by FreakLegion in "'It's sweet. It's bitter. It's ours.' The chocolate ritual that binds my family"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Probably the handful of dashes (not even em dashes!) and the sentences "It was never just about the candy. It was about being together." Superficially these look like the AI markers people are always calling out, but only superficially.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 18 Mar 2026 01:51:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47420735</link><dc:creator>FreakLegion</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47420735</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47420735</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by FreakLegion in "Google closes deal to acquire Wiz"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The board of a Fortune 1000 financial services company just fired the CISO and Deputy CISO because they did too good a job cataloging all of the risk in their infrastructure. Now that it's documented and defensibly quantified, the company is somewhat obliged to do something about it, and the board was not thrilled.<p>It can be a rough gig.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 12 Mar 2026 19:43:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47356047</link><dc:creator>FreakLegion</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47356047</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47356047</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by FreakLegion in "Iran-backed hackers claim wiper attack on medtech firm Stryker"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This was more likely an Intune admin getting phished. Intune has a built-in wipe action: <a href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/intune/intune-service/remote-actions/device-wipe" rel="nofollow">https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/intune/intune-service/remo...</a>.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 12 Mar 2026 05:03:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346691</link><dc:creator>FreakLegion</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346691</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346691</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by FreakLegion in "Google closes deal to acquire Wiz"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is well known in cybersecurity circles. I mentioned here[1] a couple years back that I know CISOs who've had to clean up big messes because their predecessor was on the Cyberstarts payroll, but on the bright side I also know a couple of those predecessors who were fired for it.<p>Cyberstarts is the most blatant offender, but to be fair, VC has turned into the next rung on the career ladder for CIOs/CISOs, whose role is otherwise generally terminal (unlike e.g. COO or CMO). So a lot of deals get done now just on giving CISOs a path into VC. It's more subtle than Gili's way, and just as effective.<p>1. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40487846">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40487846</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 12 Mar 2026 01:23:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47345057</link><dc:creator>FreakLegion</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47345057</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47345057</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by FreakLegion in "Buckle Up for Bumpier Skies"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>People point to the basic structure of "It's not X, it's Y" as the hallmark of AI, but I find it's more the incongruity between X and Y, especially when figures of speech (invariably strained) are involved[1]. That first quote reads like a real interaction that's been tightened up for print, but the second, the 'farm equipment' <> 'life-support system', does smell like AI, even though the article implies it's from an in-person conversation.<p>1. These are all from a single 850-word op-ed I saw the other day: "Presidents do not usually lose power because of a single speech. They lose power when a speech reveals something structural." "But the most important part of the speech was not the applause lines. It was the compression." "Markets can rise. But voters do not live inside charts. They live inside grocery stores and mortgage payments." "The issue is not whether a statistic was stretched. The issue is that the presidency becomes reactive instead of agenda-setting." "That friction is not theoretical — it is baked into the constitutional design." "Trump’s address was not a pivot to persuasion — it was a doubling down on confrontation as strategy." "They are not just another campaign cycle. They are leverage."</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 03 Mar 2026 10:24:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47230512</link><dc:creator>FreakLegion</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47230512</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47230512</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by FreakLegion in "Bars close and hundreds lose jobs as US firm buys Brewdog in £33M deal"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Happens all the time and doesn't mean anyone got screwed. A couple years ago Lacework sold to Fortinet for around $200m. That sounds like a nice exit for everyone, right? But this was after they'd raised $1.8b at a valuation north of $8b, which, ouch. When founders and employees fail this completely, yeah, their equity is going to zero.<p>Of course there are other cases where people do get genuinely screwed. My point is only that the cash value of an exit, even when it's a big number like $350m, doesn't tell you much.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:52:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47226458</link><dc:creator>FreakLegion</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47226458</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47226458</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by FreakLegion in "Bars close and hundreds lose jobs as US firm buys Brewdog in £33M deal"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Without liquidation preferences BrewDog wouldn't have been able to get the investment. They may have been able to get a loan instead, but the interest would've driven them under that much faster and then the creditor, just like the preferred investor, would have priority over other shareholders.<p>Which isn't to say preference stacks (like debt stacks) can't get absurd when a failing company is doing anything it can to stay alive, but standard investor terms (1x liquidation preference) simply mean you're first in line to get your money back if the company is liquidated for less than the price you paid.<p>The self-dealing bit is generally already illegal and orthogonal to liquidation preferences.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 02 Mar 2026 20:36:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47223694</link><dc:creator>FreakLegion</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47223694</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47223694</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by FreakLegion in "Don't use passkeys for encrypting user data"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>They <i>are</i> an alternative to 2FA. Which means they aren't 2FA. If they were 2FA, they wouldn't be an alternative to 2FA. They'd just be 2FA.<p>Anyway, passkeys and FIDO broadly aren't the same thing. You can read the definition of passkeys at <a href="https://fidoalliance.org/passkeys/" rel="nofollow">https://fidoalliance.org/passkeys/</a> or look at any of the marketing, which invariably talks about how great it is that you don't have to futz with passwords anymore.<p>FIDO credentials in general can obviously also be used as second factors. This is baked into the name of the original standard: U2F, Universal 2nd Factor. The specific point of passkeys though is that they're <i>the</i> single factor.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 28 Feb 2026 23:07:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47201427</link><dc:creator>FreakLegion</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47201427</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47201427</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by FreakLegion in "Don't use passkeys for encrypting user data"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's not what two-factor means. Forget about passkeys -- if you use a password manager, and that password manager has a biometric lock, your accounts don't thereby have a biometric lock as a second factor. The transitive property doesn't apply here.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 28 Feb 2026 11:35:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47193930</link><dc:creator>FreakLegion</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47193930</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47193930</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by FreakLegion in "Don't use passkeys for encrypting user data"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Passkeys are meant to replace passwords. Not being second factors is the point.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 28 Feb 2026 08:44:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47192413</link><dc:creator>FreakLegion</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47192413</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47192413</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by FreakLegion in "Can you reverse engineer our neural network?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What you're describing isn't a pump and dump, but in any case what Jane Street did wasn't a pump and dump or what you're describing. It also had nothing to do with market making.<p>India's market trades options much, much more than the underlying stocks. This means that on one hand you can trade a lot of options without moving the market, and on the other you can move the market by trading comparatively few shares. Since options prices tend to be bounded by the price of the underlying, this is...a problem. For example you could buy shares to move the price up, sell calls, buy puts (aka a collar), then sell the shares to move the price back down so both calls and puts make money.<p>But it doesn't necessarily look like this is what Jane Street was doing. Instead they seem to have realized that stock and option prices already regularly diverged, and put the collars on to profit from corrections. In other words: arbitrage. Which, fair, can be functionally indistinguishable from market manipulation. But on paper it looks like they made prices better for everyday folks at the expense of the market makers and other institutions.<p>Matt Levine wrote a long Money Stuff column about this around the middle of last year.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 28 Feb 2026 03:33:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189935</link><dc:creator>FreakLegion</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189935</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189935</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by FreakLegion in "Flock cameras gifted by Horowitz Foundation, avoiding public oversight"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This particular gift is also problematic because Horowitz is an investor in Flock, and Horowitz's family foundation is spending money on Flock that will in turn increase its value, which benefits him as an investor. Of course lawyers will have looked at all this to make sure it doesn't run afoul of self-dealing rules, but that just means the rules verge on uselessly weak.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 23 Feb 2026 23:49:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47130770</link><dc:creator>FreakLegion</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47130770</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47130770</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by FreakLegion in "Two Bits Are Better Than One: making bloom filters 2x more accurate"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It works because the original filter has suboptimal settings. An optimal filter of that size and number of items would set 5 bits per item and have about a quarter of the false positive rate. The 2 bits per item in the blocked filter is still suboptimal, but it's also saving them from saturating a bunch of 32-bit blocks, at the cost of a much higher overall false positive rate.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 22 Feb 2026 08:21:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47109317</link><dc:creator>FreakLegion</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47109317</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47109317</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by FreakLegion in "Two Bits Are Better Than One: making bloom filters 2x more accurate"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That struck me as an odd choice, too. On average there's no difference in false positives, but the smaller the blocks, the more likely they'll be saturated. Since there are 6 leftover bits in the hash anyway, there's no cost to increase the two 5-bit values to 6 bits and the block size to 64. You'll have a lot fewer hot blocks that way.<p>With blocks this small there's also no reason not to optimize the number of hash functions (albeit this brings back the specter of saturation). There are no cache misses to worry about; all positions can be checked with a single mask.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 22 Feb 2026 08:00:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47109213</link><dc:creator>FreakLegion</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47109213</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47109213</guid></item></channel></rss>