Hacker News: btheshoe

New comment by btheshoe in "What are the “trophy jobs” in tech?"

btheshoe — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 20:28:42 +0000

nah it's not top tier college, it's just being insanely smart in the mathy way.

New comment by btheshoe in "What are the “trophy jobs” in tech?"

btheshoe — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 18:10:26 +0000

Huh, in my circles the real trophy jobs are quant roles at top firms. And given the caliber of the people there - and the compensation - they're arguably not trophy roles. Tbh ppl going for the pm/vc path are seen mostly as tools.

New comment by btheshoe in "Stanford president resigns over manipulated research, will retract 3 papers"

btheshoe — Wed, 19 Jul 2023 18:52:48 +0000

do me a favor and look up all the papers in thinking fast and slow that failed to replicate

New comment by btheshoe in "Stanford president resigns over manipulated research, will retract 3 papers"

btheshoe — Wed, 19 Jul 2023 18:49:36 +0000

so based. But I do have to say that when the president of one of your top institutions resigns over misconduct, the level of misconduct is probably a fair amount over optimal. And speaking with my friends in, eg, alzheimer's research, the fraud and inability to trust the veracity of unreplicated results does really slow down work in the field.

New comment by btheshoe in "Stanford president resigns over manipulated research, will retract 3 papers"

btheshoe — Wed, 19 Jul 2023 18:40:55 +0000

> The peer review system is not designed to catch fraud, it's designed to catch scientific or experimental errors.

Yes.

> Giving up on science is such a vast overgeneralization. You could take your statement and replace "manipulated research", "scientific institutions" and "established scientific truth" with just about any negative article in any domain. You could just as easily make this statement about startups (Theranos, Juicero), or government, or religion, or suburbs, or cities...

Institutions go through similar cycles of breaking and systemic reform. Not surprised that you can see patterns in other domains.

New comment by btheshoe in "Stanford president resigns over manipulated research, will retract 3 papers"

btheshoe — Wed, 19 Jul 2023 18:13:28 +0000

On the whole, all these scandals in manipulated research have deeply shaken my trust in many of our scientific institutions. It's clear by now this isn't the case of a few bad apples - our scientific institutions are systemically broken in ways that promote spreading fraudulent results as established scientific truth.

New comment by btheshoe in "Statistical Arbitrage – An Easy Walkthrough"

btheshoe — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 06:41:37 +0000

ya so notice the pattern before anyone else and extract money by filling the inefficiency. this isn't a profound insight, the nature of alpha is that it's temporary and limited. doesn't mean it doesn't exist and you can't take advantage of it - as long as you're better than everyone else (faster, smarter, cheat-ier). tbh it's just like entrepreneurship - starting a business will attract competitors. but you can just outcompete them.

New comment by btheshoe in "Show HN: HN Resume to Jobs – AI Powered Job Matching Tailored to Your Resume"

btheshoe — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 08:55:53 +0000

? Personally I'm comfortable uploading my resume wherever - it's my resume, it exists to advertise my skills. I'd give it freely to anyone who asks, there's nothing on there I'd consider private almost by definition.

New comment by btheshoe in "Seattle Amazon workers plan walkout over return to office, layoffs"

btheshoe — Tue, 23 May 2023 04:20:38 +0000

the nba player's association has secured nba players a nice share of revenue. seems to me like engineers could do something similar.

New comment by btheshoe in "Arrest made in SF killing of Bob Lee – alleged killer also worked in tech"

btheshoe — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 15:59:43 +0000

I've never felt unsafe in an alleyway in sf. but probably the same as any other city - don't be a dumbass, avoid the alleyways in shady parts of the city, esp at night.

New comment by btheshoe in "Oxide pays all employees $191,227 (Bay Area startup)"

btheshoe — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 23:06:21 +0000

Very interesting approach to gaining a comparative advantage in the labor market: pay everyone less.

New comment by btheshoe in "The Missing Semester of Your CS Education"

btheshoe — Sat, 25 Feb 2023 11:27:56 +0000

I personally don't like the undertone of the class (tho very grateful that this material exists!!!) - this idea that universities are failing their students by not teaching them necessary material. I think a better phrasing is that students are failing themselves by not learning the material. I've personally never considered it the responsibility of my university to educate me - some of the classes are certainly useful for learning, but the ultimate onus falls on me to gain the skills that will lead me to success. I find it kind of distasteful how classes encourage a sort of passive victim mentality when it comes to learning - as if students need to be bribed with credits and cudgeled with a gpa to be forced to learn genuinely useful things.

New comment by btheshoe in "Against predictive optimization"

btheshoe — Fri, 24 Feb 2023 11:09:39 +0000

The issue I see is that humans seem to have many of the same problems as the ones they point out ml systems can have.

New comment by btheshoe in "Another Round of Layoffs at Meta"

btheshoe — Fri, 24 Feb 2023 07:02:38 +0000

generally, this is a reputation thing

New comment by btheshoe in "Physics and Mathematics Self-Study Project"

btheshoe — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 23:25:03 +0000

nah, i have plenty of similarly smart friends who are doing just fine. he'll fit right in in some college environments, and he can take the time he's not wasting doing class and pursue real things that matter, like research.

New comment by btheshoe in "This layoff does not exist"

btheshoe — Mon, 13 Feb 2023 05:51:01 +0000

re "calculator for text": gpt => wolfram alpha is scary good

New comment by btheshoe in "Visual design rules you can safely follow"

btheshoe — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 09:54:23 +0000

notice how hackernews uses an off white for its background? do you find it hard to read?

New comment by btheshoe in "Ask HN: How do you plan on making money with Open AI API?"

btheshoe — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 08:37:03 +0000

Openai is a bunch of scientists. And their product is not exactly unique - all the major cloud vendors will have a chatgpt available soon. So openai won't copy for the same reason AWS can't copy all of its customers - presumably the ppl building the product are better at building that product than, like, a room full of scientists.

New comment by btheshoe in "Databricks cofounders weren’t interested in starting a business (2021)"

btheshoe — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 23:11:24 +0000

What's ae level

New comment by btheshoe in "Programmer salaries in the age of LLMs"

btheshoe — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 05:05:23 +0000

doomer take but tbh i respect it. but the central thesis of the tech industry is that it allows for products to be created with very low marginal cost which facilitates the high returns and if that thesis turns out to no longer be true then i would say that the identity of the tech industry has irrevocably changed.