Hacker News: dia80

New comment by dia80 in "13 Models and 4 Agents on SWE Tasks: Go, Java, Python, Rust, TS"

dia80 — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 16:43:52 +0000

Why test Fable high effort vs Sol medium? Especially when Sol comes out 4-5x cheaper in their tests at those effort levels.

New comment by dia80 in "OpenClaw’s memory is unreliable, and you don’t know when it will break"

dia80 — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 23:03:20 +0000

Tailscale on your PC and phone. Free (as in beer). I run vikunja.io in docker at home and simply web browse to it over the tailnet.

New comment by dia80 in "The Dollar Is Dead"

dia80 — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 20:23:14 +0000

If you are using the dollar right now, what pain are you taking? None. What's actually happened? US added some tariffs and became a bit more isolationist and the Fed has lost some independence. Might not bode well for the future but has very little impact on today.

New comment by dia80 in "The Dollar Is Dead"

dia80 — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 20:17:54 +0000

Even if the dollar was "dead" the time and effort required by the world economy to switch away from the dollar system would be enormous so not much is likely to happen quicker than a few decades.

New comment by dia80 in "High Interest Savings Leaderboard"

dia80 — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 14:57:12 +0000

This warrant's a little caution, there may well be some negative selection bias here. The banks most likely to go bust are the ones most desperate for cash so they offer the highest interest rates... If it's FDIC insured you are good up to $250k but I don't know exactly how much inconvenience is associated with your bank going bust and potentially collecting FDIC insurance.

New comment by dia80 in "Is it insider trading if I bought Boeing puts while inside the wrecked airplane?"

dia80 — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 20:43:01 +0000

UK rules differ from the US there is a 3-point test for insider trading:

1. The information has to be specific - Yes - you should sell Boeing

2. Would a reasonable investor take this information into account when making a decision to trade - Yes - this seems quite clear

3. The information must be non public - IIRC disclosure to a large group of people - in this case the perhaps 200ish people on the plane knowing it had a problem would probably count as the information being public and thus this test is not met and you are free to trade - I think the bar is around 30 people

I knew all those hours spent in compliance training would come in handy one day!

New comment by dia80 in "Most important papers for quantitative traders"

dia80 — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 23:42:43 +0000

Not really going to help you make money...

New comment by dia80 in "Most important papers for quantitative traders"

dia80 — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 23:42:03 +0000

Forecast! Time to reach for your linear regression, GBDT or NN.

New comment by dia80 in "Most important papers for quantitative traders"

dia80 — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 22:22:32 +0000

Quant trader here... I'm a big seller of this list. Making money tends to be a relatively empirical endeavor. It's all about having information about the future and using that in judiciously way and less so about any particular theory or model. I see someone else mentioning Grinold and Khan "Active Portfolio Management", I can't recommend it enough, it's basically a how to for making money quantitatively in a principled way, there are lots of "tips and tricks" that go on top of this and it really helps to have some good intuition for the space you are trying to operate in (by that I mean understanding the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of your risk matrix). T-costs are also extremely important and the main "enemy" it's trivial to make money if you don't have to pay to trade.

Steven Boyd at Stanford and his students / colleagues are probably the richest seam of up to date portfolio optimization wisdom. If you are using python you shoult probably be using CVXPY to build your portfolio. He has lots of good papers, e.g. see [2].

Of course you also need an "edge", that information about the future, and that's the jealously guarded part...

[1] https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Active_Portfolio_Mana...

[2] https://stanford.edu/~boyd/papers/pdf/cvx_portfolio.pdf

New comment by dia80 in "Original Prusa MK4"

dia80 — Wed, 29 Mar 2023 21:47:37 +0000

What's that little box for? A foot warmer?

New comment by dia80 in "Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter"

dia80 — Wed, 29 Mar 2023 21:14:08 +0000

Great video, thoughtful and persuasive. Highly recommended to broaden your perspective, it did for me.

New comment by dia80 in "The Tantrum Venture Capitalists Threw over Silicon Valley Bank"

dia80 — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 19:23:36 +0000

As I understand it SVB is insolvent primarily due to incompetence, the actual actions they have taken: take deposits and buying US treasury bonds are every day activities for a bank. There are no exotic derivatives or off balance sheet special purpose vehicles. It's hard to regulate that away.

New comment by dia80 in "United States tells citizens: Leave Russia immediately"

dia80 — Mon, 13 Feb 2023 13:26:52 +0000

Not so, Kherson was annexed and is now back in Ukrainian hands. You can conclude from this that RU accepts their annexations are BS.

New comment by dia80 in "The Chemistry of ‘Yes Minister’ (2017)"

dia80 — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 23:20:58 +0000

True Story: I visited No. 11 Downing Street as a school boy in 1998 when Gordon Brown, our local MP, was chancellor. He took us next door to no. 12 where Nick Brown was chief whip, he started pointing out things in his office and as he was doing so a side door opened and a man stepped in. He pointed at the man and said "And that's a civil servant". The man reversed course, closed the door, opened it again and stuck his head around and said "Yes, minister". My classmates didn't get the joke, I did but was too stunned to laugh as Nick Brown and Gordon Brown had fallen about laughing and I was just thinking "aren't you meant to be running the country and not making TV jokes?" To be fair it was pretty funny :)

New comment by dia80 in "An intutive counterexample to the axiom of choice"

dia80 — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 15:31:37 +0000

You are going to love this:

How real are real numbers?

https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0411418

New comment by dia80 in "High-documentation, low-meeting work culture"

dia80 — Tue, 22 Nov 2022 17:09:04 +0000

To me, some of the benefits of having the occasional meeting is to create a shared understanding of what's going on and also to enable a vigorous group discussion. I'm not sure I would know how to replicate that with writing alone.

New comment by dia80 in "Demystifying financial leverage"

dia80 — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 23:42:56 +0000

Patrick McKenzie makes the usual smart person mistake of trusting their intuition on finance because it has served them well in other domains.

In this case the pertinent question to ask oneself a priori is: "if, as I believe, tether breaks down what are the chances that people will be defaulting on Defi platforms thus turning my clever trade in a catastrophe where I lose my principal?"

This is what traders call "wrong way risk" - your trade becomes self-defeating. An example.od this from real life is JPY cross currency basis swaps. A cross currency basis swap consists of 2 back to back loans in different currencies. Japanese investors have excess JPY and seek to convert it to USD via this mechanism so they can buy higher yielding assets in USD. Cross currency basis swaps attract a premium, in this case as the flows are predominantly lending JPY, the lenders get a lower interest rate than the prevailing market rate. The problem arises if you are a US or European bank and wish to do this trade with a Japanese bank. If there is a JPY crisis the premium will become even more negative as Japanese entities scramble to get USD in to meet liabilities by lending JPY. As the foreign bank you will have a mark-to-market profit on the JPY you lent but your Japanese counterparty may well be unable to pay due to the unfolding crisis in Japan.

New comment by dia80 in "Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week"

dia80 — Tue, 23 Aug 2022 21:20:25 +0000

Yes, The ambulances are waiting outside the hospitals with the last patient so they can't go to get the next one. Source: Family members have recently waited some hours outside A&E in an ambulance.

New comment by dia80 in "Yes, the U.S. economy is likely in recession"

dia80 — Wed, 03 Aug 2022 14:32:22 +0000

Define recession?

New comment by dia80 in "Air-purifying headphones with active noise cancelling"

dia80 — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 15:59:49 +0000

A lot of negativity here but I guess the target market is locations where the air pollution is bad enough that the benefits of escaping it outweigh looking like an extra from a sci-fi B-movie. I remember hearing on the radio in London how air pollution was going to be very bad one day approaching 10 on some scale. A scientist was being interviewed and was asked "Where would the pollution in Beijing be on this scale?", he replied "About 300"