Hacker News: farrellm23

New comment by farrellm23 in "Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes"

farrellm23 — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 03:07:38 +0000

You are comparing company valuations to annualized revenue (as approximated by some fraction of total knowledge worker compensation). Valuations are (roughly) based on the sum of all discounted future cash flows, not just the current year’s revenue.

New comment by farrellm23 in "Confidential submission of draft S-1 to the SEC"

farrellm23 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 22:47:46 +0000

This makes no sense: the whole point is to raise capital. The valuation is never just the current value of the assets; it’s based on the expected future cash flows. A good example is in biotech, some researcher developed a treatment and wants to develop a product. They have valuable IP but zero money. So they IPO to raise capital to bring the treatment to market. The investors expect that in the future, they will get dividends or a buyout.

New comment by farrellm23 in "APL Interpreter – An implementation of APL, written in Haskell (2024)"

farrellm23 — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 00:31:03 +0000

Usually you want `foldl'` (with ' at the end), the strict version of `foldl`. It prevents the creation of intermediate thunks, so effectively a tail recursive iteration over the list in constant space.

`foldr` I almost never use, but it would be for: the return value is a lazy list and I will only need to evaluate a prefix.

New comment by farrellm23 in "Show HN: I made a free tool that analyzes SEC filings and posts detailed reports"

farrellm23 — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 04:38:47 +0000

Adding to this, stock prices should be plotted on a log scale since it is log returns that are roughly normal, and then 0 really makes no sense.

New comment by farrellm23 in "A Magic Prioritization Trick"

farrellm23 — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 15:40:51 +0000

A couple more examples of urgent but not important:

- Buying a pumpkin for Halloween: the stores are going to sell out of pumpkins and Halloween is going to pass, so it is urgent to buy a pumpkin while there are still pumpkins.

- Commenting on a controversy on social media: very quickly, the attention will move on to the next thing and you will lose the opportunity to comment on this thing.

New comment by farrellm23 in "Ao is a tool for programmatic computer-aided design using Scheme"

farrellm23 — Fri, 19 Aug 2016 21:19:10 +0000

Shameless self promotion, but you might be interested in scad-clj [0]: a DSL to write OpenSCAD with Clojure. You can get a decent interactive environment combining an editor with an OpenSCAD window set to only show the render [1].

[0] https://github.com/farrellm/scad-clj

[1] https://adereth.github.io/blog/2014/04/09/3d-printing-with-c...