Hacker News: gphil

New comment by gphil in "Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'"

gphil — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 21:09:34 +0000

> I hope everyone here gets to have the experience of seeing HN discuss something that you're an expert in. It's eye-opening to see how confidently wrong most poasters are.

This is so true. And not confined to HN.

New comment by gphil in "We got hit by an alarmingly well-prepared phish spammer"

gphil — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 14:50:00 +0000

I also recently came across some of these fake company campaigns with attached employee profiles. It's very hard to distinguish them from legitimate companies.

It's especially hard now that many legitimate companies use a lot of generic sounding AI-generated content, which seems to be same approach the spam/phish/malware teams are using.

IMO we need some kind of zero-knowledge proof system that can be checked to verify if a message sender is a US citizen, employed by who they say they are employed by etc.

I don't see how we can trust anything in a post-generative AI world any other way.

New comment by gphil in "Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio"

gphil — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 15:37:13 +0000

The problem is that Twilio is not profitable. They wouldn't need to show a hockey stick if they were. Investor-subsidized, non-profitable companies have to sell growth to their investors because they have no other fundamental to point to.

New comment by gphil in "Coinbase Sued by SEC for Breaking US Securities Rules"

gphil — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 14:20:16 +0000

Or: incumbent banks worried about disruption have the stronger lobby/influence.

New comment by gphil in "Nubank acquires Cognitect"

gphil — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 13:22:45 +0000

I think the answer to both of your questions is yes. I think the related concepts of immutability and pure functions without mutable state allow for cleaner analytical modeling (and in some cases in strong functional languages, mathematical proof) of what that the code is actually going to do in production. That kind of predictability is essential for dealing with financial computations.

New comment by gphil in "Piketty’s rising share of capital income and the US housing market"

gphil — Fri, 14 Oct 2016 11:39:44 +0000

It depends on what you are looking at, but generally index returns (such as the FTSE 100) are calculated as if you are rebalancing your portfolio periodically to reflect the changing composition of the index over time, which is what a passive index fund manager would do for you if you were to invest in a FTSE 100 index fund, for example.

I am not aware of any non-index based stock market performance measures like what you are suggesting--e.g. if I bought all the stocks in the FTSE 100 index in 1994 and never rebalanced, what would have happened? I suspect that the returns would indeed have been a lot worse but I can't say for sure.

New comment by gphil in "WeWork Is Cutting About 7% of Staff"

gphil — Sat, 04 Jun 2016 13:44:35 +0000

Do you live in or are you at least familiar with Philly? This comparison is cherry-picking a WeWork the nicest area in the city and juxtaposing it with an office space in/near one of the worst neighborhoods. Of course the prices are going to be like this.

New comment by gphil in "Introducing the 2nd Generation Boosted Board"

gphil — Thu, 19 May 2016 15:04:40 +0000

In a lot of places it's illegal to ride motor vehicles on the sidewalk. I think the sweet spots for this are trails and low-traffic streets.

New comment by gphil in "Is Bitcoin Becoming More Stable Than Gold?"

gphil — Tue, 19 Apr 2016 16:50:00 +0000

Interestingly, the all-time Bitcoin price graph looks a lot like the Gartner Hype Cycle:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle

Whether or not this really is a "plateau of productivity" remains to be seen however.

New comment by gphil in "Show HN: Barnacl.es, a community news site for never-funded bootstrappers"

gphil — Mon, 18 Apr 2016 15:34:01 +0000

The problem with using "small business" as a blanket term is that they vary widely in stage and ambition. For example, it's a mouthful to distinguish between "brand new small business" and "established small business" as well as "small business that intends to stay small" and "small business that intends to pursue growth to become medium-sized or large-sized without taking dilutive investment."

New comment by gphil in "Jobs Involving Routine Tasks Aren't Growing"

gphil — Thu, 17 Mar 2016 15:59:07 +0000

OK, then I agree with you completely now that I understand. I concur we should incent small and family businesses.

New comment by gphil in "Jobs Involving Routine Tasks Aren't Growing"

gphil — Thu, 17 Mar 2016 14:40:09 +0000

I was with you until the last sentence:

> This means tax cuts but above all simplifications of the relevant law.

How do you pay for the poorest to have tolerable lives with tax cuts? Or are you talking about cutting out regressive taxes on the working poor?

New comment by gphil in "Joe Cool – Why isn’t Trader Joe’s on social media?"

gphil — Thu, 03 Mar 2016 16:20:18 +0000

From an American who's been to Trader Joe's a lot and a Marks and Spencer grocery exactly once, I think they are pretty comparable except that the food items are more aligned with their respective nation's typical dietary preferences.

New comment by gphil in "LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner Gives $14M in Stock to Employees"

gphil — Thu, 03 Mar 2016 02:56:28 +0000

If you factor in the people-hours behind the AWS services Netflix uses, I'm sure their number looks a lot different.

New comment by gphil in "90% of the billion dollar unicorn startups are in trouble"

gphil — Thu, 21 Jan 2016 16:56:49 +0000

Yeah, I wouldn't rule out the possibility of structural problems--we've never seen this phenomenon before so it's hard to say how it will turn out.

I was just trying to point out that it's not impossible for the current crop of unicorns to produce big enough winners to outweigh the failure of the rest.

I'm definitely skeptical that this will happen though, because the winners would have to be really big (hundreds of billions in actual market cap in the public markets) in order to make up for the really big failures.

New comment by gphil in "90% of the billion dollar unicorn startups are in trouble"

gphil — Thu, 21 Jan 2016 16:00:19 +0000

> There are about 144 unicorns right now. If only 10% break out, that's only 14 companies that will really make it.

Doesn't this ratio seem about right for any basket of unprofitable (or even zero-revenue) high-growth companies regardless of valuation? If those 14 winner companies average greater than a 10x return then everything pans out as expected--lots of risky investments together produce a reliable if more modest return on investment.

It seems like the only abnormal aspect is the size of the valuations, but that might be just what happens in a low interest rate environment--too much money chasing too few deals. Whether this affects this success rate of these investments remains to be seen I guess.

New comment by gphil in "The Rise of Airbnb's Full-Time Landlords"

gphil — Tue, 10 Nov 2015 15:35:58 +0000

It's troubling that this is where the entrepreneurial ethos is heading. But it's hardly surprising with the leaders of the "sharing economy" almost ubiquitously operating illegally, enticing their customers and contractors to be complicit in illegal behavior, and flouting existing regulations. To make matters worse, governments are even letting them get away with it in many cases.

New comment by gphil in "Top 1% now owns more of the wealth than the remaining 99%"

gphil — Mon, 02 Nov 2015 17:06:48 +0000

I think they mean they are subtracting debt, though I agree that isn't clear.

New comment by gphil in "S3 and High Availability"

gphil — Wed, 12 Aug 2015 15:40:33 +0000

I think this would be a pretty good approach, especially when combined with the author's strategy.

New comment by gphil in "Guido on Python"

gphil — Fri, 31 Jul 2015 12:34:13 +0000

> without the ability to allow it to be fast

Practically speaking, Python is still slower than a lot of languages that use predominantly immutable data structures. I think you'd want to go to a systems programming language for raw speed anyway.