Hacker News: hendzen

New comment by hendzen in "Apex Protocol – An open MCP-based standard for AI agent trading"

hendzen — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 01:43:48 +0000

Neat idea but this is clearly vibecoded slop.

also, apex clearing is gonna send you an angry letter asking you to change the name pretty soon.

New comment by hendzen in "Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’"

hendzen — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 02:16:45 +0000

@pg on @sama: "you could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king."

In retrospect this quote comes across as way more foreboding given what we've learned about the scale of his ambitions and his willingness to lie and bend reality to gain power.

Dario on the other hand seems to have an integrity that's particularly rare in this era. I hope he remains strong in the face of the regime.

New comment by hendzen in "Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus"

hendzen — Thu, 02 May 2024 11:44:53 +0000

Jane Street made 4.4bn net income in Q1 2024 w/ 2600 employees.

Tether made 4.5bn net income in Q1 2024 w/ probably <50 employees.

New comment by hendzen in "Urgent: Sign the petition now"

hendzen — Sun, 12 Mar 2023 00:14:31 +0000

I would be happy to support a bailout of SVB in exchange for some reasonable concessions to American taxpayers.

1) Skin in the game - GPs of YC / a16z / Sequoia / Founders Fund / etc put in some equity in to a joint venture to acquire SVB's assets and make depositors whole. Government will backstop some portion of it.

2) YC / a16z / Sequoia / Founders Fund / etc agree to support ending the carried interest tax exemption

New comment by hendzen in "TabFS – a browser extension that mounts the browser tabs as a filesystem"

hendzen — Sat, 18 Feb 2023 16:43:15 +0000

This is really cool. Great work

New comment by hendzen in "The anatomy of an ML-powered stock picking engine"

hendzen — Wed, 28 Sep 2022 02:11:51 +0000

I know a bit about this industry and I have worked on some profitable systems. Honestly not a bad effort for someone working on their own with low-cost data. Don’t let the haters get you down. I would recommend you to pick up a more recent textbook on portfolio construction like Isichenko’s recent book.

New comment by hendzen in "VC Meltdown"

hendzen — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 02:57:29 +0000

Not quite. The market is pricing in a certain trajectory of rate hikes - basically another four 50bp increases with terminal rates around 2.5-3%. If inflation doesn’t start coming down that trajectory will change and the market will adjust accordingly.

New comment by hendzen in "Index funds officially overtake active managers"

hendzen — Sun, 22 May 2022 18:49:59 +0000

Exactly, the relative weights are often proportional to the market cap. So if I invest $1M in the S&P that doesn't actually change the relative weights of the stocks in the index (mostly), since the impact on all of the underlying stock market caps should be roughly even as more money flows in to the stocks with higher market cap and smaller sums flow in to the stocks with lower market cap.

So in the case that say Meta's metaverse initiatives suddenly start taking off with the general population, it will take active investors to invest more in FB to increase FB's marketcap relative to the other stocks in the index so that passive investors are "correctly" allocating to stocks in proportion to their earnings potential.

Obviously there are some caveats here. Passive investors still have to choose an index to invest in, and inflows in to one narrow index (i.e. QQQ) will affect the weights of particular stocks in broader indexes. But the point stands that the relative marketcap ranking between stocks in the index is not affected much by in/outflows in to a particular index, and in some sense indexes are outsourcing their stock picking to active investors that actually try to accurately value individual stocks on an absolute and relative basis.

New comment by hendzen in "Index funds officially overtake active managers"

hendzen — Sun, 22 May 2022 15:42:06 +0000

my personal theory is that active management can still produce market-beating returns but the good active managers will rapidly grow their capital base to huge levels where they don't need much outside investment.

On the other hand - now we have a situation where most investment savings by individual investors are tracking passive indexes. But if everyone is indexing - what determines the relative weight of each stock in the index?

The answer is active investors. But with an increasingly smaller field of increasingly skilled investors (with more discretionary capital), we end up with the valuations of companies (and thus how societal time is allocated) competitively determined by a fierce prediction competition between the top active managers (Renaissance, DE Shaw, Citadel, etc).

New comment by hendzen in "Afghan President Ghani relinquishes power, Taliban form interim gov't"

hendzen — Sun, 15 Aug 2021 18:34:52 +0000

Have they considered raising VC?

New comment by hendzen in "Y Combinator entrepreneurs say they were kicked out of the accelerator"

hendzen — Sat, 05 Jun 2021 13:44:51 +0000

YC is not some magic fantasy organization. Like any other org you should probably discuss things your upset about internally with relevant stakeholders before complaining on Twitter. That said telling other people how to circumvent vaccine queues is clearly unethical and someone high up should have loudly squashed that immediately.

New comment by hendzen in "Semantic Satiation"

hendzen — Fri, 23 Apr 2021 15:57:47 +0000

Somebody watched Ted Lasso recently

New comment by hendzen in "The Battle of GameStop"

hendzen — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 05:29:56 +0000

I'm happy that guy did well. But one guy taking a negative expected value bet and winning big doesn't really help all the other little guys on WSB who got roped in to buying GME at 100+ today or might even be ITM on their calls but will get crushed by insane spreads, theta decay due to halts and don't have the capital to exercise.

I'm not spiteful of KG and the other people who are making the real money off all the crowds at the option casino, if anything I respect their shrewdness - Citadel prints insane money on these option premiums, and as a bonus KG gets to invest in Melvin at firesale prices and probably gets to extract insane terms.

As far as 'jealous fucks working miserable engineering jobs' - I think you might be projecting a bit there :)

New comment by hendzen in "The Battle of GameStop"

hendzen — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 03:04:39 +0000

The only person really winning here is Ken Griffin.

New comment by hendzen in "Stan is a state-of-the-art platform for statistical modeling"

hendzen — Wed, 23 Dec 2020 15:31:12 +0000

Stan used to only be able to parallelize across chains but they introduced within-chain parallelism this year. Even then some of the work is still serial so I don’t think you can expect linear speedups past a certain point.

New comment by hendzen in "Stan is a state-of-the-art platform for statistical modeling"

hendzen — Wed, 23 Dec 2020 15:26:53 +0000

If you want to learn Stan I highly recommend the book Statistical Rethinking (2nd Ed) by Richard McElreath. It’s a pedagogical masterpiece and light years away the best resource I’ve found on learning Bayesian inference.

New comment by hendzen in "MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, says she gave $4.2B to charity"

hendzen — Wed, 16 Dec 2020 04:38:30 +0000

Her generosity notwithstanding, she probably hired a great PR agency.

New comment by hendzen in "Palantir S-1"

hendzen — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 23:42:30 +0000

Cloudera... you mean the same Cloudera that has basically traded below the IPO price for years?

New comment by hendzen in "The Case of the Top Secret iPod"

hendzen — Wed, 19 Aug 2020 17:23:17 +0000

Guessing some kind of device for stealthy Van Eck Phreaking.

New comment by hendzen in "How popular media portrays the employability of older software developers"

hendzen — Mon, 27 Jul 2020 16:50:21 +0000

In fairness the CME/conference circuit is basically a way for physicians to legally embezzle a free vacation. Many of those conferences are held at places like Jackson Hole, the Bahamas, etc, with relatively short amount of hours per day spent in talks and the rest skiing/relaxing/drinking etc on the hospital dime.