Hacker News: jjallen

New comment by jjallen in "Semaglutide linked to lower predicted dementia risk"

jjallen — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 13:19:42 +0000

It’s been no secret that being fat is terrible for us. It’s getting people to actually eat less is the hard part.

New comment by jjallen in "Launch HN: EdotEnv (YC S26) – Quant Trading RL Envs to Teach LLMs Research"

jjallen — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 15:59:38 +0000

Spent more time looking at this because I was still interested in the alpha it found and found this:

"cumulative_after_cost_return": -0.004003033519454746"

https://hub.harborframework.com/jobs/af0299f9-a3bb-44ea-8ced...

¯\(ツ)/¯

New comment by jjallen in "Launch HN: EdotEnv (YC S26) – Quant Trading RL Envs to Teach LLMs Research"

jjallen — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 15:54:25 +0000

The comment in the parent said "kind alphas the agent found". It linked to a job then a trial. All of the comments I read there except for one said things like "The final alpha check is still fitting; the prior lagged backtest’s exact zero metrics make clear that model was not acceptable economically". One said "successful backtest’s" but did not expound on what that means or anything. I was looking for the alpha it found and not the feature engineering.

My backgroud is in finance but do not look at things so quantitatively.

Here is another comment/output: "correlation −0.007 and directional accuracy 0.498". Wouldn't directional accuracy have to be greater than .50 to be profitable?

Forgive my ignorance I am interested in this though. I have asked Claude/ChatGPT to show me where the alpha is that the model found as well so I can learn.

New comment by jjallen in "Launch HN: EdotEnv (YC S26) – Quant Trading RL Envs to Teach LLMs Research"

jjallen — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:54:10 +0000

I looked through the transcript/output of the model/run linked but didn't find anything that showed much, if any, alpha. Maybe I missed it?

New comment by jjallen in "Hunter-gatherers introduced fish to a mountain lake 7000 years ago"

jjallen — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 16:20:20 +0000

So many lakes do not have rivers flowing in and out. A low spot in an area will become a lake.

Many do have rivers; many don't. Ponds even more so don't have attached rivers.

New comment by jjallen in "Hunter-gatherers introduced fish to a mountain lake 7000 years ago"

jjallen — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 15:02:42 +0000

This doesn't provide an answer for lakes.

But I always thought the explanation was eggs randomly getting stuck to bird feet. Or maybe a bird carries a fish with eggs up there and eats it or something. Inevitably it happens though...

New comment by jjallen in "Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship"

jjallen — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 16:54:13 +0000

No, it wasn't. I had it in there from the get go. I did not edit my comment for any reason, I don't think at least. Like I said in the original comment, you can be moderate/non-partisan and think this is a bad idea. You can think Trump's an idiot and still think birthright citizenship is a bad idea. That's all.

New comment by jjallen in "Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship"

jjallen — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 15:10:06 +0000

You can be pro/fine with legal immigration (and moderate/non-partisan) and still not think birthright citizenship is a good idea (like I do).

Also ~95% of countries don't have unconditional birthright citizenship. It creates perverse incentives.

Reminds me of legal abortion: practically everywhere in the world has it. If you are not in that vast majority you should be taking a very close look at yourself/things.

So yes, let's amend the constitution. It's been a while and we do it on average every ten years or so. I have personally not ever been involved in one.

New comment by jjallen in "Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down"

jjallen — Tue, 26 May 2026 20:36:21 +0000

It's done to increase EPS per share and return cash to ongoing shareholders in a more tax friendly way, yes.

New comment by jjallen in "GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay"

jjallen — Mon, 04 May 2026 12:46:51 +0000

I’m disappointed and surprised you left out half of the conditions that grant him this compensation. You only included the one that suggests that all he has to do is buy a bigger company with GME stock. It was literally the first paragraph of your link:

“ The award is divided into nine tranches that are eligible to vest only if the Company achieves both a “Market Capitalization Hurdle” and a corresponding “Cumulative Performance EBITDA Hurdle”.”

This changes basically everything. He can’t just buy any bigger company. The company has to earn way more cash flow, cumulatively, as well.

New comment by jjallen in "GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay"

jjallen — Mon, 04 May 2026 12:45:19 +0000

I’m disappointed and surprised you left out half of the conditions that grant him this compensation and only included one that suggests that all he has to do is buy a bigger company with GME stock:

This changes basically everything. He can’t just buy any bigger company. The company has to earn way more cash flow as well.

New comment by jjallen in "HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing"

jjallen — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 23:12:42 +0000

They refused to refund me $200 when I had both a claude code subscription and the other thing. I had been using credits or something. Essentially double paying. And they just refused.

New comment by jjallen in "Sauna effect on heart rate"

jjallen — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:11:04 +0000

My current guess is that you get much or most of the benefits, but not all (by both value and number). If you look at the actual changes in the body during both of these activities, most are the same as exercise, but not all.

For example: body temp increases, heart rate increases, and we sweat. But the muscles aren't "engaged", consuming stuff (glycogen, etc.) while doing sauna.

There could also be sauna benefits that exercise does not impart, or is less likely to do so: sweating greater than exercise could lead to excess excretion of plastics, carcinogens, etc.

Running in mild/cold temps we do little sweating (unless long duration exercise), whereas every darn sauna at sufficiently high temps we are going to be sweating.

New comment by jjallen in "Opus 4.7 to 4.6 Inflation is ~45%"

jjallen — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 17:31:39 +0000

Also AI could help you pick those skills up again faster, although you wouldn’t need to ever pick those skills up again unless AI ceased to exist.

What an interesting paradox-like situation.

New comment by jjallen in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

jjallen — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 01:05:00 +0000

Governmental filings are not PR and either are lawsuits. The lawsuit was won or at the very least validated by a judge.

New comment by jjallen in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

jjallen — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:53:58 +0000

No. I figured it was almost completely if not completely about OpenAI. These things tend to be quite lengthy and I do not have an hour to devote to reading things that don’t directly impact me or my family of profession these days.

New comment by jjallen in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

jjallen — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 21:50:15 +0000

Yes I am sure of the second part based on the government’s own publicly available tweets and lawsuits that have been filed.

New comment by jjallen in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

jjallen — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:48:14 +0000

I do wonder exactly what he was doing to be considered a snake. I know he was working on other things, but what else was going on?

New comment by jjallen in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

jjallen — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:46:55 +0000

I mean he quit what he considered to be a problematic company, founded another one, that one’s models refused to do things that the previous company would do, then his new company refused to do the US government’s evil bidding while the other company happily went along with it.

Not small differences to me.

New comment by jjallen in "Show HN: I made a YouTube search form with advanced filters"

jjallen — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 12:23:57 +0000

I’ve never been annoyed with YouTube search. Product is great as far as I’m concerned. Love YouTube all around.