Hacker News: lesam

New comment by lesam in "Gloomberb"

lesam — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 15:13:24 +0000

It's really useful to have a chat app that is gatekept behind a 20k/year+ subscription. It's a particularly useful signal if someone is offering you a million+ dollar asset for sale.

New comment by lesam in "Ask HN: Are systems ready for the first negative leap second?"

lesam — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 17:39:31 +0000

Early in my career, I had to babysit our FX quoting app through the July 2015 leap second.

And some things do trade 24/7 (though I wish they wouldn't, one auction per minute during US east coast business hours would be totally sufficient for most US markets).

New comment by lesam in "Ask HN: Are systems ready for the first negative leap second?"

lesam — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 23:10:36 +0000

Until you work in financial markets and you want to measure latency vs a bunch of other servers you don't own, all of whom pick different smears (and some of whom aren't sure in advance which smears).

New comment by lesam in "The labor share of income in the US is at its lowest post-war level"

lesam — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 16:35:26 +0000

Assuming your labour contribution to these agents is 'minimal':

Why would you own them, instead of some well capitalized billionaire?

To the extent that you do have capital, why do you assume that your 'minimal direction and guidance' would outcompete a full time specialist working for that billionaire?

New comment by lesam in "Screen time can damage under-twos' development, landmark study suggests"

lesam — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 21:42:05 +0000

'can damage' means 'sometimes causal'.

If there's no causal link, they should say 'associated with' or 'correlated with'.

New comment by lesam in "An oral history of Bank Python (2021)"

lesam — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 11:04:00 +0000

Poetic that the most recent update is 6 months ago, a one line change adding a 'Lifecycle: Active' emoji to the Readme.

New comment by lesam in "Granularity comes at a cost"

lesam — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 19:44:32 +0000

I'm pretty skeptical of the market argument - reading the linked article, it seems low granularity subsidizes market makers when there are many small orders (which often get worse prices than they would otherwise) and this subsidy allows market makers to be deeper, which subsidizes large orders. Which is a difference, but not an unalloyed good.

Surely price competition is more economically valuable than the queue position game, which is measured in economically meaningless nanoseconds.

New comment by lesam in "Smudging the game disc to make speedrunning 'SpongeBob' faster"

lesam — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:30:18 +0000

'tech' in speed running is a reference to "technique" rather than "technology". https://glossary.infil.net/?t=Tech

New comment by lesam in "The Last Technical Interview"

lesam — Sat, 30 May 2026 14:42:37 +0000

Why would you design a hiring process that scores unprofessional people (by your own definition) higher than professional ones?

New comment by lesam in "The Last Technical Interview"

lesam — Sat, 30 May 2026 14:32:40 +0000

If you run an interview process where candidates who take 6-8 hours and claim to have taken 4 hours score highest, those are the candidates you will hire.

New comment by lesam in "Why airlines are always going bankrupt"

lesam — Wed, 06 May 2026 01:18:51 +0000

This is capitalism working as intended. Only the best run airlines can survive, and investors are collectively subsidizing air travel for non-investors.

New comment by lesam in "Vera: a programming language designed for machines to write"

lesam — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 01:26:27 +0000

I think AST aware code reading is criminally underused by agents - you don't need a header file if you can see a listing of all the functions in a library.

Similarly, I don't read the whole file a function is in while editing it in an IDE, why should a coding agent get the whole file polluting its context by default?

New comment by lesam in "Sloppy Copies"

lesam — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 20:36:47 +0000

Except this isn't 'an app from a spec', it's the potemkin village of an app whose goal is to get ad impressions and a credit card number.

New comment by lesam in "Thoughts on slowing the fuck down"

lesam — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 17:30:48 +0000

When your bridge falls down, you don't call an incident and ask your engineer to fix it, you sue them.

In software there's a lot more emphasis on post-hoc fixes rather than up front validation, in my experience.

New comment by lesam in "iPhone 17 Pro Demonstrated Running a 400B LLM"

lesam — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 17:08:15 +0000

I think Adams was prescient, since in his story the all powerful computer reaches the answer '42' via incorrect arithmetic.

New comment by lesam in "ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did"

lesam — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 10:08:33 +0000

This is interesting, but doesn't have to be correct.

If Blockbuster had kept pouring money into the new service, maybe it would have lost it all - I see no reason to think Blockbuster's movie rental franchise business would have 'transferrable skills' to allow it to succeed at streaming.

If it had been trying to pivot into a pizza delivery business (perhaps more transferable, in terms of locating franchises etc) would Icahn still have been 'killing' it?

My point is, maybe it was already dead and Icahn just prevented it from wasting a lot of money on the way down the drain.

New comment by lesam in "The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying"

lesam — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 12:50:34 +0000

If it's lasted 10 years and someone is still using it after all that time, that seems like a pretty good signal there's a lot of value in the 'garbage'?

I've seen a lot of 'fixes' for 10 year old 'garbage' that turned out to be regressions for important use cases that the author of the 'fix' wasn't aware of.

New comment by lesam in "Can you reverse engineer our neural network?"

lesam — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 13:33:19 +0000

If markets were regulated to trade in coordinated 1s auctions, instead of nanosecond precision first-come-first-served matching of orders, markets would function just as well without needing a ton of what the HFT crowd does. It's a massive waste of brilliant minds.

New comment by lesam in "AIs can generate near-verbatim copies of novels from training data"

lesam — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 17:04:34 +0000

That seems like a legal question - if the model weights contain an encoded copy of the copyrighted material, is that a 'copy' for the purpose of copyright law?

New comment by lesam in "Dead Internet Theory"

lesam — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 11:12:00 +0000

Before photography, we knew something was truthful because someone trustworthy vouched for it.

Now that photos and videos can be faked, we'll have to go back to the older system.