<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: thomaspaine</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=thomaspaine</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Mon, 02 Nov 2026 17:38:55 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=thomaspaine" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thomaspaine in "Jepsen: TigerBeetle 0.16.11"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I work on the ledgering system at clear street and as far as I know we have no plans to do this. We evaluated it internally a few years ago and found that the account and transaction model was too different from ours to migrate over.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 06 Jun 2025 15:56:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44202125</link><dc:creator>thomaspaine</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44202125</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44202125</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thomaspaine in "No amount of alcohol is good for the heart, says World Heart Federation"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>For everyone complaining about evidence citation, this is just a press release. The actual brief which includes 41 citations is here: <a href="https://world-heart-federation.org/wp-content/uploads/WHF-Policy-Brief-Alcohol.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://world-heart-federation.org/wp-content/uploads/WHF-Po...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 20 Jan 2022 15:59:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30010541</link><dc:creator>thomaspaine</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30010541</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30010541</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thomaspaine in "Andrew Ng: The suspension of H1B is bad for the US and bad for innovation"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>I have worked with Indian subcontractors that have waited 20 years!<p>And you think this suspension will help them?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 23 Jun 2020 16:46:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23616471</link><dc:creator>thomaspaine</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23616471</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23616471</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thomaspaine in "Andrew Ng: The suspension of H1B is bad for the US and bad for innovation"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>ITT: People criticizing the H1B program for reasons that have nothing to do with why it was suspended, or considering the fate of people/families who are already here on H1Bs.<p>This is a pretty obvious move by the administration to discourage immigration, in any form. Could the H1B system be more equitable to workers, more efficient, less confusing, etc? Absolutely. But suspending H1Bs and green card applications like this does the opposite of all of that and throws thousands of families into limbo.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 23 Jun 2020 16:39:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23616375</link><dc:creator>thomaspaine</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23616375</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23616375</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thomaspaine in "How to be successful (at your career, Twitter edition)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>Getting caught up in the parts of a job that don’t matter is a dangerous trap and for some reason one that a lot of people fall into.  Let other people play political games and avoid them as much as you can.<p>My experience at big companies is the inverse. The people who advance are the ones who spend 80% of their time focused on politics, while the heads down engineer will get a thank you and inflationary raise.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 07 Jan 2020 14:19:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21980081</link><dc:creator>thomaspaine</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21980081</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21980081</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thomaspaine in "Ten Rivers Contribute Most of the Plastic in the Oceans (2018)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You're not wrong, this headline is very poorly worded.<p>From the article:<p>>A recent study estimates that more than a quarter of all that waste could be pouring in from just 10 rivers, eight of them in Asia.<p>>The 10 rivers that carry 93 percent of that trash are the Yangtze, Yellow, Hai, Pearl, Amur, Mekong, Indus and Ganges Delta in Asia, and the Niger and Nile in Africa.<p>So to say "10 Rivers Contribute Most of the Plastic in the Oceans" is not really correct, they contribute something like 25%.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 14 May 2019 15:21:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19910390</link><dc:creator>thomaspaine</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19910390</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19910390</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thomaspaine in "The Effectiveness of Publicly Shaming Bad Security"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Law suits seem to be the standard tactic for dealing with other types of corporate negligence (for better or worse). Why aren't they employed more for these types of obvious security vulnerabilities if you can demonstrate harm?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 11 Sep 2018 14:05:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17959773</link><dc:creator>thomaspaine</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17959773</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17959773</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thomaspaine in "Wall Street’s Big Banks Are Waging a Technological Arms Race"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> The cause? A coder had mistakenly programmed a router to send placeholder bids as live orders. If not for the good graces of the options exchanges, the bank would have lost $500 million, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Cancellations and price adjustments reduced that to $38 million<p>It's interesting to read the full SEC report because it's a little more complicated than that: <a href="https://www.sec.gov/litigation/admin/2015/34-75331.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.sec.gov/litigation/admin/2015/34-75331.pdf</a><p>It basically outlines a cascade of failure in controls, bad configuration defaults, and poor SDLC. In particular:<p>>In addition, the firm’s operation and management of its electronic “circuit
breakers” did not effectively block the erroneous orders sent on August 20. These circuit
breakers existed to prevent erroneous orders by halting all message traffic to the exchanges once
that traffic had exceeded a certain rate. However, on August 20, the firm’s control personnel
repeatedly lifted the circuit breakers blocks between 8:44 a.m. and 9:32 a.m., thereby permitting
additional erroneous orders to be sent to the exchanges. Before lifting the circuit breaker blocks,
the control personnel did not obtain authorization from the responsible technology employees, as
required under written firm policies.<p>>The firm’s policies relating to the manual “lifting” of those circuit breakers were
not disseminated to or fully understood by the employees responsible for deciding when the circuit
breakers should be lifted, and, prior to August 20, 2013, GSCO personnel had lifted circuit breaker
blocks shortly after learning of the block and while still investigating the cause of the circuit
breaker trip.<p>From what I remember, this circuit breaker was notorious for raising so many false positives that control personnel just got used to lifting it without thinking.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 05 Apr 2018 22:09:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16769218</link><dc:creator>thomaspaine</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16769218</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16769218</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thomaspaine in "Ask HN: What information should be in any job description page?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Why can't you publish multiple salary ranges per job post (level 1: $X1 - $Y1, level 2: $X2 - $Y2, etc) or multiple job posts (one for each level)?<p>Neglecting to publish a salary range seems more like a negotiation tactic on behalf of companies of not wanting to be the first to name a number. Either that or you know your company can't compete on salary, which is my typical assumption when it's a company I've never heard of and I don't see a range provided.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 09 Mar 2018 23:30:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16556022</link><dc:creator>thomaspaine</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16556022</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16556022</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thomaspaine in "Show HN: Quantra.io, a quantitative finance API made with Quantlib"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>As someone who works in a bank, if I sent trading data off to an external service I'd be fired almost immediately. Even things like pretty printing services are monitored and blocked.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 25 Jul 2017 05:26:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14845301</link><dc:creator>thomaspaine</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14845301</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14845301</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thomaspaine in "Goldman Sachs Dumps Numerical-Ranking System for Employees"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>I distinctly remember that most of the mean scores were between 8 and 9. One was as high as 8.7.<p>I was told by several people that the ratings are normalized to adjust for this.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 27 May 2016 12:22:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11785501</link><dc:creator>thomaspaine</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11785501</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11785501</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thomaspaine in "Markov Chains Explained"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Markov chains have a lot of nice features you can derive from them, like convergence to a stationary distribution. It's hard to say that it's an inappropriate simplification if it happens to be pragmatic (like most simplifications).<p>For example PageRank can be modeled using markov chains. You can surely develop more complicated models but markov chains provide a good starting point.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 09 Jan 2015 23:01:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8865039</link><dc:creator>thomaspaine</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8865039</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8865039</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thomaspaine in "Rental America: Why the poor pay $4,150 for a $1,500 sofa"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>neither Wal-Mart nor Jack’s nor the nursing home cafeteria have shown interest in an applicant with psoriasis and a ninth-grade education.<p>People who only have ninth-grade educations aren't the greatest at basic math or delayed gratification.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 17 Oct 2014 17:37:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8472189</link><dc:creator>thomaspaine</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8472189</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8472189</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thomaspaine in "Ask HN: What is REST exactly?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>REST doesn't have to be JSON, it's agnostic with regard to the serialization format. JSON is just a popular format but I've seen XML and YAML REST apis.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 08 Feb 2014 19:26:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7202210</link><dc:creator>thomaspaine</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7202210</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7202210</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thomaspaine in "Protean Echo – Fuse All Your Cards into One"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I have the Costco Amex too, but how often are you going to Costco that you're carrying it around everyday?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 16 Nov 2013 06:50:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6743978</link><dc:creator>thomaspaine</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6743978</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6743978</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thomaspaine in "Protean Echo – Fuse All Your Cards into One"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Why do you need to carry around four debit cards and a backup credit card? I'm not saying this works for everyone but my wallet contains $20, a driver's license, and a credit card.<p>If I'm going to be somewhere where I might need a business CC or debit card then they're temporarily added. Otherwise I store all my CC info in 1password anyway which I can access on my phone.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 15 Nov 2013 05:21:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6737887</link><dc:creator>thomaspaine</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6737887</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6737887</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thomaspaine in "Is The Economist left- or right-wing?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>How so? "Classically liberal" is a way of differentiating oneself from the modern definition of liberal and is basically a friendly way of saying "libertarian" without invoking images of Glen Beck.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 30 Oct 2013 00:35:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6638619</link><dc:creator>thomaspaine</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6638619</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6638619</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thomaspaine in "Banksy Art Sale in Central Park [video]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's a cool experiment but not altogether surprising right? The provenance of a piece of artwork, and other rare goods, is arguably more important than the art itself. Especially in the case of artwork which is easily reproducible and copied.<p>If you think that's idiotic then ask yourself if you were given the opportunity to buy the first original Apple 1 or an exact replica, how much more would you be willing to pay over the replica? If the amount is greater than zero, then you're admitting that you're really buying an experience and set of emotional states in addition to a physical good.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 14 Oct 2013 01:31:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6544914</link><dc:creator>thomaspaine</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6544914</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6544914</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thomaspaine in "The Stanford Academic Who Wrote Google Its First Check (2012)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don't think he's implying social networking will go out of fashion, but that social networking companies themselves can be fashionable. For instance the progression of "cool" social networking sites seems to progress pretty rapidly e.g. myspace -> facebook -> twitter -> instagram -> snapchat.<p>To put it in Steve Blank terminology he likes to invest in companies that face invention rather than market risk.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 21 Sep 2013 18:41:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6423954</link><dc:creator>thomaspaine</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6423954</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6423954</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by thomaspaine in "Clang game project has run out of money"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You should finish the quote...<p>>Kickstarter is amazing, but one of the hidden catches is that once you have taken a bunch of people's money to do a thing, you have to actually do that thing, and not some other thing that you thought up in the meantime.<p>His point being that Kickstarter funding makes it hard to pivot, as opposed to other types of funding.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 20 Sep 2013 04:39:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6415957</link><dc:creator>thomaspaine</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6415957</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6415957</guid></item></channel></rss>