Hacker News: vain

New comment by vain in "Girl, 10, finds rare Mexican axolotl under Welsh bridge"

vain — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 03:15:14 +0000

Nobody says it your way - https://youglish.com/pronounce/axolotl/english

New comment by vain in "UK Biobank health data keeps ending up on GitHub"

vain — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 02:31:16 +0000

Huh? I got my report over email. I think you have to ask for it.

New comment by vain in "Show HN: Trade simulation engine with realistic bid/ask fills"

vain — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 23:24:10 +0000

Forgot to mention - feel free to use fake emails to register. There's no verification.

Show HN: Trade simulation engine with realistic bid/ask fills

vain — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 23:21:46 +0000

I've been tinkering as a solo quant dev and built a trade simulation engine that uses real bid/ask data with 5-second candles to model executions more realistically than most backtesting frameworks I've tried.

After experimenting with the most popular backtesting libraries, I wanted something that handled 5-second (the lowest interval data I have access to) and bid/ask fill behavior better. So I ended up building my own prediction and simulation stack - Python, Pandas, SQLite, DuckDB, Torch, etc.

The simulated fills line up closely with empirical results from actual trades (the sim is deliberately a bit pessimistic), so I'm feeling confident in its accuracy so far. The live trader itself is another python codebase :)

I've just wrapped it in a small web frontend. It's running on my home machine, so performance might be rough. I'd love to hear what you think!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45599535

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by vain in "Foreign visits into the U.S. fell off a cliff in March"

vain — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 13:30:06 +0000

This at least reflects my feelings about visiting anytime soon.

I mean if I was just put on a flight back (for a tweet they found on my phone or such), that'd be kind of bearable. At least one visitor from the UK got locked up in a facility for a week.

New comment by vain in "The Kimchi Masters of South Korea"

vain — Sat, 20 Jul 2024 21:14:15 +0000

I really don't see the correlation with food shortages. Cabbage isn't nutritious at all. You'd need to eat 8 to 10 heads of cabbage to get 2000 Calories

New comment by vain in "The physics of airplane flight"

vain — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 18:48:11 +0000

I remember being taught that Bernoulli's principle causes lift. I was skeptical—how does the air on top know to reach the other end at the same time as the air at the bottom? I think I did ask, and I was just told this is how it works, and that's the correct answer for the exam. This was before the internet, and I couldn't just look up the correct explanation.

I parked it in my brain as something I didn't really understand and forgot about it. This was until not so many years ago when I found a satisfactory answer on YouTube. It was criminal to have been raised in an era without the internet.

New comment by vain in "U.K. rejoins Horizon Europe research funding scheme"

vain — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 14:14:41 +0000

Probably because the then PM decided to not follow the recommendations of the Russia report and order an investigation. Would have been good to know either way.

New comment by vain in "U.K. rejoins Horizon Europe research funding scheme"

vain — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 14:07:34 +0000

Nope. The 350 million was supposed to be from money saved from not being in the EU.

New comment by vain in "Why UK supermarkets are rationing fruit and vegetables"

vain — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 16:19:05 +0000

If any UK politician openly admits that Brexit has had any adverse effect on anything at all, it is effectively game over for them.

New comment by vain in "BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout"

vain — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 18:16:35 +0000

Modi apologists seem to make similar attacks on the media and the west. They claim that the media is biased and out to get him, any criticism of him is anti-national and so on.

You're claiming that the Uighur women that got forcibly sterilized are terrorists? Modi similarly uses the terrorism bogeyman to suppress criticism. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/10/how-terrorism-...)

And why isn't it easy for western journalists to report from Xinjiang, if it is as you describe it, a benign situation?

New comment by vain in "BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout"

vain — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 17:28:47 +0000

@FooBarWidget, I take it you're not uighur?

New comment by vain in "Internet Archive takes down upload of BBC’s Modi documentary"

vain — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 17:21:06 +0000

magnet link

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:3C378A82CF67A1107523CA6C647077403A1EF74D&dn=India+The+Modi+Question+S01E01+1080p+HDTV+H264-DARKFLiX&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.opentrackr.org%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.leechers-paradise.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.dler.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopentracker.i2p.rocks%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2F47.ip-51-68-199.eu%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.internetwarriors.net%3A1337%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2F9.rarbg.to%3A2920%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.pirateparty.gr%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.cyberia.is%3A6969%2Fannounce

New comment by vain in "Jack Ma flees to Tokyo"

vain — Sat, 17 Dec 2022 07:50:03 +0000

https://archive.ph/rxodt

New comment by vain in "How to Find Hidden Cameras in Your Airbnb"

vain — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:47:12 +0000

It isn't true that airbnb rooms cost less than a hotel, at least in Central London. The reason they can appear cheaper is that you can cram 8 people into a small flat or even a room.

I was renting a room in a flat in Soho. The other floors slowly got converted to amateur hotels for airbnb/booking. Many a night, I'd see families stuck downstairs with luggage. They would then phone a capricious property manager who would tell them to walk about two miles to the key safe. Many a time, they didn't have a phone that worked in London, and I would lend them my phone. One angry customer checked in to the 5* boutique hotel next door after waiting for an hour. The hotel was about the same price. I wonder if he got his money back. I doubt it.

I don't book airbnbs. Hospitality is not for greedy unregulated amateurs. Of course, there might be some great hosts, but I like consistency.

New comment by vain in "Musk: Hyperloop Tunnel Is Now a Normal Tunnel – ‘This Is Simple and Just Works’"

vain — Sat, 25 May 2019 23:42:23 +0000

Thunderf00t had me convinced years ago.

Cheap tunnel debunked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ezF7NmwQZs

Hyperloop debunked: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNFesa01llk

New comment by vain in "The MAD Computer Program"

vain — Tue, 11 Dec 2018 12:17:06 +0000

I spent an entire night typing this into my Commodore 64. And it didn't work. I also messed up the save to tape, and never had the patience to type it all over again.

Real world software programming was hard, and it still is. It remains just as frustrating when it doesn't work.

Ask HN: iPhone Helium Freeze – security backdoor?

vain — Wed, 21 Nov 2018 00:31:46 +0000

Helium freezes iPhones as discussed here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18340693

I know Apple is big on security, but could this possibly be a vulnerability? Could an iPhone be frozen with helium, and then disassembled to read off the SSD?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18499190

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by vain in "Clan Wars Blamed for Ancient Collapse of the Male Chromosome"

vain — Wed, 13 Jun 2018 12:44:41 +0000

Redirects to https://www.history.co.uk/ for me. Stupid.

Google's cache works.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ehTZ26r...

New comment by vain in "Chinese police use facial recognition tech to arrest suspect at a pop concert"

vain — Fri, 13 Apr 2018 12:25:49 +0000

Perhaps the time is right to start a business that sells facial plastic surgery on a subscription model.