Hacker News: yellowstuff

New comment by yellowstuff in "I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk"

yellowstuff — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 01:24:47 +0000

You make a valid point. Dario suggests that DoD wants to have the capacity to do domestic surveillance and autonomous killing. Sean Parnell said the DoD doesn't want those capacities. These statements are in conflict. Them talking past each other is one possibility. Without much evidence except the track record of the Trump administration, I think it is much more likely that Sean Parnell is lying.

New comment by yellowstuff in "Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes""

yellowstuff — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 17:29:44 +0000

From Stephen Fry: "You know that scene in Animal House where there’s a fellow playing folk music on the guitar, and John Belushi picks up the guitar and destroys it. And the cinema loves it. Well, the British comedian would want to play the folk singer. We want to play the failure."

Homer and Peter Griffin are idiots but they smash the guitar. Charlie Brown gets his guitar smashed.

New comment by yellowstuff in "‘Bluey’s World’: How a Cute Aussie Puppy Became a Juggernaut"

yellowstuff — Sat, 22 Mar 2025 00:43:35 +0000

I believe that Happy Days started the trend in the 70s, with Mr. Cunningham being portrayed more realistically than earlier TV fathers. Allegedly (I can't find a source) an executive said "He doesn't look like a father. He looks like my father."

https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Bumbling_Dad

However, in the 80s there were still examples of mostly competent fathers, like The Cosby Show and Family Ties.

New comment by yellowstuff in "Firing programmers for AI is a mistake"

yellowstuff — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 20:28:01 +0000

I've worked in finance for 20 years and this is the complete opposite of my experience. Excel is ubiquitous and drives all sorts of business processes in various departments. I've seen people I would consider Excel gurus, in that they are able to use Excel much more productively than normal users, but I've almost never seen anyone use VBA.

New comment by yellowstuff in "Vanguard's Average Fee Is Now Just 0.07% After Biggest-Ever Cut"

yellowstuff — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 18:01:52 +0000

There's a lot of confused comments on this thread. "Front running" in the strictest sense means illegal trading that involves taking advantage of trades that you know will happen and you have a responsibility not to exploit. "Front running" is also used informally to mean legally trading prior to trades that you anticipate happening. Studying the rules of an index and buy a stock just before its added to the index and index funds are required to buy it is "front running" in the second sense.

New comment by yellowstuff in "Microsoft Is Dead (2007)"

yellowstuff — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 14:53:55 +0000

I'll admit that this is a charitable reading of the essay, but I think that MS was dead in 2007 and is still dead in 2025, in the sense that Graham was focused on. In the 90s startup founders were scared that if they started a software company MS would copy their idea and crush them. Bill Gates used to talk about how he wanted to "monopolize" software before the lawyers caught up with him. By 2007 MS was mostly irrelevant to startup founders, and with a few exceptions it's mostly irrelevant to them now. They're not in the business of crushing the life out of software startups anymore. Paul's a VC, and that's what he was focused on.

New comment by yellowstuff in "Next stop: Miami"

yellowstuff — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 17:25:17 +0000

It looks like they contracted to buy "up to" 20,000 Jaguars: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/27/waymo-sel...

Pretty effective press release! Nothing in it is untrue, but it's obviously misleading even to careful readers.

New comment by yellowstuff in "Ask HN: Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there?"

yellowstuff — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 17:59:26 +0000

I've done a fair amount of technical hiring at hedge funds, my experience doesn't support this comment. There is some amount of credentialism/elitism in hedge fund hiring, but I see that more on the fundamental investment side, and much less for technical roles. There are a lot more hedge funds than FAANG companies, and different funds can have very different cultures.

New comment by yellowstuff in "3rd Edition of Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ by Stroustrup"

yellowstuff — Sat, 20 Apr 2024 00:55:10 +0000

ii is also good.

New comment by yellowstuff in "Harvard concluded that a dishonesty expert committed misconduct"

yellowstuff — Fri, 15 Mar 2024 12:30:08 +0000

Probably the most important reason this story got big is because it involved Dan Ariely, a popular author and perhaps the most famous active researcher in the world.

New comment by yellowstuff in "A 'scam manual' written to help immigrants not become victims"

yellowstuff — Sat, 24 Feb 2024 02:07:48 +0000

Off topic, but as a finance nerd I want to point out that if you know you won't touch your money for 10 years and put it in a savings account paying 5% you are bearing "duration" risk. It's possible that interest rates will fall a lot and by failing to lock in a 4% return you end up with less money at the end of 10 years. (Just a technical note! You probably shouldn't buy 10 year treasuries!)

New comment by yellowstuff in "How not to bomb your offer negotiation (2016)"

yellowstuff — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 15:24:07 +0000

I believe that I read in Cracking the Coding Interview that big tech doesn't consider your current job as a comp, only pending offers. They won't increase an offer because you make more at your current job. I agree that candidates who are currently employed are generally seen in a much better light that candidates who are not currently employed.

New comment by yellowstuff in "Python 3.13 Gets a JIT"

yellowstuff — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 10:11:06 +0000

There have been several attempts. For example, Google tried to introduce a JIT in 2011 with a project named Unladen Swallow, but that ended up getting abandoned.

New comment by yellowstuff in "The Knight Capital Disaster"

yellowstuff — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 21:28:39 +0000

Great story. The part that sticks out to me is 72% (the discount that GS got due to busted trades) and 0% (the discount Knight got due to busted trades.) If you're going to eff up, first make sure you're a big player!

New comment by yellowstuff in "The Knight Capital Disaster"

yellowstuff — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 21:22:45 +0000

That's what always struck me about this story. I like to think that if I was in the room we would've turned the system off at 9:31 when we knew it was working abnormally but didn't know why. Instead they let it run for over an hour while they tried to QA it. I've heard that Knight had no kill switch to stop all systems from trading, which seems like by far the biggest mistake they made.

New comment by yellowstuff in "The Knight Capital Disaster"

yellowstuff — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 21:19:33 +0000

I believe that Mizuho had a similar check in place. This stock was an IPO so there was no last price to compare against.

New comment by yellowstuff in "Why does unsafe multithreaded std:unordered_map crash more than std:map?"

yellowstuff — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 04:30:37 +0000

Clearly the author should have stated a third time not to violate thread safety, to prevent the article from being misinterpreted.

New comment by yellowstuff in "Book Review: Going Infinite"

yellowstuff — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 20:53:20 +0000

Gotcha. I agree that the main premise of Flash Boys was wrong, HFT is unambiguously better for retail traders than the market makers that preceded it.

New comment by yellowstuff in "Book Review: Going Infinite"

yellowstuff — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 18:53:53 +0000

1) Kahneman had a chapter in his book about social priming, and endorsed the subfield, which was totally decimated by the reproduction crisis. But Kahneman himself didn't research social priming, and I don't think any of his research with Tversky has been challenged by the reproduction crisis. I think it's unfair to say he was "right in the middle" of it, unless I'm missing something.

2) What's wrong with Katsuyama? If you mean IEX was a dumb idea and HFT is good for markets overall then I agree with that. I think that just means Katsuyama is wrong and self-serving, not problematic.

New comment by yellowstuff in "Ask HN: PG's 'Do Things That Don't Scale' manual examples?"

yellowstuff — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 18:44:24 +0000

Dropbox didn’t have horizontal scaling and ran off one database for a long time.