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Dilpil

1,909 karma · joined October 9, 2008

Math/Computer science student at University of Pittsbugh. Soon to be working at one of those dastardly high frequency trading firms. Lover of all things mathy and puzzly.
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Dilpil··on Ask HN: Do Americans stand a chance on freelance sites?
The higher your bid the better. Your $100 an hour rate is your premium branding.
Dilpil··on Mozilla tells DHS: we won't help you censor the Internet
Wait a minute- DHS? As in, department of homeland security? Why are they involved in this even?
Dilpil··on MIT Creates The One Video Game You'll Be Thrilled To See Your Kid Get Hooked On
There are quite a few games I wouldn't mind seeing my kid get hooked on.

If raising a chess champion is a good thing, I can't imagine that raising a starcraft champion is a bad thing.

Dilpil··on A common bug in published code
Alot of people probably look for Random but find Math.random().
Dilpil··on Ask HN: What are the changes you made in your life and never look back?
salesman => college student => software engineer
Dilpil··on C++ repl (IGCC)
So given all the negative reviews of this so far- why isnt there a good C++ repl? Surely there is a huge demand.
Dilpil··on If high school was better, would we need college?
I might add: especially to entry level jobs. These jobs are hard to judge candidates for- you can't evaluate their past work, you have to evaluate their potential for future work.
Dilpil··on How to Pay No Taxes
This is what happens when your approach to system design revolves around whacking out the latest bugs with quick fixes rather than creating something logical and consistent. How many of these loopholes were created in order to stimulate a particular activity, or to close another specific loophole? At no point have lawmakers ever sat down to completely plan out the tax code, carefully considering the consequences of various interactions between laws, and this is the result.
Dilpil··on Friends don't let friends get into finance
If investment banking is so needless, why did the economy falter when lehmen brothers went bankrupt?

If high frequency trading is so needless, why does the entire market go into shock when the traders panicked and left on may 6th 2010?

Most importantly- if these products are useless and harmful, why do people keep buying them?

Dilpil··on Microsoft Shuts off HTTPS in Hotmail for Over a Dozen Countries
Id be very surprised if more than 100 of those employees were involved in this decision.
Dilpil··on India to block .XXX top-level domain
I would pitch it to the adult industry as follows: If someone is surfing from behind a content filter, they are either a child without a credit card, or in an area where sex is so taboo they will not possibly whip out their credit card for a porn site. Let us filter out these useless bandwidth leeches for you.
Dilpil··on Your Username Will Now Serve as Your Password and Your Password as Your Username
Aye, me as well. And later written my fair share of them when the going got rough.
Dilpil··on The Death of Adventure Games
Decent graphics are murder for adventure games. With some of the oldest adventure games, there were only a few places you could plausibly click on and see a result. Hunting for the interactable object in a 3D textured and shadered world is less intuitive.
Dilpil··on “A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points”
A better challenge would have been "a million dollars to the first person that points out a contradiction in my viewpoints".
Dilpil··on Super Mario Brothers GameBoy (and all GameBoy games) ported to HTML5
Horrid sound glitches on mozilla in windows 7 as well.
Dilpil··on Tell HN: Breakup Notifier is now Crush Notifier
Heres how people actually use this application.

You get crushed. Now you crush everyone you know of the opposite gender to figure out who it was. You then email the person who crushed you. But she only crushed you to figure out who crushed her...

Dilpil··on Apple’s Next Greedy Move: Exclusivity
The reason film and music operate like this is because consumers have loyalty to individual actors and musicians. It is also very hard to imitate having a specific actor in your movie. It isn't hard to imitate another developers application style, and I don't think consumers have too much loyalty towards their app developers. I don't see it happening.
Dilpil··on OKCupid: We Didn't Censor Our Match.com-Bashing Blog Post
OP is not owner of OKCupid, post is satire.
Dilpil··on The Worst Interview Question (and How to Answer It)
My favorite: "Whats yours?"
Dilpil··on $3 million machine learning prize
I'm not sure about that- unlike social network data, there isn't a publicly availible dataset containing the names of all the people in here which could be used to de-anonymize this data.
Dilpil··on Poll: What is your personal annual income?
Before taxes, no non monetary benefits.

Not a perfect measurement, but it is the standard.

Dilpil··on Poll: Where do you work?
High frequency trading
Dilpil··on Help wanted: Google hiring in 2011
Below industry average? Do elaborate.
Dilpil··on [dead]
I'm not actually so sure about that- being "good" with excel is partially about being able to break a big problem into a series of transformations of data. Excel is a kind of sneaky way to get business analysts to program.
Dilpil··on Open letter to BC Law School's dean to leave and get a refund
Of course maybe that realization was his ingenious motivation for writing the letter. Which means he did learn to make a convincing arguement, in which case he does not deserve his money back, and it was a dumb arguement to begin with. Which means...
Dilpil··on The New Speed of Money, Reshaping Markets
I recently got into it. Proficiency with C++ is highly valued. Knowledge of low level networking is valued as well.

Experience in telecoms, embedded systems, and video games industries is looked upon highly.

The following is a list of firms that engage in proprietary trading, a good deal of them hire software developers for automated trading systems: http://www.quantnet.com/quant-internships-graduate-recruitme...

Dilpil··on 4chan has been DDOSed
My guess would be that 4chan is somehow DDOSing itself, in pursuit of some subtle poetic irony outsiders like us simply could not understand.
Dilpil··on S.E.C. Scrutinizing Stock Trading in Facebook and Twitter
What does being a public company mean?

Part of it is having to spend a large chunk of your profit on audits, which supposedly certify that your company is healthy and non fraud committing.

This certification was granted to Enron, Lehman Brothers, and many other companies that absolutely did not deserve it.

The S.E.C. should take this as an opportunity to learn something about what investors really want. It isn't regulation. Its profit and growth.

Dilpil··on The Meritocracy Myth
As I see it, there are two components of a meritocracy: does merit imply success, and does success imply merit.

Many of these arguments are meant to prove that success does not imply merit. This may be true, there are plenty of rich people who did not work hard to earn their wealth.

These arguments should be removed.

We should be more worried about whether hard work implies success or not. After all, this is what will determine if people decide to work hard or not.

Dilpil··on How to hide thinking at work so that the non-programmers don't suspect slacking
Keep a pencil and paper on your desk, and use them to guide your thinking. This eliminates any ambiguity as to what you are doing, while at the same time actually helping your thought process along.
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