nv-vn

Then what are they doing at work all day??? If they spend 20% of their week slacking off then they would get paid more if they just worked the whole time and got more done

Tbf, this is page 13 of the list. If you go to the first page, Saudi Aramco made $230B with 73k employees according to their website. This is still ~3x as much profits/employee as VeriSign. FAANGs are pretty comparable as well. It's definitely a very profitable company _per employee_, but I fail to find a metric where Verisign can be described as the most profitable public company

>Today, Verisign is the single most profitable company in the stock market, a great example of an economic termite

This is just blatantly false. VeriSign is in fact the 1215th most profitable company in the stock market [1]. By operating margin, it's 155th [2]. I find it hard to give an article much credit when I can't even get past the introduction without having to comb through citationless false/misleading statements.

[1] https://companiesmarketcap.com/most-profitable-companies/pag...

[2] https://companiesmarketcap.com/top-companies-by-operating-ma...

Sounds like they're already using Rust where performance matters and are looking to switch

This is a terribly misinformed take. If you throw enough resources at Python then sure, you can probably get adequate throughput. The problem is that in finance a lot of problems require you to think about latency, which is a total non-starter for Python

Well they only publish trades ~30 days later. There's no real chance of front-running a politician and for all you know they could've closed their position before the 30 day period ended. Plus, if people follow them into the trade (i.e. people buy because Pelosi bought) that only moves the price in the politician's favor. It's not like politicians are running crazy strategies that you can figure out from their trades, so I can't really imagine it creating any incentive to hide trades

I think maybe the key idea I was missing here is that the type of a variable is not always the same as the type of the scope it was defined in? If I'm understanding correctly, there's an implicit rule that's missing:

    a : la   b : lb   a := b
   --------------------------
             a : lb

So for example if `b : lb`:

   a := b :>>
   doSomething()

need not have a type `>= lb`.

Does that sound vaguely correct?

Btw thanks for clarifying

I find the explanation for the sequencing rule rather unsatisfying. Why shouldn't the following be true?

         b : lb      d : ld
   -------------------------------
    a := b :>> c := d : max lb ld

Otherwise, it seems like you could leak info by just assigning two variables, where one is always public. E.g.

    x = user.firstName;
    y = random()

would be "safe."

(It's very likely that I'm missing something here)

I've interviewed with a reputable company (mentioned on HN frequently) that performs background checks before interviewing you on-site

Doesn't Tesla pay more than GM?

I think you may be comparing salary to total comp here, though I'll admit I haven't looked for the source for your $105k figure.

As an American o had the exact opposite impression -- every European company I've applied to has requested one. Interesting to see that it was just an outlier experience (and I suspect your experience was the same)

I suspect that removing that functionality would take more work than can be accomplished in 1 day, which is why they temporarily suspended it and why they're adding "limited buys" tomorrow

Either way, it would be illegal to say that they closed their position for the sake of influencing the market. The SEC really doesn't play around with that type of thing in such a high profile case

That connection is like 3 degrees of separation at best, though. Robinhood sells order flow to a number of market makers, one of which is Citadel Securities [1]. Citadel Securities is part of the Citadel group, which consists of a hedge fund (Citadel LLC) and a market making firm (Citadel Securities LLC) [2]. While both companies are owned by Ken Griffin and share many resources, they are split by a "Chinese Wall" [3] to prevent any conflict of interest between both sides of the firm. They also have different CEOs, management, employees, infrastructure, etc. as a result of this. Now, Citadel (the hedge fund) has invested $2 billion into Melvin Capital, which is one of the firms central to the whole issue [4]. Yet Melvin Capital has already closed its position in GME [5], which means that they no longer have a vested interest in the performance of GME.

There are several glaring problems with the theory that Citadel is pushing for Robinhood to ban buying GME for financial motives:

1. Robinhood has NO relationship with Citadel LLC

2. Everybody knows about the theoretical conflict of interest between Citadel/Citadel Securities so it is incredibly unlikely that Citadel Securities would risk doing anything to help Citadel in such a high profile scenario (i.e. the SEC/FINRA would be able to find out this kind of thing very quickly and very easily)

3. Citadel has no financial motive to stop trading of GME, because Melvin Capital has no financial motive to stop trading of GME

4. If it was as simple as trying to profit off of GME going down, why would they bother halting trades on other securities (AMC, BB, NOK, BBBY, etc.)?

This article does a really good job at explaining the situation (much better than I can do) [6]

[1] https://cdn.robinhood.com/assets/robinhood/legal/RHF%20SEC%2...

[2] https://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20170203/NEWS01/1702...

[3] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/chinesewall.asp

[4] https://www.wsj.com/articles/citadel-point72-to-invest-2-75-...

[5] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-gamestop-melvin-idUSKBN29...

[6] https://finance.yahoo.com/video/heres-why-robinhood-restrict...

After I stopped using non-stick, I realized it was kind of a cheat method for cooking. Non-stick is super forgiving because you can cook anything too hot/too cold with too much/too little oil and get approximately the same result. With stainless, cast iron, etc. it actually takes some thought to make sure you have adequate time to preheat and are actually using the right heat in the first place, but by the end of it you end up being a lot more precise in the kitchen. Once you get the hang of proper temperature control it seems like your results get way more consistent. Plus you're spot on with the satisfaction thing, it's definitely more work to cook without non-stick but it just feels better for some reason.

>For whatever reason, papers ... that ... use data to make arguments about productivity, safety, etc. always seem unconvincing to me. ... maybe it's just because the way most programmers write code doesn't matter to me, because most programmers aren't aware of what is possible on the frontier.

As someone involved in PL research I partially agree, but I think this effect happens in both directions. There are plenty of great ideas in PL that haven't been applied to real problems whereas, simultaneously, there are plenty of huge problems for programmers where PL hasn't been applied. That is to say, us researchers often ignore the problems of the masses in favor of ones with more elegant (or more rigorous) solutions because we enjoy writing fancy proofs and theory more than we enjoy pragmatism. I think both sides of the equation are very important here, but it would be great to see some more direct interaction between the two sides. As it stands, a conference like POPL contributes about as much to recreational math as it does to the state of the art in programming.

>while those of us who worked on crypto without any specific feelings are early retirees

I'm sure all the Enron investors said something similar before they went bust

That mindset pisses me off so much. Every time someone asks me about advice for an interview and I don't mention doing hours of leetcode studying they accuse me of lying and trying to sabotage them because _obviously_ the only way to pass an interview is to memorize every possible question the interview can ask! It's so crazy to me how people think this and then I'll sit down with them for a mock interview and watch them completely stop communicating or treat me like I'm a binary switch that only comes on when they have the optimal solution.

I think the 2008ish version of the internet was just a much happier place. Part of why HN feels like a breath of fresh air still

Someone needs to do the same for YouTube ca. 2007

I'm a little disappointed that there's so little analysis on the free form questions.

I can't remember what I answered, so I was looking through some of these free form questions to try and identify my comments. I kept thinking something had to be me because it's word for word the same thoughts that have gone through my head 100s of times as a long-time OCaml user. Unfortunately, it feels like these are getting ignored because there's so little commentary on them (though I doubt that's actually the case).

> High speed trading has no societal value

And investment banking does?

>Even just charging a dollar for every "bad faith" bid or offer made that expires without being within, say, 10% of the actual price, would put a big dent in them.

Tell me this, what is the actual harm of these orders?

Jane Street is not a hedge fund and they're pretty well-known for having a huge emphasis on high quality/maintainable code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUqvXHEjmus

Because they would hire the person in hopes of new ideas.

>Jane Street has spent decades developing their own trading models and machine learning solutions to identify profitable opportunities and quickly decide whether to execute trades. These models help Jane Street trade thousands of financial products each day across 200 trading venues around the world.

>Admittedly, this challenge far oversimplifies the depth of the quantitative problems Jane Streeters work on daily, and Jane Street is happy with the performance of its existing trading model for this particular question. However, there’s nothing like a good puzzle, and this challenge will hopefully serve as a fun introduction to a type of data science problem that a Jane Streeter might tackle on a daily basis.

Sounds like it's just for fun/recruiting rather than trying to crowd source new strategies -- I'm sure if they were looking to crowd source strats they'd pay a whole lot more than 40k for first place

100% agree. For a long time I got by with my resume just covering achievements at a high level without any numbers. Every time I asked for resume advice, people suggested adding more numbers to it. Having worked on building up a lot of infrastructure stuff from the ground up, I never really had a great way to describe my job with a handful of numbers because the impact was the creation of the project rather than increasing/decreasing/reducing/whatever metrics. Eventually I caved in to the trend but this led to an interesting encounter: I had one behavioral interview where the interviewer really ripped apart some of the numbers -- what does "growing user base by 50%" mean out of context if you only have 10 users, how accurately can "decreased load time by 75%" actually capture the scope of your work if it's a 5 minute change, etc.? Numbers can be great to tell a story, but it seems like often time that story is either a distraction from the day-to-day reality of a job or just a gamed metric of some kind.

This trend really sucks because there's a definite pressure (at least early in one's career) to pick up tasks at work that look good on a resume but may be low-impact IRL (e.g. rather than adding a new feature that people will pay for, let's just whittle away at latency that's already fast enough for our users).

Yes, the real criticism of this article should have focused on the hard-to-fix problem of performance because it seemed absolutely abysmal to me -- multiple seconds before the page showed up as anything but black on both Firefox & Chrome.

People say stuff like this all the time but the truth is that Google as a company has very little direction at the scale of niche software like this. Google as an organization is not pushing Flutter in any meaningful capacity or trying to convince everyone to start adopting it. As a sibling comment asked, how would you expect a search engine giant to go for something that makes the web less indexable? The truth is that Google is a massive company with hundreds of teams that have 0 shared interest in any of their products and operate almost entirely independently.

I think this article is far too cynical. These demos show an early version of Flutter Web rather than a stable, production-ready system. I'm not sure how the author stumbled across Flutter Web and thought otherwise, but I think they largely missed the point here; in the very page they link to explaining "Flutter Web", all the content is preceded by a large warning stating that this is a beta and the bottom of the page talks all about use cases where Flutter doesn't make sense on the web [1].

It's important to take a step back here and remember that the web did not start as accessible, nor did any of the native desktop UI frameworks. The author suggests that the only way to "fix" Flutter Web is to throw it all away and start over, which is just patently false when comparing to the history of the competition. Not only would it be ridiculously easy to make Flutter generate semantic HTML without changing any of the core functionality or interface, but in fact HTML already features a widely-used solution for exactly the use case the OP focuses on [2].

The author also tries to take a stab at Flutter initially for attempting to replace HTML, but I think this is another misunderstanding of what Flutter is trying to accomplish. The goal is not to replace the web with something else, but instead streamline creating web apps (in much the same way as React, Vue, etc.) With that in mind, many of the criticisms stop making sense -- are people really expecting CSS restyling tricks and Vimium to work in modern web apps like Google Drive or Discord?

To take one (rather sneering) quote out of the authors playbook:

>To end I’d like to leave you with a quote from Dr. Ian Malcolm.

>Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

[1] https://flutter.dev/web [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...