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yellowstuffon The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95

Consider that “Don’t ask don’t tell” was a progressive policy in 1994, and reassess whether even in the US things were better for most people then than they are now.

The quickest way to contextualize this article is that it’s like asking crypto true believers to write about crypto a few years ago, just as it was becoming mainstream. Of course someone said there were no real problems on the internet.

yellowstuffon Ask HN: What are the best programming tricks you know?

Eric Lippert taught me that if you see a bug in some tricky code, rewrite the code with a simpler approach, rather than put in a fix which will make the code even trickier and quite possibly create new bugs.

More specifically, if you have a bunch of bugs related to storing data in an inconvenient way, convert the data to a simpler format rather than write a bunch of complex logic around the bad data format.

Article here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/ericlippert/b...

As a tangent, this article took me ages to find, even though I remembered the author, most of the details, and the string "SensibleDate". I'm not sure if the lesson is that MS is at fault for moving old content and having a lousy internal search tool, or Google is getting worse because it couldn't find it anyway, or I've gotten worse at finding stuff. But a few years ago I would've been shocked to not quickly find an article where I remembered a few relevant details, and now it seems like the norm.

yellowstuffon Beating the Averages (2001)

Lisp is great, and Paul Graham has done some good things with it, but the only other people who ever actually listened to PG and tried to build something practical in Lisp lived to regret that decision:

https://web.archive.org/web/20051207043012/http://reddit.com...

yellowstuffon How to professionally say

Good idea, but a lot of these feel like saying the professional way of telling someone to eat shit and die is “consume fecal matter and perish in an inferno”.

yellowstuffon Sweet-potato washing revisited: 50th anniversary of the Primates article (2015)

Not an expert but: married women covered their hair to make them less attractive to men. (Religious Jewish women now often wear wigs that look better than their natural hair, but that's OK. The Jewish God sometimes allows loopholes and workarounds.)

Not wearing mixed fibers was never a practical rule, but part of a common theme in Judaism of separating things, like separating milk and meat. Most importantly, the sacred is separated from the mundane, and the Sabbath is separated from work days.

There are quite a few rules in Leviticus that are impressively practical for an ancient people with a primitive understanding of biology: there are restrictions on a touching corpses or people with skin diseases, and frequent handwashing is mandated, including before eating, after urinating or defecating, and after visiting a graveyard.

yellowstuffon Actuarial Life Table

Most people will miss this reference and the rest will feel old. You owe us all apologies.

yellowstuffon Predicting Best Picture winners using coughs and sneezes

There was a lot of skepticism that their planes were real, even years after they had first flown publicly. Information spread more slowly in those days.

https://generalaviationnews.com/2011/05/09/fliers-or-liars/#....

yellowstuffon Kettle Logic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_pleading

Using multiple logically inconsistent defenses is generally allowed in the US.

yellowstuffon Inflation propagates unevenly

Good point. Related- stocks are traditionally considered a good inflation hedge. Even this article partially debunking that idea shows positive real returns in all inflation regimes, and suggests that inflation up to 5% doesn't hurt stock real returns. Long term inflation over 5% has happened and could happen again, but it would be very surprising to most economists.

https://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2021/07/19/myth-bust...

yellowstuffon Senior devs. Is anyone else insulted by coding exams?

Consider that recruiters charge around 25% of 1 year of salary for helping to hire a developer, and the person-hour costs of hiring one person can easily exceed the recruiter cost for a small organization.

Firing also requires a fair amount of person-hours to do, and if you fire someone and need to replace them those costs stack.

yellowstuffon One Way Smart Developers Make Bad Strategic Decisions

This article does a good job describing one failure mode that's not understood well, but the opposite failure mode is much more common in my experience- having lots of ways to do the same thing can be very inefficient and brittle, even at small companies. The right answer is not "never unify systems" or "always unify systems", but develop judgement about when things should be unified.

yellowstuffon Finality does not exist in payments

> Sure, but that money you stole buried in your backyard is still yours.

In what sense?

> The rightful owner cannot just steal it back.

The rightful owner doesn't get any special rights, so they can't trespass to get their property back. A policeman could get it back for them, though. If it's just lying there they can take it back themselves. I've heard stories where people find their stolen property on Craigslist, meet with the thief, and steal it back without using force. That's fine.

> Similarly if it wasn't yours, you wouldn't have to pay taxes on it

Ownership is a tricky concept. There are many rights and responsibilities associated with ownership. Owning a bike carries a different set of rights and responsibilities from owning a house. Paying taxes on something is an obligation typically associated with ownership, but since stealing something does not create many of the other legal rights associated with ownership I don't think it's sufficient to say that it demonstrates that it's "yours." Also, of course, no one actually pays the taxes.

yellowstuffon Compensation Data and Trends in the USA

That can't possibly explain all the difference. Mean family income is $115k, still lower than what they have for average salary in any region. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MAFAINUSA646N

If this is meant to be a representative sample of the US, the data doesn't pass the sniff test. They don't provide enough context to understand how else we should understand it.

yellowstuffon Compensation Data and Trends in the USA

Mean personal income in the US is $54k. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MAPAINUSA646N

This post shows an average in every region more than double that. It's not a representative sample. The charts are pretty but I don't think this analysis has any value.

yellowstuffon Does Not Translate

Most of these words don't have a 1 word equivalent in English but the full range of meaning can be easily captured with a short definition.

Yiddish has good examples where words actually do not translate easily. EG, schmendrick and schmuck both translate as "a fool", but have distinct shades of meaning that aren't trivially explained. "Nu" is an interjection that has several specific meanings that require long examples to explain, EG: https://forward.com/culture/12736/just-say-nu-01335/

If you like that kind of stuff I highly recommend The Joys Of Yiddish https://www.amazon.com/Joys-Yiddish-Leo-Rosten-1968-06-23/dp...

yellowstuffon How did LastPass master passwords get compromised?

"Credential theft occurs when attackers breach a system and steal users' access credentials -- usually ID and password. The ID is most commonly the user's email address. Credential spilling is when those credentials are made available to other criminals. Credential stuffing is the large scale use of automated means to test stolen passwords against other unrelated websites."

https://www.securityweek.com/credential-stuffing-successful-...

The term "credential stuffing" is a bit counterintuitive for me as well, but I guess it fits the pattern of credential attacks. "Password reuse" has other meanings, so would be less precise as a technical term.

yellowstuffon Code Review as a Service

Microsoft famously called that process “infinite defects methodology”, and decided it was a bad idea in 1989. "In general, the longer you wait before fixing a bug, the costlier (in time and money) it is to fix."

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...

yellowstuffon Ask HN: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine comparable to 2005 Google?

I get what you mean, but part of the whole initial appeal of Google was that it gave much more relevant results initially than Altavista or the other options. That was why Google put in the audacious "I'm feeling lucky" button.

yellowstuffon Larry Page: “I think we should look into acquiring YouTube” (2005)

I'm basing this on nothing, but at the time I thought Google figured that if Youtube lost the lawsuits it would destroy the video market for everyone, so they bought them with the intention of defending the lawsuits better than Youtube could have on their own.

yellowstuffon Do nothing (2020)

There can be a thin line between doing too much of your own QA and too little.

The flip side is when I've spent 30 minutes QAing an issue and another 30 minutes writing up what I've learned, and then the response is "I brought that server down for maintenance, it'll be back in a few."

After a few times of that the sys admin is going to get some very poorly thought out bug reports from me, because I don't want to burn any more of my time QAing known issues.

yellowstuffon Note that I wouldn’t pass the listed minimum requirements

Based on the story it's also entirely possible that the HR person just disliked the guy for some unrelated reason, or had someone else in mind for the role, and came up a plausible excuse for the rejection.

yellowstuffon How does one get hired by a top cybercrime gang?

Tournament theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tournament_theory

yellowstuffon Bill Hwang of Archegos Capital lost $20B in two days

I work in levered hedge fund strategies, so I have some insight here, although I don't negotiate financing myself. Banks tailor leverage to your strategy, so if your strategy is just to go long good stocks you won't get anything like 6X leverage. 6X leverage is realistic for a strategy that is long and short equal dollar amounts, and also carefully controls other risks besides dollar exposures.

Also, you have to be fairly big to get that kind of leverage. $100 million is probably too small but $1B might be enough.

So you put up $1B of your own money, and a bank would let you go long $3B and short $3B. The idea is that your longs hedge your shorts well so you can't lose too much.

Obviously, in the case of Archegos the shorts didn't hedge the longs well.

yellowstuffon Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?

My opinion only- For the middle class going to college is not seen as optional. Doing the same expensive activities as the other middle class kids is not seen as optional. There are millions of working class people in the US with good lives, but most middle class people would never seriously consider not following middle class norms.

So raising a kid who's middle or upper class is actually quite expensive, and that's part of why low income and high income families have more kids than middle income families. https://qz.com/1125805/the-reason-the-richest-women-in-the-u...

yellowstuffon Credit Suisse Takes $4.7B Hit on Archegos Meltdown

This wasn't really a two sided bet, Archegos bought a lot of stock and essentially borrowed a massive amount of money to buy even more stock, then the stock lost value.

If Company X is worth $60B on Monday and $40B on Tuesday then some people who were short could make a lot of money, but in general $20B of value has been destroyed and the world is poorer on Tuesday.

yellowstuffon Red Flags I Saw While Doing 60 Technical Interviews in 30 Days

That is certainly not true in all cases. It's possible that there's a second choice candidate, and the hiring manager wants to extend an offer to them as soon as the other candidate declines.

Probably more common is an experience I was in- we found a good candidate, he wanted to finish other interviews before making a decision and I gave him a few weeks to decide, then later I regretted giving him so much time. It meant I had to either pause the candidate search for a few weeks or potentially waste my time and candidates' time interviewing people when there may not be an opening.

yellowstuffon Young Koreans are echoing r/WallStreetBets in their war against short sellers

This would make more sense as a narrative if there were any prominent examples of short sellers materially harming the operations of a company, but I can't find any. In theory short sellers could help push a company into insolvency, but so could a lot of other vicious cycles for a failing company- worse terms from suppliers, worse credit terms, less trust from customers.

The Wikipedia page on "bear raid" mentions a single example, from 1609. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear_raid

yellowstuffon A Man Who Abandoned Value

Institutional Investor is targeted at people who work in finance, and I think "early" is meant in the sense of being early to trade a particular stock or theme that later becomes popular. So being "early" to GME would mean a month ago, not early relative to the IPO.

yellowstuffon The Global Population Crisis That Never Was

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. It could be that worrying about doomsday is an innate human trait, and that as the article asserts, certain types of worries are motivated by racism.

I still think it's a good idea to allocate some resources towards mitigating low probability, high impact events.

yellowstuffon Warren Buffett's bet against hedge funds at the Long Now Foundation (2008-17)

Hedge funds won’t necessarily have technical experts in every field as employees making investment decisions, but they are paying those people for research. So “more knowledgeable than the average trader” doesn’t mean that you know more than the market is pricing in. That said, the hedge funds with big research budgets focus on large companies, leaving more opportunity in smaller stocks.