HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

yellowstuff

1,280 karma · joined December 15, 2014

submissionscomments
yellowstuff··on How poker and a spaceship imposter game make you better at life
Von Neumann proved that there exists an unexploitable strategy for any zero sum game, where playing that strategy gives you the best possible outcome if your opponent knows your strategy and can play perfectly against it. Poker players refer to this strategy as "Game Theory Optimal". It is not necessarily "optimal" in the sense of making the most money in real life, EG if your opponent always folds to big bets then you should bet big more often than a GTO strategy would.

Over the last 15 years or so high level poker strategy has increasingly focused on approximating GTO play, and people are moving away from any type of exploitative play, whether that's psychological tells or adjusting to weaknesses like an opponent folding too much. So a GTO player actually will bluff quite frequently, but it's due to the math indicating that it's an advantageous spot to do it, not because of anything he's observed about his opponent.

That said, there's still room to adjust to exploit an opponent, and the weaker the opponent is the more profitable it can be to deviate from "correct" play.

yellowstuff··on New Steve Jobs recordings from the '80s released
Bret Victor has captured this really well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4

yellowstuff··on Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?
I tracked down an explanation for the 810 bug, although it doesn't actually clarify why 80 was a magic number.

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7Ms9oq...

yellowstuff··on Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?
Like "640k is enough for everybody", the iPod review isn't as bad as it seems in retrospect. It's a review of the first version of the iPod, which was Mac only and actually wasn't a great product yet. It was a few years and 2 versions later that they had a design breakthrough and started selling a lot of units. I don't think a reviewer should get dragged for not knowing that a product would be vastly improved a few versions later.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/09/08/640k-enough/

https://www.lifewire.com/number-of-ipods-sold-all-time-19995...

yellowstuff··on Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews
Something seems off in this story. $110k base is less than the entry level salary for FANG https://www.levels.fyi/SE/Amazon/Google/Facebook
yellowstuff··on Google says it doesn't monopolize digital ad market – senators don't buy it
I'd think that if someone has the intention to buy but doesn't have a site in mind, they'll usually use Google: like "best mortgage rates" or "american girl doll clothes". I can see FB ads being better for raising interest in a product to a targeted demographic, but I'd assume that the Google ads that are very close to the point of sale are much more valuable. What am I missing?
yellowstuff··on The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business
People say that shareholders "own" a public company, but that ownership is much more limited than ownership in the normal sense. In reality shareholders have very little direct input on how the CEO gets paid. The best chance for shareholders to influence CEO incentives would be if an activist investor got involved and made it an issue, but that's fairly rare, and usually only happens in the most egregious cases.
yellowstuff··on Desolate English path has killed more than 100 people (2017)
About one tourist a week dies in Hawaii doing touristy stuff. Mostly snorkeling, but occasionally hiking or climbing on rocks near the ocean. My recollection was that in Maui there was a mix of dangerous areas with warning signs and dangerous areas with no signage at all.

https://www.civilbeat.org/2016/01/death-in-paradise-is-all-t...

yellowstuff··on Why are there 5280 feet in a mile? (2009)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

Esperanto would probably have to be 10X better than existing languages in some sense to be a viable replacement.

yellowstuff··on Citi’s $900M Misfire Happened During Software Switch
I don't fully understand what happened, but it sounds like essentially someone was supposed to update a payment from "repay full amount" to "pay interest only", and didn't do it. The system correctly executed the instructions it was given. The only way this would show up as a "loss" to the bank is if some part of the system expected to pay only the interest, and it sounds like that wasn't the case.

It also sounds like there was another human who was supposed to catch the error and didn't. My guess is that the volume of transactions is high enough and errors of this type are rare enough that most people wouldn't be able to catch it manually.

yellowstuff··on What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition
I'm curious why you think HFT is harmful. They do the same job that human market makers used to do, buy vastly more efficiently, leading to lower prices for "customers" (IE lower spreads), and lower profits for the industry:

> TABB Group estimates that US equity HFT revenues have declined from approximately $7.2 billion in 2009 to about $1.3 billion in 2014.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140404072855/http://tabbforum....

I mostly agree that Robert Mercer has been a force for evil in the world, but subjectively my impression is that finance billionaires are more likely than people from other industries to spend their money on relatively uncontroversial philanthropy.

yellowstuff··on Citibank's $900M Blunder
That's not totally true. Don Trump had a lot of trouble borrowing money, eventually only Deutsche Bank would deal with him, because they were probably the least ethical bank on Wall Street at the time, and even for them there was a lot of internal controversy about working with him. Yes, ultimately he got the loans and was able to stay in business, but there are other shady operators who didn't and failed, you don't hear as much about them.

Conversely, Warren Buffet famously has a "halo" which means he gets favorable terms because people know that doing business with him will reflect well on them.

Different pockets of finance have different norms about who it's OK to screw and how, and even as an investment professional I don't understand the conventions in areas outside of my specialty. So it's very hard to judge as an outsider what is considered unethical and reputation-destroying, and what is considered aggressive business practices that happen to come at the expense of other sophisticated professionals.

yellowstuff··on The Strange Costumes of the Plague Doctors
I've seen a number of articles suggesting that cloth masks protect the wearer more than experts initially believed. EG: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8543869/Face-masks-...
yellowstuff··on Simple SQL in Python
Almost, but not exactly. If you import a Python file you get exactly what's in that file. A stored proc is not tied to a file- you can change the file and forget to update the proc, or change the proc without updating the file.
yellowstuff··on I made an app that lets you split a file into horcruxes
To people in the US reading this, I used RocketLawyer to make a will valid in New York that specified that I currently had no children, but directed how my assets would be distributed among my future children.
yellowstuff··on Teaching GPT-3 to Identify Nonsense
This is a wild guess- When GPT-3 got confused by "no legs", I don't think it's because it would have any trouble correctly interpreting "no legs" in other contexts. In this context it was searching in a semantic space set up by "a head, a tail, is brown", and the general form of a question looking for an animal. GPT-3 didn't find anything in the semantic space matching "no legs" so it assumed that was an error and corrected it. It's actually fairly close to how a human would solve the riddle, except when the human noticed nothing matched the explicit and implicit prompts, they would correct the implicit request for an animal, and then reinterpret the rest of the riddle.
yellowstuff··on ‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ Doesn't Work That Well
I think you can draw an analogy between probability and counting. Negative numbers seem weird and very different from positive numbers, but for many applications 0 is not a particularly interesting boundary, and you benefit from not treating negative and positive numbers as two different cases. EG, I could owe you $2 or -$4.

In probability, 50% feels like it should be a special boundary. But often there's a lot of benefit to not treating it that way, and treating a 49% belief more like a 51% belief than like a 10% belief.

It sounds trivial written out, but how often do people behave that way?

yellowstuff··on Cool URIs Don't Change (1998)
"Smooth" is definitely still current slang, with a meaning similar to "cool." And "smooth" came first:

> Slang meaning "superior, classy, clever" is attested from 1893. Sense of "stylish" is from 1922.

> A 1599 dictionary has smoothboots "a flatterer, a faire spoken man, a cunning tongued fellow."

It may be time to bring that one back. "Did you see Keith chatting up that girl at the bar? Total smoothboots."

https://www.etymonline.com/word/smooth

yellowstuff··on Why general artificial intelligence will not be realized
Surely the burden of proof is on someone claiming something is impossible? I skimmed the article but I didn't see any support for his argument beyond pointing to the limitations of existing technology, and asserting that these limits were insurmountable.
yellowstuff··on Who Is History’s Worst Political Adviser?
You could make a strong case that the Vietnam War was a more significant error. Including Iraq and Afghanistan, the War On Terror cost about 6 times as much as the Vietnam War, but Vietnam cost more in terms of American lives. I believe the Vietnam War inflicted greater damage to America's reputation and self-conception, and it ended in unconditional retreat after achieving none of its goals.

https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-09-09/war-on-terro...

yellowstuff··on California accuses Cisco of job discrimination based on Indian employee's caste
I'd guess SAP or IBM.
yellowstuff··on Microsoft to permanently close its retail stores
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121218-00/?p=58...
yellowstuff··on Perceptions of musical octaves are learned, not wired in the brain
You probably know this, but due to the 12 note tuning, most intervals on a piano are slightly off from perfect intervals. EG, on a string instrument or with voice it would be natural play notes a major third away such as C and E with a frequency ratio of exactly 5 to 4. There's no way to get every natural ratio exactly right and have 12 notes in an octave, so most of the intervals on a piano are tuned to approximations of an exact frequency ratio.

So pianos have at least 2 things working against having perfectly consonant chords.

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

yellowstuff··on Wirecard – The “German Enron”, and a personal history
Enron is one example of how these things can turn out, but Herbalife (HLF) is another. HLF is a multi-level marketing company; they're a shady company in an inherently shady business; they have far-flung operations; they aggressively went after people expressing negative information; they had questionable accounting; and there were eventually regulatory rulings against them. But they also are a profitable business that sells stuff that people want to buy. They started getting a lot of press over being a fraud in 2012, today the stock is 30% higher than the 2012 peak, and Bill Ackman lost around $1B shorting it before he gave up.

"Fake it til you make it" isn't just for tech startups. A lot of companies juice results with a bit of fraud, but eventually get good real results anyway. It's hard to tell the difference between an outright fraud and a healthy company with aggressive accounting.

yellowstuff··on Stories about the B5000 and people who were there (1979)
I feel like driving from Milwaukee to Pasadena 100 miles per day is the most Donald Knuth thing ever. IE, a huge task completed in the slowest and most deliberate way possible.
yellowstuff··on Woman makes $420k by buying insurance on flights she predicted would get delayed
You're right in some particulars, both gambling and insurance let customers enter transactions with an uncertain payoff that favors the house, and both are relatively aggressive legally when customers try to get an edge.

But the purpose of healthy gambling is to have fun, and the purpose of insurance is to pay a small amount in most future states of the world to avoid very bad outcomes in some future states of the world. These are both reasonable things to spend money on, but they're very different objectives.

yellowstuff··on An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in
How have machine learning algorithms negatively affected financial markets in the last 6 months? Markets have been volatile because information about the real world has been volatile. I don't think markets in an earlier era would have handled a global pandemic any more robustly than they did in 2020.
yellowstuff··on Bicycles from Sketches (2016)
Yeah, I think I have a relatively poor visual imagination, but when I try to picture a specific object it's probably ~10% as vivid as actually glancing at it. When I try to recall a smell, it's probably more like 20% as vivid as smelling it.
yellowstuff··on HFT in My Backyard (2014)
I'm generally supportive of HFT, I think the massive reduction in total profits to market makers relative to 20 years ago is proof of a positive-sum efficiency gain. But I'm not sure I buy your argument for why the nanosecond arms race is good.

Computers getting faster has allowed us to do more and different stuff with computers. What are the actual benefits of HFT "efficiency"? If stocks had an auction every millisecond wouldn't that still be plenty fast enough for any practical purpose?

Only other HFTs will notice or care that AAPL's price got updated in 1 nanosecond instead of 2. Or to go the other way, how would we be better off if stocks ticked every femtosecond? Every attosecond? Is there some limit where the benefits of this "efficiency" aren't worth the resources to pursue it?

yellowstuff··on HFT in My Backyard (2014)
You can imagine a successful financial system without a stock market if you don't know much about financial systems, in the same way that you can imagine a jet flying without wings if you don't know much about aerodynamics.

I believe that the rise of importance of finance has been a net good for humanity, but I know that's an unpopular opinion and I've seen good arguments that it's a net harm. But I don't think you can make a reasonable argument that we could have a modern world anything like the current one without stock markets. Banks and credit unions don't, can't and shouldn't provide the kind of funding that equity markets do.

← PreviousPage 5 of 12Next →