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Raidion

1,295 karma · joined May 24, 2017

Engineering Manager, former Tech Lead.
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Raidion··on Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
As a manager with 10-15 reports at a company you've probably heard of, I think the main question is how much they will need to contribute. I put up a PR or three a week, usually in non-critical path flows or system support, and its honestly fine. I could barely contribute to the productivity level of even one of my junior engineers, but I can debug production issues and ship code AND be a good manager (with a decent work life balance).

I feel like managers should be able to contribute. Managing a good team isn't that hard, though managing a bad team (or a good team in the midst of a ton of bad processes) is a nightmare.

Raidion··on The "Passive Income" trap ate a generation of entrepreneurs
Creating an additional 30%-50% on top of whatever a normal person would consider passive income in order to actually have passive income is NOT a realistic option for a huge % of the population.
Raidion··on Layoffs at Block
Really? Revenue loss was pretty directly tied to Elon replying and supporting some "jews vs whites" type posts in Nov 2023.

That caused Apple, Coke, and many other large clients to stop advertising.

Raidion··on Extremophile molds are invading art museums
I'm not sure you read the article, these are molds that love low humidity. Controlling for humidity made these environments more attractive, not less.
Raidion··on Ask HN: Senior engineering mngrs: how has AI changed your day-to-day work?
Same. I can take on things that are nice, but not critical (yet) and make a ton of progress without bothering the devs.
Raidion··on 6 weeks of Claude Code
I've been telling people, this is Uber in 2014, you're getting a benefit and it's being paid for with venture capital money, it's about as good as it's going to get.
Raidion··on Memory safety is table stakes
Java is "fast" but not fast. Most of the time if performance is a true concern, you are not writing code in Java.
Raidion··on AI is going to hack Jira
I would also argue that software (and the people that write it) have a "correctness" bias that is not fully aligned with business goals.

Tech debt is real, but so is the downside of building a system that has constraints that do not actually align with the realities of the business: optimizing for too much scale, too much performance, or too much modularity. Those things are needed, but only sometimes. Walking that line well (which takes some luck!) is what separates good engineering leadership from great engineering leadership.

Raidion··on College baseball, venture capital, and the long maybe
Money is fungible, doesn't really matter what source the money comes from other than optics.
Raidion··on How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup
You pay for one or two people with real experience and 4 reasonably new hires whose job it is to answer questions posed by the senior team and to build documentation.

You want the senior people focusing on the problems, strategy, and comms and not data aggregation and power point formatting.

Half the time it doesn't actually matter who the consultant is, the business is just looking for an arbiter to provide a second opinion or justify a decision.

Raidion··on Doge Is Planning a Hackathon at the IRS. It Wants Easier Access to Taxpayer Data
I think the group of people that work on this should petition for their tax data to be the first to be used. Seems to align the incentives on internal controls of PPI.
Raidion··on There Was a Texas Lottery Arbitrage
I've never this at Google, but at my company, if you pass the technical screen you're offered to hiring managers. If they don't want you on your team because they want more leadership (or less leadership), or if there were 5 senior python roles and you were the 6th person to pass the interviews, you still won't get hired.
Raidion··on Leaked VA memo calls for up to 83,000 layoffs to reduce workforce to 2019 levels
It's not the hiring people that's the problem. Assuming those people "cost" 300k a year all in (benefits/offices,etc) which is probably high, that's $24 billion. The government spent $6.8 trillion, cutting these jobs cuts spending by .3891%.

Cutting the people without cutting the programs won't do much and is (IMO) a problem in that you should be able to access government services in a way that the writers of the laws (house/senate) have clearly agreed to. When you're cutting this widely, it's hard to believe you're not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Raidion··on “The Traitors”, a reality TV show, offers a useful economics lesson
In poker it's called levels. Fighter pilots call it being inside the other persons OODA loop.
Raidion··on A marriage proposal spoken in office jargon
In a softly held defense of those words, they basically are an escalation level.

If someone asks you for something, it could be something with undefined scope or priority. An "ask" signals "this is official". Same thing with learnings: lesson is personal, learnings means ways things are changing.

Are there dumb business terms, absolutely, but these aren't bad IMO.

Raidion··on TikTok preparing for U.S. shut-off on Sunday
I think the OP is saying that both nations are banning software because of the risks of the software/data collection posing risks to the political stability of each nation. You can obviously say "our reason is better because X", but the outcomes being the same means that there is justification.

Both sides say it's worth banning "Tiktok/Google for granting the CCP/USA the ability to algorithmically influence the views of Chinese/Americans".

Raidion··on Jaywalking legalized in New York City
Laws that allow cyclists to treat stop signs and red lights as yield signs are called "Idaho stop" laws and are debated fiercely.
Raidion··on Permira completes Squarespace acquisition after upping bid to $7.2B
Mine got moved over and haven't really looked into it. Why are you moving off?
Raidion··on How to delete your 23andMe data amid the company's turmoil
I work for a company managing a team that has built this for GDPR compliance.

Customer submits a deletion request. We have a fan out process that takes the deletion request and submits it to a bunch of different data locations. All of these must respond within 2 days (though the required time is 72h). Each of those data locations will queue up a job to remove access (soft delete) the data, and schedule a hard delete for 28 days in the future. If the customer says they don't actually want the data to be deleted, we cancel the data hard deletion and revert the soft delete. If nothing happens the hard deletion goes through.

Raidion··on Bots, so many bots
Every SaaS platform with a reasonably cheap offering deals with these. I work for a recognizable SaaS and there are checks that flag both the accounts and reports the credit cards that are used after a fairly low threshold of "add payment method attempts". High levels of fraud usage hurt your reputation with payment processors and that's bad for business.

It doesn't stop the truly determined ones I'm sure, but it does mean that it adds complexity. You don't need to be impossible to test cards on, you just need to be harder to use than someone else (like a lower resource charity). We've even debated "fake accepting" some payment methods after we're confident it's someone trying to find working credit card numbers to add some false positives into the mix.

Raidion··on The Paradox of the Distance Runner
For me, running is fun, but the real "hook" is the pure escapism. If you don't take a phone, you're unreachable. I have a lot of responsibilities, running is just an amazing way to take 30m-1h+ and just have some time to think and listen to music that also has health benefits.

I do highly recommend a RoadID or other identification. I'll also carry at 20 dollar bill for food or (hypothetically, I've never needed to do it) a tip for whoever gives me an emergency ride home.

Raidion··on Professional poker players know the optimal strategy but don't always use it
Modern Poker Theory by Acevedo was the premier book on this, but I've been out of the game a few years. Idk if I'd fully trust his charts given modern sizing theory, but it's going to improve your game if you understand the concepts. If you're really serious, you want to get a solver: GTO+, PIOSolver, or GTOWizard (online version).
Raidion··on Professional poker players know the optimal strategy but don't always use it
I think another way to say this is that MDF works only if you're in a spot where you have hands that are strong enough to call. If you play every hand, and you see every river in that 100into100 situation, you shouldn't call with 50% of your hands because your hand range is too wide for that to be profitable.

So you can't make a ton of mistakes say "MDF" and call off, you have to have done the right things in previous streets to end up with a range that can call at MDF. That range (and those street actions) require an understanding of GTO (and the adjustments needed when someone isn't playing GTO).

Raidion··on The economics of the Birkin handbag
This is always how Rolex has worked. Supply is limited, and prices are fixed, so they have to pick and choose who gets the rarer and more desirable watches, and who better to offer them to than the people who are your best customers (or have enough clout to be free advertising?).

Ferrari works the same way.

Raidion··on Show HN: Allocate poker chips optimally with mixed-integer nonlinear programming
Also an experienced poker player, and this is 100% correct.

Ideally you want to use common casino chip colors (though these are somewhat fungible) and just shift orders of magnitudes.

If 1BI is 20 bucks, you can make it equivalent to a $200 BI at the casino, which really only uses 2 colors 95% of the time: whites for 1 dollar, reds for $5. Deeper games might need a $25 (green) or even $100 (black chip). So whites in your home game are 10c, reds are 50c, greens are $2.50, blacks $10.

Raidion··on Swiss' Entire Boeing 777 Fleet Now Has Shark Skin Technology
The plane can carry 45,000 gallons of fuel. 2.1 bucks a gallon. So probably 500 bucks of savings a flight since most flights arent full capacity. 130k flights in '23. So ez 65 million in savings a year.

Worth doing for the environment even if it's cost neutral probably.

Raidion··on Weekly 1:1s are a staple of management. I hated it and found it useless
It's also the only way of getting direct takes from ICs. Can it turn into a vent session, yes. But it also can surface small issues early on and allow you to prevent things from becoming problems.

This is super important for when you manage multiple people who have to collaborate together very regularly, less so when your reports are managing teams with clear missions and defined interfaces with more internal projects.

Raidion··on Apple apologizes for iPad 'Crush' ad that 'missed the mark'
Destroying classic cars for a movie creates something. I think a few car people would be pretty upset if some really bad, made for TV movie destroyed a lot of classic cars. This is just that, but upsetting musicians, photographers, artists, and basically anyone who cares about the environment.

This ad destroys a lot of things people are really really fond about: musical instruments, painting supplies, photography equipment, and record player. And then says that all of those things will be replaced by this "gadget" that won't have the years of life of the piano, guitar, camera, record player, etc.

So it destroys things people care about AND tells you the things you care about don't matter anymore.

Raidion··on We have 4 days to contest KYC being required by internet services
Aren't you basically revealing yourself anyway because you need to pay them?
Raidion··on How Africans are changing French, one joke, rap and book at a time
I was (at one point) fairly conversational in French by US standards (was taking 300 level French conversation classes).

Did a fairly long trip in France, using as much French as I could. The speed of native French speakers meant comprehension was hard but manageable, and they seemed (almost intentionally at times), unable to make anything but what I would consider "travel French" work. I was fairly discouraged. I then met an Italian ski instructor who worked in France, and I could understand him quite well, and talked with him at a level (job, hobbies, family, reasons for travel) that I never achieved with a native speaker.

It was one of the most memorable moments of the trip and really gave me a feeling that we're all "citizens of the world" and not quite so divided by culture and lines on a map.

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