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barchar

131 karma · joined March 12, 2014

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barchar··on Fearless SIMD v1.0
LLVM does do bit pattern tracking. Referred to as value tracking or known bits analysis.

I’m not sure if the vectorizer uses it a ton, but isel does (though maybe not heavily for vector ops)

barchar··on US 10-Year Breaches 5% as Inflation, Supply Worries Mount
No, there is no credit risk, they print the money.
barchar··on Intrusive linked lists (2019)
You can do this with non intrusive lists too. See c++’s merge/splice/etc. You can store the iterators in some other place as you do this, making it quite handy on occasion.
barchar··on VC isn't VC anymore
It’s strange, every startup offer either is obviously a horrible scam or comes from a place of fairness and is sold like a total scam.

I guess being honest brings about too many opportunities for people who don’t understand the finances to make (or be perceived to make ) promises they can’t keep. So you might as well just get into a race to present the most ridiculous stuff possible.

barchar··on VC isn't VC anymore
Pref shares do get diluted, they are however senior to common stock so they get money FIRST if there’s not enough to go around. There is some cap on this and sometimes it’s pretty high. Huge pref overhangs are, indeed, a problem.

Pref shares with a 1x preference are still worth like 10x common stock in early stage companies and it’s common for employed to get fucked by this.

Founders don’t get preferred shares (I think it’s really, really rare). There is founder pref stock, which is somewhat different. It’s common for founders to cash out some shares along the way, though.

barchar··on AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt
It would cost an extreme amount. The only reason to do something like that would be to defer capital gains into retirement while protecting your position.

You can use a collar for this at somewhat reasonable cost. Not sure how rolling that would compare to just using it to defer until you can cheaply sell and buy some fixed income ladder. Probably badly.

Also, there’s no capital gains to defer if you use a retirement account, which will be a better place for fixed income anyway.

barchar··on Fixed-Rate Mortgages Are Rent Control for Homeoweners
I mean homeownership (with the intent to occupy the home yourself) causes this misallocation by itself. The proper policy remedy would be to prohibit people from owning their own home until it was a very small portion of their net worth.

I think this policy has been crafted in a lab to have both very few financial losers and yet make literally everyone mad.

barchar··on The value of employee equity depends a lot on volatility
It is worth about what it's worth, and that's not zero, but the difference between the median realized value and the mean realized value (upon which the price is set) is much higher than for public equities.

The above means it can be an irrational bet to take the startup equity if the price you pay in opportunity cost is high relative to your bank. This problem gets worse the longer you stay after that first vesting, but is mitigated by the extrinsic option value of your options (which goes away when you leave and exercise)

barchar··on Using Git's rerere feature to escape recurring conflict hell
You can use the rerere-train script in the git repo to populate rerere from existing merges. I use this when something in a merge has regressed a big feature branch and I need to bisect. I can train rerere then rebase on the 2nd to latest merge-base, all while still doing no extra work if there isn't a regression.
barchar··on The dead economy theory
This is only sorta true, the total dilution from SBC is very small for most tech companies with some outliers (cough snap cough).

They may not purchase on exactly the vesting date but they certainly do offset the issued shares with buybacks. I think they can choose to reduce those buybacks without as much rigamarole as they'd need to issue new shares for funding, so they can effectively used that as a "back door" way to raise money. I think it might juice their P&L a little too, but I doubt that's why they do it.

barchar··on The real cost of owning a home
The annual price-appreciation of a home is usually lower than the risk-free rate (and thus the HELOC rate). If you "pay yourself" rent and use that to pay the HELOC down then it can make sense I suppose.

It's just leverage and it depends on the returns you're getting on the loan. Renting is also a kind of leverage though so if you own a home outright it might make sense to lever up. If you want that kind of leverage while still having the position in the house then an I/O loan is probably the easiest way to do it.

barchar··on The real cost of owning a home
If you have public REITs active nearby you can do this comparison for real: if you buy ~1 unit's value in shares of that landlord you will probably own about 1/<however many units they operate> of the company and receive someplace around the rent of that unit in dividends and capital gains.

The government subsidies for investing in the stock market are also pretty nuts, and the TCJA hosed owner-occupants by limiting the interest deduction, the gains exclusion, and raising the standard deduction.

If you invest you get to deduct any interest against investment gains (even better: you can just not pay any interest), you pay ZERO capital gains taxes on up to ~$80,000 of (real!) contributions each year (with no maximum excluded gains), you can defer $22,000 of (real!) income to literally whenever, AND you can take the standard deduction every year (including in retirement when you wouldn't have had any income to deduct had you paid off a house).

barchar··on The real cost of owning a home
It seems like public (REIT) landlords haven't really been making an above market return. Admittedly they have constraints that private landlords don't, but they also own a metric shitload of rentals.
barchar··on The real cost of owning a home
You are also not a charity and need to pay _yourself_ profits on the home you own yourself. Otherwise you're no different from a landlord offering below-market rent.
barchar··on The real cost of owning a home
Renting also has hedges embedded, and every hedge can be a risk position.

In particular the interest rate options in foxed mortgages are pretty expensive and it only hedges the cost of a particular house not housing in general.

Housing cost is correlated with local incomes so in some ways it's doubling down. In particular recessions are deflationary in the immediate aftermath.

barchar··on The real cost of owning a home
Many high cost-of-living places have this property. People bid up owner occupied home prices even when rents can't support them.
barchar··on The real cost of owning a home
It's not true that paying off the mortgage makes it more advantageous to buy, home equity creates portfolio drag.
barchar··on The real cost of owning a home
Eagh, the leverage really isn't that cheap, and you can think of renting as giving you cheap leverage too (it's just your borrowing the house instead of the money).
barchar··on The real cost of owning a home
This article does not mention the opportunity cost of all the home equity you accumulate, which is frequently a big component of the overall cost of ownership.
barchar··on Who will buy your services if you fire us all?
The saying is "workers spend what they earn and capitalists earn what they spend".

Capitalists don't need worker demand to support their own consumption; spending out of profits directly supports profits overall.

It would be something of a consumption race to the bottom, however. They wouldn't be any better off vs if we supported adequate demand for everyone, but they might control a bigger slice of the (much) smaller pie.

barchar··on Who will buy your services if you fire us all?
If they've eliminated all the jobs then presumably the economy has the idle productive capacity required to either produce the goods demanded by ubi recipients or produce the (real) capital required
barchar··on Why Japan has such good railways
The central sections of link were expensive because they're built through the center of the earth with really huge stations, some of this is to avoid impacting cars but much is just to get elevation changes. The connection over lake Washington required a lot of money and work too, as it's a floating bridge.

The less complex sections were mostly on-par with other us cities.

barchar··on Show HN: Is Hormuz open yet?
I think sentinel-1 has a SAR instrument, it's very easy to see ships with that data
barchar··on We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do
There is a fee implicit in the market spread. It's formed out of the time value of money w.r.t. the cost of NOT trading as well as the adverse selection faced by those with standing offers.

Increased insider trading will increase spreads.

barchar··on We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do
In that case you limit your upside as well as an insider, and have to deal with liquidity and slippage coming and going.
barchar··on We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do
Polymarket "odds" I think are just the price of the contract * 100 right?

That's not actually the predicted odds by the market because every single bet is also a bet on interest rates.

A contract that literally 100% always would resolve to "true" in 1 year would have a non-zero price for the "false" side because selling that option (and thus taking the "false" side means you get ~$97 today and then pay $100 in a year.

Polymarket's 4% chance of jesus returning by 2026 actually represents a market consensus of basically a 0% chance.

For trump losing office there might be some bets predicated on his losing office being correlated to a higher interest rate outcome, too.

barchar··on We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do
In theory this should limit the damage insiders can do, since as the probability of encountering an insider rises the market makers will need to widen the spread.
barchar··on Cockpit is a web-based graphical interface for servers
Uhhh what? If they take control of the server they have control over the box.
barchar··on Cockpit is a web-based graphical interface for servers
Cockpit tends to be less ad-hoc than others ime. Often it'll use dbus on the backend.

It's also socket activated, which is nice.

barchar··on Aliens.gov ~ domain registered 17MAR2026
It's because of the time value of money. Buying no is much like buying a bond.

It doesn't mean there's a 16% chance.

It's probably more attractive to gamblers when presented like this.

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