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dnadler

643 karma · joined February 23, 2016

dan@thetortoise.io
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dnadler··on Reflections on software engineering in the age of AI
Well, for one thing, I’d point to all the other anecdotes of developers being made 10x more efficient due to LLM use.

But really I’m just comparing against my personal experience. Once I learned how to use the tools well, and what to expect (and what not to), I’ve found LLMs to be very powerful.

dnadler··on Reflections on software engineering in the age of AI
> Don't use it to write code. It's a terrible programmer.

I see this sentiment often, and I’m honestly not sure where this comes from, as it’s really not been my experience. I feel like this must come from people feeling threatened and just moving the goals posts, or not knowing how to use the tools effectively.

dnadler··on GPT Guesses Between 1 and 100
Was it repressed? It doesn’t look to be significantly less prevalent than other 9s from the histogram.
dnadler··on Anthropic acquires Stainless
He sold his business. That tends to happen quite a bit.
dnadler··on Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal
Yeah, historically it’s been software that’s limited AMD here. Not surprised to hear that may still be the issue. NVidia’s biggest edge was really CUDA.
dnadler··on GitHub will prioritize migrating to Azure over feature development
It’s not that they don’t have it. It’s that they don’t want it.
dnadler··on AMD and OpenAI announce strategic partnership to deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD GPUs
Software aside, does AMD have a potential strategic advantage in the long term since they are also producing top tier CPUs? Is there some future benefit to tightly integrating their products? IIRC NVidia partnered with intel for this purpose, right?
dnadler··on AMD and OpenAI announce strategic partnership to deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD GPUs
I’ve been wondering about this. It used to be that different chip makers had different efficiencies, and so measuring two different companies chips in gigawatts wouldn’t be a good apples to apples comparison.

Is that still true or has the gap narrowed? Or have GPUs always been similar across the board and it’s CPUs that have more disparity?

dnadler··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2025)
Franklin Templeton | Quant Implementation Lead | Boston, MA | In-Person | $145k - $190k + Bonus

We're building an end-to-end portfolio construction system to support FTIS, a $100bn multi-asset investment manager within FT. This is a front office role that will help guide our quantitative staff as we build out this new system. This project is a strategic objective for FTIS, highly visible, and frankly one of the most fun jobs in the industry.

We're looking for mid to senior level researchers or developers with strong buy-side backgrounds who can help translate our investment process into a robust, scalable, and approachable design.

Reach out with any questions - dan.nadler (at) franklintempleton (dot) com

Apply here: https://franklintempleton.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/Primary-Exte...

dnadler··on Gemini 2.5 Pro reasons about task feasibility
I think maybe this refers to unlearning wrong information?
dnadler··on Career Development: What It Means to Be a Manager, Director, or VP (2015)
I have a similar mindset though less focused on the type of questions being asked and more about how many times I have to answer the same question.

Ideally, the number is one time. As in one conversation where the person walks away understanding the answer. If I have to have that conversation more than once it’s a problem.

Obviously there’s nuance - it can take time to get your head around a new concept or hard problem. But in any case, I like that as one dimension when thinking about a person’s skill/level/potential.

dnadler··on OpenAI's o1-pro now available via API
Actually, I think humans require much less energy than LLMs. Even raising a human to adulthood would be cheaper from a calorie perspective than running an AGI algorithm (probably). Its the whole reason why the premise of the Matrix was ridiculous :)

Some quick back of the envelope says that it would take around 35 MWh to get to 40 years old (2000 kcal per day)

dnadler··on Firefly ‘Blue Ghost’ lunar lander touches down on the moon
I think the big piece that is being overlooked here is the distance. The distance itself poses significant challenges. The obvious things like resupply and communication are much harder. But also the journey to mars is much harder on the human body.

Rescue and abort options are also much harder. The moon is close enough to easily resupply or rescue people on the surface, mars is much harder.

dnadler··on Show HN: Python micro event loop library (~250 LOC)
I haven’t kept up with python too much over the past year or two and learned a couple new things from this code. Namely, match/case and generic class typing. Makes me wonder what else is new, off to the python docs!
dnadler··on Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall (2022)
Oof, yeah, this site is really not great on iOS.

The first time I published a site, I was surprised by how much traffic came from mobile devices, even though my page was intended for desktop users. I really shouldn’t have been surprised, but fortunately I had some basic analytics and saw fairly quickly how bad my bounce rate was on mobile and was able to work on it a bit.

dnadler··on A messy experiment that changed how I think about AI code analysis
It’s interesting how many different opinions there are in this thread! Perhaps it really varies by field.

I was reading mostly neuroscience papers when I was taught this method as an undergrad (though the details are a bit fuzzy these days).

I’d bet it also varies quite a bit with expertise/familiarity with the material. A newcomer will have a hard time understanding the methodology of a niche paper in neuroscience, for example, but the concepts communicated in the abstract and other summary sections are quite valuable.

dnadler··on A messy experiment that changed how I think about AI code analysis
While that wasn’t my experience as a junior developer, this is something that I used to do with academic papers.

I would read it start to finish. Later on, I learned to read the abstract, then jump to either the conclusion or some specific part of the motivation or results that was interesting. To be fair, I’m still not great at reading these kinds of things, but from what I understand, reading it start to finish is usually not the best approach.

So, I think I agree that this is not really common with code, but maybe this can be generalized a bit.

dnadler··on Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them
You’ve convinced me!
dnadler··on Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them
It can be more than one thing - it's both, and more.
dnadler··on Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them
Well, commutes into a central city is a bit of different beast, and many metros in the US have trains that service the suburbs.

Driving in and around the suburbs is what I was talking about.

dnadler··on Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them
That fixes it for certain types of people, but certainly not for most people in in the north east during winter.
dnadler··on Americans' love affair with big cars is killing them
People in US suburbs frequently live several miles from their town center, if they even have a town center at all.

Cycling simply isn’t viable to large swaths of the US. There isn’t an easy answer to this either, given that you’d probably need to tear down entire neighborhoods and rebuild a more dense town

dnadler··on ArcticDB: Why a Hedge Fund Built Its Own Database
Yeah, that’s fair, and something you basically get for free.

Also, hi James! :)

dnadler··on ArcticDB: Why a Hedge Fund Built Its Own Database
I’ve never seen it used for backtests personally. Generally backtested results are saved as a batch of variants following some naming convention as different symbols.
dnadler··on ArcticDB: Why a Hedge Fund Built Its Own Database
For pricing data, sure, but for things like fundamentals or economics where there are estimates that are revised over time, one way to store this data is with a versioning feature. It allows for PIT data without much overhead, in theory.

And actually, pricing can be revised as well, though it is much less common.

That said, versioning is not the only way to handle these kinds of things.

Versioning can also be useful as an audit trail for data transformation. Though again, these could be stored in another way as well.

dnadler··on ArcticDB: Why a Hedge Fund Built Its Own Database
Yeah that’s fair, not open source, I was incorrect, though I think it’s more than personal use only. “Production use only” is doing a lot of heavy lifting and I don’t know exactly what that means (though could make a guess).
dnadler··on ArcticDB: Why a Hedge Fund Built Its Own Database
If it wasn’t clear from the article, this is open source and available on Man’s GitHub page:

https://github.com/man-group/arcticDB

I used to work at man, so take this with a grain of salt, but I really liked this and have spun it up at home for side projects over the years.

I’m not aware of other specialized storage options for dataframes, but would be curious if anyone knows of any.

dnadler··on ArcticDB: Why a Hedge Fund Built Its Own Database
Nope, it’s fairly generic. I worked at Man for a number of years and with Arctic a lot during that time.

In my role I was mostly working with daily data, but also higher and lower frequency data, and never had issues.

dnadler··on CSS Grid Areas
“1 of 3” is not the same thing as “1 to 3”, so I don’t think they mean the same thing here.
dnadler··on Startups building balloons to hoist tourists
Gravity is proportional to 1/r^2 (r being distance), so you could take a stab at computing your ISS question with that info.

The centripetal force question is a little more challenging, but still in the realm of algebra. The complicated part is setting up the problem and understanding where the forces are coming from and if/how they cancel each other.

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