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elemeno

2,625 karma · joined December 10, 2010

Technology Consultant in Capital Markets

Ex-Health Care disruptor

Ex-Quant/Developer, working for a bunch of derivatives traders. Spend my time thinking about volatility curves and option pricing.

Work in C#, play in C++ and F#/Haskell with a hint of Lisp on the side.

Avid player of (board) games, preferably of the unforgiving economic variety. Leads to long discussions about the desirability of different stock markets in various 18xx titles.

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elemeno··on I Like Small Keyboards
Keyboardio sells both the Preonic and Atreus (https://shop.keyboard.io) fully built with a variety of key switch types.

I use the Preonic as my daily driver and really like it - minimal but not too much so. I tried the Atreus like the idea but it was a touch too minimal for my taste - certain key combinations I used a lot at work were too much of a finger twister!

elemeno··on An oral history of Bank Python (2021)
To the best of my knowledge much of this originated with SecDB/Slang at Goldman - SecDB (securities db I believe) being the object store and slang the somewhat quirky C like language that ran with it (also the only language I’ve used professionally that let you have spaces in the variable names).

Some of the folk that built that (or worked on it) ended up at JPM and Merrill where they built the Python centric version - Alpha and Quartz respectively. Barclays Capital has/had a similar system as well I think, but it’s not one I know about offhand - they did though, memorably, have a system that was pretty much Haskell-in-Excel.

elemeno··on Agents that run while I sleep
It’s not an agentic pattern, it’s an approach to test driven development.

You write a failing test for the new functionality that you’re going to add (which doesn’t exist yet, so the test is red). You then write the code until the test passes (that is, goes green).

elemeno··on Anthropic AI tool sparks selloff from software to broader market
They’re one of the two big names in legal data - Thomson Reuters Westlaw and RELX LexisNexis. They’re not just search engines for law, but also hubs for information about how laws are being applied with articles from their in house lawyers (PSLs, professional support lawyers - most big law firms have them as well to perform much the same function) that summarise current case law so that lawyers don’t have to read through all the judgements themselves.

If AI tooling starts to seriously chip away at those foundations then it puts a large chunk of their business at risk.

elemeno··on Show HN: A 2mm micro-bearing ring that spins like a real fidget spinner
It looks like this user here - https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=spinity - has created a new account to continue spamming posts about their fidget spinner.
elemeno··on Evals in 2025: going beyond simple benchmarks to build models people can use
I’ve been building a tool to help with this - Safety Evals In-a-Box [https://github.com/elemeno/seibox]. It’s a work in progress and not quite ready for public release, but its a multi-model eval runner (primarily for safety oriented evals, but no reason why it can run other types as well!) and includes cost and latency in it reporting.
elemeno··on ReMarkable Paper Pro Move
I had a similar problem with mine where the clock was out and preventing it from syncing or updating.

The solution i was told (and which worked for me) was to plug it into a computer for a while - I assume that some time syncing must happen in the background when it’s connected via usb.

elemeno··on Making Explainable Minesweeper
If you’re interested in this you might like the game Bombe (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2262930/Bombe/) - a game about defining rules to let the computer solve various minesweeper (and more advanced variants) puzzles.

It’s a bit mind bending as you’re never actually solving the puzzles yourself, but creating sets of rules to solves whole classes of potential minesweeper patterns. It definitely solves that pleasurable puzzle solving itch!

elemeno··on Show HN: I built the tool I wished existed for moving Stripe between countries
nit: on the front page it says "transfers everything seamless", I think you want to say "seamlessly" instead.
elemeno··on Ask HN: What are you reading Feb 2024
Which Lisp book is that?
elemeno··on A partially-automated medium-throughput homemade cider press with lasers
It's an americanism as far as I can tell - 'cider' is what would be called apple juice in the UK (or maybe just fresh pressed apple juice) and 'hard cider' is what would be called 'cider' in the UK (i.e. the alcoholic beverage).
elemeno··on Ask HN: Did anybody apply for UK Global Talent visa? How did it go?
Other than Netflix (that I know of) all the other FAANGs have big offices in London. Between them and the financial sector, there’s a fair number of very well paid tech jobs in London.
elemeno··on The bank effect and the big boat blocking the Suez
From another article on the FT it sounds like they’re talking about ballast, not that it’s taking on water. -

“ Alongside specialists dredgers that are working to remove sand and soil from around the vessel, salvage experts Smit are looking to bring in high-powered pumping equipment to remove ballast water from the front and back of the ship, BSM said.”

elemeno··on The Bloomberg Terminal, Explained
> Yet, in all cases, after hedging, the airline will still either win or lose depending upon the change in oil price. No certainty has been gained.

That’s not really true. You’re locking in the price that you’re going to pay - that’s the certainty. You might however not be getting the best price at that point in time. From a financial forecasting perspective it probably worthwhile trade off though as you’re fixing one of your costs for that time period and that’s useful even when sub optimal.

elemeno··on Show HN: Million Dollar Jobs, a platform for jobs with $1M+ annual compensation
What would be the use case for those firms?

An executive search firm that's able to find candidates who would be suitable for jobs that pay $1mm+ in total comp is going to be using the network of people who they already know in order to find those candidates. At that level of comp you're relying on relationships and recommendations in order to find candidates (along side, most likely, some judicious use of LinkedIn) rather than any form of job board.

elemeno··on Running an eInk Display with Elixir, Scenic and Nerves
Should be this, I think - https://thepihut.com/collections/raspberry-pi-screens/produc...
elemeno··on The Toyota Way
Do you have a title or a link to the case study - just searching for TPS on HBR returns an awful lot of results!
elemeno··on Some business schools are shutting down their on-campus MBA programs
Oxbridge is a portmanteau of Oxford and Cambridge. In the UK it's a term often used to refer to the universities - which are routinely ranked as the top two universities globally.
elemeno··on Dear Client, Here’s Why That Change Took So Long
But in a case like yours if sounds like steps 2 through 5 aren't strictly relevant to the change you're making, so it's no wonder that your estimate is blown out the water. (Sorry if I'm wrong, you've obviously got more context on your own platform than I do!)

It does make me wonder though if there is a trend of 'hiding' necessary maintenance work in larger tasks - if so that seems to me to be indicative of a larger problem around not being given/making the time to do those jobs as their own tasks.

elemeno··on Why Developers don’t TDD: a podcast series
I used to have that view of the world as well, that a lot of the programming I was doing was simultaneously exploring the problem space as well as working towards a solution and thus writing tests (let alone full blown TDD) wouldn't work.

I think that what changed my mind, other than the dubious joy of maintaining my own code a couple of years down the line, was the realisation that while I don't know the solution to the problem yet I do know what each function I'm writing is supposed to do and thats what I should be testing. As a side effect it also meant that the functions I was writing became smaller (easier to test) and it became easier to see what the end solution might look like because I could understand the intermediary steps more easily.

Or to put it another way, I might not know how to write the compiler, say, but I do know that I'll need to start off by reading a line of input and I can test that I'm doing that properly, etc.

elemeno··on Scooter mechanic, once homeless, says cheap rides now help him pay rent
Now that's got to be a Submarine Article, with the repeated mentions of one company and the underlying narrative of Scooter companies being job providers. Simultaneously a job ad and an attempt to sway public and/or local government option in favour of scooter companies (or at the least, this scooter company) remaining in SF.

Otherwise, it's hard to believe that 'person gets a blue collar job' is something that an article would be written about...

elemeno··on Using D to Create the World’s Fastest File System
Just a nitpick, but it's OCaml for Jane Street rather than Haskell.

Haskell is certainly used as a bit of a secret weapon in some of the Quant groups at banks like Barclays Capital though!

elemeno··on 1.1B Taxi Rides on Kdb+/q and 4 Xeon Phi CPUs
Bank of America uses it to quite an extent - especially in eFX.
elemeno··on How to Hide $400M
You don't have an e-mail address in your profile, else I would have used that instead.

As someone who works in finance, and has a keen interest in how the murky side of that world works, I'd love to read your screenplay.

elemeno··on Ask HN: What to do after failing final interviews twice?
How is that odd - the whole point of interviews, and especially on-site ones, is to decide whether or not someone is 1) qualified to do the job, and 2) a good fit for the role/team/company.

A CV only tells you so much after all,

elemeno··on Brexit wins. An illusion dies
> The british economy will collapse completely, they are by far not that important globally.

The UK has the worlds fifth largest economy by GDP and the second largest economy in the EU (Germany is larger, France is smaller) [1]. To claim that they're 'not that important globally' is, frankly, asinine. Do you really think that the EU won't also get hurt by the UK leaving? If you think it won't then it's worth asking why EUR/USD has also gone sharply down today...

[1] http://money.cnn.com/news/economy/world_economies_gdp/index....

elemeno··on Unraveling of the tech hiring market
They're proprietary traders (that is, they trade with their own money and don't have clients - unlike a hedge fund), so they're very unlikely to tell the world what their performance looks like. If it's bad, they'd not want you to know, if it's good they'd not want their competitors to know!
elemeno··on Airbnb purged 1,000 "entire home" listings days before preparing data snapshot
Generally speaking, altering your statistics to report to regulators will open you up to a lot of potential legal trouble as the regulators might well decide to take the view that you're deliberately giving them misleading information.

If you need to massage the date to represent what you believe to be a realistic view of your data then you still need to start off with your 'bad' data and explain why you don't believe it's representative and present your arguments for altering your data along with your 'clean' dataset. That way you can't be accused of misleading regulators and you'll have best opportunity to present your arguments for why your initial dataset is 'wrong'.

Your fiduciary duty to shareholders almost certainly includes not making yourself liable to having legal action taken against you by the government.

elemeno··on Square stock drops 10%, is now less than IPO price
There was an article in The Guardian this past weekend about Saudi Aramco which estimated it's value at $10tn, which would definitely put it in a league of it's own when it comes to total value.

Saudi Aramco – the $10tn mystery at the heart of the Gulf state - http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jan/16/saudi-aramco...

elemeno··on Cutting Back Sugar Improves Obese Children's Health in Just 10 Days
Being a minor pedant - the sugar in Smoked Salmon isn't really 'the food producers putting sugar everywhere', it's part of how the Salmon is cured before it's smoked. Rubs and cures are fairly typically a mix of salt and sugar along with herbs and spices - the sugar is a pretty integral part of the process rather than being an additional ingredient.
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