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gkuan

1,099 karma · joined January 27, 2012

www.typedynamic.com
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gkuan··on A network engineer in search of greener pastures
At least they save on the interview travel costs now since most interviews seemed to have moved to Zoom and ilk.
gkuan··on America's Surprise Revival: The Suburbs
Your comment reminds me of the Guardian’s piece on cities busing homeless from a while ago [1]. It was kind of like Defcon.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...

gkuan··on Stock market charts you never saw (2021)
It may be hard to imagine, but dividend yields were not always this low [1]. Investopedia has it usually something healthy over 4% up until 1990s it seems. Over that 1926- time frame, dividends are said to have contributed 32% of the total return of S&P 500 [2].

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/071616/history...

[2] https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/research/article/a-fundame...

gkuan··on Ask HN: Best book to learn C in 2022?
Besides K&R and Modern C, I like the classic Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets by van der Linden.
gkuan··on Ask HN: Is any company still hiring entry level engineers?
Another tip I would give: try to be timely. Especially for college grads/early career, for some companies even when companies are hiring, they might not be hiring all year long (for college grads). The prime college hiring season (summer and fall) is coming up. Waiting until or starting in the winter and spring tends to be tougher.
gkuan··on Ask HN: Is any company still hiring entry level engineers?
One more resource that may be helpful, there are a whole bunch of tech interview meetups in various cities. Those meetups are a tremendous resource in terms of sharpening interview skills and finding supportive peers and people further along in their careers. They are also a resource for getting an idea of who is hiring for what.

Disclosure: I founded one of these meetups in one city a long while ago.

gkuan··on Ask HN: Is any company still hiring entry level engineers?
Does your college offer career fairs or college-specific job boards? Chin up. Breaking in is definitely challenging, but there are resources out there. Hopefully as the pandemic effects subside, there will be more in-person networking events. Some companies also like to recruit from hackathons and other contests. There are also some medium size companies that tend to keep significant entry level hiring pipelines.

One gotcha I would mention, though, is don’t go in with the expectation that submitting resumes down some company corporate HR website is sufficient. It is definitely worth it to get in front of companies in person when possible.

gkuan··on Ask HN: Is any company still hiring entry level engineers?
Yeah, it is unfortunate but being at a target school sometimes does give an unfair advantage. But the bright side is different companies have may a different set of target schools.
gkuan··on Tether Withdrawals Top $10B
This (more yield with longer duration) is true most of the time, but sometimes the yield curve inverts. Especially in recent months, the yield curve has flattened quite a bit.
gkuan··on Ask HN: Learn C++11 or Rust in 2022?
MSVC has a good amount of C++20 support now https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/compiler_support#cpp20.
gkuan··on I accidentally loaned all my money to the US government
Sorry to be a bit pedantic, but you got me curious, looks like from TreasuryDirect that one doesn’t have to be a citizen to buy and hold, just a resident with a SSN is fine [1]. Everything else right on!

[1] https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/research/indepth/ibonds... under “Who May own an I Bond”

gkuan··on Where Do Research Problems Come From?
> The final approach I've encountered is where research problems come from an external body.

For a good helping of the government research organizations, they hire academics and practitioners as Program Managers (PMs) who gather the experts in the field to come up with research programs, agendas, and seedling programs. Of course, the PMs have to sell areas to their higher ups too, but it does have some degree of dynamism and alignment with academia. The amount of resources that could be brought to bear on a problem is impressive.

I do wonder about this whole notion of “success” of research. Hundreds of years ago, wealth patrons sponsor the “researchers” of their times. Creative people found problems that interested them which sometimes led to unexpected results and new areas. I don’t think serendipity should be discounted.

gkuan··on I accidentally loaned all my money to the US government
One interesting thing is that even nominal Treasuries are yielding above CDs at the moment but the difference is more like 20 bps or so.

Can you imagine the people who bought i bonds in the 2000s when the fixed yield part of the return was 3.6%? Though they obviously had their ups and downs, but right now if they held on they are sitting on a year of 10%+ yields.

gkuan··on What was wrong with SML?
I do wonder if differences in language governance models impact uptake. Being completely biased (having worked on the SML/NJ compiler a long while ago), I very badly want to see more adoption. There is definitely continuing activity with new (IFL award winning) LLVM backend work [1] and Manticore.

[1] http://cs.uchicago.edu/news/smlnj-overhaul/

gkuan··on I accidentally loaned all my money to the US government
Unfortunately, for this particular type of bond, a Series I US Savings Bond, they can only be purchased through TreasuryDirect or by way of a tax refund. Since 2012, they are no longer sold through banks [1]. For regular Treasury Bills, Notes, and Bonds, buying through a broker is an option.

But separately, it is a miracle that the author didn't hit the physical identity verification path [2] when signing up for the TreasuryDirect account.

[1] https://treasurydirect.gov/timeline.htm?src=td&med=banner&lo...

[2] https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/46840/treasury-dir...

gkuan··on U.S. interest rates have soared everywhere but savings accounts
TIPSWatch also wrote up a comparison between I Bonds and TIPS [1] from September 2021.

[1] https://tipswatch.com/2021/09/07/i-bonds-vs-tips-whats-the-b...

gkuan··on U.S. interest rates have soared everywhere but savings accounts
Where are you seeing real yield on TIPS? There is certainly that 0.125% positive fixed coupon rate subject to that principal inflation adjustment. Looking at https://www.treasurydirect.gov/instit/annceresult/annceresul... TIPS tab, all the recent auctions had a high yield of < 0% with the exception of the 30-year TIPS on 02/28/2022 at a high yield of 0.195%. Secondary market does seem to show some deals on 20+ years with some getting close to 0.50%. TIPSWatch [1] runs the numbers on I Series and TIPS. TIPS yields are improving but I'm not sure it has quite changed the balance yet. Of course, especially in tax deferred/exempt accounts, TIPS have that great attractiveness of principal adjustment (depending on one's inflation view versus nominals) and no annual limits so the time will probably arrive soon enough.

[1] https://tipswatch.com/2022/04/21/new-5-year-tips-auctions-wi...

gkuan··on U.S. interest rates have soared everywhere but savings accounts
And if one happens eventually come under the IRS Form 8815 MAGI cutoff, it has a federal income tax exclusion for education [1]. Consistent with what you say, it is exempt from state income taxes, which savings accounts typically aren't.

[1] https://treasurydirect.gov/indiv/planning/plan_education.htm

gkuan··on Nearly two-thirds of Gen Z think they’ll become crypto millionaires
US I-series savings bonds are yielding 7.1% (and is tax advantaged) which seems to be better than the staking yields of the more reputable PoS coins.
gkuan··on The seven programming ur-languages
Interestingly, there is a Cambridge ML (binary was called CML not to be confused with Concurrent ML CML), which seems to underlie the Nuprl theorem prover (http://www.nuprl.org/book/Metalanguage.html), and was used in Cambridge FCS courses (https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/0910/FoundsCS/usingml.html). There was also Cardelli ML (https://smlfamily.github.io/history/SML-history.pdf). I am not aware of either being called CaML but who knows maybe there is more history out there.
gkuan··on The seven programming ur-languages
The blog post seems to be getting some ML language history wrong: Caml was developed in INRIA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caml) and ML was originally from Edinburgh (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming_language)).
gkuan··on LA’s new trains have not lessened the time spent stuck in traffic
I once did the LA transit ride from Thousand Oaks to Pasadena and back entirely by transit (40 mi one way by driving, transit was more circuitous than that). More frequently, I would take Thousand Oaks to Hollywood or Thousand Oaks to DTLA transit trips. The Red and Gold lines seem quite reasonable. Though short of something I would want to take daily given that I lived far away, it was still a lot less exhausting than trying to drive from Santa Monica to the other side of 405 during the afternoon. Now I’m in a different city and take transit daily.
gkuan··on Big technology companies are doubling down on New York City
Where can one find 2500 sqft apartments for 3000-3500? Very curious.
gkuan··on Ask HN: Resources for learning to write compilers?
I would recommend Appel's Modern Compiler Implementation series. It is good starting place for building up compiler fundamentals and progressively implementing a reasonable compiler for a reasonably rich language without getting bogged down from too many idiosyncrasies.
gkuan··on Show HN: SECCOMP – A Secure Spreadsheet
The ENCRYPTO group put together an implementation of garbled circuits protocols called Tasty a good while ago if it helps anyone. https://github.com/encryptogroup/tasty
gkuan··on No tipping means better business
In some places, the wait staff will grab you on your way out and notify you that you didn't tip enough (say 20% instead of 30%).
gkuan··on Ask HN: What service would you pay $1k/mo for?
individual: child care, higher education that improves career prospects, insurance

business: certain high-end dev environments & tool suites, contract automation

gkuan··on Real-Time Garbage Collection Is Real
There is also this paper by Bacon et al that develops a framework that shows the relationship between refcount and tracing GC (duals of each other) plus the various optimizations of the two: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.143....
gkuan··on Ask HN: Learning about Type Systems
Bob Harper's _Practical Foundations for Programming Languages_ is a good starting point and from there I would go on to Benjamin Pierce's _Types and Programming Languages_.
gkuan··on Vienna again named world's most liveable city
FWIW, the NAR and some publications put out these Most Affordable Cities lists:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/morganbrennan/2012/04/05/america...

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