jshaqaw

Bell Labs in its prime was a marvel of human civilization. But let’s admit the economic conditions which made it possible. Pre antitrust Bell was an absolute monopoly. They could afford science projects with no economic returns because they were insulated from any economic pressures.

The public paid for Bell Labs through high monopoly rents. Want Google to have a Bell Labs then designate it the nation’s sole internet monopoly (which I’m not really advocating and nobody else would either).

I totally remember the time the oracle feed flash loan thing on my fdic insured US dollars was hacked and it violently went to near zero.

Oh wait - that never happened.

I’ve wanted to jump to something sexier for a long time but finding data deep in my notes is so fast on Evernote. It’s also the only way I’ve found to stay in eats sync btw laptop and iPad.

This again? McKinsey doesn’t really charge 3mm for that 23 year old. In reality the customer pays for a project what they pay. How that gets allocated over project staff is meaningless technicalities. As for the value of that 23 year old - my info is dated as of my actual McKinsey experience 20+ years ago - but other than me (who was a 25 year old particularly unsuited to the work) these were some of the most brilliant and hard working people I’ve met as it would pertain to doing that kind of work. But more importantly the job of the analyst and associate - despite a let’s trash the elite consultants article a day - is not to provide advice to corporate chieftains. It is to be the on the ground first point of interaction gathering data and running analyses so that the Partners and Directors who actually do know quite a lot can do their jobs. CEOs pay to get advice from Partners and Partners get the info they need to provide that advice from their on the ground teams. Finally, the actual cost relative to specific work product is a bit illusory. Like a banker who counsels a CEO for 10 years on the house to finally get paid with an M&A fee, Partners/Directors often provide constant counsel over many years to C level types and are intermittently given actual paid engagements.

I feel like I write this response every 3-6 months on HN so I should just save it to Textexpander at this point. I hated working at McKinsey and left in under a year. It was a miserable fit for me and I have no illusions about the firm.

But they are very effective in certain ways. Yes the costs are high but so are the costs of making a mistake or failing to capture an opportunity where impacts are in the billions. Why does McKinsey (sometimes) provide value? One - an organization may be facing something critical which it only faces once every 20 years or once ever. Meanwhile, McKinsey has institutional experience it can draw on dealing with that issue hundreds of times. Second, when the issue is more of a white page strategic question you frankly have more analytical horsepower and broader perspectives than most organizations can field internally.

Are the results always great? Of course not. Bet some of you FAANG and co devs also know some ultra high paid developers and execs at your firms who sometimes strike out. The real world is messy and hard.

People saying McK gets paid millions to have a snot nosed 23 year old tell grizzled veteran operators what to do is either click bait canard or doesn’t understand how this really works.

It is embarrassing that rich tech bro drivel like the Network State is what counts as intellectual discourse in modern society.

After my 2018 top line Intel based MacBook Pro needed weird surgery involving me stacking thermal pads onto the motherboard to remain usable (not something I was thrilled to do with my expensive machine!), Apple is guilty until proven innocent to me on laptop thermal design.

Interesting to me that here on Hacker News there are so many "VR will never happen" based on a static view of where tech is today. I don't think that staring into a lit rectangle with a keyboard based on 1800s technology is the be all end all of human-computer interfaces. I suspect mass AR/VR adoption will happen faster than most people imagine.

The crypto community managed to ignore every lesson from 2008 on cascading networks of financial instability. This is a market microstructure built on sand. We are still in the early innings of what the ultimate forced unwind will look like. The core of the 2008 crisis was at least based on housing which has some inherent downside value and could be resolved via the Fed as a liquidity provider of last resort. Crypto libertarians have been angry at the Fed ever since. Well let’s see how fun a liquidity crisis goes as a counterfactual in an environment with no Fed support.

According to many posts here I’m not supposed to ever interact with a centralized entity but I should manage my own wallet and keep my keys printed on paper buried in the backyard. Yeah that sounds like a path to mass use case adoption of cryptocurrency.

The only ones who are going to walk away from this intact are the lawyers who will be litigating the wreckage here for decades. So much of this industry happens in the grey area of the law which was fine when everyone was getting rich. Now you will have an angry bunch of populist bag holder voters looking — fairly or not - to blame someone else for losing the kids’ college fund in some dodgy levered alt coin scheme.

I’m trying to say this without sounding like a conceited jack@&$ but failing so I’ll just do it. Based on what seem to be objective markers of cognitive performance over the last quarter century this hasn’t been an issue. Neither has it been an issue for my kids who have been vegetarian since birth when benchmarked vs peers and they are easily at the top edge of their grade cohorts of reasonably similar socioeconomic status. Maybe my kids or I would have unified quantum field theory and gravity by now if we ate meat. I don’t know but it seems unlikely. Again though, FWIW we do our best without being zealots to eat varied foods (ie not just spaghetti and Mac/cheese), limit processed food, drink 99.9 percent water vs sugared drinks, etc…. And we are not vegan so eggs and other dairy provide some balance.

I am not a vegan but this article conflates a bunch of issues. Shocker- the consumer packaged goods industry has latched onto veganism to sell more high margin processed food. As to arguments about the need for supplements to get vital nutrients missing even in a whole food vegan diet that may have more heft. I will say as a sample set of one I’m a vegetarian but I eat lots of eggs which I try to buy from humane sources. Middle aged in my late forties. I have a very scientific test of my physical status. If I can still hold my own against someone 20 years younger who weighs 50 pounds more in martial arts then don’t tell me my diet makes me weak!

We have a single data point for the performance of crypto as an asset class during a time of inflation. Admittedly a single data point isn't great but it's all we have. What do you take from the data so far? I don't see Bitcoin exactly holding up its promise as an inflation hedge.

Lots of jobs can be done remotely. We all know that. But putting together something new and dynamic? You need to meet people. In person. A lot. You need to build relationships. You need to have conversations where you explore ideas and test who the people are who may be vital partners, employees, funding, or whatever down the line. You want to inspire a team? You need to be there.

WFH in NYC gives me the best of all worlds. As an introverts introvert I can work from home during most days. But I have a critical mass of top people to have breakfast,lunch, coffee, drinks, a walk in the park, whatever at my immediate fingertips. I don’t need to schedule a trip and I can be home to see the kids in 5-30 minutes after wrapping up. In many ways it’s the best of all worlds.

The number of brain cells and compute cycles being wasted on this nonsense is staggering.

Please make your Turing complete game of life execute arbitrary Lisp code and you will have rescued the holy grail of computer language hacker nerdom here.

Just talk to VCs, CFOs, and their bankers around offerings. Targeting say the Russell 2k inclusion criteria is an explicit part of the roadshow pitch.

You aren’t tracking the whole market. An index is a subset. Even total market indices have weightings which embed biases. And the whole game has been reverse engineered by charlatans to dump crap into rivers of blind money. If think capital offerings aren’t designed explicitly to target index inclusion criteria then you aren’t in on the joke.

Refreshing my memory via Wikipedia the PCjr and AT did come out about the same time but the AT cost 6k in 1984 vs 1500 for the Jr. 6k in 1984 was around 12-13k in 2022 dollars.

That was the first gen keyboard quickly replaced by a nice model which was perfectly comfortable and quote ahead of its time wireless (IR).

Interest to revisit such militant attitudes should the current crash of inflated bullshit techcos continue.

Is your kids 529 plan on the S&P. Well congrats - you got to buy Tesla at the peak of Elon’s pump train just in time to be a ticket holder for his self-immolation show.

Does your 401k hold small cap exposure to the Russell. Yippee you get to be the bag holder for a good chunk of the SPAC garbage VCs dumped into public markets based on things like projections that personal electric helicopter taxis would become ubiquitous in US urban markets by 2025.

Passive investing got gamed by Silicon Valley and isn’t exactly what Bogle had in mind when he got started.

Little known fun-fact re Lotus 1-2-3 was that it came on a ROM cartridge for the PCJr. The PCJr was a total sad sack of a machine. Technically superior to the PC and cheaper too so IBM intentionally crippled it with incompatibility bugs so that businesses could not really rely on it.

BUT they did release Lotus 1-2-3 for it in on a ROM cartridge which in the days when most programs ran on 5.25 inch floppies meant that performance just cranked!

With full warning that it is heterodox, stock-flow macroeconomic models (lots here on it at the Levy Institute: https://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/a-stock-flow-appr... ) is another framework for macroeconomic thinking which is a great supplement to traditional equilibrium-based approaches. I happen to find stock-flow models resonate better with my own intuitions.

Here is a study of one. My next day mood is so predictably awful I pretty much cut alcohol to zero. Like a little buzz well as the next guy but the price for me is just too high. My wife doesn’t affect at all the next day.

This is a neat project. Visual tree/outline approaches to s-expressions is an idea which recurs from time to time. I haven’t embraced them myself but I appreciate the approach. That said, usually if you are many levels deep in nested parens and need a map to find your way out it means some refactoring into smaller simpler functions may be in order.

Byte was great in the day as was Compute with all those pages of hand entry Basic or assembly code.

Yes operating systems are crufty wastelands. Yes the modern internet is a bordello of privacy snooping con men stealing our minds with dopamine engineering.

But most of all, when many of us (not all!) age our passions shift from abstractions to the real. I still think lots of computer ideas are quite neat but it doesn’t fill me with passion like it used to. But that’s the same way for many more abstract things that used to keep my brain and heart churning.

Now I appreciate things like a perfect summer sunset evening more. It’s a goofy evening playing board games and laughing with my family. Maybe it’s a growing sense that these moments aren’t infinite in quantity. Who knows. But it is a natural progression for many of us.

Given this is Hacker News… it was a magical time for technology. Yes it helped I was ages 5-15 for that period. Computers were just coming into the general population and that was a mind blowing thing. At the same time, the pre-mass internet era meant that our brains were our own. Concentration and space to think weren’t yet deprecated features.

Other than that it had the same ups and downs as any other time.

This makes a lot of sense in at least a few cases I can think of. Yes if I want to do a pair trade/arb at a spread it doesn’t make sense to try and execute both parts atomically ca interacting with another party directly looking to put on the inverse. No idea if the funky ai past that point adds value or is fluff but interested enough to find out.

There is an interesting kernel of an idea that much of math is emergent from A low level basic structure but it didn’t take a book the size of Kentucky to say it and others like Chaitin say the same thing with far more clarity and far less self promotion.

Not limited to Hacker News. Other forums I participate in have seen parallel shifts downward in civility. Some of it is generational. For better or worse younger generations often see strident online discourse as totally different than how you would treat a person irl. Older folks have less of a sense of separate worlds there.

In general anonymous commenting was cool for a while but seems to be leading to negative results most places. I’m ready to engage with forums limited to verified real people ex specific situations where personal safety might be at risk (and I’m not in any of those myself now or in the past).

Why do you say Facebook threw it away? Talk to most consumers and Oculus is almost a synonym for VR like a "Xerox machine." I wont weigh on on the tech merits vs competitors but the brand is strong.