noname123

Hoping when J2EE/Java Beans of the late 2020's consultants from Accenture takes over and makes a million ClaudeHelloWorldFactoryBuilder, there will be a profitable niche in the Haskell and Erlang of 2020's for the rest of us!

It makes me wonder if the current app dopamine/gold rush will be similar to the Sora/MidJourney dopamine hit in 2023 or the AI "make me a story to make fun of my friend on Discord" dopamine hit in 2022. "We have never been able to make more images, movies and now apps... but they don't seem to have made a single killer art, film... or dare I say app?" Maybe just maybe, the novelty will wear off and people realize how artificial and soul-less these AI-tokenmaxxed app's are, with their temu Cyberpunk aesthetics, California minimalist Dashboard UX flow and mid-witted Rust stack.

I wonder what is the equivalent in 2026 of what Dave should do to be a human cosmonaut to go against the transformer VAE probability-based machine we call Claude.

Lol you literally clipped my quote (citing the exact candidates) - so thank you for being you! Just a pro-tip, politics is not changing the minds of ideologues, addressing directly to the middle and silent majority and letting them observe your political opponents make their own mistakes. Thank you again for the engagement in my top comment thread.

Thank you for your kind words. It's mostly because this particular American thinking is driven by a sense of belonging to an in-group and need to feel that they are good people (versus actually doing good and staking something of value, which I respect completely regardless if I agree with someone's politics or religion or whatever). I push back on them because (a) most of time, ad-hominen attacks mean they have already lost the argument and (b) for people who are too timid to speak against the toxic group-think. Life is too short to live and placate this type of mentality held by people who don't really like you or mostly don't really believe in it themselves, just go along to get along.

My post may come off disgruntled (point taken). But my point is to completely dispel any romantic notion for someone who is young and want to make the switch into life science research, if they learn all of these ugly things and still want to do it - then they made the right decision and I've done my job. Kindness imho is not being polite and then taking advantage of people's passion/enthusiasm later (nobody so far has disputed the -EV nature of the field itself just my tone) - it is doing right by people from the jump, not serving the institution or my interest in it. And I'm not sayin you're wrong either or that you are not dedicated (by default I presume everybody is in the research), just sharing my perspective, hope you have a good one.

Thanks labrat! I appreciate your comment - when you made a living "shaving" p-values, shrinking fat tails and crafting a narrative in the life science industrial complex, maybe it's easy to make the switch to exposing bad risk/reward payoffs in the manic and /r/wallstreetbets-driven options and binary options casinos??? Best of luck to you!

Appreciate your comment and opinion, I can't say I agree but I really do respect the honesty and where you are coming from!

I'm not sure who is the next DSA candidate versus the Democratic establishment or Republican candidate (e.g., Francesca Hong v. Dave Crowley, or Abu Sayed v. Mike Rogers). But I encourage you to go to the "machine" (Polymarket, Kalshi) to take position and express your opinion!

I think it says more how you read things and where we are coming from - I meant int'l students earn my respect for being cleared eyed and pursue both their economic and academic interest. For the feminists professors, I'm actually shading the sciences by saying that a lot of times, the so-called tangible and much well-funded science departments produce just as little tangible value as the intangible humanities. But don't get me wrong, I also understand your comment - hope you get social capital up so one day you can stake it in the future to help an immigrant or a feminist stranger for real.

My original point is to make a point that biology or academia in general is very romantic to outsiders - but it's not a very +EV play unless (1) you are already very independently wealth, or (2) you are really really into the subject and know what you're signing up for (the long odds, hours and politics). 99% of the people will take this as a pessimistic view and stop there but 1% will actually pursue option (2).

RE: your political point, I submit to you many institutions are very left-leaning and "Woke-1" was defeated by its emphasis on shaming tactics and identity politics - which ironically brought upon the identity politics of the right and the current "regimen's" backlash on defunding DEI initiatives, which hurts ironically the sciences most due to its outsized reliance from NIH/NSF/DARPA etc. And I welcome actually "Woke-2.0" where DSA is actually focused on kitchen table issues such as grocery and health insurance cost; and anticipate that our political pendulum will swing to the left at the next cycle.

Yes for me, it's mutually beneficial and gives me a quick way to polarize, filter out people I don't want waste time associating with (and vice versa too - people who are institutionalist, professional managerial class (PMCs); thank you for making my point!)

This is a very romantic view of life sciences.

Speaking as a guy who made the pivot to research in life sciences (as a "data scientist") from "full stack software engineer", yes the data and mission is very sexy to a nerdy guy like myself, applying deep learning algorithms to spatial or epigenetic sequencing data of cancer cells to figure out the secret markers or mechanism of cancer cell mestasis or human immune response.

The realistic or unromantic view is you are a cog in the life science industrial complex where you are underpaid and under-appreciated; research often takes years and unclear if you are making progress or scamming the taxpayers like a humanities professor in women's studies (yes even STEM sometimes feels like that); and in computing, unlike tech, you are not the center of attention, most wet lab scientists treat you more like a resource, a grad student they need to make their pvalue or figure panel pop nicely versus a "full stack software engineer" - And if you don't like it, hundreds of thousands of post-doc's or grad students are waiting to take your place for their shot - not in pursing their passion but for a visa in America.

The real value I learned from my pivot from pivoting away from tech and pivoting into Biology is ironically how to gamble. I joined a Discord/Slack sub-channel for #options-trading, #sports-betting and #poker during my studies for a Masters in data science with other degenerate students who loved gambling, and how to identify, automate and size +EV plays in gambling or derivatives trading. I make more than 2-3x what I make in W-2 from my capital gains and W2-G than my W-2 for past the 6 years. But that is not put shade on biological sciences and rather giving credit to Biology for teaching me how to analyze data and gamble.

QQ for all the pro players out there, for 6 or 9-ring poker, can solvers really solve every scenario - or there is simply too many permutations.

The other question I have is how do human players adapt to GTO play now? Like in other games, humans have adapted to novel strategies - I'm curious for poker whether there's ways to exploit GTO solvers (ie, if you put your opponent bot on the GTO range and chase the fat tails). And is the poker community's fair play detection algorithm good enough to catch players who use solvers like chess community - or it's easy to evade by making a few deviations. Much thanks!

As a Chinese-American, I feel rather ambivalent about it - dare I say even positive emotion at the West's current propaganda. Due to the quote - "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win", with the only caveat that West doesn't laugh but rather "coddle you as the savior". So in another word, I don't expect NYT (or Fox News for that matter) to "accept" or "approve" Chinese people - as much as I can't wait for Japan to apologize or ask reparations for IJA 's action in Asia during WW2; when China has overtaken Japan in GDP decades ago. (which is by the way of due to Plaza Accord which is an tangent but not really on the subject matter of self-reliance and global unilaterism vs. multilaterism).

Not sure when we will see this but when we have the Century of Africa, I'd love to see the spin on the front-page of NYT then. I predict something similar to the shade like "Nationalism/Hinduism by Modhi" when he won't play ball with the West on Russian sanction; when African countries rise up with their own ambitions and visions for their own people.

My apologist response would be that Polymarket isn’t the root cause—it’s more of a mirror. It simply makes the incentives and speculation already present in late-stage capitalism more transparent and accessible for anyone to participate in.

You argue that platforms like this encourage speculation about things like celebrity deaths. But celebrity culture is already heavily monetized—think Page Six, Access Hollywood, livestreamed royal weddings, or endless coverage of Taylor Swift’s personal life.

Conceding the point to you that death pool bets increases a significant security risk to celebrities (never mind the appeal to emotions), would that such a risk acceptable to have a more accurate and non-biased informational poll of who might be next U.S. president or who/when will US/Israel strike next made available to the wider public?

Thank you for your response. My last word is one of my favorite film is "Y tu mamá También" where my favorite character de la película es Mexico, life is like foam, so give yourself away like the sea. Puedes vivir el momento, pero tu posición social es para siempre. Hope you have a great day/year.

Mi Mexicanito, sinceramente de este chinito, "On the Road" is imho about all about these gringo's chase for cultural/spiritual accumulation - just with beatnik fashion/prose than with a briefcase.

>Teresa (who is from Mexico/o la conquista sexual temporal de nuestro supuesto héroe en "busca de la verdad") didn’t want Sal to leave, but he told her that he had to. He had sex with Teresa in the barn his last night in the area, and the next morning Teresa brought him breakfast. They agreed to meet in New York whenever Teresa could get there, though Sal says they both knew this wouldn’t happen. Sal left and hitchhiked back to L.A., arriving in the early morning. There, he bought a bus ticket to Pittsburgh and spent most of his remaining money on food for the trip.

My reading of "On the Road" is Jack Kerouac's ultimate realization that their restless wandering is really a pursuit of narcissism of sex, jazz and drugs to fill up their empty inside. Look at the real personal lives of the Beatniks and Kerouac's later readings (e.g., Dharma Bums) for the confirmations or disconfirmations. Or look to the spiritual children of the Beatniks, the Western backpackers or the spiritual seekers to Mexico or Thailand (privileged, naive and ultimately exploitative and conformist when the chips are down).

Banality of evil. Promotion-driven/mortgage driven development. NIBMY. But don't mind me, I'm guilty of this more than most people but IMHO I think at least it's important to acknowledge the culpability of the affluent 10% people vs. the 1%. IMHO, we are worse than the 1% for enabling this society.

As a Chinese-American, in my humble opinion the Great Gatsby is the 1920's version of "On the Road", "American Psycho" and "Liar's Poker". In another words, it is about the American spirit to chase money/success/glamour in spite of the protagonist's preconceived understanding that doing so would end up ultimately futile and empty.

"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgasmic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther ... And one fine morning- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." IMHO, the green light is the dopamine rush of the American spirit.

Your notion of the American inner life that it somehow does exists I agree with but it is imho a far cry from stereotypical notion of inner life of quiet contemplation, familial and communal obligation in the European or Chinese manner. You can look no further than in this forum where people talk about accumulating material wealth whether by pursuing a well-paid tech job at a BigTech company or raising money or bootstrapping as an "indie". And people here will have read great books and understand the notions that "money do not buy happiness" or that "family is everything", but put the same people under your so-called WandaVision test of illusions of two choices - they will, 9/10 times choose a morally compromising job BigCo, business pursuit AdTech or AI Slop that favors material accumulation at the expense of true self-actualization (Gatsby vs. Nick).

IMHO the pursuit of "the green light" for the "orgasmic future" IS the American inner life, whether it be from the pioneers going West, to Italian immigrants in Brooklyn to Jersey Shore/Soprano's, to the rich Chinese Fu-Er-Dai shopping/clubbing fashion in Manhattan to the Indian immigrants going West again to switch job from WiPro to FAANG E6, the pursuit of accumulation and glamour is the inner life, dare I say "it's not even about the money" - but a spiritual pursuit of a lifetime of running to make one feel whole like Gatsby did . And that we can't help ourselves - like "boats against" rolling bubbles and crashes of the American stock markets or TikTok trends, thinking "but this time it's different", but "borne back ceaselessly" into our past selves of emptiness that we were trying to fill up with wealth and social status in the 1st place.

My response is there were many people (primarily engineering students and professors) who might have seen the shooter during the previous weeks - but it is only the former student who given his background of being homeless and being extra vigilante as a homeless person noticed the shooter as suspicious and even followed him to his car that led to the tip.

Many in tech will quote Steve Jobs "you can't connect the dots forward, only backwards" speech, but this guy whom I don't know, I like to believe he lived it. Flip your question on your head, would you be willing be homeless for 10 years and in the process help catch a school shooter?

I think Christina Paxson should hire him to be a director of patrol or more realistically a community liason for Brown campus police. The RI/FBI circus were all mum on whether the guy will receive the 50K reward - very on-brand. He wants privacy so I don't know even if there will be a GoFundMe but I think they should do the right thing and give the guy his 50 grand at the very least.

I agree 100%. The biggest example here is if you read and go back to the threads of HN before the downfalls of SBF and Liz Holmes, you'll see so many people on here worshipping them and apologists for their bad behavior. Most are corporate types are conformists who buy what they are told ('till the narrative are changed). It used to bother me but nowadays I just keep it pushing and aim for the tails and let the mid-curve people be the mid-curve people.

I work on campus (very very close to the engineering building) and I previously lived near Brookline. So all of this hits home.

But what got me was the tipster who blew wide open the case is reportedly a homeless Brown graduate who lived in the basement of the engineering building (a la South Korean film Parasite). It made me so sad but also not surprised, that building does have a single occupancy bathroom with showers; and no keycard access was needed in the evening until 7pm.

So it made sense to me that he or she would've used that building for shelter and comfort. Also it didn't boggle my mind at all that a Brown grad (from the picture, the tipster looked like a artistic Brown student vs. the careerist type) would be homeless - given that I known many of my classmates who have a certain personality, brilliant but also idealistic/uncompromising that made them brittle unfortunately in a society that rewards conformity, settling and stability.

I can't get over the fact that two Brown student whom presumably have fallen on the wayside of society have chosen two different paths, (1) the homeless guy who still perseveres even in the basement of Barrus & Holley for 15 years a la Parasite after 2010 graduation but still has the situational awareness and rises to the occasion to give the biggest tip to the Providence Police, (2) the other guy who harbors so much resentment over a course of 25 years to plan a trip from Florida to gun down innocent kids who are 18 and 19 and his classmate when they were 18 and 19 year old.

>The basis trade, classically executed, is delta neutral: one isn’t exposed to the underlying itself. You don’t need any belief in Bitcoin’s future adoption story, fundamentals, market sentiment, halvings, none of that. You’re getting paid to provide the gambling environment, including a really important feature: the perp price needs to stay reasonably close to the spot price, close enough to continue attracting people who want to gamble. You are also renting access to your capital for leverage.

Patrick is largely correct on perp futures being mostly used as a leverage instrument to gamble on bitcoin or ether by retail. However I think he's missing one point which is that actually some institutional players also use CME futures to gain exposure to Bitcoin (e.g., BITO ETF or a pension fund that wants to gain exposure to crypto and have a fiduciary duty to hold assets with AAA custodians).

The thesis being that if you're an institution, you don't trust the relatively "fly-by" offshore crypto or even US-regulated custodians of crypto. When you trade CME bitcoin futures, your settlement is guaranteed by the clearing entities of Chicago Mercantile Exchange which are bulge bracket firms of TradFi. So why CME futures largely reflect a premium over the spot BTC price - and this premium is a function of the demand of bitcoin at anytime and the Fed fund rate. As the bitcoin futures market is highly efficient, the CME futures premium is arbitraged across the various DeFi and CeFi exchanges with basis points added relative to the default risk of each venue.

And the basis trade itself is not a "risk-free" arbitrage. The seller on the other side of gamblers are exposed to "right-tail" risk - your premium you get paid to "carry" the bitcoin is fixed while the collateral you must hold in theory to "hold" the coin on behalf of the buyer could be in theory infinite if bitcoin skyrockets to infinity. Sell too much and you might not have enough collateral before the futures settlement happens (for a fixed term futures, not perps) kind of like a reverse but still deadly scenario with Silicon Valley Bank (i.e., you incur "paper loss" that goes away if you can hold it to expiry; but you get force liquidated before then).

If picking as a finishing poker position, I'd definitely to end up as the 95 year old with a trillion dollars. When you're 95, life is about reflecting and living more with the past - and I like reflecting about that outcome with its share of certainly many greats and bads it takes to accumulate that kind of fortune. 25 years old with a thousand dollar on the other hand, statistically speaking, is starting and will finish with mediocre chip stack. Just the laws of averages sorry.

If picking as a starting poker position, I'd definitely want to be the 25 year old with a thousand because you'll be able to play more hands and have more experiences and hopefully have more fun even if you'll most likely end up very average or lose your entire chip-stack. I guess what I'm saying is there's no virtue in poverty and no guarantee wealth will bring you ultimate satisfaction either. Your choice is a false mutual exclusivity imho (in that everyone is 25 AND 95 [assuming that that they in everyone lives to 95], someone wanting to be 25 again doesn't imply that their previous journey to 95 is somehow intrinsically worth less - like an adrenaline junkie wanting to ride again the rollercoaster he just got off from).

To be honest, I don't know what is worse. Installing a R library that require re-installing a bunch of updates, and being stuck in R installation hell or exerpiencing conda install that is stuck in "Resolving Dependencies" hell. The only thing I've learned to mitigate both is just containerize everything.

For AlphaFold3 (vs. AlphaFold2 which was 100% public), they released the weights if you are an affiliate with an academic institution. I hope they do the same with AlphaGenome. I don't even care about the commercial reasons or licensing fees, it's more of a practical reason that every research institution will have an HPC cluster which is already configured to run deep learning stuff can run these jobs faster than the Google API.

And if they don't, I'm not sure how this will gain adoption. There are tons of well-maintained and established workflows out there in the cloud and on-prem that do all of these things AlphaGenome claim to do very well - many that Google promotes on their own platform (e.g., GATK on GCP).

(People in tech think people in science are like people in tech just jump on the latest fads from BigTech marketing - when it's quite opposite it's all about whether your results/methods will please the reviewers in your niche community)

To me both are beautiful. At risk of getting further tangential lol, microbiology and cancer genomics to me are beautiful competitions like trading between market participants (cancer cells vs immune cells).

What I'm trying to say is I don't buy the notion of humans "conquering" a disease or the virtue of somehow "elevating" ourselves beyond greed. We are just player-actors in both the beautiful cycle of life-and-death and the madness of crowds participating in markets of life (airbnb rental, dating, job, you name it). To pretend otherwise that somehow we can solve and tame uncertainty is -EV.

Beautiful eulogy. I don't know the author nor the eulogized but reading the eulogy made me appreciate people like those two (poker players, options traders, sports gamblers etc).

I often see in HN comments about how trading and Wall St in general is evil - when I feel completely the opposite. The two inventors of Figgie may not have contributed directly to curing cancer, saving the dolphins or the whales - dare I posit that most of tech building enterprise JIRA-esque todo-lists, e-commerce middleware and ad trackers don't either.

What I love about their friendship is that I see poker/gambler-mindset of always going for it, shoving the chips to the middle of the table when the pot-odds are good and it is a +EV play. I think they went all-in on several projects such as Figgie, AI Poker and teaching - seemingly all without the whole LinkedIn life coach-advised manner of building up your brand, client-base etc.

The older I get, I find more value too in the honesty of finance and trader types. Yes trading is about money but being honest about that is ironically one of the most altruistic things that can happen for a person. I find that most traders and gamblers who become aware of their greed and selfishness in their work - ironically also causes them to be very generous and selfless people in life due to their constant awareness of that limitation; and to also have zero fox given about what other people think of them professionally and socially (vs. in tech nowadays).

As an options trader/gambler, I'm thankful for the author's eulogy and their efforts in inventing the game. It's a bittersweet story. I read from the eulogy that Max Chiswick embraced the variance of life. Their friendship albeit short and sweet for me is like a fat right tail call option - the holding period might've only been a year and change - but the payoff is one that enriches the soul for life.

Don't work on or for a SaaS business.

But the argument would go for a SaaS, you're paying for (1) potentially upgrades and support, and (2) the ease-of-mind to off-load self hosting to someone else. So yes I agree, only SaaS business people who offer customers a buy-to-own option (open-source their SaaS suites with a push-button to deploy and host on AWS) should be able to comment on thread!

Folks flagged ae_throw's question and got it to be muted (which I found very interesting)... so I'm resurrecting his question from <dead> and answering it anyways:

>Can someone give a reasonable argument as to why we should read WSJ? Or WaPo? Or NYT or any other large publication of this nature (looking particularly at The Economist). We know they post propaganda, spin stories however they please, and we know their fact checking is awful. I don’t think they have any journalistic integrity left.Please enlighten, am curious.

I find it useful to understand the other side and the echo chamber/bubble they are in; and by extension, leads to better insight and critique of the echo chamber my side is in.

As a right-winger (I put my bias forward to help communicate up-front my angle/bias as everybody has their biases) - for instance, I stopped reacting to NYT, NPR and WaPo's headlines and instead just categorized and label mechanically (as an AI sentiment bot might do) what their purpose for "manufactured consent" is; the headline behind the headline, for example for the left:

Many headline news if you flip to any NYT headlines any time of day, you can categorize them as "climate insecurity" (Global Warming is eating up a local area, Maui/Florida), the "MAGA threat" (a minority group is being persecuted by the vengeful "white right"), "neo-conservative foreign policy endorsements" (Ukraine is 'wining the war; Ughyur human rights violations; America is winning against Russia/China bloc and always on the progressive side of human rights).

It helps me frame critically the right-wing biases in my own echo chamber. For instance, it makes me realize that WSJ's more endorsement for "holier-than-thou" free-wheeling enterprise/business is really the equivalent right-wing propaganda to indoctrinate its side against left's efforts to union and regulate businesses for consumer rights and the environment. Similarly, the anti-SJW, exodus from California to Texas theme in Fox News is parallel to the "MAGA threat" stories from the left; and is just right-wing identity politics - just as bad as left-wing identity politics. And foreign policy-wise, both left and right are surprisingly uniform and orthodox to American exceptionalism and interventionism.

It makes me realize that American politics and journalism is at large a game of sports, marketing where both sides hype up the "brand-values" of their sides and vilify the other side; but at the end of the day, the owners in the box seats at the top of the arena have the same values; and the fans/citizens though may spit and belittle each other in the spirit of factional rivalary, surprisingly have so much in common with each other as jersey-wearing blue collar tailgating fans - than the NFL owners in their suites and boardrooms. And this notion of simultaneously gives me both great cynicism and hope for the state of America.