yold__

Joined 8 years ago

Karma
367
Submissions
56
Member since
Oct 22
I work as an actuary and data scientist, but I started my career as a software engineer.
View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 2 months ago
Vb 6 got native compilation too
Comment · 1 year ago
In a nutshell, the defect that causes the guns to fire when holstered occurs when there is a small amount of pressure on the trigger. If the slide (top part of the gun) is wiggled / nudged, it will fire. Also, the gun can fire when dropped. Both these issues are mitigated by other manufacturers with a trigger safety and longer trigger pull.
Comment · 1 year ago
Semaglutide / GLP-1 compounding is not limited to just Hims. Lot's of pharmacies do it. The manufacturer (Novo Nordisk) charges 5x-10x for the exact same thing. The author calls the GLP-1s used in compounding "Chinese Knockoffs", but offers no evidence of quality control problems, and is instead relying on the reader's prejudices.

GLP-1 drugs may be a game-changer for obesity and diabetes, the same way that cholesterol (statin) drugs have greatly improved heart health. Hopefully reversing a long trend of increasing waistbands in developed / developing countries. Unfortunately, America will pay the highest price (including Medicare). I'm all for anything that makes them cheaper, including the many compounding pharmacies currently exploiting the loophole the author takes issue with.

Comment · 2 years ago
No, this doesn't imply an "infinite amount of money", it's just a pricing model. You still need the parameters of the distribution (brownian motion / random walk), and these are unobservable. You can try to estimate them, but there is a lot of practical problems in doing so, primarily that volatility / variance isn't constant.
Comment · 2 years ago
Your post is completely off-topic. The paper includes a great discussion about how the property insurance crisis in Florida dates back to Hurricane Andrew in the 90s, not a court decision in 2017. The issue raised in the paper isn't climate change, its weakly capitalized insurers and the conflict of interest created by one particular rating agency (Demotech), that is giving sketchy insurers clean bills of health that allow them to operate.

Tort reform in Florida is a bandaid. The state-run insurer is creating serious market distortions by undercharging for the risk, accumulating very large proportions of the state homeowners insurance policies (since no one else will), and then offloading the policies to undercapitalized insurers while looking the other way about their poor financial condition. When Citizen's claims are in excess of its reserves, the legislature steps in and taxes the rest of the state to cover the shortfall. I'm guessing when the other insurers become insolvent, the shortfall is offload to the state guarantee fund (possibly on the taxpayers dime). This is all covered in the paper.

Comment · 2 years ago
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/faq/505/what-doe...

I really don't want to keep googling things for you. The police are not judicial officers. Yes, I've read the article.

Comment · 2 years ago
https://www.hipaajournal.com/hipaa-compliance-for-pharmacies...

The police are breaking federal law and the article is wrong. This is not a gray area.

Comment · 2 years ago
When you buy health insurance, you sign a temporary HIPAA release (limited duration) to cover the period that they are underwriting. They can only query your specific pharmacy records for the purposes of underwriting. So yes, this is a HIPAA violation when it is being used by the police. I work in this space with HIPAA data.
Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
no prob, go ahead
Comment · 3 years ago
I think there is an additional reason here too. Software development work is (too often) seen as heads-down, anti-social work. Large corporations often bridge communication between software developers and the business/end-users via third-parties, such as product owners/manager, architects, and business analysts. Remember the "telephone" game we all played in kindergarten, where a message whispered between participants becomes comically unrecognizable by the time it reaches the last person? That is BigCorp software development in a nutshell.

Solving this communication problem is uncomfortable. Connecting software developers with end-users is hard. It means software developers have to have courage to ask "dumb questions" when the end-users explains something too quickly in jargon-laden terms. It means that end-users have to be patient, with the time to teach and explain enough about the problem domain. People with strong communication *and* technical skills are hard to find, and creating ongoing mutual respect and cooperation between end-users and the oft-hated IT department is only possible when employee attrition is low enough to create long-standing relationships.

Software development is fun when it is a high-momentum, self-contained exercise. So we direct our energy to complexity, because its fun and safe. We don't need to stop and engage with end-users who speak a language we barely understand. We don't need to create consensus among disagreeing end-users representatives. We just need put on some good music, drink some coffee, and solve clean technical problems, rather than messy people problems. I'd guess most software developers would say "you don't pay me enough to deal with people", and walk away.

Comment · 3 years ago
witch (incorrect), rather than which
Comment · 3 years ago
Have you heard of Citadel?
Comment · 3 years ago
> Generally they make 25-50% more than a similar level vanilla software engineer.

It's often even less in my experience. Despite having a "unicorn" skillset (soft-skills, advanced degree, domain experience, and SWE experience), I make about as much as a vanilla SWE. There are a huge number of inexperienced PhDs that want into the field, and we are flooded with resumes every time a DS leaves. Also, most of the time, models don't really matter. What makes or breaks most DS projects is soft-skills, stakeholder management, and data cleaning / feature engineering.

Comment · 4 years ago
Not if you factor in risk aversion and declining utility. Most investors would happily give up some upside for downside protection. This is where option strategies are not zero sum

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton