thehappyfellow

That's what I had in mind! The whole post is a claim that evaluating knowledge work got more expensive because cheaper measures stopped correlating well with quality.

If someone was already evaluating the work output using a metric closer to the underlying quality then it might not have been a big shift for them (other than having much more work to evaluate).

Which means you can't select all on text which isn't editable - insane!

My blog is at https://blog.happyfellow.dev if you'd like to read it.

I'm also the Head of The Institute for Type-Safe Memetic Research which website is https://typememetics.institute/

Author here.

I wonder about that as well!

Of course practitioners shouldn't expect to understand the bleeding edge without investing a lot in learning the subject.

However providing people with software engineering background an easier on ramp for understanding PLT would be nice, wouldn't it?

It's closely related to another truth:

Unconstrained curiosity is a vice, not virtue.

Thank you, this makes much more sense and it's a classic issue Matt Levine's readers will be familiar with.

Allegedly being investigated is also quite far from "been manipulating markets", I appreciate the clarification.

source?

You’re right, there are downsides like turbine you mention! We mitigate it by running a hot backup we can switch to in seconds and a box in which we test restoring backups every 24h, that’s necessary! But it requires 3x the number of big expensive boxes.

I still think it’s the right tradeoff for us, operating a distributed system is also very expensive in terms of dev and ops time, costs are more unpredictable etc.

It’s all tradeoffs, isn’t it?

It’s incredible how much Postgres can handle.

At $WORK, we write ~100M rows per day and keep years of history, all in a single database. Sure, the box is big, but I have beautiful transactional workloads and no distributed systems to worry about!

It really makes me happy to know that my writing struck a chord for at least one person - thank you!

Yeah, I was angry when I was writing it, not denying it.

Author here. I did not expect to see my post on HN!

It was a rant, I was venting, it’s not supposed to be an objective statement about the state of tech. It’s shouting into the void about the things I find unfair and unbearable, I don’t think it’s a great HN material.

I made up parts of the story because it didn’t happen to me and I didn’t want to share details of somebody else’s situation.

Hah, thanks!

I really wanted an optimisation rabbit hole and seems like this projective going to deliver on that :)

I also tweet about the progress on @onehappyfellow if you’re interested

Learning Rust by building a simple database using it.

I’ve done my share of programming languages (PHP, C++, Python, Ruby, Haskell) and for the last 10 years I’ve been working in OCaml (which I love so much) but Rust would be a nice addition IMO.

And I never implemented LSM style database before! So that’s fun.

I only just started and the pace will be slow (I have 3h/week to spend on it on a good week), if you are curious: https://github.com/happyfellow-one/crab-bucket

Just a normal deck is fine, you have to prepare it but it’s not a big deal.

You should play a lot of hands, or organise a tournament, for Figgie to really make sense. It's fun but I prefer to play in person.

For related background read the (horrifying) description of Leverage, a “research” institution with links to Zizians: https://medium.com/@zoecurzi/my-experience-with-leverage-res...

There’s an undercurrent of cults and cult-like institutions in the rationalist crowd (think: lesswrong.com folks) and this is one instance of this.

I think the surprise part in under-appreciated. The quicktest tests I write are frequently of the form “let’s spend 15 minutes and see what happens” kind of tests - and I almost always find bugs that way. The return on investment is bonkers.

I do think that immutable by default OCaml + good PBT tooling there helps a lot.

Even trading companies have a ton of project and code which you'll find at any reasonably sized tech company, the algo-heavy code is a small fraction of the total code they write. In this sense, they are not such an outlier just based on the business they are in - I think the use of a functional language, good tooling and education around PBT are much more important factors.

Fine but cutting the thought process at "it depends" is not a great way to understand what's happening here. You can explain anything happening at any company by saying "they need certain things more than whatever else they could spend that time on".

Why is PBT useful at Jane Street, at least more than in other places? Is it the use of functional language? Average Jane Street dev being more familiar with PBT? Is the domain particularly suited to this style of testing?

Explicitly, my claim is that the biggest bottleneck is education on how to use PBT effectively and Jane Street is not using them to get an extra mile in safety, they use it because it's the easiest way to write large chunk of the tests.

How’s that comparable at all? There are no network effects from writing property based tests, people use them if they are helpful - are they testing enough of the code with reasonable amount of effort. Nobody’s forcing people to write tests, unlike Google forces usage of protobuf on all projects there.

How come e.g. Jane Street uses it so much? It’s the second most common type of test I write.

To be honest, my thinking on this is not crystalised but I do think there's an important difference between a religion like Christianity and other "occult" practices - it's about social guardrails against going insane.

Practicing Christians will congregate weekly, reinforce their beliefs, chat about them, confess to the same priest - all of this stops going into crazy corners of the belief space. Also, normal to be openly Christian (at least where I'm from) and people have vague ideas about which beliefs are roughly in that category - and can call out deviations.

I'm basing this all on my guesses to be clear! Still curious to see if others have similar thoughts.

I can believe that it works. But there's a risk of actually starting to believe that the astral plane and other stuff is real, particularly if someone has predispositions for schizophrenia.

There's also a degree of danger, believing your dreams tell you the future is one thing but if you immerse yourself in occult, text about daemons, start believing they might have their own agendas - and I mean really believe - you can see how dangerous it can get.

The classic, train your mind to believe anything you want, use it to improve your life, try believing some really cooky stuff, woah you actually believe it, no shit, you descend into crazier and crazier stuff.

I’m currently leaning towards believing that learning intense focus through meditation + setting intentions for yourself in that state is genuinely useful, just like rituals are (saying “yes” to your partner in front of friends and family it changes you). But the border between it and “I’m a trans dimensional shaman in psychiatric A&E” is a bit to thin for my liking.

Want to second that, not getting people an opportunity to like you can turn you into that person at the top who’s disconnected from line engineers work - and people won’t trust you enough to tell you when you’re making a mistake. Guess how I learnt that :)

Happy New Year everyone! I hope this coming year you’ll find the meaning you’re yearning for, spend it with people who deeply care for you, love and be loved. That you’ll flourish, feel content and happy. That you’ll experience more good than evil.

Learn OCaml in 2025

I’m sorry I don’t have a summary but the judgment is also enlightening: https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/bates-v-...

And wiki has rest it the judgments: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bates_%26_Others_v_Post_Offi...

I have a lot of respect for the judge after reading this. Here’s a quote describing Post Office evidence:

  “bare assertions and denials that ignore what has actually occurred… [amounting] to the 21st century equivalent of maintaining that the earth is flat”.

Buggy software is important aspect of the story but to me it’s not the main one.

The main one is that the post office management/officials at some point became aware of the bugs and that they were ruining lives of innocent people and they knowingly kept lying to save their asses.

The inquiry page has all of this and more: https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/about-inquiry

I’ve read through it, it’s long but it’s a good (while terrifying) read.