lagrangian
2mo ago
Does anyone have advice for transitioning from FAANG -> finance/HFT?
I know some c++, but not a ton, so "learn more c++" is the obvious first step. Beyond that, unclear to me what to do. I'd like something fully remote that pays better than FAANG and is less soul crushingly boring. Something with high performance code instead of just tons of business logic.
Relatedly, I'm about halfway from (1-2 years away from) promotion to senior. Worth sticking around to get it, or jump ASAP? Leaning "stick around" to hedge my bets and have time to study.
We have lots of programmers and aspiring programmers on here. Is there interest in my hosting a (possibly regular) "office hours" via discord etc? Career advice, code review, anything I can help with. --FAANGer
Edit: link is http://meet.google.com/ieq-zixv-xwf
lagrangian
1mo ago
statutory rape is very much not rape
To be clear, are you espousing the belief that an adult (e.g. a 30 year old man) is in no way morally transgressing to have sex with an enthusiastic twelve year old? Nine year old? Toddler?
lagrangian
1mo ago
getting taken advantage of
I think a key detail here is that alcohol is a helluva drug. It's quite easy, especially as a smaller, younger woman to overestimate your tolerance. Either of you also might not know what's in the punch exactly, or how long you hit the keg.
So, the ethical thing is to look at the person as you're getting to bed and ask "ok, but really, is it OK to have sex here?" I think if she'd never in a million years have sex with you after a moderate amount of alcohol, no. If in the heat of the moment and a bit buzzed, she'd probably have said yes, you're at least in grey territory, potentially fine, depending on the details.
lagrangian
11mo ago
I've been seeing a woman for two months now. Both early 30s. She's very busy with work (which often takes her out of town), but even so, we've had an all-day date each weekend. She's finally in town during the week, so we're getting dinner tonight. I think I'm going to ask her to be my girlfriend. We talked about things a couple dates ago and established that we're not seeing other people. I feel like exclusive and girlfriend aren't even very different, but a little. More expression of intent to grow things. It's not that we discussed and avoided bf/gf labels last time, we just didn't talk about it.
It's been a minute since I've gotten this far into things with someone. (Four years ago, a three month relationship; seven years ago, 7 months; some fucking the ex mixed in there...) And the last couple times I have, I felt like I had more sense that there was a reason things wouldn't work out. This one actually seems plausible, which is scary. It's not entirely clear to me how I feel about her, which is reasonable for two months. But it just makes me feel guilty, like am I just saying things and following steps because it seems like the thing to do (and also, sex)?. I don't think so, I really think there's something here, but feelings are confusing. Who knew.
We've both basically lived alone and had intense jobs forever. It's weird imagining fitting someone into my life, maybe even living with someone eventually. Weirder, I think I like the idea. This just in: even programmers are social mammals.
Also weird is that I'm in good shape and have money now. I've never been terrible on either front, but man, does seem to be helpful. How to split expenses is an awkward thing I haven't figured out yet, and I just don't care that much. She seems quite well off actually, for not being a programmer/doctor/lawyer. Also, hot. And not crazy. Didn't seem to particularly care for my briefly discussing the motte style politics, but also just doesn't seem to care about politics or generally be terminally online, which might be better than agreeing with me in the first place...
lagrangian
4mo ago
Related followup: what is the safest OTC sleep aid? Thoughts on doxylamine (unisom)?
lagrangian
2mo ago
I'm not an expert on C++ or HFT, but I think in short: yes. Very much so. The main thing. When I've interviewed in the past (Citadel, Two Sigma, etc), C++ is a huge topic. Outside finance, I get language agnostic leetcode type things (and usually answer in Python). In finance, details of C++ are the majority of the interview topics. E.g., implement your own shared_ptr class.
I think that while there are finance jobs where Python (no doubt wrapping Pandas or similar, and therefore C++) is adequate, something faster/more customizable/more predictable is usually needed. Golang is garbage collected, so the pauses will ruin your tail latency. "Web friendly" is not relevant at all to HFT.
Rust is an option - it should in general have equal control and performance to C++. But, the institutional knowledge and ecosystem are just not in the same league as C++. The basic rust tradeoff vs C++ is that you get more safety, but it's harder to get anything done. Maybe a sufficiently good Rust programmer can be actually more productive, since the safety lets you avoid thinking about certain things, but there's vastly more adequate C++ programmers than Rust ones.
Idk if "too low IQ for FAANG" was a joke or not, but I think "medium IQ, high conscientiousness, high willingness to be bored for money" is more the requirement. Sure, there are people doing cool shit who need all the IQ they can get, but it ain't most of us. For every engineer optimizing the company-wide database engine, there's thousands shuffling bits from A to B.
lagrangian
3mo ago
Re sheep skin condoms: 1) they're actually sheep intestine, 2) they're great
That said, I don't know how old their use is, or if DIY sheep condoms were common, or if they would have been as surprisingly not gross as the kind you can buy today.
lagrangian
14d ago
Thanks for this!
One modification I wonder if you'd be willing to simulate for us: what if we don't strictly require stopping at n? You could formalize it to something like "given a strategy that on average samples n suitors when run it to its stopping point, what are the loss/etc?" p(miss) becomes 0 by definition.
That feels more like real life: if the goal is to stop dating by 35, but I happen to be dating Hitler when I hit 35, I'm probably gonna push it to 36.
lagrangian
1mo ago
A motivated young person can easily earn $300k annually by age 30. Not as a doctor, not as a lawyer or consultant, nor as a software engineer. But it's quite possible, even trivial. The catch is that you have to work in a disfavored trade such as tire repair, HVAC, or construction
This feels unlikely. Even as a software engineer, you're doing well above average if you hit 300k ever, let alone by 30 (source). Do you have a source on your end?
lagrangian
4mo ago
largely off topic, but are you suggesting withdrawing 5-7% per year from the 401k? (50-70k/1M). 4% is generally the "safe rate of withdrawl" I see quoted.
Wow, ok, let's do it. Provisionally scheduled for Thursday 7/13 at 6:00pm Pacific. Google calendar/meet event here.
I'm open to other platforms/schedules if people have input. Barring that, I'll be in the call as scheduled. I will post a reminder in the Wednesday Wellness thread.
Edit: link is http://meet.google.com/ieq-zixv-xwf
lagrangian
15d ago
99% IQ? I know we are supposed to be kind in this particular thread. But...are you sure you're in the top 1%?
Yes. I'd guess 140-145 IQ, based on various standardized tests/competitions/comparison to peers. I'd wager she's smarter. (Insert some standard disclaimers about IQ being stupid, especially out at the tails; I mean all of the above more about intelligence than IQ, let alone IQ as measured by any particular test.)
What is going on with this filter setting?
It's possible that it's a pure coincidence that the strongest connections I've felt to people, platonic or romantic, male or female, have all been to people this bright. But, I doubt it, and the causality isn't difficult to imagine. Shared life experiences and interests, and a sense that they can see more of me than "that smart guy." Somehow this all matters even when we're not talking about anything that requires being smart
That being said, on an unrelated note, I did appreciate your arguments against sexual intercourse with black out drunk women and I agree that is a bad thing. Unlike a lot of people in that thread.
Thank you, shit, that was not the proudest of themotte I've ever been. OTOH, it's nice to know I don't quite fit every stereotype here, and to have something to point to as foil to when I explain to someone "look I'm really not that conservative, it just sounds that way sometimes".
Russian allies in the US still think Putin is the based defender of Christian civilization against the homosexual globalists
What % of Americans do you think this is? Above or below lizardman constant? I'd guess way below, like OOM less than "literal Nazi," but maybe it's my bubble.
lagrangian
1mo ago
One result of this is that Google is kind of screwed
GOOG is up 40% YoY, compared to 25% for SPY (SP500) - the market strongly disagrees with you.
I like LLMs quite a lot, for certain things, but almost orthogonal to what I like search for. If I want reliable docs, or to find reddit posts: Google. If I want a particular passage in a book explained: LLM...but then usually Google to confirm things.
Old people are super not into LLMs, or change of any variety. LLMs are also going to take a big ol' reputational hit if they start being monetized to suggest you have a delicious Slurm. The search results model of paid results is a much cleaner separation of ad vs not. LLM responses are so much longer that it'd be hard to separate out the ad and organic responses, decreasing trust, adoption, and monetizability.
lagrangian
1mo ago
I agree in general, but I think it's considered OK when (as here) the poster wrote the content of the link. Maybe he could have made that more obvious, though.
lagrangian
3mo ago
Texas is currently being forced to accept more people showing up at their borders than are actually being born in the entire United States
While I agree with the spirit of your point, I don't think the above specifically is accurate. I see 3.7M births/year for the country, vs 1.8 M total population of illegal immigrants. The rate of "border encounters" appears to be 150-250k/month = 1.8-3M/year, but that's for the whole country.
And, while "border encounters" is technically in line with your phrase of "people showing up at their borders," the more reasonable comparison is to people actually net staying here. That must must be far lower, unless the illegal immigrant population was zero until about six months ago, which it wasn't, which makes the point feel weaker.
lagrangian
5mo ago
Fuck mice, install Vimmium. It lets you do ~anything in a browser without a mouse.
lagrangian
8mo ago
I make money passively so I don't have to really work more than an hour or two a week
Nice, how? I identify with the rest of your post, and aspire to also this part, but do worry that I'd end up with (even more of) your complaints about life.
Signal boosting (albeit a bit late): Ask a FAANGer office hours scheduled for Thursday 7/13 at 6:00pm Pacific. Google meet link.
Edit: the markdown link handling has a bug. The link is meet.google.com/ieq-zixv-xwf
Edit2: current office hours population is three (including myself)
Edit3: had a second round of office hours, with three newcomers. Total people today: 7. Not bad! I will try again next week, probably at the same time.
lagrangian
1mo ago
The key difference is that only in the rape story has anything been done to her by someone else.
When driving, the damage is to the pole. Heck, let's say she ("S") kills someone else ("E"). S has violated E's rights, so S should be prosecuted for murder (or property damage to the pole). No one did anything to S, except insomuch as S did it to herself, so no one should be prosecuted (or held morally responsible) for anything that happened to S.
When S is raped, the damage is entirely to S. This was done to her by someone ("R"[apist]), who should be prosecuted. Debateably, S did something to herself too, but undebateably (well, it is themotte, but I feel pretty good about this one), there is the key difference that something was done to S in this one.
Further, in my version of the setup, she really hasn't decided to sleep with the nerd ("can't count to ten"). Past some level of drunk, you're on autopilot, and anyone who steers you transgresses. So yes, I absolutely do deny people agency once they are blackout drunk. I put that agency in the hands of society/morality to protect them. Enormously practical? No, so go be monogamous and sober, but still better than a free-for-all on drunk coeds.
I love the new site UI, even relative to old.reddit. But, I miss two RES features:
- custom user tags
- the net upvotes I've given a user
Are either/both of these plausible from a scaling standpoint? I'm a backend dev with some spare time the next few weeks and happy to take a stab at 'em. If so, maybe point me to where to start digging?
See e.g.:
Edit: I poked around the codebase. I forget this is generally simpler when not in FAANGland. Looks doable, I'm going to see about a prototype over the next few days, starting with #1. I still haven't thought about scaling, but again I suspect the answer is this is not FAANGland, it'll be fine. If we can manage the 'new comment' markers, surely this is doable, too.
lagrangian
2mo ago
Maybe I'm missing it, but isn't Kulak making the basic mistake that Social Security (etc) are, by design, an immediate transfer from the young to the old? I will pay so much more than my 633k in taxes over my career. I get that most people pay less tax, and it doesn't all go to Social Security. Still, the analysis seems to fall short of showing that amount can't be paid off per person.
My prior of "nothing interesting happens" strongly objects, e.g. to
Sometime soon, the economic weight will become non-viable, like a broke gambler doubling his bet each time he loses, the debts will go exponential then asymptotic… and instead of a a lifetime to find a way to squeeze all that money out, there will be a crisis, and the American, probably “provisional” government at that point, will have to decide:
lagrangian
4mo ago
Overall I have a very high opinion of Aella's integrity and have no reason to believe she's intentionally duplicitous,
I feel oppositely.
Her entire brand is attention seeking behavior through discussion (and sale) of sex. She got attention and advertising by redefining a thing in a way that you found interesting enough to podcast and effort post about.
Had a second date today. She's great. I mean, great. Just objectively an obscene number of things in common, but different enough to be interesting, and the chemistry was there. Never felt this way really, although one other time was in the ballpark (...and then I moved out of state).
Unfortunately, she learned today that she's "definitely" leaving the state for work related reasons, permanently, in a month. If I had any sense, I'd've walked away when she gave me this news, early on in the date, along with the suggestion that I do so. Instead, I'm going to just ignore this fact, I guess, despite my dating goal being "a very serious relationship at a minimum" - next date Saturday. Why ignore this fact? Well:
there's some reasons (omitted for anonymity) to believe it's more "probably" than "definitely"
genuinely enjoying the dates
market research
And it's not even a "well, let's at least get laid" kind of thing (or I'd just text my ex instead of being back on the apps...). I wouldn't be shocked if we do sleep together, but I might actually try not to, in the interest of not getting hurt more than necessary. Might, anyway.
At a minimum, I think I've just found the bar by which future secretarial interviews will be judged. At a maximum, hell, I work remotely and make rash decisions sometimes - maybe I leave the state, too. I "definitely" won't do that. Even if she stays, I think long term she leaves, but by that point it'd be not crazy to imagine following.
I do in fact realize the above is rashly strong, I really do. The saner takeaway here is that I should approach dating more seriously, more optimistically, and with higher standards - women like that do exist. But damn, if not for the atomization of society, the tendency of high achievers to move around so much; if we'd met in some small town before the internet, the outcome would, with reasonable probability, be the obvious and happy one.
I did some napkin math. With 3.5M people in my greater metro area (~1 hour driving radius), I estimate 22 potential matches (though she clears a bar more than a bit higher):
I can't decide if 22 is good news or not. I lean "good news" but finding 'em is a bit elusive.
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