Viewing profile — madmanslitany

New York City, NY - Palantir Technologies http://www.palantirtech.com/ I haven't officially started work at Palantir yet (and will be in Palo Alto for training once I do), but Pala…

The exclusivity was also emphasized by everyone knowing it had come out of Harvard at the very beginning, which had and has a social cachet that Google Plus won't.

I remember an old article, probably from Wired, floating around a few years ago. I think it had something to do with a single operator seizing control of a stolen credit card numbe…

I don't really have much to contribute on the story itself, but I suddenly realized that my former CS472 Artificial Intelligence project partner and friend from Cornell works for S…

I could speculate on any number of reasons. A large number of my relatives work in defense contracting and you see the same videos passed around there as well. I admit that I feel …

There's a great applicable quote from Nikola Tesla here: “If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw afte…

I occasionally do Topcoder SRM's and Marathon Matches. It's partly for fun, partly to keep myself in practice since I don't feel my current job pushes me as hard intellectually. Th…

Dude, the normal career path of pretty much everyone is over by 35-40. Lawyers that haven't made partner, traders that haven't made been made head of their desk, engineers in gener…

I doubt this is actually what happened, but I can picture Zed finishing a post suggesting that students take some time to learn about culture while at university. Then he decided t…

Your best bets are electronic trading at a bank or hedge fund or realtime market data work at a place like FactSet or Bloomberg. I don't know of anything non-finance related though…

I'm sure I can one up you with the kind of code that goes into a trading system. I think production code in any realtime environment, whether it be at Amazon or a trading desk at a…

I was in your situation immediately before the recession and chose "honor" over reason. Have regretted it ever since. At the very least, interview with the company that's approache…

All I can think of right now is the Chinese room thought problem for artificial intelligence. Even if you make people laugh following these guidelines to the letter, would you have…

There's another pg essay out there that talks about "premature optimization," which is what I generally think of apprenticeships. Giving teenagers a chance to see what really goes …

Just the kind of thing I've been looking for since the end of the Netflix Prize and the cancellation of its sequel. Seems that the site is relatively new, hopefully it'll get some …

Am I already, at the tender age of 25, on enough in years that yesterday's bad taste stirs feelings of nostalgia today in my web weary heart?

I have a younger cousin in high school right now who's just starting to show some interest in an engineering career. It could be interesting to try to use this to teach her to prog…

I do think that some more real-world and unstructured experience added into standard schooling would do some good, but I sometimes think there's an odd anti-schooling bias on HN, m…

Anecdote: I'm a software developer writing trading systems at the moment at a large bank, and I've known three people at my workplace who have interviewed at NYC area startups in t…

This is why I was pretty content with Google's original China stance; censor, but make the censoring obvious, arguably still adding net good for the average mainlander using its se…

I'm very impressed with Google's willingness to back up "Do No Evil" with hard action. For a while, I was wondering if the initial incident from last month was going to fade into o…

Hacker. I work on trading systems, it's a huge part of the job to find obscure and occasionally somewhat ridiculous bugs in other people's code under time pressure. And, unrelated,…

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppr…

If these allegations are true, and really, I don't expect anyone to be better than Google at tracking who's doing what on the internet, then this is the right choice. It's refreshi…