Paul Graham and Garry Tan were both big cheerleaders of DOGE, so, keep that in mind.
A shocking number of the biggest stories about DOGE over the past year were flagged here, probably including the stories about goons physically removing people.
Posts questioning this suppression/censorship were flagged.
Some people like to argue that since any story about Musk becomes toxic - for some reason - it 'makes sense' to flag every story about anything to with him. You know, like Israel, or US torture, or Assange, or Snowden, or Epstein, etc.
For we are but naive children here in the tech industry, and must have a safe space to discuss PCB specs and the meaning of 42 without too much 'current affairs', lest the site 'lose its focus'.
It's not like almost the entire top of the industry is neck-deep in collaboration with all this or anything, right?
... Anyway, if people here don't know much about DOGE, the massive flagging that's gone on here is probably a big factor as to why.
“Shocking number” being “pretty much all of them” to the point I discovered https://news.ycombinator.com/active which shows topics where discussions are happening even if they’re flagged.
That’s the only way I browse HN now because this place is clearly brigaded to bury certain topics.
Yeah, you can't rely on HN to get important information. It will be flagged to death. There could be a holocaust going on and it'd get flagged for being "controversial".
In the business, even the appearance of impropriety is damaging. People who work in finance aren't allowed to trade the same stocks as their company is trading, whether they have any inside info or not. The assumption is that simply by being close to a source of information, you are compromised. The same restrictions should apply to those close to government. By being family, he is compromised by default.
Wrong. People who work in finance (I spent years there) are allowed to trade stocks their company is trading. There is a process to get approval. The equities division at an IB might be trading every single name in the S&P500. If you sit in the investment banking division and that division isn't doing anything related to a name, you are likely to get approval.
In this case, the idea that Cantor can't do something because the former head is now in a government job is crazy. No one "in the business" thinks Cantor is suddenly hobbled.
> In this case, the idea that Cantor can't do something because the former head is now in a government job is crazy. No one "in the business" thinks Cantor is suddenly hobbled.
That's not the idea, and it almost seems like a straw man to be honest. The actual idea is that the current head of Cantor can't do something because he's a direct relative of a high ranking government official whose powers and job duties present a conflict of interest for this specific set of transactions.
Cantor Fitzgerald is an investment bank. Rather than claim a straw man, think about what they do and how it interacts with the administration. Everything they do is heavily regulated. If they couldn't do anything that gave an appearance of a conflict, they literally couldn't do a single thing that makes up their business and would be hobbled.
I think a lot of people feel like people who have one foot in a heavy regulated industry shouldn't have their other foot in the regulatory body that regulates that industry.
> If they couldn't do anything that gave an appearance of a conflict
This time I won't say maybe - that's a straw man.
I never said Cantor shouldn't be able to do anything that even gives the appearance of a conflict. Or anything even close to that really.
As you said yourself further up the thread, investments of investment bank employees are highly regulated. And not only employees themselves, but also their immediate family members.
Yet that same level of legal regulation doesn't apply to immediate relatives of government officials. We've seen frequently with spouses and children of congressmen, and now we're seeing it with the son of a cabinet member. Yes, this may technically be legal, but legal does not equate to just and desirable. This reads to me like a serious loophole in the law that needs to be closed.
You are just out of your depth in this area. You don't understand what Cantor has done here, you don't understand what Howard can or cannot do in his role.
Howard Lutnick's positions have been directly opposite of what Cantor has bet will happen. Cantor has 10 or 12 thousand employees and is constantly doing all manner of things. Howard has no power over the supreme court. His son is the chairman, he's miles away from being in the weeds on what specific things they do. He isn't going to be comped like crazy as the chairman.
There is no conflict. There is only the appearance of one and it only appears that way to people who don't understand the situation.
Almost all companies issuing stock to employees also ban them and their family members and fellow house residents from trading in the same stock to avoid insider style improprieties and the SEC has frequently prosecuted such cases. Wild that congress and WH staff have zero such restrictions even in 2026!
>People who work in finance aren't allowed to trade the same stocks as their company is trading, whether they have any inside info or not
But the supreme court is a separate branch of government from the executive, so the analogy doesn't really hold. To claim otherwise would require Lutnick playing some 4d chess where he's publicly pro tariffs, but secretly anti-tariffs and was sandbagging the government's legal defense (can he even do that?), all the while not tipping Trump or the MAGA base off for being disloyal.
What kind of founding ethos doesn't allow tracking internal latency? Is their founding ethos "Never Admit Responsibility?"; "Never Leave A Paper Trail?"
This company's official ethical foundation is "Don't Get Caught."
From the wiki about IEX: "It was founded in 2012 in order to mitigate the effects of high-frequency trading." I can see how they don't want to track internal latency as part of that, or at least not share those numbers with outsiders. That just encourages high frequency traders again.
One would hope for a more technical solution to HFT than willful ignorance lol. For example, they could batch up orders every second and randomize them.
I worked in HFT. (Though am now completely out of fintech and have no skin in the game). "Flash Boys" traditional HFT is dead already, the trade collapsed in 2016-2018 when both larger institutions got less dumb with order execution, and also several HFTs "switched sides" and basically offered "non-dumb order execution" as a service to any institutions who were unable to play the speed game themselves. Look at how Virtu's revenue changed from mostly trading to mostly order execution services over that time period.
Flash Boys was always poorly researched and largely ignorant of actual market microstructure and who the relevant market participants were, but it also aged quite poorly as all of their "activism" was useless because the market participants just all smartened up purely profit-driven.
If you want to be activist about something, the best bet for 2026 is probably that so much volume is moving off the lit exchanges into internal matching and it degrades the quality of price discovery happening. But honestly even that's a hard sell because much of that flow is "dumb money" just wanting to transact at the NBBO.
Actually, here's the best thing to be upset about: apps gamifying stock trading / investing into basically SEC-regulated gambling.
This is what should happen, because what the game actually being played is to profit off those who cannot react fast enough to news event, rather than profit off those who mispriced their order.
Or leave things in place, but put a 1 minute transaction freeze during binary events, and fill the order book during that time with no regard for when an order was placed, just random allocation of order fills coming out of the 1 minute pause.
These funds would lose their shit if they had to go back to knowledge being the only edge rather than speed and knowledge.
This isn't a good approach because it assumes there are no market makers on trading venues, and that they (as well as exchanges) do not compete for order flow. Also, maybe you haven't noticed, but stocks are often frozen during news announcements by regulatory request, so such pauses are already in place and are designed to maintain market integrity, not disrupt it with arbitrary fills.
The availability of exclusive content should not be the point over which streaming services compete. The same content should be available on all streaming services, and they should compete on the quality of their delivery and discoverability technology.
Content producers must not be vertically integrated with content distributors.
You might not be surprised, but you should still be shocked. Being struck by a heavy weight will shock you even if you expected it. We are allowed to be shocked by things that we abhor even when we understand their causes and probability distribution. Not being shocked suggests you no longer despise it.
For me, it's tracing code/pipelines to figure out how a result was produced, typically in the context of that result being wrong somehow. Go To Definition is the most useful function in any editor.
I'm always surprised by how frequently colleagues don't think to do this and are left helpless.
This reminds me of my further theory that everyone needs one 'heavy' and one 'light' technique. The 'light' technique is something that often works well as a heuristic and can be an effective unit of iteration. The 'heavy' technique is something that you can fall back on in difficult cases, something that can reliably solve hard problems, even if it's slow.
Sometimes the heavy technique is: just ask someone else. ;)
You jest, but that's how my sister gets through life, and it's always fascinated me.
She's incredibly intelligent, but more importantly she's a phenomenal social networker. She always has someone to call to ask about any question or solve any problem that comes up in life, and she's great at connecting these people with each other when they have problems of their own - so they all want to help her with whatever she needs, just to gain access to a pool of people they themselves can talk to.
What do you do with a skillset like that? I honestly don't know - something in leadership, probably, something where finding the right people and setting them to work is the most important skill of the job.
That wasn't in jest. I worked in a place where this was a norm. Nothing was properly documented, instead everyone would just ask and answer questions on chats; somehow, this actually kept velocity high.
Found it really hard to adjust to that. I'm the kind of person that prefers to research things on my own, find hard references and understand context. But there, this was the wrong approach.
I have both felt and seen this at work and I would add to this the meta-technique of binary search. Once it is added to your light and heavy technique you can solve what seems intractable at first glance faster than many people can even orient to the problem.
Likewise. I don't always do this, but for problems that cost me much time or effort, I like to try to make sure that, if I wanted to reproduce a bug or problem, I'd know exactly how to write it.
Writing and understanding working correct software is, it turns out, a rather different skill from that of writing and understanding broken (or confusing) software. I'd also wager good money that the latter skill directly builds the former.
It's amazing that a lot of new developers don't know how to use them at all! I'm not even talking about using the command line gdb, but just the basic "Set Breakpoint" feature and attaching to processes.
Your supply chain is superficially fewer, but not smaller. The way you're counting the number of suppliers is heterogeneous: ChatGPT has a bigger surface area than 20 individuals.
Your supply chain is smaller in the sense that every person or organization you obtain code from is similar to a vendor, just an unpaid one. They are a separate entity your business depends on.
If we replace code written by 20 of those organizations with code written by ChatGPT, we've gone from 20 code "vendors" we don't know much about who have no formal agreement to speak of with us, to 1 tools vendor which we can even make an enterprise agreement with and all that jazz.
So whatever else the outcome may be, from this perspective it reduces uncertainty to quit using random npm packages and generate your utility classes with ChatGPT. I think this is the conclusion many businesses may reach.
What enterprise agreement would you make with OpenAI that would make you feel better about the supply chain? Seems to me you just get stochastic output that may or may not be battle tested level code, without guarantees either?
Simple means not complex, means not composed of even simpler parts. A twelve step plan is literally a list of simpler parts, making it not simple. Most things are complex, since there are so many ways to combine simples. It is an ironic title.
I disagree. Most things are complex, yet most things are also simple.
Don't forget that words are overloaded so they only mean things in context. Words are both simple and complex because of this.
As an example: the rules to the game of life are simple. The outcomes are complex. The rules cannot even be decomposed further, making them first principles of that universe.
> means not composed of even simpler parts
These would really be "first principles". Which is a form of simplicity. Being the simplest something can be, yet that sentence itself conveys that "simple" relies on context and in a continuum.
This relationship of "simple yet complex" is quite common. We could say the same thing about chaotic functions like the double pendulum. It is both simple and complex.
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