I've worked at some of the "top tier" finance firms over the years.
It is absolutely astounding how much of them run on code that is:
- very reliable aka it almost never breaks/fails
- written in ways that makes you wonder what series of events led to such awful code
For example:
- A deployment system that used python to read and respond to raw HTTP requests. If you triggered a deployment, you had to leave the webpage open as the deployment code was in the HTTP serving code
- A workflow manager that had <1000 lines of code but commits from 38 different people as the ownership always got passed to whoever the newest, most junior person on the team was
- Python code written in Java OOP style where every function call had to be traced up and down through four levels of abstraction
I mention this only b/c the "LLMs write shitty code" isn't quite the insult/blocker that people think it is. Humans write TONS of awful but working code too.
Finance is like an oil well. You can do just about anything technology-wise and as long as it more or less pulls the oil from the ground, the money just keeps coming. So good code is not necessary. Some may even say that terrible code that needs to be replaced every year is a feature in terms of promotion possibilities.
It is completely possible that the path that got them to this point was the optimal path given their goals and knowledge at the time. And wildly enough, maybe it was even the optimal path with perfect knowledge of the future as well.
This is getting to be possibly the most irritating thing I've seen on Hacker News since registering here. Every thread about a limitation of LLMs being immediately rebuked with "humans do that too."
It's a continuous object lesson in missing the point. A similar thing happened a few hours ago when an article was posted about a researcher who posted a fake paper about a fake disease to a pre-print server that LLMs picked up via RAG, telling people with vague symptoms that they had this non-existent disease. Lo and behold, commenters go in immediately saying "I'd be fooled too because I trust pre-print medical research." Except the article itself was intentionally ridiculous, opening by telling you it was fake, using obviously fake names, fictional characters from popular television. The only reason it fooled humans on Hacker News is because they don't bother reading the articles and respond only to headlines.
It's just like your code examples. Humans fail because we're lazy. Just like all animals, we have a strong instinct to preserve energy and expend effort only when provoked by fear, desire, or external coercion. The easiest possible code to write that seems to work on a single happy path using stupid workarounds is deemed good enough and allowed through. If your true purpose on a web discussion board is to bloviate and prove how smart you are rather than learn anything, why bother actually reading anything? The faster you comment, the better chance you have of getting noticed and upvoted anyway.
Humans are not actually stupid. We can write great code. We can read an obviously fake paper and understand that it's fake. We know how hierarchy of evidence and trust works if we bother to try. We're just incredibly lazy. LLMs are not lazy. Unlike animals, they have no idea how much energy they're using and don't care. Their human slaves will move heaven and earth and reallocate entire sectors of their national economies and land use policies to feed them as much as they will ever need. LLMs, however, do have far more concrete cognitive limitations brought about by the way they are trained without any grounding in hierarchy of evidence or the factual accuracy of the text the ingest. We've erected quite a bit of ingenious scaffolding with various forms of augmented context, input pre-processing, post-training model fine tuning, and whatever the heck else these brilliant human engineers are doing to create the latest generation of state of the art agents, but the models underneath still have this limitation.
Do we need more? Can the scaffolding alone compensate sufficiently to produce true genius at the level of a human who is actually motivated and trying? I have no idea. Maybe, maybe not, but it's really irritating that we can't even discuss the topic because it immediately drops into the tarpit of "well, you too." It's the discourse of toddlers. Can't we do better than this?
Google “hospital server room”. Guess everywhere should just do the same thing with their server rooms, yeah? Works for hospitals, and look how much money the healthcare system makes! Why even pay an IT engineer, just plug in another wire bro.
> I asked if what they had done was ethical—if making deep learning cheaper and more accessible would enable new forms of spam and propaganda.
Someone asked Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, his thoughts on LLMs and how easy it was to create fake news, ai slop etc.
His response:
"People creating fake stories is nothing new. It's been going on for centuries. Humans have always dealt with it the same way: by creating institutions that they trust to only deliver factual information"
This could be government departments, newspapers, non-profits etc.
A personal note on this:
There is a Christmas card my grandfather made in the 1950s by "photoshopping" (by hand, not the software) images of each member of the family so it looked like they were all miniature versions of themselves standing on various parts of the fireplace. The world didn't collapse due to fake media between the 1950s and today due to people having that ability.
I see this kind of take a lot, and I don't think it's convincing. To me it's similar to saying that the water frame and the power loom won't change anything, because people have been able to make thread and cloth for millenia.
Individuals with Photoshop making obvious fictions for entertainment is different from funded entities producing clips at scale and passed off as real.
They're essentially a combination of a plane, spoke-shave, draw-knife and gouge but all in a one handed tool. They were primarily used by Native Americans to build things like canoes, snowshoes, baskets etc. I first found about them from reading John McPhee's Survival of the Bark Canoe [1] but there are lots of uses of them on video on the website below (which I created).
If you want to get into woodworking but want only a few tools and/or a very portable tool, highly recommend.
e.g. in theory you could build an entire canoe with an axe, crooked knife and 3 or 4 sided awl (and a lot of time, patience and materials)
> There was a great article on here a while back about VHS and Betamax. While Betamax was better by nearly every metric, it lost.
There is some nuance here.
Manufacturers didn't know if people preferred shorter, higher quality (Beta) or longer, less quality (VHS). That's partly why there were two formats.
Most people like to say VHS "won" but what it really won was the consumer market. Beta won the professional TV news market because it turns out news stations had a high demand for short, high quality video storage.
I point this out only to say that winning isn't a one dimensional/binary outcome. You can "lose" in one market but still be very profitable in another market.
Many years ago, back when companies could ask for your previous compensation [0], a hiring manager once said to me "don't ever lie about your past compensation".
I wasn't sure how they could figure this out at the time until someone later pointed out that many corporations do a credit history check on you as part of the background check. This gives them access to past compensation.
The information asymmetry here is, as with much of hiring, pretty bonkers when they had both the current and past comp history during negotiations when you have just yours. You might also have the comp history of your friends too (if you share) but that's still tiny compared to the corporations.
0 - this was in NYC where it's now no longer allowed.
An old neighbor of mine was a headhunter. He once told me that some companies had a trick to get around the law. Upon getting hired, you'd sign a document saying that you'd agree to all policies in the employee handbook. Pretty standard stuff. One of the company policies was that you needed to prove any previous salary you stated in the negotiation. If it was too far off, they'd just terminate you. The trick is that they didn't ask at all during the hiring process; you're already hired and onboarded and then HR puts a meeting on your calendar to explain the policy to you.
That seems like a great way to open your company up to a discrimination lawsuit (whether warranted or not). Not to mention the costs of hiring a new employee you only fire a month later - why bother?
> The trick is that they didn't ask at all during the hiring process; you're already hired and onboarded and then HR puts a meeting on your calendar to explain the policy to you.
It sounds made up. Who would go through the negotiating phase, hire the person go through all paperwork only to then gotcha them and fire them if they lied about their past salary? I've never seen an org that actually played games like that.
I call BS. Why would they hire you at an agreed to price, go through the cost & effort and then try and "get you"? Your old neighbour was either in bed with his hiring clients or not very good at his job.
He recruited for wall street trading firms; based on the finance types I've met over the years in NYC I would 100% believe some did this just because they hated losing. He was just making the point that you should never lie about your salary history, because he can help you if you didn't want to give it but he couldn't help you if you BSed everyone and got caught.
It’s definitely made-up. I worked for a Wall Street trading firm in the securities division for 8 years. People lie about comp as a matter of course. Secondly, many/most senior-ish jobs in those firms come with a guaranteed bonus for the first year or couple of years. If they were to fire the person before that period elapsed they would have to pay out the bonus.
I know of many people who were fired the day their guarantee elapsed- I can’t think of a single person on a guarantee who was fired before then. To put this into context, we had a guy on a guarantee on our prop desk who came in for one week after he joined, put on a (massively winning) trade that got him enough to get his guarantee and then literally didn’t set foot in the office for the rest of the year[1] until the day he came in to collect his bonus and resign/be fired.
[1] And it’s not like he was working from home because people in trading were (for compliance reasons) not allowed to work from home unless there was an emergency like a terrorist incident where the trading floor was closed.
"don't ever lie about your past compensation" — because they can't figure it out on their own and IF they do (at least in my jurisdiction), you've got a nice case on your hands to sue them for violating privacy laws.
The correct answer is: ALWAYS lie about your past compensation. It's the only way to get forward, one way or the other.
A better strategy is to push the conversation in another direction:
- My current comp is X, but that's not what I am worth to you.
- I've done my research, and someone with my experience is worth Y. I expect at least Y.
You set your salary expectations with your opening bid instead of letting them make the opening bid. It's also contingent on you having done your research =)
If you are a non-managerial employee, the NLRA explicitly prohibits your employer from restricting you from discussing your compensation.
And anyway, if you’re not in a state that has banned employers from asking for salary information, the recruiter always has the option of shit-canning your application for being non-responsive.
Collectively battling this is good, but individually no one wants to because its personally high risk (legal costs, deter future employers hiring you) and low reward (some settlement that won't change your life).
I'm skeptical. Credit checks don't give you an accurate picture of your compensation and it's not like they get your transactional banking history or tax documents (yet). Even with that it would be impossible to get an accurate compensation figure within 25%, so while I agree there's an informational imbalance if that's how you're negotiating you've already lost.
The Work Number by Experian gives all past income information. I think many (most?) companies participate in it, so it's somewhat likely your current income is being reported.
This is accurate, except theworknumber is an equifax product. Experian and transunion have similar products however that share past comp data in exchange for a fee and/or current data sharing. Basically, "theworknumber" lets employers see what you made previously in exchange for the employer sharing what they pay all/most employees currently.
Large companies often share a lot of details too, such as yearly raises, bonuses, weekly rates, etc. Still, it is often inaccurate. For example, I have worked freelance extensively under my name (DBA) and llc and none of it is there.
You can pull your record if you want. If your employer uses workday, they almost certainly share every paystub with theworknumber.
See also sibling comment, the Big Three offer free annual credit reports through https://www.annualcreditreport.com/index.action but I haven't seen work history included. I believe that they do collect & report on this information, but I have been unable to get them to share it with me.
Eh, I don't have the link at the moment - it was posted some years ago on HN. In the US, your employer very likely reports your salary to a national agency. And other companies can access it.
You can go to the agency yourself, prove your identity, and see all your salary history.
I don’t recall ever seeing a salary in my credit report. Certainly when applying for credit cards you are asked but generally they have you include all sources of income including bonus, passive income, and alimony.
There are data sources for this info but I don’t think it’s technically a credit report.
Equifax’s The Work Number buys salary data from employers and they use it for income verification when applying for loans and rentals.
You’d be surprised how much data is out there; and it was all sold by entities you ‘trust’.
One example being the DMV
If you lease a car these days you will be swamped with offers from banks and lease-end "providers" as your end date approaches. I got really mad with the dealer until they told me it was the DMV that was selling that information.
Regarding The Work Number: you have the right to see your own report and it's worthwhile to do so. And it's scary. A lot of the information is usually incomplete and/or full of holes. I can't believe anyone would base a decision on this data.
as an example, i have received usmail junkmail addressed to my address, but with the name of my first cousin's husband's name, which makes no sense unless some incompetent data brokers are just merging their datasets in all sorts of random ways and seeing what sticks.
i dream of phone calls costing the entity placing the call some significant-at-scale price, perhaps a dime, and bulk rate physical junkmail needing full postage.
If I remember correctly, ADP and the other big payroll processors sell your income data, as do many of the finance apps that get access to your bank account data. They also have your rent and mortgage payments typically. It's not always a line item in your official credit report, but the data leaks (and is sold) everywhere. Probably the more correct phrasing would be "in your financial target data profile as sold by [credit agencies, et al]"?
Experian does collect and sell income data about people, in fact i think they pay companies directly for this information. This is helpful for salary negotiations. It’s not in a normal credit report though, true.
Mortgage loans and car loans in America also ask for your W-2 or proof of that said income. Can't prove it, they won't let you use your claimed income as basis for loan approvals.
I've even had to prove my salary when applying for apartments. No loan involved. The first time that happened I didn't have a w-2 yet, so they called my employer to check.
I never had to supply a W-2 for a vehicle loan. Just my SSN. I almost always get unsecured loans too. They just dump money into your bank account and say "please buy a car with this" and you keep the title. For a mortgage you do have to validate your income. The work around is to just buy your house in cash, I guess (sigh). So I guess mortgage loans leave you open there, but those happen less frequently and may not be good map of income level on a shorter period.
Once in a while they want to see a bank statement or two showing actually paycheck deposits, but I only ever saw that on a mortgage. Once for the car loan they asked to see a balance or two via bank statement. So I showed them a bank account sitting around the $$ for the vehicle loan.
I tend to just avoid loans if at all possible now though.
An unsecured loan just a straight cash loan. In my experience the interest rates are usually a fair bit higher than a vehicle loan, and I would assume the maximum amount is generally quite a bit lower.
In my experience it really depends. You are still contractually and legally obligated to purchase a vehicle in many of these setups, they just don't follow up or enforce it directly in most cases. Loan rates are nothing like unsecured personal loan rates. Probably higher than best auto loan rates. With rates being what they are it may not make as much sense to use an unsecured loan at this point, but when rates are low the cost was negligible and the convenience worth it.
In Maryland I received my car's title, but it just shows the lien holder's information on it. I've never bought a car in any other state so my information is limited.
i'm pretty sure that in Arizona, and i think in California, they DMV sends the title updated to show the original holder (like BMW Financial Services, Subaru Financial Services, or whatever) has been payed completely, and the person is then shown as the title holder.
The information asymmetry here is ... pretty bonkers
This is why you shouldn't trust anyone who sells you on the idea that the ability to negotiate your own deals against large corporations is a feature and not a bug.
The information asymmetry, plus the difference in legal fire power & wherewithal to withstand a drawn out negotiation, will always put you at a disadvantage.
The information asymmetry is sort of wild to me. I can't really figure out an angle why this isn't bad for the same reasons insider trader is bad. I'm even okay with them having the info, I just think companies should be required to publish everyone's salaries. Redacting names is fine, but I should be able to look up the team I would join and see titles and salaries for everyone on the team.
Been using LLMs both at work (FinTech DevOps/SRE) and on side projects (big data, games, websites) and here has been my "arc"
- first used copy and paste in and out of Grok
- started using CLI tools e.g. Claude and OpenCode
- move up to using 3 and sometimes 4 agents at the same time
- considered going to the agents managing agents
- have settled on having LLMs build tools that are both deterministic, usable by humans and the agent, and also faster (b/c there is less "back and forth")
Honestly, it feels a LOT like when Kubernetes came out. e.g. you stopped running containers on a box using Docker Compose plus scripts/configs etc. Instead gave a large part of the operation to an "agent" (in this case k8s) that managed all of the details you didn't need to care about anymore.
I've also realized that while the LLMs can crank out code at a very high rate, someone still needs to make sure everything is running, debug issues etc. You could set up agents to monitor what the agents do but then you still end up with someone needing to keep an eye on everything. If anything, you need MORE people b/c now you can just keep spinning up new components etc.
Also, was in a discussion with one of the best developers I've ever worked with. It came down to the following point:
"Programming is rapidly becoming a hobby. Software engineering is becoming more important than ever."
>You can get workflows that have individual parts that aren't so precise become better by composing them, and letting one component influence the other. Like e2e coding gets better by checking with "gof" tools (linters, compilers, etc). Then it gets even better by adding a coding review stage. Then it gets even better by adding a static analysis phase.
This is the exact point I make whenever people say LLMs aren't deterministic and therefore not useful.
Yes, they are "stochastic". But you can use them to write deterministic tools that create machine readable output that the LLM can use. As you mention, you keep building more of these tools and tying them together and then you have a deterministic "network" of "lego blocks" that you can run repeatably.
It is absolutely astounding how much of them run on code that is:
- very reliable aka it almost never breaks/fails
- written in ways that makes you wonder what series of events led to such awful code
For example:
- A deployment system that used python to read and respond to raw HTTP requests. If you triggered a deployment, you had to leave the webpage open as the deployment code was in the HTTP serving code
- A workflow manager that had <1000 lines of code but commits from 38 different people as the ownership always got passed to whoever the newest, most junior person on the team was
- Python code written in Java OOP style where every function call had to be traced up and down through four levels of abstraction
I mention this only b/c the "LLMs write shitty code" isn't quite the insult/blocker that people think it is. Humans write TONS of awful but working code too.
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