Top all-time · #12168
Kris Machowski
Personal blog · machow.ski/postseconomicsprogramming
Kris Machowski's personal blog at machow.ski covers economics and programming. Since 2021, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 22 times, most often “An Introduction to Limit Order Books”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
One commenter links the author's article on order books as a comparison for public SaaS pricing data. The comment does not judge the article's writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The personal site of Kris Machowski. I work in the crypto/fintech industry as backend software engineer. Based in Hong Kong. KDB/Q, Golang, Python, TypeScript, Java, Rust.
Most-linked posts?
- An Introduction to Limit Order Books2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-07-21
- A Beginners Guide to Crypto Derivatives2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-08-10
What Hacker News says?
https://machow.ski Pretty happy I got my name with the tld. I write about finance.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Share your personal site”Submitted Positions, Profit and Loss as a story · 76 points
HN discussionI've done side projects before, but I feel like I don't have a knack for business. I decided to try and start writing after it was suggested to me many times. I work in the finance/crypto space, so decided to try and write some articles about the basics on my personal blog ( https://machow.ski ). So far I am enjoying it, though it's a lot of work! Getting people to read what you write is also not straight forward.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What you up to? (Who doesn't want to be hired?)”Submitted An Introduction to Limit Order Books as a story · 44 points
HN discussionReminds me of machowski's article on order books. By making these things public, I think it'll decrease the variance in costs in the space. If it was public knowledge how similar SaaS are priced, people would always go for the cheaper option (this assumes identical features, which is not the case). I guess in the end, pricing is determined by costs (materials, labor, rents) for a floor and then profits (which might…
Comment linking /posts/2021-07-18-introduction-to-limit-order-books/
on “Show HN: We built PriceLevel to find out what companies pay for SaaS”Submitted Adverse Selection and Markouts as a story · 9 points
HN discussionDefinitely agree. I think some people find it controversial these days with agile etc but i think making prototypes is a severely underrated skill and practice. Not all problems are obviously tractable from the outset by pure analysis. Sometimes you need to build something out of cardboard and rubber bands (figuratively) to see if it will work. Was a topic I wrote an essay about some time back ( https://www.machow.s…
Comment linking /posts/galls-law-and-prototype-driven-development/
on “My guiding principles after 20 years of programming (2020)”Submitted A Beginners Guide to Crypto Derivatives as a story · 5 points
HN discussionAs others have mentioned this depends on how matching works on the exchange. The case where the bid is higher or equal to the ask is known as a "crossed book". I most cases, this should never happen and if it does it would be as a result of a bug in the matching algorithm. If you place a buy/sell order with a price that is in excess of the best ask/bid respectively then that order will be matched against the opposit…
Comment linking /posts/2021-07-18-introduction-to-limit-order-books/
on “What to know about the stock market (2007)”Submitted Scamwicks and Stop Cascades as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI've always favored exploration before implementation [1]. For me TDD has immense benefit when adding something well defined, or when fixing bugs. When it comes to building something from scratch i found it to get in the way of the iterative design process. I would however be more amenable to e.g. Prototyping first, and then using that as a guide for TDD. Not sure if there is a name for that approach though. "spike"…
Comment linking /posts/galls-law-and-prototype-driven-development/
on “I have complicated feelings about TDD”Submitted Crypto and Carry as a story · 2 points
HN discussionRecently I've got into the habit of doing both. Typically if there is a topic that is important to understand for a casual reader, but likely will be obvious for someone familiar with the topic i add a "click here to skip" link. I haven't actually measured how often this is used, so it's hard to guage effectiveness, but I think it at least suggests to readers that you are trying to respect their time. An example fro…
Comment linking /posts/scamwicks-and-stop-cascades/
on “Tips for making writing more fun”Submitted How Crypto Derivatives Exchanges Prevent Bankruptcy as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThat is true up to a point, however with the "passive" aspect you get exposed to "impermanent loss", which is a loss in value due to the relative price fluctuations between the two assets in the AMM ( https://www.machow.ski/posts/an_introduction_to_automated_ma... ). As in most things in finance, TNSTAAFL.
Comment linking /posts/an_introduction_to_automated_market_makers/
on “Theoretical Advances in AMM (Automated Market Maker) Understanding”Submitted A Beginners Guide to Crypto Derivatives as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThat's the distinction between an MVP and a Prototype. While it can be useful to put together a hack and slash version, it needs to be marketed as such. Shameless plug, but I wrote about this exact thing: https://www.machow.ski/posts/galls-law-and-prototype-driven-...
Comment linking /posts/galls-law-and-prototype-driven-development/
on “When MVPs Hurt”Submitted Leverage, Liquidation and Insurance Funds as a story · 2 points
HN discussionContinuing to work on my technical blog about finance and crypto: https://machow.ski . Other than that, working on some smaller side projects related to that.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What Are You Up To? (April 2022)”Submitted An Introduction to Automated Market Makers as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI would say for side projects, your best bet is just to make a blog and talk about them, that's what I do anyway [1]. The projects themselves can live wherever, such as a VPS etc. For blog posts these days there are IMO two choices to make: 1. Self publish, I.e. Host the blog yourself. There are many options but I personally go with Hugo/Netlify which uses git and markdown as my "backend" and has the upside of basic…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Where do you publish projects?”Submitted Gall's Law and Prototype Driven Development as a story · 1 points
HN discussion