skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Avanti Bank & Trust | Senior Engineer | Full-time | Remote | https://avantibank.com/

Avanti Bank & Trust is a Wyoming bank formed to serve as a compliant bridge between digital assets (such as bitcoin) and the U.S. dollar payments system, and as a custodian of digital assets that can meet the strictest level of institutional custody standards. On October 28th, 2020, Avanti's bank charter was granted by Wyoming's State Banking Board. Avanti intends to offer products and services including: a tokenized, programmable US dollar called Avit™; custody services for digital assets; API-based online banking services where customer deposits must be 100% backed by reserves; and prime services for digital assets.

Help build the future of digital banking on the Wyoming frontier. As a senior backend and frontend engineer, you will be responsible for aspects of architecture design, written proposals, schema design, rapid prototyping, business logic, security, integrations, testing, documentation, and code review. We're looking for senior engineers that value principled, idiomatic code and clarity of thought, and can take ownership for building high quality software.

Tech stack: python/django, postgresql, terraform, typescript/react

Read more here: (1) https://www.coindesk.com/blockchain-pioneer-caitlin-long-to-... (2) https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeldelcastillo/2020/04/01/a... (3) https://twitter.com/kanzure/status/1287829114653728768

Contact: jobs@avantibank.com and reference this post.
I've tried it once and it just didn't feel right. It didn't feel like I'm working, it felt more like staying in bed while sick. Also, my back started hurting after a few hours. I can't imagine someone doing it for more than a few days.
The movie industry unions definitely sounds more appealing than those of the steal industry for instance. But of course it's easier to rally for a cause in an industry that is doing well. I think unions need to be rethought and I'm curious how it will look like if the Google union actually happens.

At the same time the Hollywood unions obviously were not there with all these scandals of the last years. Essentially it was both traditional and social media that helped with that.
You used to, but it now has FOSS graphics/music/sound packs that you can use.
This works really really well until it really really doesn't. There's a reason why these towns don't exist in the West anymore, Detroit being the biggest example (though they got out of their predicament by trying to diversify).
Because income disparity has larger effects that will in the long-term screw over tech workers as they have the rest of society. In the Bay Area alone, income disparity coupled with housing shortage has contributed to mass homelessness; cue highly-paid tech workers Tweeting about having to step over human waste on the way to work. On a national and indeed international level, income disparity leads to political upheaval as populist movements capture discontent from slipping standards of living in diminishing middle classes.
> Why shouldn't employees expect, and get, better working conditions?

have their cake and eat it too is absolutely correct. And the reason why we want to keep it the way it has been, is that the status quo productivity maximization is what has resulted in our current high pay and quality of life.

> individuals leaving "collectively bargain", it's the complete opposite, it's individual bargaining, with all the perils that entails.

The benefit of market rate is that it's fundamentally sustainable, and fair. When businesses collectively bargain, we call them "cartels"

>look at Germany where every industry has unions, regardless of size, and unions has a say in how companies are run, and what direction they head in. They make sure that shareholders and employees get input into the highest levels of leadership, ensuring that shareholders can't force decisions that benefit shareholders at the detriment of employees.

Because shareholder need to make decisions to improve shareholder value even if it means it's going to suck for employees. That's an important part of the system. You need to let go of deadbeats. Go ahead look at Germany. All their companies are very old. There's no room for startups. The only halfway relevant company they've produced in decades was a complete fraud. If the USA was like that, Google wouldn't even exist.

Shareholders provide real value. For the most part from the fact that the business wouldn't even exist without them. How much they provide is supposed to be determined by the cost to replace them, the shareholders, by starting a new company and competing with the old one.

> employees should absolutely make it clear who generates most of the value in a company,

This would be hilarious. Only a tiny fraction of Google employees work on a part of the business that actually makes money.

Most of the value google generates comes from their monopoly on search, not from workers. It would be trivially easy for google to crush the unionization efforts, sack more than half their employees, and increase theor profits.
The Sense-Making Web
HN's tolerance for jokes and sarcasm is extremely low.
The last company I worked for where I was (de facto) in charge of IT (small company so I wore lots of hats) could have recovered if both sites burnt down and I got hit by a bus since I made sure that all code, data and instructions to re-up everything existed off site, that both most senior managers understood how to access everything and enough to hand it to a competent firm with a memory stick and a password.

In some ways losing your ERP and it's backups would be harder to recover from than both sites burning down, insurance would cover that at least.
Three months off is not a “few weeks”. Good lord. What school district are you referencing where teachers are forced to work every day during the summer?

Yes, they don’t get paid for not working, but can usually have their employer stretch the 9 month salary to cover all 12.

There are a lot of reasons I wouldn’t want to be a modern American teacher, but the time-off schedule is not one of them.
It has made coming back from a long Christmas vacation a lot easier. Once I got my emails taken care of, I was able to get to work without distractions. It's been nice.
> The federal government funds states.

Wrong, try again. States are self funding entities. The fed does give grants for some projects (bridges, rails, etc). Some states do receive more tax/grant benefits than they give, but those funds are earmarked - states can't use that money for any old reason.

> Moreover, the federal government can use its resources to physically drive the vaccines around...

Correct, the Fed can help make resources available to the states but the states have to request and allow the resource. The fed for instance can have the military perform interstate logistics, or rent out all the frozen delivery trucks and lend them to states.

The fed can not force states to take the grants, or perform operations in the state without approval.

> In your worldview, what is the purpose of the USA as opposed to 50 separate countries?

Alaska isn't overly qualified to run a military, form treaties with foreign powers, regulate interstate commerce or run the FDA. The fed does have a place, but the fed doesn't have the power to control states or boss them around (in theory - in practice federal grants do give a fair amount of power over many states). The fed is limited to interstate (that is, things involving multiple states) actions, and can't dictate the internals of a state.
The Untold Story of Moderna’s Race for a Covid-19 Vaccine
I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually a combination of a new feature being recently rolled out, along with the sudden spike in load this morning.

The holidays are actually the perfect time for Slack to roll out a risky deployment, as it has to be their lowest usage time. So it would make sense if something was pushed out last week or the week before. And everything probably seemed fine.

And then this morning they suddenly realize this new feature does not perform under load. And to make matters worse, the new feature has been out long enough to make any sort of rollback very tricky, if not impossible. Which means they'd need engineers to desperately hack out, test and deploy a code fix.

If this is the scenario, I do not envy them at all.
1. Abnormally high investment returns. The most obvious sign of any investment skulduggery is the promise of an abnormally high investment return. ...

I'd argue there's no promise of any investment return. Bitcoin just allows the transfer of money nearly instantly.

2. Guaranteed returns. ...

There are no returns since it just a currency to be used.

3. Consistently high performance. ...

Bitcoin isn't a stock, it's a currency. If you're using it to invest, you're gonna have a bad time.

4. Vague business model. ...

Not a business, just a currency.

5. The need for more investors. ...

There is no need for anyone to invest in Bitcoin, there are plenty of hedge funds putting their money into it.

6. Pressure to reinvest. ...

You can go in and out of Bitcoin as you please.

7. The pressure to act now. ...

This is probably FOMO, noone's forcing you to purchase Bitcoin and I would not purchase Bitcoin during a rally unless I was doing a Monday-Friday trading run (buy Monday, sell Friday)

8. Credibility through association.

Noone is associated to Bitcoin, it's an anonymous currency.
I'll note that zlib and gzip are approximately the same, with the same algorithm under the hood (`deflate`) but different framing. But if it's working well for your use-case, that's all that really matters - especially over having to deal with C interop.
Indeed, if you champion FOSS, why would you recommend a proprietary piece of software as fallback?
> The monetary transmission channel for equities is exactly the same as Bitcoin’s.

Can you explain what you mean by this? From my understanding the fed has been buying corporate bonds and ETFs directly. I shouldn't have said the Fed is buying 'anything else available on equity markets'.
I experience the same issue. Could be that a ton of people are looking here for information regarding all these service outages and delays.
I agree with you in principal, but I have had no problem connecting to Slack today (I have a free one I use with friends, not a business account) so to say they are down would also be inaccurate.
The funniest part to me is that their status page still says "Uptime for the current quarter: 100%". These uptime messages are so BS. Heroku reports 6 9s of uptime for this month, even though their own status page shows multiple days with incidents >6 hours
Yes, Google plans extensively and runs regular drills.

It's hearsay, but I was once told that achieving "black start" capability was a program that took many years and about a billion dollars. But they (probably) have it now.
I find it hilarious that the status page is still saying the uptime for the current quarter is 100%. I'd think it'd have lost at least one 9 by any obvious definition of "current quarter".
>"Non subscription doesn't provide for a steady revenue stream for the developer, however."

Developer is not entitled to that "steady revenue stream". Keep working and releasing new products / features that customers are willing to pay for and you'll be fine.
> You are correct in a way -- judges do not decide issues that do not need to be decided, and things they do say about those issues are ignored, so yes, she omitted to discuss it.

And that's a bad thing as it leaves the case more or less open to US side coming up with "We promise to put him in some VIP jail with blackjack, and hookers," and more opportunities for retrials for state attorney to attack weaker defense arguments one at a time.

Having the extradition flopped as political, would've closed the door on it for good.
> You don’t have to be genius to understand what is going on: USA printed trillions and gave most of it to already rich people.

It's also a good time to understand "The Cantillion Effect"

> Namely, when you print money, it causes more pounds to chase fewer goods, pushing up the average cost resulting in inflation. His theory has been dubbed ‘The Cantillion effect’, and is a lesson to us all on the effects of inflation ‘financing the financiers’.

https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-cantillion-effect

https://fee.org/articles/the-cantillon-effect-because-of-inf...
It'd be late for that. Logistics takes weeks, or even months, to ramp up.

This is stuff that needed to be planned out last October if we wanted it working this month or next month.

I guess better late than never. But... don't hold your breath. We're going to be having these logistic / distribution problems for many weeks moving forward.
"Oopsie woopsie!"
Ether soars above $1k as Bitcoin sets another record
Right, but he was kept on suicide watch, given paper clothes and sheets, and placed in a special jail cell specifically designed to prevent suicide, as they are currently doing with Ghislaine Maxwell: https://nypost.com/2020/07/09/feds-take-ghislaine-maxwells-s...
OnSpecta | Redwood City, CA & Warsaw, Poland or Remote | Performance Engineer (HPC) | Visa

OnSpecta is an early-stage startup founded by successful serial entrepreneurs and deep learning experts, and was born out of MIT’s neuroscience lab. We offer a Deep Learning Server (DLS) which increases the performance of deep learning computations on Intel and ARM CPUs, GPUs and ASICs etc. We're a small team (~15), so you'll have a huge opportunity to make a difference.

We are looking for talented software engineers to work directly with our technical founders. If you have experience in C++ and are interested in working on cutting-edge AI/ML infrastructure tech, please reach out to us. Open positions include: C++ engineer, Sales Engineer, DevOps Eng, ML & Research Eng. See more at http://onspecta.com/careers.html

Please reach out to hiring@onspecta.com and include "HN: " in the subject. (Note: we're open to remote work, but you must be in California's or Central/Eastern Europe's timezones. Local candidates are preferred. Mostly remote now due to covid.)
We've seen lots of exodus from Hollywood to states that are less union friendly, or at least that don't yet have a strong related union presence (yet).

While there maybe isn't yet a definitive "Hollywood East" or "Hollywood South" etc yet, the desire to find/build an alternative to Hollywood proper seems clear.
Yeah I thought there was something wrong with my connection
There aren't any.
The huge risk that I see with Bitcoin is the introduction of capital controls. The United States, if we have a crisis may not allow capital flight. It could move against companies such as coinbase, that provide a means to move capital out of the country. These ideas are already being discussed with limits on how much and to whom you may send bitcoin to from coinbase.
There is another thread for those seeking work. You should post there. This will probably get voted down here.
Regardless of intent, it's undeniable that at some point there were insufficient controls to prevent this executive, or any executive in the future, from gaining this level of surveillance access.

And it's also undeniable that the consequences for Zoom (really, just needing to fire a few people, and not even the people who designed those controls if there were any) are so minimal that they have no incentive to strengthen those controls.

For some organizations (mine included) the benefits of Zoom outweigh the risks of Zoom having proven itself to not have those controls, namely the possibility of both political and corporate espionage. As with all things, YMMV.
Where does technology come from?

Labor. The labor of knowledge workers, which is what software engineers are called by economists ...
I don't see what adding a body that allows you to vote on what get's done involves all of those problems.

Unions are structured in a way determined by the workers who are voting, there is no inevitable path for a union to take. A teacher union is very different from an actor's union, for instance, even if they are covered by the same basic laws.
It was pretty clear the 'may' is a euphemism when your whole system is down.
Surely at that point one is as much bought into the ethical compromise as the money, and the knowledge of where it comes from?
Why? If there is no law there is no government.
Yeah, I don't know, because the Slack status page is so vague.
It's more the difficulty in standing up a new site for GMP (good manufacturing practice). Closest analogy in the tech word would be standing up a new fab, but quite a bit cheaper. It takes time to iron out all the kinks and show that everything is being produced correctly and safely. And skipping this would be disastrous, since we are already reaching dangerous amounts of vaccine hesitancy.
That’s the wrong way to look at it. If HN struggles in certain situations then it is not right-sized. You don’t beg of users to walk an unintuitive happy path (i.e. logout when not commenting).
> ignoring that the ability to independently verify the money supply and being able to transfer money across political boundaries without censorship is probably the most important intrinsic value one could hope for in a MoE/SoV.

That BTC is not (yet?) money should again be non-controversial, since the vast majority of economic agents anywhere won't accept it directly (so you need to exchange BTC for cash first). It does have a decent claim at "store of value". But, where is the "intrinsic value"? You claim two of them:

1. ability to independently verify the money supply

2. being able to transfer money across political boundaries without censorship

I don't understand either, to be honest:

1. You can verify the supply of other things (e.g. company shares) at an independent body. I'm pretty sure that's true for "money in circulation", too. Ok, the verification is not distributed, but is that distribution so valuable? Or do you actually mean "The supply is naturally-limited and nobody can easily produce tons of BTC out of thin air"? Then, yes, BTC has that property... but, tons of other things do! E.g. why not invest in amber, it's probably one of the rarest things in the universe.

2. Transfer across political boundaries: is there ANY inherent guarantee? Say US decides tomorrow that trading BTC is illegal, how would BTC protect you from that? Using existing anti-money-laundering laws & global institutions, you'd be effectively banned from getting back any value from your BTCs (or, doing so would expose you to all the associated risks).
Hello World, Byte for Byte
An introduction to Linux binaries
Most releases are automated with time lockouts.
Weren't there rumors they were rewriting it in React Native Windows? Now going full web, what message shall we read? Is React Native dead on Windows?

Fuck, another UI platform they're killing - at least it's OSS and someone might pick it up. But at this point, we should all just give up and do web shit I guess...
The title is inverted, it should say "Putting $400M of your company [balance sheet] into Bitcoin". And it's no different than any other corporate management decision: makes sense if your company is supposed to do such things. Almost all companies aren't supposed to trade cryptocurrency.
Much before MS did that, macOS had builtin exFAT support presumably licensed from MS, Paragon had exFAT support for android for a one time fee which works with other file manager apps(also licensed from MS), On Linux Exfat-utils enabled support for exFAT(open-source implementation).

Has there been any changes to these since MS has opened the license to exFAT?
The experience of people you know flies directly in the face of my experience (not at FAANGs but similar caliber) and that of several hundreds of my friends and acquaintances who work at these companies.

Whatever the exceptions are, if you work at these places, you're living a GREAT life in the grand scheme of things.

Conversations about other employers not relevant.
Bets, Bonds, and Kindergarteners
Unfortunate they called it a 'coin' then. Maybe it should've been Bitgold. Digimetal.
>I can't even begin to guess what went wrong. What are your guesses? How many screaming executives are there at Slack saying "just roll it back"?

Doubtful it's a code issue causing a total system outage. I'm assuming they have a bunch of auto scaling infrastructure that wound down over the holidays and couldn't take the spike this morning.
> which effectively IS email for many, many people

Doesn't have to be, though. One person doesn't even have to tie their address to a single provider, and seeing past received messages doesn't even need internet connectivity.
Which assets exactly are seeing artificial government fueled inflation?
Can we please trade in centralized Slack and single-sign-on and get back the netsplit of IRC :) ? At least I can chat with half of my colleagues :)
Definitions mean something. IANAL, but as I understand it, trade unions are a legally protected entity, not an abstract concept which relates to any organization of people who happen to be employed in the same line of work.

> trade union: An organization of workers in the same skilled occupation or related skilled occupations who act together to secure for all members favorable wages, hours, and other working conditions.

There is apparently a concept in trade unions called the "golden formulae";

> golden formulae a non-technical but convenient expression to describe the conditions required for a trade union to benefit from the limited immunities available to it under legislation. There must first be a trade dispute that relates wholly or mainly to matters such as terms and conditions of employment, sacking or suspension of workers, allocation of work, discipline, membership of a union, facilities for union officials or negotiating regime. The acts in question must be in contemplation of furtherance of the dispute.

So, for example, the legal benefits of a union may not confer to any possible activity a group of employees may conduct, but rather must pertain to specific aspects of their employment and relations to their employer.

US Federal labor law defines a trade union as;

> any organization of any kind, or any agency or employee representation committee or plan, in which employees participate and which exists for the purpose, in whole or in part, of dealing with employers concerning grievances, labor disputes, wages, rates of pay, hours of employment, or conditions of work.

I'm not saying that it's impossible for a collective of employees to organize around political rallying points, just that these actions are not generally recognized as the purpose of a trade union, and perhaps would not be legally protected in the same way.

For example, there are carve-outs to requiring employees to pay union dues which are not used for specific purposes;

> In 1988, the Supreme Court ruled (5–3) in Communications Workers v. Beck that private-sector workers who are not full union members cannot be forced to pay for the “social, charitable, and political” activities of unions. They can only be forced to pay the portion of dues used for “collective bargaining, contract administration, and grievance adjustment.” Per the ruling, the federal law that requires compulsory unionism in certain situations does not provide the unions with a means for forcing employees, over their objection, to support political causes which they oppose.

To the extent that this "union" is more of a PAC than a collective bargaining agreement over labor contracts, the specific protections (like required payment of dues) melt away.

[1] - https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/trade+union

[2] - https://www.justfacts.com/unions.asp
I encourage you to read your own sources:

> Money from the federal government is redistributed back to states in the form of grants, aid programs for the needy and payments to major government contracting firms such as defense companies.

That isn't open funds, it's earmarked grants and things like foodstamps.