skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And since that $146t figure is long-term obligations looking out decades, the US net worth also must be adjusted for future terms matching those forward decades. Even a modest growth rate applied to the US asset base over 30-40 years produces an extraordinary sum. As you note, the people that like to pretend the $146t is actual debt, go out of their way to evade such discussions.

Since the peak of the real-estate bubble circa 2007 (right before household assets dropped), US household wealth has more than doubled, while household debt has remained very tame by comparison.

The gain has roughly been $66t to ~$145t since 2007, in household assets. The debt increase has been $14.6t to ~$17.3t.

So nearly $80 trillion in added wealth, stacked against $2.7 trillion in new debt, over ~14 years. That's beyond extraordinary. You can hear the skeptics though: yeah, but that's bubble wealth; ok, chop it in half, $40t stacked against $2.7t in new debt, still extraordinary.

Over that time US households produced more new wealth than China did, to put that gain into perspective (and yes, most of it went to the top 1/3).

Also interesting, the debt of US states has shown no consequential increase in those 14 years. The total debt of the states went from $3t to $3.23t. That's another great positive for the US when it comes to debt (stacked against the growing federal debt mess of course). States fortunately often have restrictions on deficits.
> I guess what I'm wondering is why do you care? It's like a girl ghosting you for 2 months and then saying she wants to break up. Whether it's right or wrong, why are you even still waiting around?

Totally relatable.

>If I'm honest, I've never seen what you're describing in tech.

I may have exaggerated by mentioning 2 months, but it took be 1 and half month on some case and 2-3 weeks on most cases. There was one which took more than 2 months.

> If you're talking about the first stage (reviewing CVs) then some companies will hold off on arranging interviews for a week or two so they can select applicants with the strongest CVs.

I didn't know about this one. It's really tricky for starting out without any connection. Because it's hard to get that chance :(
There are already bills in the pipeline to require all cars to have GPS in the EU (speed limiters) and more privacy violating stuff. Governments want to know of every aspect of your life, so any privacy conscious device will not be viable.
I mean, each cycle does leave us with real accomplishments. If the question is whether it leaves us closer to AGI, then it's an open question. Like, when AGI happens, it will certainly trace its roots back to things happening in each period, but its roots will also go back to Gauss and Newton and co, so nobody knows whether it gets us closer in the way you probably mean.
It is terribly possible. As a 20 year old kid I was part of a two man crew responsible for transporting dead research animals. I have no idea what credentials the guy I was with had. But its not like this was even the only thing he did. When we were done with animal duty it was off to haul recycled books. That man possessed high degree of trust from the University authorities, I wonder if it was formalized in any way. To be very clear, this guy had an unbelievable character and work ethic. I've maybe met a dozen guys who just oozed it and he was one of them.
I like to think that the Hawaiian practice of using native bird feathers for large and elaborate cloaks might let us pursue de-extinction through DNA extraction and cloning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBAhu_%CA%BBula

Just think about how many individual birds' feathers contributed towards making these. And we know plenty of the yellow feathers are from the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō bird which was declared extinct. The Kauaʻi Akialoa was also declared extinct and they had yellow feathers too. There could even be feathers from species that went extinct before being cataloged by science. There is so much potential in this area, yet I don't know if there are any proposals to attempt DNA extraction or try to examine feathers and determine which species each came from.

Edit: This is food for thought and I'm in no way advocating we do any less to prevent extinctions today. I just like having the hope that future generations might be able to bring a few species back.
That, unfortunately, is not as great of a loophole as you might imagine - you can ask interwar Germany and the Papiermark[1] how that worked out for them. Effective debt (a concept I'm coining here) is essentially the product of: 1) the abstract value of a debt and 2) the ability of anyone to actually collect that debt - this is why it's hard to get a loan in the US if you're a government backed organization in Russia - since the issuing bank can only expect repayment on pure faith. The US government can now (and for the foreseeable future) fend off any potential collection attempts with a combination of military might, economic might, international good will and self-destructive power - this may change in the future (at which point the debt will become a lot more critical) but for the time being the US is pretty immune to collections. It always pays back its interest (that itself contributes to the continued good will) but nobody can forcefully collect the lump sum of debt.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_R...
When we talk about debt, we are usually talking about bills, notes, and bonds the US treasury issues. The Federal reserve does buy lots of treasury bonds but it’s a fraction of the public market as a whole. Most of the debt is held by American institutions and private individuals, then American government agencies and the fed, then the remaining third or so are foreign governments/institutions.

https://www.thebalance.com/who-owns-the-u-s-national-debt-33...

My understanding is that the Fed buys treasuries at the market rate and does attempt to keep interest low that way by creating some demand at the current rate, but that it’s ability to influence the treasury rates is not as important as the perception that American debt is rock solid. It works by buying a small amount to “soothe markets” and keep other players interested, and is unable to create all the demand by itself without basically destroying the value of the dollar.

Disclaimer: I’m not an economist and probably have massive gaps in the details and mechanics of The US’s fiscal policy (or monetary when we talk about fed creating credit to buy treasuries).
And don’t forget that we haven’t even really begun to search the areas that resemble aspects of human neural anatomy. The ultimate heuristic.
One important part of the chip shortage is the massive amount of price gouging going on.

Every IC is being bought up by new 3rd party distributors to scalp to desperate electronics manufacturers.

Take a look at this chip we are just now crossing as an example, click on 'Non-authorized stocking distributors':

https://octopart.com/tps2052bdgnr-texas+instruments-699312?r...

Win Source has a bunch, but you will pay 6x the cost. We have been quoted even 100x the list price for some ICs on our boards.

Luckily as a small company we are nimble and can mostly cross to similar components, and have been for months now, but a whole board assembly run can be stopped with a single component being impossible to find out of hundreds on the BOM.

Having scalpers in the mix raising the price for all components worries me that the chip shortage might not end for many years, as they can self-fund by raising their prices to stock up on new supply. Not to mention the higher number of random failures as counterfeits easily find their way into the supply chain without 'authorized' distributors.
So true. Computing is very cheap nowadays. It is also very reliable.

If you watch Sandy Munro's videos, he mentions often how his visits with Chinese car manufacturers go, when they discuss architecture options. Customers hold up a cell phone and ask "How can we make it more like this?". The cell phone got rid of separate components a long time ago. Everything's on one PCB, plus the display. And many things that used to be on the PCB but consisted of many chips, are now integrated to a single chip. The car consisting of a lot of OEM boxes connected with wires seems so outdated.

And each box having a separate computer makes it in essence stranded. Instead, if the control is centralized, then it's possible to take the complexity to software and keep managing it much better, features are easier to develop and can be sent to existing cars over the air etc.
Right now Machine Learning with "neural" networks is all A and no I.
And how fast is JS compiled to wasm? Are you claiming that it's also as fast as C++ compiled to wasm?
> the only reason we don't feel this too much just yet, is because often times cheaper alternatives where available.

There is a trick, what I like to call value extraction, that companies do in place of financial extraction(or raising prices).

This is commonly known as shrinkflation in regards to commodities, such as cereal, as the company provides less product for the same price and as such the product has to be bought more. People just buy their product as usual and don't realize the quantity has gone down and just have to purchase more and more.

In the sense of a more tangible product, like a tool or shoe, the company lowers the 'value'...it is cheaper pricewise by say a factor of 3 but the actual quality of the product is lowered by a factor of 10 or more, in materials, in manufacturing, etc..so the value is reduced massively, and it's cheaper financially in the short run on the price tag, but not cheaper in the long run, because the product fails much more often than the quality product and has to be purchased over and over again.

As humans we just see the price tag in the short term for all of it. Prices are easy to compare and are objective, value is much harder to quantify.

This is also part of Ubers business model of milking drivers as well, not out of money, but out of asset depreciation. The drivers just see the money they're making today, and aren't thinking about long term asset depreciation.
So the less educated driver thinks they're making 20 bucks an hour, but in reality that driver is making like 4 bucks an hour after operating expenses, however, Uber advertises the 20 dollar an hour number in employment ads.

I haven't formed a complete framework for it but this idea of 'value extraction' is one way companies make money without raising prices.
Some states ban pay day loans. Talk to your state reps and ask them to ban non-competes and fine companies which attempt to do business in the state but block the state from hiring.
My original comment was referring to companies who train their own machine learning models. They might not be spending the way large slow corporations and the government do but there's a lot of investment in the space and a ton of room for growth.
You can't quite 'cancel out intergovernmental debt', as their sale (to extract their value) would cause devaluation. I am not sure how you would model the loss in value.
Excellent explanation and separation of concerns.
> I'd love to find another one

how about bamboo tabletops?

https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/anfallare-tabletop-bamboo-00465...
> 2) No-code/lo-code analytical app building. Reporting and dashboarding tools are just highly specialized app builders. Why not make a step further and generalize it a bit?

Yes exactly! Dashboarding tools only get you halfway - there's no easy way to take action from within the dashboard itself. I see analytic app building as a cross between Tableau and Airplane/Retool
They're used by cloudflare to generate random numbers -- so a subset of the internet, the bits that use cloudflare.
It depends, but generally yes. Collapsing to 1 may or may not be a good thing, but you probably want less than 3-5 different DBMS, CMS, Cloud providers, printing services, source control systems, office supply/equipment, etc.
Many open source projects started as passion projects. Someone had a problem they wanted to solve, so they solved it for themselves or for their team. The products weren’t designed based on a need to sell to a wide audience, or to attract a particular kind of buyer, they just need to work and work well.

Function is often more important than form when these projects are born.

I think it’s also worth mentioning that a pretty UI should not be confused for good UX. We can make snap judgments by looking at screenshots that look a little old school, but if the UX is good, the rest is just eye candy.
Zimbabwe. That’s what we will do. You can’t simple hand assets over to normal people and expect the assets to maintain their value.

The Zimbabwe government took the farms from their owners and gave them to normal people. Mismanagement of them lead to food shortages.
Yes, and it actively manages it. Occasionally, one of the potential outcomes of this management becomes visible to the outside world, when it sunsets a product. Other times, lack of investment in this management also becomes visible, when a product is clearly languishing.

As in any other company, headcount is always limited, and some products are funded by nothing but the willpower of particular passionate engineers/managers, which results in a very low lottery bus factor.
I'm assuming they have a profit motive not a moral one. I could be wrong but I'm very cynical when it comes to the motives of big companies.
Interest Rates! You nailed it. Nobody is going to collect on the US, but if we default we basically lower our national credit score. It then becomes harder to get/give loans internationally. Debt is also super complicated. The most recent estimate is only ~40% of all public debt owed is foreign. That means the rest of our debs it owned by Americans themselves or intergovernmental. This article is mostly highlighting that we will need to borrow in order to fund some of these programs. I doubt that will be difficult for us considering our current credit rating. https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/RS22331.pdf
Don't forget the title insurance scam which takes out ~0.75% as closing fees. Look up their pay out rates and that industry's lobbying. Same few companies make 0.75% insuring new customer from previous customer every time the same house gets sold.
> Getters and Setters also permit you to specify that something can only be retrieved or assigned, but not the other.

Only retrieved? `final` and set the fields through the constructor.

Sure someone could implement setters-only if they wanted that. Except I’ve never seen it and get/set are always used instead. Just one layer of indirection for no benefit.
Just use restructured text (rST) already.
Cars are a really noisy electrical environment. Can you replace that micron-scale chip with a 7 nm chip and have it function reliably for two decades in that environment?

I mean, worst case, when you let go of the starter motor, it creates a huge back EMF. Imagine your chip finding its +5 input suddenly 12 volts below ground for a significant fraction of a second. (Now, it shouldn't be that bad any more. That was back in the bad old days, when chips were just starting to be added to cars. Shielding should be a mostly-solved problem these days. But is it solved well enough for your 7 nm chip, or just well enough for the micron-scale chips? It's something you have to really carefully look at before you move to smaller processes.)
Some things seem to have changed from 2018, but MongoDB was by far the worst database I ever had the displeasure of using (and Amazon DocumentDB was even worse).

https://jepsen.io/analyses/mongodb-3-6-4

https://jepsen.io/analyses/mongodb-4.2.6
0% of these SEO dweebs do it this way.
From the article it sounds like invasive species, plus the fact that we have royally screwed up the local ecosystem.

For instance — white-tailed deer are growing exponentially, eating all the underbrush and outcompeting other animals, and they have no/few natural predators left.

I agree that not much has changed since the 80s, I think it's just catching up to us now.
But then you're multiplying your storage costs 100x, aren't you?
Don’t worry :) I read it as “The biggest idiots I've encountered are brilliant people (who are [idiots when they are]) outside their knowledge domain.”
Anything which visualizes a Gantt chart will automatically look like steaming garbage.
> Stellantis has halted production at other plants, including in Europe and Canada, forecasting that it would make 1.4 million fewer vehicles this year due to the chip shortage.

For perspective:

> Combined sales of FCA and PSA totaled 6,206,000 units in 2020, down by 22% compared to 2019 figures. When the two companies announced their decision to merge, they became the world’s 4th largest automaker by sales volume. It was only outsold by Volkswagen Group, Toyota and Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance. With 7,907,000 vehicles sold in 2019, FCA-PSA (which was not called Stellantis by then), was bigger than GM and Hyundai-Kia. One year later, these two outperformed Stellantis.

https://fiatgroupworld.com/2021/02/14/stellantis-sold-6-2-mi...

If I'm reading this right, pre-pandemic sales were ~8 million. So a cut 1.4 million due to chip shortages represents an 18% drop. But compared to 2020, the drop is 23%.

That's disastrous hit for any company to withstand.

I'm curious how much of this is actually due to chip supply vs. how much could be due to other factors, but blamed on chip supply.
About iCloud Private Relay
Cruise gets permit to give driverless rides to passengers in San Francisco
Great visuals
Then you get people nagging about how big companies are bad at security with leaks.

It is easy to nag when they never had to secure anything or operate at scale of 100's of employees and 1000's of users.

It is just hard even if you have good practices in place, because checking that everything is in place and training new people to follow rules is a lot of work.
I'd describe myself as having above-average privacy anxiety but I have to ask, what's the threat model here? I'm way more concerned about ALPRs than I am about Bluetooth or a data connection.
> to a modern standard

We let perfect be the enemy of good a lot here. Environmental regs, construction standards, and the ADA bring a lot of benefits but they've made it so there's so such thing as a minor project anymore.
That seems pretty cheap TBH. Boston is something like $90 per month. Adding commuter rail or ferry would add several hundred dollars plus parking.
The government is also circumventing the 1st amendment by pressuring Private Companies to ban speech for them.
If I’ve learned anything during the pandemic, it’s “that’s not how money works”. If it runs out, they’ll just borrow more. The real question is at what point are we so leveraged that we default on bonds because we can’t meet our obligations? 10 years? 100 years? I don’t think anyone can answer this. But this is how it will likely end.
time to go home...
Mind telling us whether you're hiring? And, mind pointing us to some contacts where your people are going?
https://youtu.be/EPjrFjAxwlw
Exactly. People make the case that something along the lines of AGI is necessary and sufficient for some task, then someone comes along and solve it with something completely unlike AGI, proving that it's not a necessary condition. Or in more straightforward but less precise terms, solving this is AI and then it isn't.
Stop peddling conspiracy theories and bad faith arguments.

Your "misinformation" is the notion that masks work, vaccines are not "100% effective" as originally claimed, and that the coronavirus strain causing covid-19 is man-made. You want to stifle political opinions that threaten your narrative, and you have twisted your words in such a way that you are framing state censorship as a form of liberation. Your advocacy for state controls on speech would be far more at home in a totalitarian regime such as the DPRK, and I suggest you pursue your ideals there.
> What if it’s some pesticide? or some food packaging or something

What if it was? I don't expect things to change much with corporate's death grip on the government.
... and only a third of the salary deductions you have in Ausria. Plus, you can choose your own health insurance. Seriously, don't travel there.
It's the only one that matters.
Aks HN: GitHub's Home Page is so smooth, how?
Today I opened Github in a new browser and I noticed how amazingly smooth and well animated their landing page is, while being fully responsive.

How are they doing this? Is the key, handcrafting everything or is there some secret sauce/tooling?

Also, to those who worked on this: My admiration.
Efficient Partitioning of Road Networks
It feels like a lot of people singing Workers’ praises haven’t really used them in customer-facing scenarios at large scale. They are useful but there’s a lot missing compared to Lambda.
That’s a good one. Also we gave everyone a copy of “Give and Take” by Grant at one point. And I buy anyone a copy of “On Writing Well” by Zinsser.
> Cars are a really noisy electrical environment. Can you replace that micron-scale chip with a 7 nm chip and have it function reliably for two decades in that environment?

For as long as you talk about digital side, you can. Your smartphone is a way more noisy electrical environment than your car.
Better to have full cars using the roads and all of the otherwise solo drivers in their largely empty cars attracted to public transport.

There'll be various reasons why a large family can't take a train, but drastically fewer reasons why a person or a commuter travelling alone cannot (or, a group of friends, or a couple, etc.)

Maybe one day that'll change again, but at least now it helps reduce the amount of pointless traffic on the road.
Yes, you've hit on the other advantages of a direct listing! Retail investors get the same treatment as big funds instead of being shut out which I love. Everyone's also allowed to sell right away which so you know you have full market information AND it's much better for the employees.

RE startup raises these are all what I call champagne problems (is it possible to win too much?). My philosophy is to aim for a little above (eg 20-30%) "market price" for what similar companies are raising at. If you go too much beyond that (eg 2-3x) then it can start to set the wrong expectations and it can get difficult to beat in the future even if you're doing well. It's not great to have misalignment with your shareholders (eg the investors who are now partial owners of your business). There is another train of thought that says to get the highest valuation you can, investors are professionals and will deal with it. So maybe I'm not bold enough. Either way, funding markets, particularly for startups now, are incredibly rich. They're probably 3x the valuation when we did venture/growth stage funding so you'll be in great shape no matter what.
With the current development in climate change and resource exploitation, one can expect this to be the tip of the iceberg.
Someday we’re going to hit the cascade point, where we’ve simultaneously and severely damaged or disrupted so many ecosystems that they won’t be able to recover and it all just collapses.
People want hands on physical hardware. If you just wanted 2021, you could run everything in an emulator. Having a floppy drive is cool and nostalgic.
Dublin Core's dirty little secret (2010)
Many of these species were considered done for by the time they were listed. The tools we have to rehabilitate our ecology from the brink of near total destruction really only came online in the late 60s through the 70s and it's taken time for them to be effective, but they have been in a lot of ways, whether it is the ESA, CWA, NEPA, etc.