skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I recently listened to an episode of the How I Built This podcast with one of the members of the PayPal mafia.

He mentioned that one of Peter Thiels greatest abilities is to spot and predict upcoming economic declines. Max Levchin said that Peter seemed to always know when to get in and out of markets.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-built-this-with-...
scylladb is one of the most technologically sophisticated companies in the world and their team has more expertise with the linux kernel and distributed systems than anyone even 100X their size in california. to claim that expertise in one technical field doesnt translate to others is just ignorant.
It's used in the forward pass right under it, no?
Is this correct then? : SVP gives easy credit to VC friends. VC friends use that credit as investment in startups who are told they must use SVP. So money moves from magic-money-printer -> SVP -> VC -> Startup -> SVP. Then SVP takes those deposits and invests it elsewhere. Now they are making money from loan to VC and reinvestment of those same monies that are deposited back.

So a bank like SVP seems designed to enable VCs with easy credit to de-facto control an important (and balooning) niche of the economy and by their control over the beauty pageant of which startup idea gets money (and PR) they also control what kind of technology becomes dominant. (For example, these VCs share significant credit/blame for creating the surveillance tech. They share blame for creating an engineering culture that must serve full throttle growth business models. etc.)

Is there a social graph of SVP and VCs involved? Are these people pals, friends, "effective" ideologues, etc.?
> it’s generally considered to be a bad idea evolutionarily speaking to kill hosts you infect

That sound's like it's giving some kind of agency to the pathogen ;) when in fact it's more like: everyone that's severly infected isolates or dies, so the more harmless variants of the pathogen can replicate faster.
Software expands to use whatever system resources are available. If overnight we all got ten times the RAM, within a few years all new software would require ten times the RAM.
TypeScript has the most complicated type system ever. Don't know why Anders&Co needed to go that far.
The objection is one can't effectively lecture while heckled, not that they can't "handle" it. Disrupting class, in other words.

Though FIRE also calls that heckling "unlawful", which, unless I'm missing something, I disagree with - I don't see which laws the hecklers broke, since as far as protesting goes, they were tame, if allegedly uncivil and in the wrong venue.
Perhaps it’s an anti-SV backlash? Seems misguided as a lot of the places that you’ll want to work at 5-10 years from now are probably depositors at SVB. I think we all have an interest in a trustworthy financial system so rooting for depositors to get wiped out seems particularly short sighted.
To be fair, the bank run is what made SVB insolvent. Prior to that, all they had was a liquidity problem. A rather big one, but if depositors hadn't bailed, SVB would just have had subpar growth for a few years.
Wow, it takes some tremendous mental gymnastics to look at the Weimar republic and come to the conclusion that UBI is to blame.
I remember one time when I was 14 I loaded my entire Civilization 5 install, including saves, into my RAM without a backup, and then I shut off my computer, deleting said install along with all my saves.
You’re still missing the forest for the trees. It is doing a lot and it’s better at producing text that is how a human would write about topics better than many humans.

That’s not at all related to being close to general human intelligence.
I recall reading in "Wanting" by Luke Burgis that he was a follower of Rene Girard. "Thiel left the corporate world and co-founded Confinity with Max Levchin in 1998. He began to use his knowledge of mimetic theory to help him manage both the business and his life. "

"When there was risk of an all-out war with Elon Musk’s rival company, X.com, Thiel merged with him to form PayPal. He knew from Girard that when two people (or two companies) take each other as mimetic models, they enter into a rivalry for which there is no end but destruction—unless they are somehow able to see beyond the rivalry."[1]

Maybe he has found a way to identify when things will self-destruct based off of mimetic theory.

[1] I did a summary of the book here : https://www.chestergrant.com/summary-wanting-by-luke-burgis
Can you link them? I couldn’t find them on his blog.
The main cause of the issue was that deposits increased so much over the pandemic and then decreased a lot simultaneously with a huge spike in interest rates. The Fed and the government have (unintentionally) engineered a banking crisis. A lot of banks are having liquidity issues now.
This is a simple liquidity problem. SVB had the treasury bills and loan book to cover all the deposits. They just couldn’t access any of that money.

The FDIC should take on the bills and loans, and pay out the cash now. They will collect the entire balance eventually and they have the benefit of time and I imagine they’re authorised to hold assets like this long-term (or do a cash swap with the fed, they have plenty of long term bonds what’s another $100B). I have always assumed this is what the whole point of the FDIC and similar schemes in other countries. They foot the bill immediately and then spend time fixing up the mess but eventually reclaim it all back. It’s a bit like if you’re not at fault for an accident - the insurer pays you out now and then they deal with the at-fault driver and you’re not involved in that process afterwards in most cases.

According to the press release, SVB had $206B in assets and $176B in deposits. The math is simple: everyone should get their money back. There may even be some money left over for investors.
1/1000 people are dead in the US. Much more in places like in India. And yet here we are people still underplaying it. It’s amazing seeing rewriting of history right in front of your eyes for sure.
I think the point is that a precipitous pull of deposits actually diminishes ability to maximize the underlying asset disposition required to cover the whole of deposits.

You are correct that there is a bit of prisoner's dilemma here. I'm sure Thiel's portfolio companies that successful transferred funds had an awesome maybe even productive weekend while the rest had to scramble to figure out what this all means for them.

I think there's also tragedy of the commons at play here and this is where some level of orchestration would have been beneficial to optimize the common good or at least prevent unnecessary depreciation for the overall ecosystem.
I think this mostly comes from the PayPal mafia sort of attitude: libertarian when it helps me, bail me out when it helps me, start a bank run when it helps me.

There was a time when tech did seem like a better business movement. Certainly better than the financial sectors, or heavy industry, or pharma. But then we let Thiel and Musk become the face, with Sachs and Calacsnais (or however you spell his name) become their media toadies, and we got fucked on the PR front.

We need to reject these guys a bit harder. Thiel's bank run was unnecessary. He should have picked up the phone and got the numbers from SVB instead of destroying an institution that's so helpful for small founders. Founders are now more dependent on Thiel and his ilk, and less independent.
Also I would just like to say that I find it absolutely disgusting that "do you look respectable" is some kind of proxy for the quality of medical care someone deserves, or the level of suspicion or ire a person deserves.

No, I do not look sketchy or aggressive. I am literally just a normal looking dude. Rather healthy, rather well kempt. Now what the fuck should that have to do with my medical care?
I sure am glad I can afford nice clothes, glad I was raised to speak proper english, and glad I have adequate dental care, cause it sounds you are suggesting pharmacists will not work with you if you are an "undersireable". I think that is pretty fucking gross. If you gave 50 junkies their drugs but it meant you didnt hassle even 1 legit patient Id call it a win. What bizarre moral high grounds peoppe take.

Also I was at no point complaining about pharmacists - theyve always been super helpful to me, as much as they legally could anyway. I was complaining about the law itself, and complaining about primary care physicians.

And you are correct I should have said "some states" instead of "some pharmacies" - it was, in fact, in Texas where this happened to me and you are correct, The first pharmacy I called told me that no texas pharmacy could legally fill the script from an out of state doctor.
First of all, the FDIC has always arranged to make depositors whole when banks failed. This is why there weren’t massive runs on bank checking and savings accounts in 2008.

Second, CA gets the least back in federal spending per dollar of taxes paid, and NY is close:

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/federal-spe...

Pre pandemic, only 11 states were turning a profit:

https://howmuch.net/articles/federal-budget-receipts-and-exp...

The regions most upset about federal safety nets are also the ones that benefit the most from them.

Third, it is not a minor inconvenience when $10M’s of investor money from a fundraising round gets permanently lowered to $250K (no “bailout”) or if a startup stops making payroll for 2 years (upper bound of the time range the FDIC has proposed).
An environment is a set of bindings and other information used
during evaluation (e.g., to associate meanings with names).

The Lisp idea of an environment is informative for the emacs-ai curious user.

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw51/CLHS/Body/03_aa....
Not an expert, but with a back of a napkin guess, the minimum for say digital HD, might be something like the following:

X x Y x colour_bytes x frames x 8bits

Eg, 1280x1080x3x60x8=1.99Gbps

So at 133Mhz, each cycle the RP2040 would have to push 15 bits out. It's got 2x cores, can be overclocked at double reliably, and has a bunch of programmable IO machines, so maybe doable, but likely not 4K. (More around 10-20Gbps.)
Reminds me of /r/place
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/place

While it would be interesting to see a reboot of the million-dollar homepage, just like we saw with /r/place, the fact that it involved money makes it unlikely. Maybe it could happen again if the organizer agreed to donate the money to charity.
Here is how Wikipedia defines it:

> Addiction is a neuropsychological disorder characterized by a persistent and intense urge to engage in certain behaviors, one of which is the usage of a drug, despite substantial harm and other negative consequences.

In fact, the article goes on to specifically refute the argument you are making:

> The term addiction is frequently misused when referring to other compulsive behaviors or disorders, particularly dependence, in news media. An important distinction between drug addiction and dependence is that drug dependence is a disorder in which cessation of drug use results in an unpleasant state of withdrawal, which can lead to further drug use. Addiction is the compulsive use of a substance or performance of a behavior that is independent of withdrawal. Addiction can occur in the absence of dependence, and dependence can occur in the absence of addiction, although the two can occur together.
Ideally they would, which is what happens to some banks in 2008. Unfortunately the banks that stepped in and bought failing banks got very badly punished, because they also inherited a whole bunch of liabilities far beyond the failing bank’s deposits, liabilities the purchasing bank didn’t expect and ultimately cost them substantial amounts of money.

If FDIC wanted another bank to buy SVB and make depositors whole, they would almost certainly also need to guarantee some sort of firewall against any liabilities beyond the deposits. Presumably the purchasing bank would want some ability to pick and choose exactly what bits of SVB it buys, and which liabilities. Leaving the remainder with either the feds, or some shelled out SVB entity. But who’s knows if that’s a path FDIC want to go down.
Multiple banks. There's one thing called counterparty risk and any firm with millions (or more) of US dollars in cash should have a function just to take care of this. But it seems a lot of tech firms' CFOs were sleeping at the wheel if it indeed transpires that all these firms were keeping their money all in one bank.
I’m sure his politics don’t align with everyone’s, especially Stanford students. But if you invite a judge to give a lecture to a bunch of law students and they disagree - there’s a much better way to show the disagreement.
Wa-SQLite (WASM SQLite) benchmark discussion
Interesting results https://rhashimoto.github.io/wa-sqlite/demo/benchmarks.html
yes, but some countries have a pretty streamlined process.

Canada, for exemple. They asks you for your name, passport number, credit card number, if you have anything specific to mention. Then you instantly received an email with your ETA

On the other hand, countries like the USA make it weird. They infamously ask you if you were involved in the 3rd Reich, and they want your social media accounts.
The latter is probably to know if you're an American&Trump loving tourist, or if you keep saying that Canada is better. Idk what else they can get out of this.

oh, and they ask you if you have a mental health disorder; They probably don't want autistic tourists either.
"With all the advances in tech..." Hmmm.

When I joined virtualization startup Bromium shortly after it was founded in 2011 (product now sold by HP as HP Sure Click), we were planning to put 100s of VMs on a single laptop, for security purposes, and were counting on and hoping() for the amount of RAM available to us on customer devices exponentially increasing over time, as had been the norm until them.

In 2011, a typical low-end laptop came with 4GiB of RAM, and a high-end one with 8GiB. I was a the company for five years, and those specs stayed exactly the same. Now in 2023, almost 12 years later, the minimum spec for a laptop has grown to 8GiBs of RAM, whereas Moore's law (transistors per unit space doubling every 18 months) would have predicted somewhere around 256GiB of RAM (4 (2*(12/2)) = 256GiB).

So where is the feast we were promised?

*) We actually made that happen, using lots of cool software tricks, but that is a story for another day.
if you’re an influential figure your words alone can trigger a bank run that wouldn’t have happened if you said nothing

Imo the question isn’t whether Thiel privately emailed founders advising them to pull money but whether they made a decision to leak their advice to the press to incite broader panic (eg how did Thiel’s advice make it into the headlines to begin with? who tipped off reporters?)

There is plenty of evidence that Founders Fund wanted to fan the flames: a Founders Fund partner literally published a “some VCs are saying to pull money out” the night before. Not sure how anyone can read this and think there was no intent to broadcast panic.

https://www.piratewires.com/p/some-vcs-advising-founders-to-...
> Imagine a 70 year old woman ...

I think the idea is that millionaire grannies should be advised to split their cash across four accounts, or buy bonds, or some other sensible thing, rather than just keeping bank deposits.
I program on old hardware in order to keep me in check.
I think whether you can "copyright a database" has a somewhat more complicated answer than you suggest, especially in the USA.

Was the "selection and arrangements" of the weights made by a human using at least some minimal level of creativity? I'm not really sure, it's an odd question. I'd lean toward no.

https://sco.library.emory.edu/research-data-management/publi...
i'm not really clear what this article is trying to say, but european cathedrals are beautiful buildings. i have no religous beliefs whatsoever, but living less than a mile from lincoln (uk) cathedral it always cheers me up to see it.
Programmer's time is expensive and RAM is cheap. Unless there are problems with memory leaks that cause the app to crash - programmer's time is better spent elsewhere.
Hmm, "the" commuter rail seems most likely MA and 45mi with a short drive to rail puts you in Groton/Harvard or more likely Worcester.
You're missing my point.

In the US, in most places, it is illegal to have work and home close to each other. You are forced to choose between commuting and WFH. In Europe no such laws exist. If anything, the opposite is cemented in laws. Meaning it's often possible to work close from where you live and vice versa.

I often work from home. But can choose to get on my bike and be in an office with colleagues, beer, pingpong and noise when I need it.

My point was that this choice is important. And that good city planning allows for such choices
I tell my fellow developers at work: "Any is banned. If you want any, use JavaScript, and we don't use JavaScript here. Perhaps you haven't heard about unknown?"

In my experience, 90% of the time when a developer uses any, they just don't know about unknown. 9% it's because they are lazy. 1% is because you are implementing something from an imported library, and they fell into the other 99%.
The Making of Boulder Dash
They're really long numbers.
Exactly. Why wasn't the article titled "How To Appreciate Things"?

It felt more like "How To Grin and Bear Things".
I’m getting paid below market rate, I’m the sole provider, and I have two children in preschool. So while you chortle over “tech bros,” I’m looking at the end of my family’s healthcare and financial stability.

When everyone around you looks like an asshole, you might be the asshole.
Aphyr has a series of posts in this style, all of which are excellent.
I like the design of that web site.
This is just Linux working as intended. There is no need to spread FUD. The more memory you put in the system, the more physical pages will be allocated by the kernel to make more efficient use of available capacity. When was the last time you consciously thought about how frequently your OS is executing page faults?
Nailed it. If people get whatever short term vengeance they're looking for, the contagion will cause a whole lot of collateral damage to people who aren't in tech.
Might be easier to simply extract CO2 from sea water. 120 times denser than in air, no massive concrete/steel structure needed. Plus helps oceans do what they do better than us: extract CO2 from air.
Worth noting the use of titanium at Mach 3, Mach 3.5, is really at its limit. Any faster and you'll start to see serious problems with thermal management. This pushes you into using super nickel alloys or even ceramic matrix composites, which would be necessary for use cases at Mach 5+ for sustained flight. Acknowledging planes in the last have gone faster like the X-15 but this such plane's architecture wouldn't stop for longhaul flight distances. CMCs and super nickel alloys will be very very expensive.
You mean he's choosing his investments so as to benefit himself?

Scandalous.
Oh crap you’re right. I was mixing up tenancy and type.
Israeli companies have an large footprint in the computer security world that employs a lot of Americans. Many people were thinking this was an American problem on Friday and are now realizing this has world wide ramifications.
In other words: consequences are good.

We enjoy watching people face the consequences of their actions. We absolutely hate it when they manage to avoid the consequences.
Activists discourage or disapprove of participating in debateing because they believe it could provide a platform or legitimacy for opposing views. They also think other people are delusional, using wrong concepts or lacking the unique perspective they have, so there is no way they could understand. It's a despicable move, it kills dialogue, separates people into little churches, and encourages dogmatic communication. They are trying to convince society that we have more reasons to fight than to cooperate between groups, which is not true.
The moral hazard is that if depositors know they'll always be made whole then they'll keep their deposits in riskier institutions and therefore executives who are taking on undue risk will win at the expense of the insurance provider. (I think this is probably what lotsofpulp was saying in a different way.)
What’s the next Silicon Valley Bank – and how can the US prevent more chaos?
[sounds of goalposts shifting]
Getting replacement parts of these kinds of cars is really expensive. Your car insurance will probably suck as well.
I think you're wrong. 'risk' is where I invest my money somewhere I can expect to lose some/all of my investment. Placing my money into the likes of a JPM or SVB, etc. should be RISK FREE because a) I am not investing my money and b) To recognise the fact it should be close to risk-free, I receive negligible interest on my deposit.
Interesting. I also see a few periods and a lot of colons with a line over them.

What do they mean? Just curious.
It's not the bank that guarantees it. It's the US Government through FDIC insurance. And that is working perfectly. There is no guarantee implied or explicit over 250k / entity / bank. There are distribution facilities that allow higher amounts to be guaranteed and that is working too.
> the bank run is what made SVB insolvent. Prior to that, all they had was a liquidity problem.

The bank run exposed the insolvency. But it was already there. That’s why SVB couldn’t solve their problems at the Fed’s discount window.

SVB lobbied for exemption from the Fed’s stress tests and Basel III that would have prevented this problem. The policy treatment is rolling back those changes so regional banks are covered.
The warning signs were all there since January. There needs to be some incentive for the employer not to use an unsound bank because if there aren't you end up in a situation like this, where the government needs to step in again and bail out depositors because the alternative would be worse.
Cool, can I also make up statistics?

How about we use actual examples:

Getty is suing Stability because the model has captured so much information about its training set that it reproduces Getty watermarks in its results:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/02/getty-sues-stabi...

Github's Co-pilot can be coaxed into reproducing entire chunks of copyrighted code:

https://twitter.com/docsparse/status/1581461734665367554

But sure, go ahead, keep trying to convince me these models (particularly once they get large enough) aren't compressed representations of information represented in the underlying training data.
Bob Shaw's SF novel "The Ragged Astronauts" plays with this idea. A major plot point is a journey to a neighbouring planet - by balloon. The novel indicates that the laws of physics are different, e.g. a scientist character indicates that π = 3 (IIRC).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ragged_Astronauts
Slackware-current on my ThinkPad R61i

https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware-current/
Reasonable choices. And a good description of a specific use for the em dash. But I think it’s a poor mind that can only conceive of a single use for a punctuation mark.

We could also use em dashes to signal excitedly running from one thought to the next—as if we’re just riffing on an idea—too fast to be interrupted—wouldn’t that be amazing?

Or we can use the em dash to slow us down—to pause and reflect on what we just said.

Or in dialog:

“Perhaps we can use it to signal an unexpected inter—“

“-rogation?”

“No, an interruption.”

“Yes, that would make more sense.”

“Oh! I just thought of something—we could also use it to indicate stunned silence.”

“—“

“Exactly.”