skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why are we complaining about the VCs when this isn’t their fault?

I wouldn’t be so sure. VCs didn’t tell the bank how to invest their deposits, but they caused some of the conditions for the illiquidity and they instigated the bank run.

Why were so many startups concentrated at SVB? VCs recc’d it to their investment companies.

Why did SVB’s liquidity dry up last year? VC funding dried up last year when interest rates rose.

How did the run on the bank accelerate so fast? VCs directed their investment companies to divest at the same time.

Why was SVB the first bank to be affected by the interest rate rises? Only about 7% of SVB’s deposit dollars were FDIC insured, compared to 40%+ of other banks of comparable size. And previous answers.
It might not be the only thing that matters, but once you lose your health, it's very hard to get much enjoyment out of anything else in life. Our bodies remind us constantly in no uncertain terms when they're not functioning well. I can't imagine anything I'd willingly sacrifice my health for, except in some extreme case like saving the lives of loved ones.
> tech industry and its workers are strategically important to the U.S.

I think there are a lot of people who don’t feel that this is true to the extent that you (and possibly the fed) do. When I see Calendly being valued at 3 billion dollars, I think that somewhere down the line, someone has mis-valued something. I don’t just accept whatever the market-value is as it’s true importance.

There’s a lot of tech that’s overvalued, or valued for reasons that don’t contribute to real economic growth or wellbeing. Part of the point of people’s protests here is to get people in charge to realize/admit this. Tech isn’t actually that important.
Where will you be building these?

I think in this case it makes sense to sell units, and also generate feedback about the product as early as possible

So you're going to use end customers as your test base? That's pretty gutsy. Especially when they're shelling out $10K and ripping out their existing (and working) HVAC system to do this. Don't use the car analogy here, there's no backup if it doesn't work.

Unless you predict 100% flawless execution and satisfaction on that aspect, you're going to get screwed. Your customers, more so. A few fucked up installations, or performance below expectations, and it's over.
Why would a landlord charge a rent of $2000 if he pays $2200 on his mortgage? The rent you pay covers all the landlord's costs, and then some.
Depositors are effectively bondholders. Bondholders get paid before shareholders.
> All the magic of "7B LLaMA running on a potato" seems to involve lowering precision down to f16

LLaMa weights are f16s to start out with, no lowering necessary to get to there.

You can stream weights from RAM to the GPU pretty efficiently. If you have >= 32GB ram and >=2GB vram my code here should work for you: https://github.com/gmorenz/llama/tree/gpu_offload

There's probably a cleaner version of it somewhere else. Really you should only need >= 16 GB ram, but the (meta provided) code to load the initial weights is completely unnecessarily making two copies of the weights in RAM simultaneously. You could also lower vram requirements a bit more with a bit more work (I just made the smallest change possible to make it work)
But would the government run solution sacrifice personal freedom? After all, when you socialize costs, you get free rider problems.

Will I have to pay more if I'm obese? Can I get cut off the system for not taking a vaccine?

I'm hesitant to make the government a partner in my personal choices regarding diet, recreational fun like hang gliding, lifestyle choices, etc.
It is questionable whether people foolish enough to vote via SMS should be considered competent enough to vote in the first place.

But then it is the failure of due diligence of educational system to teach from an early age how democracy works and how to participate in it.

People are trained to be doctors, lawyers, technologists etc, but the basic social skill of participating in democracy is not taught, when in fact it is the most important skill.

That and money management skills.
Very cool that you built your own production site in Pynecone!

https://github.com/pynecone-io/pcweb
Practicing doctors don't have the bandwidth to do this except in the most egregious of cases though.

I'm imagining a non-profit organization that solicits any denial by "insurance" companies, determines if it is based on medical reasons, determines if it is medically imprudent (including harm caused by delaying care), and files a mostly pre-prepared complaint to the appropriate medical board. Make it extremely uncomfortable to work for a death panel.

Then if the state boards start really brushing the complaints under the table to protect the death panels, turn it into a direct political issue. Right now there's too much plausible deniability to hide behind.
Yeah this is only necessary, not sufficient! What a dumb idea.
That's the point of diversification. To average out idiosyncratic risk.
This is why I've been very skeptical of the kids these days kicking literally everyone off of the production servers.

Having a few greybeards with the keys to the kingdom and the wisdom not to use it to screw around in prod, outside of existential emergencies, can be quite useful.

Also should have console access.

One time a bad config push took out a couple hundred webservers with effectively a single iptables default deny rule and we had to get a dozen people to fix them in chunks by logging in manually over remote terminal (probably could have expect-scripted that up, but it was quicker to just get it done).
> Jesus Christ.
Let me get this straight: you're saying the solution to medical expenses is "let old people die, they don't want to live anyway"?

That’s quite an uncharitable take, and plainly not what they meant to express.
I couldn't take the loneliness and joined a small studio. Good initiative, I wish you best of luck!
HSBC buys Silicon Valley bank UK for 1 pound
Apple has managed to position itself as a lifestyle product as well. It's not just the functionality, it's a brand in the way that Microsoft tried (and failed) to be with Surface. Samsung positions itself in a similar way in the cellphone world, but for Apple it's everything they make.

People will put up with more bullshit because it's also a fashion statement.

And on top of that they have very good interop between the different parts of their ecosystem, and make going outside of that ecosystem painful, so you need a very good reason to jump ship once you've gotten into it.

They have a pretty good moat, and that buys time for any missteps to be corrected.
If you can use just a bit of capital to borrow a whole lot of capital, with the only risk to you being your original capital, then you can engage in very risky ventures, getting a huge payoff if you succeed and at worst losing your original capital if you lose.

Come to think of it, that seems a bit like what SVB did. Buying long term bonds when interest rates were likely rise seems like a recipe for disaster - and in fact the logical outcome was this bankruptcy. But there was a chance that interest rates wouldn't have risen, at which point the shareholder get a big payoff, pocket it and go on to the next risky maneuver.
RFC: Organizations for Sourcehut
Flatpak is pretty great if you want to containerize things you install or are using an immutable system. The Steam Deck supports Flatpak and it's how most people install things outside of Steam.
I think the solution to that is placing predence on the bank selection mechanism. You could audit banks' lending positions and make risk adjusted based decisions.
This is wonderful and a much welcome addition for those of us who don't need to pixel peep but still want to assemble a web app quickly to test product market fit.

I'll certainly try to get a feel for what you built and how it differs from stuff like Streamlit. I have a love hate relationship with the latter and constantly looking for a more mature and faster moving alternative.
> So long as the amount of audio sent in a packet is larger than how long it takes the next packet to get there, you'll be transfering audio data faster than it is playing, making minor fluctuations in timing between packets irrelevant.

Even major fluctuations. Not talking about the quality here (but the received quality is identical to what is being sent), but just think about Netflix & Co, Imagine if they had to maintain an "ideal network, with no packet loss and constant ping" to your device or otherwise audio and video would be out of sync?

There are protocols that shuffle more or less raw audio streams over the network (Dante for example). In that case yes, you do things to make sure the variables are within a certain range by (usually) segregating the traffic etc, but even then if the timing is off the playback will stop until the stream is reestablished properly. Theoretically it's the same as with any other media stream, just much more sensitive to fluctuations as it is real time (i.e. delay so low you are unable to hear it).
Malware ?
Scientists Learned to Treat the 20th Century’s Biggest Killer of Children
It almost seems like it might be a good idea to create a wall between personal banking and investment banking.
I wonder how the SSDs are exposed to the OS.

While dealing with the Samsung Pro Firmware issue, I read that SSDs mounted on a hardware RAID controller need to be removed from the RAID in order to have their Firmware update applied, since Samsung's tool won't see the SSDs if they are placed on the controller.
Yeah, but there's a random in RAM and SSDs aren't that great yet.
I saw a comment about demand response below.

You don't opt your residential hvac into demand response unless you want to freeze. Juice is not worth the squeeze.
Personally, I don't even know if the VCs were asking for such a crazy thing, but the way VCs like Calacanis went about asking for it were certainly unhinged and histrionic, undignified and deeply revealing, which is what TFA is all about. It was a "mask off" moment.
How much ductwork are you having upgraded, also any electrical panel upgrades? There can be extra scope that drives up install cost.
The normal forms are about how data is stored, rather than how it looks after a query. After all, most joins will violate second normal form.

But yes, SQL doesn't work well with this solution.
Humanitix, the Non-Profit Changing the Ticketing World
Nice to have some alternatives. I use gotty for this. As for usecases, it's easy to quickly show my terminal with a teammate for code I need help with or showing off a demo of real command uses to others. I generally don't allow the client interaction, just read only view.
There's no denial of the problem, only of the attempt to elevate it into something more common than it is in an obvious ploy to make gender affirming care harder to access with a time-honored "won't someone think of the children!" moral panic that's already having negative effects on adult trans people's access to care.
I don't know that I would describe any of Thiel's opinions as "mainstream."
The first person to pull money out of a failing bank is always going to get blamed, but they didn't do anything different than the others who pulled money.

What was Thiel supposed to do, keep quiet about the problems at the bank and hope nobody else noticed? Then some other guy can be first to withdraw and take the blame, while Thiel gets soaked? Or maybe nothing happens, and the bank takes on even more deposits and fails even more spectacularly a year from now, and then people blame Thiel because he knew back in 2023 and didn't tell anyone?
Java does have Vaadin but it's a mostly proprietary software. But it is very good and largely under appreciated.
yes, clearly they've crippled it... they're still hosting it and allowing people to fork and clone the repo.

US export and import restrictions must be followed by companies who operate in the US. GitHub is one of those companies, and the developer in question is associated with a newly restricted company, so GitHub must cease allowing that company to operate on its infrastructure.
I would like a standard air filter to be used. a lot of individuals don't require HEPA, but I do. I would like to be able to source my own filters from anywhere, and put them in. just like my current furnace. let people pick their level of air filtration they are comfortable with
Yes. In a dense everything to everything neural network layer, the number of 'inputs' to a node is proportional to the square root of the number of weights.

Therefore, assuming quantization noise is uncorrelated, as the number of weights doubles, the number of inputs goes up by sqrt(2), and the (normalized) noise goes down by a factor of 2*(sqrt(2)).

So, as a rule of thumb, you can remove 1 bit of precision of the weights for every 4x increase in the number of weights.

All this assumes weights and activations are uncorrelated random variables - which may not hold true.
That question comes out often but... Apparently the $2bn realized loss that SIVB took was only about 1/10th of their total unrealized gains. Numbers are floating around now saying there's about $620 billion of unrealized losses among the various banks at the moment (due to the same issue of rates going up after trillions were printed).

Which institution can honestly offer any kind of product hedging against $620 billions of losses without, itself, going bankrupt should people try to exercise their hedge?

Basically the headlines, instead of being: "SVB goes down for it has $20 bn of unrealized losses" would be, instead, "SVB goes down for it has $20 bn of hedged unrealized losses, but the institution which is supposed to cover the hedge is bankrupt for it miscalculated and cannot cover $620 bn".
Paperclipping is just one example of one of many ways it can go wrong.

While I agree LLMs are unlikely to be the last word on AI, the fact we understand alignment so poorly that they spew random things, let alone any arguments about which words are acceptable[0], is a sign we have much foundational work to do.

Indeed, as I recall, one of the main researchers in this topic describes it as "pre paradigmatic" because we don't have a way to even compare the relative alignment of any two AI.

[0] personally, I suspect but cannot prove that tabooing certain words is a Potemkin village solution to the underlying social problems
Another approach is to try emulating different models of neurons/synapses/etc, and find models that act similarity to the real organism.

Investing the search space, to invent a name, can sometimes be very powerful.
> What's the point of a captcha if they are using some other metric anyway?

It's all about not letting scrapers or bots know that they have been blocked, similarly to something like always failing SSH attempts after a certain amount of failures to prevent brute-force attacks. By the way I should say I hate CAPTCHA too, not defending the practice.
This is more philosophy than anything. The FDIC, an instituted paid for by taxes, was introduced because farmers lost everything in previous bank failures. Insuring deposits but not shares is entirely a choice made by society, not any inherent property of cash, despite some people wanting it to be so.

In my opinion it's really rather arbitrary at a point. If an individual or corporation has a lot of money that they need to store, they need to consider risk and return regardless. Deposits have FDIC reducing risk, but don't earn much interest. There are government bonds which a different risk and earning profile, and stocks with a different risk profile again.

I feel it's rather narrow to focus only on deposits when in a practical sense it's pretty unlikely that anyone with any meaningful amount of money will keep it all in deposits. Similarly I also have sympathy for small share holders who lost money as part of their pension funds or otherwise. Not sure why hacker news commenters appear so gleeful about these people losing. It's not like bank failures are a "normal" occurrence in any sense.
That's really impressive. Thanks for doing this test.
Your colleagues should consider skipping conda and stick to using venv. It will make life much easier. Given pandas/numpy is huge in data science, moving away is not much of an option unless you are working on a personal project or already have a dedicated team comfortable with using a different stack. There is also the Docker option which is great but much more involved.
Folks knew it was going to happen - but banks are highly regulated and don't have a lot of choice in what they can invest in, it has to be 'safe'. Which means specific types of bonds.

It's why the fed is currently bailing out the industry by being willing to take them all at par value, not market value, in exchange for cash.
> Remind me why, exactly, these guys have so much control over technological innovation?

Oh, it's be because tech companies need money to operate, and when they ask people for some of their money, the people who give them the money demand input over how that money is used. Hope that answers your question.
And you shouldn't get any interest on holding cash alone
https://www.efficiencymaine.com/at-home/heating-cost-compari...

And you can update the values there. There are some approaches that are even more cost effective.

I will also note on the url that you provided:

> Heat Pump Water Heater (HPWH) and Air Source Heat Pump (ASHP): Final fuel prices (i.e., far right column) reflect the increased efficiency of HPWHs and ASHPs. According to Efficiency Maine Trust and when compared to electric resistance heating, HPWHs are 2.98 times more efficient and ASHPs are 2.93 times more efficient. To obtain a theoretical and relative fuel price per unit, divide the price per kWh by 2.98 or 2.93 depending on your technology (e.g., $0.2099 for an ASHP is like paying $0.0716 for electric resistance heating).

The numbers in the heating cost comparison roughly match the ones that you have. A natural gas furnace can be as cost effective. The point with the heat pump in part isn't the cost effective nature for the residential user - even if in parity, but that in addition to being similarly priced it is more environmentally sound to use a heat pump than to burn hydrocarbons for heat.

The comparison that we're making above is also natural gas vs heat pump. When you get the rural locations, natural gas isn't always an option and so then you need to change to the propane and heating oil versions.

From the WaPo article:

> “Oh, hell no,” Casagranda said, when asked recently if she missed her propane furnace. As part of the experiment, the agency promised residents they could have their fossil-fuel-burning systems back if they didn’t like the results. So far, none of the homeowners have wanted to go back, according to agency officials, and Casagranda said she is more than satisfied.

> ...

> But oil’s market share is falling. Whereas 74 percent of the state’s homes relied on oil to keep warm in the winter of 2010, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, that figure had fallen to 60 percent by 2021.

> ...

> Despite the bitter cold, a drive up U.S. Route 1 reveals a quiet transformation underway with major implications for climate change. Mainers who have heated their homes, diners, libraries and churches with oil and propane for decades are turning to an alternative source of warmth.
Ok, I'll start.

Username had to be less than 12 characters, weird.
Password had to be less than 12 characters, ultra weird.
Just got an email from blanco.ai8888@gmail.com, shady.
None of the Docs, Blog, Careers links work, not good.

I would love to try your product but I can't ignore all of these issues and get myself to pay 49$ for something that with the current information I have seems it will be unpolished, rough and a waste of my time and money.

Looks/polish matters for conversion unfortunately.
It is sad that tcc is unmaintained as it would be really useful in small embedded systems. I just tried it on Debian and compilation fails without #undefining CONFIG_TCC_MALLOC_HOOKS in lib/bcheck.c. After compilation it passes tests, but they warn that it could be unreliable.
> Do expensive amplifiers have noticeably lower white-noise than the standard amp?

I'd say amplifier topology matters more than absolute noise figures.

For example, you can build a 2kW class D amplifier that fits on a PCB weighing ~1lb. A 2kW class H amplifier is going to weigh over 40 lbs. Why would you ever want the one that weights 40x more and likely costs more as a result? The numbers are the same? Maybe even the THD is lower on the class D...

The reason is the path the electrons take. In class D, there is a finite/discrete amount of energy available per unit time. The computer knows precisely what these limits are and controls the signal accordingly (clips/attenuates).

In class H, there is a gigantic toroidal xformer that is responsible for directly stepping the raw line voltage to required DC rail(s) which then goes straight to your loudspeakers by way of basic mosfets. There isn't a discretized energy mechanism involved anymore. The entire chain is analog.

As a consequence of topology and other factors, certain types of program material and loudspeakers can perform substantially better than otherwise possible. If you are looking to set up a system with ridiculous LFE that extends well-below 20Hz, class D amplification is probably going to get in your way.
It's not a bold assumption. t's the only assumption. We can't control the output of llms completely because we don't know how they generate. Nobody on earth has the faintest clue how all those 175 billion paramters are shaping the response to input.

It doesn't matter bout "thinking" or whatever. Any black box system will be uncontrollable in essence. You can not make inviolable rules for a system you don't understand.

And saying LLMs hallucinate because they don't understand anything is stupid. And just shows ignorance on your part. Models hallucinate because they're rewarded for plausibly guessing during training when knowledge fails. Plausibly guessing is a much better strategy to reducing loss.

And the conclusion is obvious enough. Bugger smarter models hallucinate less because they guess less. That holds true.

https://crfm.stanford.edu/helm/latest/?group=core_scenarios

All the instruct tuned models on this list follow that trend.

From Ada to Babbage to Curie to Claude to Davinci-002/003. Greater size equals Greater truthfulness (evaluated on TruthfulQA)
The problem (and opportunity for US investors) is Canada has almost no VC, and the few they have are extremely risk averse.

One one side they held back economic and social growth of ~1/3rd of the population for more than a century through systemic racism and discrimination. On the other side, the government has created little incentives for capital owners to take more risks thanks to policies that artificially propped up real estate (enormous immigration quotas, lax laws on foreign money entering the country, no market correction post 2007 crash).

Why invest in hard to understand and uncertain tech when you can simply build luxury houses and sell them to wealthy foreigners?
Gotta love confidently incorrect attempts at calling out other people for being confidently incorrect!
Needs citation. I think the idea that the NSA has stronger data storage and analysis infrastructure than commercial operators is not even conjecture, it's something weaker, a fantasy. Commercial hyperscale operators claimed the ability to sort 50PB datasets at 600GB/s, eleven years ago. Storing and analyzing bulk data is the #1 thing these guys are good at.
Training a model to do math is impossible. If you tell a child that 1+1=2 10+10=20 100+100=200 an "AI" can not figure out that 1000+1000=2000 like a child can.
That is true, too. There is no reason an employer should be involved a person’s retirement or healthcare.
The profits from tech are available to investors via the stock market. Meanwhile, no taxpayer money is being used to clean up the failure of SVB and prevent the contagion from spreading.