skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree, in fact a couple things in the pitch don't add up.

> ... where the 80M single family homes in the US replace their furnaces with heat pumps.

Where did they get this statistic? I already have a heat pump and know many that do too. Are we included in this 80M estimate? What about those in the northern half of the US that also need back-up heat for when it is very cold? They aren't going to replace their furnaces with a heat pump. They might add one to their setup but replace, no.

> In addition the process of getting a heat pump is painful, including finding a trustworthy contractor, sorting out financing, and wading through rebates. And finally contractors struggle with installs because of the difficulty of properly sizing the system, and understanding if your duct work is compatible with a heat pump

I don't know the contractors they are talking about, but I literally had to say the words "heat pump" to my local Carrier installer and they did all the rest.
Thanks. This should be the submitted URL. The Bloomberg article with the original formatting, punctuation etc. is much more readable, too.
Which is exactly what is happening here. A large business is failing and its investors are losing their investment.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but planes, cars and books also started as something very expensive and only affordable for the 0.1%, but are now enjoyed by everyone.
Allowing only paying businesses to contact you, I ensure that you will be contacted by a high quality firm and neither your or their time is wasted.

You are free to post your profiles on others sites for free too, I'm not stopping you.
I don’t understand. If you hold a bond to maturity you get it’s NPV. Valuing it at NPV vs mark to market has more to do with your plan than any sort of fundamental truth - they’re both legitimate ways of valuing it. The mark to market only comes relevant if you’re experiencing a run, which they were holding sufficient regulatory liquidity for. They should have hedged their rates risk a bit better, especially as inflation became even a whisper, but if it hadn’t devolved into a run this whole story would be a foot note in a quarterly filing. Rather I suspect there was a bit of market manipulation by some wealthy valley insiders that took a relatively routine asset management event and turned it into a crisis. For profit.
Always want someone else to blame, and why not the Fed. Nobody likes them.
Came back five days later to say this:
I understand that the problem is these cops being criminals. That's unacceptable. Full stop.

My larger point was that apparently people without morals or ethics are being attracted to the police force for some reason. And that could be because there's no way to attract moral/ethical people to do that job.
But then who is Signal for? Yes, it has E2EE encryption, but who cares about that other than us orangey types?

And Signal makes plenty of user hostile moves: making backups is not supported. If your Android phone dies, you can kiss your previous conversations goodbye. That's working as intended according to the team.

If I receive a large number of photos via Signal, i have to long tap each of them and save them individually (several taps to do that).

So really, who is Signal for then? It's not for anonymity fans. It's not for people who care about long term discussions.
The people who got the wealthiest from the California gold rush were the ones selling shovels and tools not the ones mining.

When you sell how to do something, you don’t have to shoulder any of the risk or good luck required to actually make the thing happen. A “how to do something” sale is shorter and more direct than actually doing the thing.
A more recent example is the water crisis taking place in Cochise county.

https://grist.org/regulation/arizona-groundwater-cochise-cou...
Your constant dismissiveness of criticism wrt Signal remains pretty darkly amusing.

>They make decisions that are certain to upset orangey-types like us (phone numbers, no federation, tethering to phones, and so on) because HN people aren't their core user base.

These decisions upset other people beyond your elitist dismissive "orangey-types", but upsetting "orangey-types" has its own cost. Nobody in my family, friends, or client organizations use Signal, because I advised them all against it. Sure that's <200 people but for network effect stuff it adds up.

>And, like the Flash letter, it has been pretty conclusively vindicated

Huh? It's successfully replaced SMS completely? It's replaced email? It's beaten out iMessage and Whatsapp etc worldwide? Oh. I mean sure, tens of millions of users worldwide is nothing to sniff at. But that's not a story of domination and "we won so all of you are wrong and also stupid".
To emphasize this point. Most of the deposits potentially lost at SVB were in checking accounts to cover day to day expenses. It is hard to imagine why we would discourage companies from using banks to hold cash over a relatively short term.

Should deposits have an associated risk, so that companies prefer to pay their employees in cash and require cash paper bills to settle accounts? If physical cash were required, our economy would be much less efficient.
Amazon probably wants the vans first.
That’s being pragmatic.
I saw on another HN thread that when a bank has bonds designated as "hold to maturity" they are not allowed to hedge against rate risk--because there isn't any! The bonds will be held til expiration for purposes of the coupon, not to trade.
Unfortunately, it also swiftly devolves into the issue being discussed...

It's not possible to prove whether or not a model can hallucinate or even think, based upon the premise that we have arbitrarily defined what constitutes "thought" (and so also "hallucination").

Can you prove an AI can or can't "think" in a way close enough to us that it could be considered to have basic ("human") rights? What if we built it out of biological material? And would that make any difference? Why?

This leads to: how may we objectively prove that the exclusivity of biological "consciousness", as we've defined it, is correct?

How may we prove either we or an AI can think, hallucinate, or "be conscious", when we are unable to objectively define the terms in a provable way?

I think it may be impossible, and as I said - I don't think it's a trivial concern. We may soon be faced with an entity that demands we respect it, and we need to have worked through as much of that discussion as possible, prior.
My discomfort arises from centering this on the idea of a child's consent. While I admit your point makes sense, it also feels like a slippery slope - "No Chris Hansen, she was one of those rare breeds of 15-year-olds who is capable of giving consent..."

As a society we have settled on the idea that regardless of the emotional development of a minor, they are materially incapable of granting consent since we believe they do not yet the maturity to comprehend it. I know this is a terrible analogy, but alas, this is where I feel the slippery slope leads by centering this debate on the idea of consent. Yes, there is a material difference in the kinds of consent we're dealing with, but I'm not sure if they're all that different.
>decided to go the conservative way and buy bonds.

While strictly true, they did decide to go with long dated bonds that would tie up those funds for years potentially. Typically banks will buy bonds of shorter duration.

SVB however couldn't resist the higher interest rates of those long dated bonds. IIRC they had an average maturity of six years, whereas most banks are typically under one year.
Users that give great feedback also generally give great feedback in the future.
From the link I posted:

'What this means going forward

An unintended side effect of the Federal Reserve’s rate hikes is that many banks and institutions are holding an unfathomable amount of low-yield debt that is now worth far less than it was a year ago. We went from a world where 100-Year Austrian bonds would pay only 0.39% yields, to one where we’re now concerned about 8-9% annual inflation, in just two years.

If institutions rightfully start deeming long-dated bonds to be a risky asset that isn't safe to hold on sensitive balance sheets, we could see bond premiums rise for these longer-dated bonds, raising the cost of capital for companies and governments alike...'
I meant strategically important according to the government.

From the 2022 NSS (https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Biden-...)

> Technology

> Technology is central to today’s geopolitical competition and to the future of our national
security, economy and democracy. U.S. and allied leadership in technology and innovation has
long underpinned our economic prosperity and military strength. In the next decade, critical and
emerging technologies are poised to retool economies, transform militaries, and reshape the world... our technology strategy will enable the United States and like-minded democracies to work together to pioneer
new medicines that can cure diseases, increase the production of healthy foods that are
sustainably grown, diversify and strengthen our manufacturing supply chains, and secure energy
without reliance on fossil fuels, all while delivering new jobs and security for the American
people and our allies and partners. With bipartisan support, we have launched a modern
industrial strategy and already secured historic investments in clean energy, microelectronics
manufacturing, research, and development, and biotechnology, and we will work with Congress
to fully fund ...

> We also are doubling
down on our longstanding and asymmetric strategic advantage: attracting and retaining the
world’s best talent. Attracting a higher volume of global STEM talent is a priority for our
national security and supply chain security, so we will aggressively implement recent visa
actions and work with Congress to do more.

> These investments will enable the United States to anchor an allied techno-industrial base that
will safeguard our shared security, prosperity and values.

I'm not sure Calendly is necessarily central to the articulated strategy. And I agree that most tech companies don't produce much of value at all.

But the administration seems to think the future direction for the U.S. is tech, especially energy and military tech. And it begs the question: if not tech, what else could give the U.S. an advantage over China?
Right.

Without a bailout, each customer would have $250K today (if they had that much n deposit) and probably another 10-20% this week, as assets were sold off. The FDIC could have worked a deal so that depositors were paid off in a few weeks, but in Treasury bonds with 5-10 years to maturity, to match the maturities of SVB assets. Depositors who really had to could sell their bonds immediately at a discount. That would have given time to liquidate SVB's loan portfolio. Depositors probably would have lost 5%-20%.
My company took GP’s suggested strategy and got an incredible community response. Really resonates with the high-end residential market, both DIY and DIFM (pros / CEDIA).
Japanese funds have high dividend yield, I think like 5% and up returns are common.

Very annoying for the layperson that dividend returns are often much harder to find than stock value
I occasioanlly set my Framework down in a place where it's more convenient to have power and/or HDMI on the other side and it's simple to rearrange the modules.
Funny you mention it because that's what I'm providing in my daily business. Productd teams as a Service.
Only when the depositors have lobbyists on their payroll ;)
Interestingly, I am in the middle of replacing my HVAC which died last fall. I was dead set on getting a heat pump. I didn't really care about the increased upfront cost, so long as I was getting increased comfort and there would be a reduction in costs after install.

When I really looked at the numbers though, my cost of electricity is so high, and my natural gas is so cheap, that I would need a COP of over 5 or an HSPF of around 20 on the heat pump to just break even on heating- I pay about 16.5 cents per KWH for electricity all in, and $1.05/therm for natural gas in NJ just outside of NYC. Efficiencies that high don't exist on central units. It would cost me easily an extra $100/month to heat my home, and the additional upfront cost was $7-10k. In cooling mode they are slightly less efficient than the best AC units as well, not by a significant amount- but its not like it will make up for it on the cooling side of things.

I really wanted to go this route, but this would be an extra upfront as well as ongoing cost. I really have no option but to replace with a conventional system and in 10-15 years re-evaluate. I will likely eventually get solar, but my roof is currently close to, but not yet at its end of life, and I have a townhome with limited roof space and a historic district to contend with, its not going to solve the electricity cost problem.
We used to manage 500+ servers with Ansible for almost 10 years. It was a nightmare.

With so many servers Ansible script would ocassionally fail on some servers (weird bugs, network issues, ...). Since the operations weren't always atomic we couldn't just re-run the script. it required fixing things manually.

Thanks to this and emergency patches/fixes on individual servers, we ended up with slightly different setup on the servers. This made debugging and upgrading a nightmare. Can this bug happen on all the server or just this one because it has a different minor version of package 'x'?

We switched to NixOS. It had a steep learning curve for us, with lots of doubts if this was the right decision. Converting all the servers to NixOS was a huge 2-year task.

Having all the servers running same configuration that is commited to GitHub, fully reproducable and tested in CI, on top of automatic updates of the servers done with GitHub action, was worth all the troubles we had with learning NixOS.

This entire blog post could be a NixOS config.
there are diy systems with threaded connectors, pre-vacuumed units and linesets filled with refrigerants.
Because there are lots of people on HN that benefit from disgusting things like this, that's why they have to pretend they don't know the solution.
> You will need to provide an OpenAI API key
I was going to say neoliberal. But then I have to remember self-confessed neoliberals pushing for war in Iraq and basically giving a blank check to the military industrial complex. And needlessly expanding government on the war on terror. So that term isn't apt either.
Too bad SVB's CEO lobbied so hard for those stress tests to no longer apply to them when Trump relaxed Dodd-Frank.
Musk gave a presentation on Tesla Semis and competing with Rail. And if you take like 5 semis and put them butt to butt (to reduce drag), autonomously, you can beat the cost of Rail. And you essentially just took Rail and expanded the reach of it with all the highways in the US. So that is the grand plan, to go after Rail.
Wow that's beautiful.
Active discussion on Alpaca: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35136624

Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35139450
> Now, apparently there are people who consider abandoning plastic straws absolutely hands-down unthinkable sacrilege.

It's not an "unthinkable sacrilege", it's a fart in the wind. It's something that politicians and trendy restaurant owners do to make themselves feel like they're solving a problem while making zero effort. The reality is that it doesn't make the tiniest dent in the problem. Classic slacktivism.

> The arguments I heard so far are mostly misguided (no forests nearby!), refer to problems not specific to high density living (nosy neighbors!), and such.

Maybe I want to live in the forest. Yes I know, that's terrible because I and the rest of humanity are a blight upon the earth that must be contained, right?

Here are just a few problems that are definitely more prevalent in high-density areas: piss-soaked front steps on my building, high traffic (yes, I'm sure you have a "car free" solution to this, which is undoubtedly just as unappealing as the rest of your cosmopolitan utopia), neighbors pounding on my walls, and being accosted for money every time I walk outside. I could go on.

> the technology to live comfortably with little footprint is here

In another comment you explain that "comfort" means to you "suitable temperature and humidity, clean air, soft bed, clean water and so on". If your mindset is such that you think that's what people like me are worried about, then I'm not sure you're even capable of understanding what we're actually worried about. Suffice it to say that I am not interested in being an interchangeable unit of economic production to be kept in a neat little pod by my technocratic betters. Yes, even if it has "suitable temperature and humidity" LMAO. Do you actually think that the only thing humans want out of life is for their physical needs to be met?

> such areas are simply not built.

Exactly, so you don't even know if they would have all the wonderful attributes you extol. How about you go build one, and we'll see? Prove your idea and watch people come, instead of herding all of humanity into an experiment.

> Did you ever have an issue with...

No, I actually haven't. But like I said, it doesn't matter. I don't doubt that other people have these negative experiences, and they're free to go somewhere that they would be happier. Remember, I'm not the one trying to dictate where people can live. If you prefer cities, then by all means, live in one! I'll stay in my small town. Win-win.

I'm not sure why you're trying so hard to convince people of the benefits of city life. It's clear that if you had the authority, you'd herd them all into your skyscrapers whether they like it or not. Why waste your energy pretending that you care what people want or have any respect for their autonomy?
Ah! Yes, sorry, this is fair Dang. Happy to die on this hill today, as it were, will do better in future though. cheers.
There's a war being waged on whether or not we're going to allow certain institutions to belong to the commons. If certain industries had their way, every sip of water and every breath of air would have an associated cost and market value.

Can't afford to pay? It's unfortunate, but that's your own fault.

Every time we encode and reinforce these systems through laws, market mechanisms, and now AI, we tacitly agree that people who cannot afford such things do not deserve them. If you can't afford private healthcare before the 0 cost system was implemented to decide that well... best of luck!
> Heat pump passion is kind of a thing for some reason!

Because they are throwing money at it. Billions. All policy driven, not science-driven.

If every home in the US switched to electric powered HVAC heat-pump systems we'd have huge blackouts in every city. Our power grid and power generation systems are not ready for this at all. Add electric cars to the mix and the scenario gets much darker (no pun intended, lights will go out!).

This is a case of placing the cart ahead of the horse. We are in desperate need of a non-trivial 25 year program to double out reliable power generation and delivery infrastructure.
Thanks for the feedback! If you feel ok saying, how much was the quote for this install? Do you place any value in indoor air quality?
Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Alpaca: A strong open-source instruction-following model - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35136624

Also recent and related:

Large language models are having their Stable Diffusion moment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35111646 - March 2023 (355 comments)
I appreciate you're just playing Devil's Arbalest here, but this feels like the least libertarian take possible. It's the government's fault that my customers are handing me so much money to manage and I managed it poorly?

Admittedly, I still don't fully understand the link between investing too cautiously and seeing poor returns and there being a run on the bank.
The problem with promissory estoppel is that the promise can be terminated.

Suppose in 2017 I promised you can graze your sheep on my field. Today, desiring to now keep cattle, I tell you that from next spring (so 2024) I'll have cows on this land, so you'll need to find somewhere else for your sheep.

Courts won't buy the theory that I'm estopped. It was reasonable for you to rely on my promise yesterday, it'd be reasonable tomorrow - but a year after you received notice? Not going to fly.

And the problem with many Peppercorn contracts is that they're about super long term situations, such as long leases, where a 125 year period is normal even though that means the initial contracted parties - if human - will likely be long dead by the time the term ends even if it isn't extended. Thus, we need to ensure the law recognises that this is permanent, or at least, very long term.
Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors
Why hedge when we privatize the profits and socialize the losses? SVB execs sold tens of $millions in stock before the failure. Are the execs going to be forced to return the compensation they received for showing higher profits by not hedging?
i am thinking to replace one of the hvacs with ducted mr.cool. just curious, what was the needed duct work ?
> Is it really just a ton of slowly developed things happening to mature close together?

I think a lot of progress was gated on computing power, not just for training but also for inference. Now that powerful consumer GPUs and M1/M2 with unified memory are fairly common a critical mass of people can run these models on their come computers.
Death? Depends on how you look at it.

Check out the end user ratings and product diversity on Prisjakt, the main price comparison site in Sweden.

https://i.imgur.com/A2j7mYi.png

That is a very high bar.

Sure, they sold out their production but their brand name is pretty strong.
I do not think there is a label that accurately represents even one individual person's views.

I would suggest you try not to think in labels and embrace the reality: no person is a democrat/republican/tory/labor/whatever. Those are political parties, sure, but what happens when a person disagrees with the platform of that party? Are they no longer a 'whatever'? No, they were never a part of the party to begin with, they just identified with the group that most closely aligned with their views.
Yeah, npm was the first good package manager. It gets a lot of hate but my experience is that its strategy is the optimal solution for the problem it solves. And, I think a lot of things people complain about (lots of trivial packages, huge dependency trees, etc.) are an effect of solving the packaging problem well: if you make it easy to add dependencies, people will take advantage of that to add lots of dependencies.
Loading up on bonds when rates are rock bottom instead of bills is asking for trouble. Sure, when yields are at averages or historic highs, back the truck up; otherwise, there's not much difference between yielding 0% and 1%, but a lot of difference in liquidity.

As an aside, I remember in recent times various institutions, either by law or voluntarily, loading up on long term bonds at 0% +/- 0.5% bonds. I'm sure that's going to be a fun situation should they face even a slight liquidity crisis of, say, more retirees pulling money out than there are young people depositing into pensions and whatnot.