skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you look at the history of banks, it's clear that banks naturally fail whenever a bank run occurs. This happens because banks exist to turn liquid deposits into long term loans for things like homes.

Liquid deposits at low interest rates are useful. Home loans are useful. And banks can bridge the two successfully almost all the time. And even when banks can't, the biggest problem is probably panic.

In many countries, the solution has been to transfer the tail risk from bank depositors (not owners) to the state. The state then reduces this risk by regulating banks heavily, and by requiring them to pay into an insurance fund.

I am not a libertarian. I support the idea of government as a regulator and an insurer of last resort. I am 100% aware that banks can only exist because the government holds the tail risk.

I think that wiping out SVB's shareholders and unsecured creditors was the right move. If we can claw back some executive bonuses or recent insider stock sales, all the better. However, I also think that making depositors whole is the right move in this case, because lots of banks own long term T bills and mortgages locked in at low rates, making them vulnerable to bank runs. Our best chance of fixing the situation is to prevent short-term contagion and then to change the regulations on banks to eliminate this risk in the future.

But yeah, I think banks are a useful fiction created by state regulation and state-mandated insurance. If we no longer want to provide that particular economic fiction, then I would prefer voters to elect people who figure out an orderly plan to wind down banks, rather than just letting the system implode.

(Full disclosure: Neither me nor my employer has money in SVB. But my paycheck is handled by Rippling, which passed funds through SVB in the process. Had my paycheck been paid last Friday, it would have been held to at least Monday.)
Not on the same scale but in my previous company we observed the same thing (though the other way around since we moved from self-hosted to cloud).

He had a team of 4 managing the infra for an app (82 million users, 30 million DAU) and spent around 500.000€ per year on the data centers + this team's salaries + some other expenses like travels to the datacenters, some new stuff etc..., let's say around 1.000.000€ per year.

At some point upper management decided to move to the cloud and we eneded up in a worse situation: the promise of easier resource management was unfulfilled since the same 4 people was managing now the cloud so no cost reduction on that side and most important, cloud costs were 4-5 times higher than self-hosting

I still wonder why management decided to go that way
I was once on a London bus that got stopped by the police for jumping a red light.

It was at Hyde Park Corner, heading north toward Park Lane - the light guarding the intersection with Knightsbridge turned red, the bus sailed through, and I think a nearby police car just happened to notice. Pulled the bus over and had a word with the driver, nothing more I think, but it was curiously reassuring.

I agree with you (as a former cycle commuter too) that drivers in London jump the lights far more than most people realise. If you go out for a half-hour walk and pay attention, you're highly likely to see it at least once.
Thanks for this. How fascinating to be using AI to make AI more accessible to people. Clumsily said, but hopefully you know what I mean. :)

Article here : https://archive.is/WVdIi
America’s schools are heading for a crunch
https://archive.ph/b0xgs
Ask HN: Practical finance/risk books for small businesses
What books can I read to learn practical finance/risk management I can apply? eg. I've recently learnt about sweep networks and intrafi to insure deposits above $250k and also multi-account budgeting.

What can I read to learn more things like this?
Websites that spit out “logos” are a dime a dozen. What all of them fail to understand is that a logo is not just an icon that you aesthetically like, it’s a communication tool. A logo is not for the CEO, it’s for the customers. These tools do a huge disservice to the businesses who pay for them by selling a bland generic icon which means nothing and has no personality. But then again, I no longer have the strength or will to fight against the poor design decisions of others. I’m glad I left that world.

Now it’s the era of the AI grift, where every low effort startup which can be made with AI will be made with AI. As long as there’s fast money to be made at the end, everything else is pushed aside. I remember when the norm was “I made this cool thing and had interesting challenges along the way”. Now it’s “I don’t really understand how I made this, but it made me money”.
If you're writing a database engine, and you accidentally wrap each table cell in a Java object, you'll very quickly hit a GC performance wall, particularly when using a low pause GC. So we try to write Java without objects. Guess how easy that is. ;)
Yes, those people who extracted millions in salary, bonuses, and stock sales and get to keep them.

The shareholders are wiped out. But the bad management made out great. They don’t have to repay any of those ill gotten gains.
You’re comparing a rate - murders over population, of a province with a vast rural population with few murders to US cities where murders are concentrated.

Edit: I'm an idiot and can't read.
Not sure what SVB's total assets were but in 2018 Congress changed up the asset size requirements in which Dodd-Frank regulations kick in [1]. Seems like the sensible thing to do is to rollback those changes and put Dodd-Frank back to its initial state.

[1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/6/17081508/se...
> I've seen plenty of motor vehicles run through a yellow-red, but never a long-red light

I really don't think you're paying attention. I cycle daily with a GoPro in London, I initially reported every driver obviously ignoring red lights to the Met through their online portal, but it was several a week and took up too much of my time.
And where does the government get the money to lend to the bank? Right, it issues Treasury debt for which it pays a market-determined rate of interest. In other words, taxpayers would be subsidizing any below-market rate loans.
Read The Case for 4 Bit Precision. https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.09720

Spoiler: it's the parameter count. As parameter count goes up, but depth matters less.

It just so happens that at around 10B+ parameters you can quantize down to 4bit with essentially no downsides. Models are that big now. So there's no need to waste RAM by having unnecessary precision for each parameter.
Yes, typo, edited the comment.
The progressive college on the front line of Ron DeSantis’s culture war
https://archive.ph/zroyz
If you think the fed is independent I have a bridge to sell you
To add on, people forget that Twitter was never really FAANG. It not only wasn't profitable but had no monetization plan for years. I'm sure it paid off for all the investors who got Elon's money but even as a Facebook competitor they don't have Facebook money.
You’re linking an article from 2002 that was controversial even at the time. You can see coverage from 2002 in the Washington Post, for example: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2002/06/29/p...

The author of the article, Timothy Dailey, is associated with the Family Research Council, which still in 2023 has this on its website: https://www.frc.org/homosexuality

Now, why do you need to go back to an obscure article published over 20 years ago by a homophobic ultraconservative organization to source your claims? Perhaps because the vast majority of experts now believe these claims to be false.
It reflects rather badly on you that you're talking mad shit without knowing their circumstances. What's the bus factor on your systems? Can they handle literally every person being fired overnight?
Other banks did take similar risks. Why do you think the fed setup a facility large enough to serve the entire country to prop them up?

The only risk is trying operate in a broken banking system.
Lessons from finance’s experience with artificial intelligence
https://archive.ph/XZrDt
While large enterprises have dedicated resources like Security Operations Centers (SOC), SMBs undergo a different trajectory compared to their large enterprise counterparts to attain a mature security posture.

To summarize, ensure your cybersecurity provides you complete visibility, interoperability, scalability, hunting & early detection capabilities, analytics & incident reporting, low latency, and on-demand access to experts. You can take cost-effective approaches explained in this blog

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An incredibly incoherent and long winded way of saying you don't know the term 'capacity factor' and don't understand what dispatchable loads are isn't evidence you weren't lying.

As to the amount of backup needed: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z

Then consider all the dispatchable loads that decrease the gap even further.
Elegant weapons for a more civilized age.
> Several standard library types have such niches, but today there is no stable way to make your own yet.

However note that if a type has suitable niches enums will automatically take advantage of those. So that’s more of a concern with T than with a bespoke Option, that’ll work OOTB.
From the FDIC's own Insurance Fund, which is paid by fees assessed on banks. Ultimately I guess taxpayers pay for this because they pay for banking, but it isn't through taxes.
>Selling the bonds now at their current valuation or taking on debt and hold them to maturity lead to roughly equivalent outcomes.

Correct. This is literally why bond prices move inversely to changes in interest rates.

The people criticizing you here are ignoring carrying costs (which are fundamental to finance math) and assuming that default risk is the only form of risk (which is obviously false).
I wanted to try it, but my computer at the time couldn't handle it. It seems like I missed both a great experience and a serious disappointment.
I have been thinking about this more than can be healthy recently.

In my kids school there is an open yard, through an open gateway, into another open yard in front of the school

┌─────────┐
│ │
│ │
│ │
│ │
│ │
┌──────┴───xx────┴──────────┐
│ │
│ │
│ │
│ │
│ │
└───────────────────────────┘

Lets say xx is the gateway. At pick-up time this is where parents will stop to talk.

This used to drive me mad as it was literally a bottleneck and i wondered why people could be so inconsiderate, but I started to observe, and people would meet, greet each other, and then walk together to that point to stop and talk - and everyone would do it, it is like they are drawn to that gateway to talk - and it has baffled me, i really think we are hardwired to do it, despite the impracticality of it for other people - why??
FTTH is somewhat open in Canada. You don't have to use their router, but you do have to use their SFP. (Why? I'm not entirely sure. AFAIK it doesn't send anything back to them)
I think you are in a position to be the “king behind the curtains”: your product managers and architects depend on you to get their job done. Take advantage of that (in a good sense) and: ask for salary raises, and get more time off (which you could use to slowly start your own business).
If you want recognition, well, find another job. But judging by the amount of years of experience you have, I would say you are in your middle thirties (maybe forties), so imho you should maximize compensation and free time (instead of ego/recognition).
> a merge sort

We use a bucket sort. My wife grudgingly conceded it was faster and doesn't hate doing the dishes as much as she used to (but I still do them most frequently).
Generally, but this individual has his own spaceworthy rockets, which is more than halfway to an ICBM.
The cached range is -128 to 127. I just reran these benchmarks with ints instead of longs and the mask changed to 127(0x7F) and sumNulls and sumSimple results are exactly the same: 0.6 ns/op. As for the sumOptional method, changing Optional<Integer> for the primitive variant OptionalInt, doesn't change the result much, its the actual creation of the Optional object itself that dominates the time.

In nutshell, on my old i5 2500k:

ints 0.6ns/op

cached Integer 0.6ns/op

boxed Integer 1.3ns/op

OptionalInt 3.5ns/op

Optional<Integer> 4.2ns/op (time includes boxing the int)

Where an op is getting the number, checking it, then an addition.

For hot loops inside a jmh benchmark, you can use @OperationsPerInvocation(MAX) and it will spit out the results in this more readable format for the time just inside the loop.
Wait… I’m using `delay` to create an “edit window” because I often spot mistakes after posting. Didn’t realize it actually shows up instead of being, well, delayed.

Edit: tested it on this comment (in another private window). Observations: delay=1 is actually around 3 minutes. The comment didn’t show up until the time has passed. No * * * was observed.
I'm not sure you understand what's happening here or the basics of business and liquidation.

"Normal companies can't go bankrupt in one day" - They didn't go bankrupt. They went into liquidation. Massively different thing. You can have a company with billions of quid saved up in the bank that goes into liquidation.

Liquidation is quite common and happens daily in the UK to 'normal' companies. Companies that were profitable last week and no longer can operate as they're not profitable enough to pay their debts/what they owe.

I think your issue here is you don't understand what liquidation is/means and basic principles of business profits. The most important part is that while a company may be profitable at the 'end of year' -- They have to first get to the end of the year.
You might enjoy these.

IBM Selectric Typewriter & its digital to analogue converter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRCNenhcvpw

The Whiffletree: A mechanical digital-to-analog converter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_SC7oWL78A
I would have thought that the deposits will leave SVB/what is left of SVB pretty soon, so the FDIC will need to cover that rather now than in the far future.
I mean, why can’t the ATC streamer mix the audio sources into stereo?
Oh sweet summer child.

The bankers sold most of the shares before it happened, because they knew it was coming.
> everything is actually paintings by AI artists

It just occurred to me that we're actually going through the opposite transition outlined in Pratchett's discworld. Oh the irony.

> Down in the cellar Otto Chriek picked up the dark light iconograph and looked at it again. Then he scratched it with a long pale finger, as if trying to remove something. 'Strange . . ,' he said. The imp hadn't imagined it, he knew. Imps had no imagination whatsoever. They didn't know how to lie.

From Terry Pratchett's "The Truth"
The US regulators really frown on the big banks snatching up failed bank assets. They allow it when they have to but the median regulator driven take over is done by banks in the same tier as the one acquired.

I actually wonder if that’s why the uk arm of svb was able to be purchased but the US one wasn’t. It’s probably just the relative size differences but I’m curious if the fdic got no bids for svb or didn’t get any it liked.
+1ing things far predates Google+.
Mine is really really poor at it.

Half the time it responds with "one moment.. One moment.. this is taking too long" or "I have problems connecting to the internet". But there's no internet problems whatsoever and it connects to my home Assistant using local homekit integration which shouldn't even need that.
Props to you. I'm impressed of what you were able to accomplish in such a short time. :)
Yikes. Inspite of leadership changes by hiring from Oracle, it’s clear GCP will be stuck in 3rd place for a while. You can’t treat long standing customers (even with a modest spend) like dirt and hope to somehow edge out Azure or AWS.

Submitted your link for discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35133917
U.S. military in 'crisis,' could lose a war to Russia and China (2018)
The entire banking system was about to be revealed as a total clown show scam (that it is) if they weren’t going to step in here. How do you expect an SVB company to run payroll for more than 10 or so employees in a risk free way? How about 100 employees? If you can’t even ensure a tiny company can do that without losing everything and folding then you have problems with your banking system that are wayyyy more serious. This epiphany was going to happen in an extraordinary way today if they didn’t restore confidence in the (very broken) system.
There's a reason why the science community demands rigorous papers and not "you saw it with your own eyes so it must be true."

See also: Professional illusionists.
You’re the one who said “The loans we are talking about are from the government and don't need to stick to market rates if the government doesn't want them to.”
> I am having a hard time even getting an interview for these types of roles because people just seem to instantly reject a software engineering background for solutions architect positions.

It's easier to do this transition within the company. Just show enough leadership and big picture qualities, signal that you want to move into that direction. Of course, depends on the actual political configuration of your team, your manager etc. If you're doing all the work for them, they might just want to keep you in your place. So, in practice, you might say that, if things won't change within the next year, you'll start looking for opportunities elsewhere.
Oh, I know that problem, we did change Puppet root CA due to mishap of one of the admins during updating to sha256 certs. But IIRC (it was long time ago) Puppet CA cert by default are issued for like 10-20 years, would be a bit weird if true. Also, old versions didn't had trust chain "just" root CA so puppet master would have to have key for that on disk anyway, proper "root CA + leaf CA for puppetmasters" have been a thing for just few years in Puppet.

It would only be really problematic if they also lost SSH access to those machines using Puppet. If you have root access the fix is not exactly hard.

But then they fired people that did had access so that might also be a problem

We made sure all of our machines can be accesses both by Puppet and by SSH kinda for that reason; we had both accidents of someone fucking up Puppet, and someone fucking up SSH config rendering machines un-loggable (the lessons were learned and etched in stone).

So really, depending on who has access to what, it can be anything from "just pipe list of hosts to few ssh commands fixing it" to "get access manually to the server and change stuff, or redeploy machine from scratch". Again, assuming muski boy didn't fire wrong people
Er, as a Catholic I'd be inclined to dispute this. I know a few ex-priests. One of whom has been happily married for years. Another became a C of E minister and also got married. Another left the priesthood for 17 yrs then eventually came back. My understanding is, its intended to be a lifelong commitment, but it doesn't always work out. A marriage can be annulled in the church if it is thought that one of both parties failed to fully understand what they were promising to each other or fully enter into the promise being a true commitment. That could be the case with ordaining a priest too. As well as the fact that being a priest is an extremely hard job as well as the celibacy requirement so some people come to the conclusion they are unable to fulfil the role properly.
How does having less stress not make you happier? Or if not “happy,” then what other word is there to describe this axis on which there was positive movement?
For criminal charges, yes, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other consequences. For example, a professional engineer can lose their license if they are found to be negligent or deceitful even if it doesn’t rise to the level of criminal charges. This is one of the reasons why most other fields using the term “engineer” don’t think software meets the same level, and having known a couple of people who completed PE qualifications I can understand why.

I don’t think that would make sense for all software development but it certainly doesn’t seem unreasonable to think that, say, the FSD team at Tesla or the accounting team at a bank should be held to a higher level of expectations (and presumably pay) than the ad click optimization team at some retailer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benveniste_affair
You only need 40GB of RAM for the largest model and inference latency mostly depends on single core performance and memory bus speed because it has to crunch the whole 40GB for every token it produces.

If its slower than you want, figure out which one is your bottleneck. Because even 64GB of faster cheap RAM could be a 50% speedup if your CPU isn't the problem.
Been there before, we did exactly this; except over OOB+reboot-into-single-user (because SELinux). Took us a few days (~5k servers) but managed to get out of it with no public-facing downtime. The other way would have just been to rekick the world one box at a time. A number of integration tests were added after that disaster :)
We flip every other utensil to help with this. Genrally works great.
This is a good read! Thanks @yamrzou.
Yes but its parent/owning company had gone bust. Lehman Brothers UK arm was also solvent (I think they had roughly £8B of assets after everything was wound up and the administrators bills were paid) but had no cash after the parent company went bust.
No problem. If you have any questions feel free to ask.
SVB should have learned from some of their depositors - just throttle withdrawals and blame "technical difficulties" or "systems update" or "scheduled maintenance".
Generating Crosswords via SAT/SMT (2020)
i ran a successful small business for 12 years. in my opinion, you must learn by doing. it's scary but you have to do it. the problem is every business is a unique snowflake and you're not going to find much general advice other than "buy insurance" or "outsource your payroll and HR."

one strategy i used was to sit down and think of all the things that could possibly go wrong with your business or a specific project, and google for solutions that can help you with that. work backwards from the problem. it's like designing a resilient software or systems architecture.

you're going to read a LOT of federal and local laws, accounting rules, insurance regulations, speak to a bunch of different solutions vendors, and wade through a bunch of bullshit before you find the one nugget of information you need.

you also need to be generally savvy about how to deal with money and people. naive people don't make it very far.
HSBC is buying the UK one of the arms of SVB. I wonder who buys the legs.
It doesn't even install them in a dedicated environment where they can be cleanly removed and won't break the rest of your machine. This really should be containerized or at least use s conda environment at a minimum.
Create new root CA, ssh to machine, remove old certs, re-add machine to Puppet, sign the new CSR on Puppet master, then it will download new root.

Very simple operation... if you have working SSH access with root. If they don't, well...
I've released JavaScript Assistant for VS Code (120 refactorings) as open source
Which isn't great for those of us with very little ability to attend activities outside of the home.
That’s just a convenience for

theField == null ? Optional.empty() : Optional.of(theField);

As Optional.of will raise an NPE if given a null value.

It doesn’t change the issue that the Optional itself can be null, and that null is its default value.