skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looking at my bookshelf, there are three books that I've re-opened as references for a while that have a significant impact on my current work:

1. Refactoring/Fowler
2. Design Patterns/Gang of Four
3. The Art of Unit Testing/Osherove

Although, the last book (Unit Testing) is C# specific, what I appreciated was the open discussion of using techniques and tools, rather than ideology.
Are we talking 7 figure offers? I was under the impression that $500k packages were not uncommon for AI researchers at Google.
>From whom?

Lloyds and AIG will insure just about anything, they'll happily protect $x million or billion for a nominal fee.
This. So much this.

I've been bootstrapping my startup with Regions bank for 3 years and it has been one unending nightmare after another.

It's been like having an active and hateful adversary at every single moment when you need help most.

I was extremely fortunate to be able to open an account with SVB late last year and it had been an enormous relief.

The unreasonable delays, hostile policies, nickel and diming, obvious incompetence, all gone.

Fast loading web experiences, instant transfers, employee credit cards, full service treatment, everything has been seamless with SVB.

My account is below the FDIC threshold, so I'm optimistic about Monday, but the loss is so huge and so much more than the money.
I'm attempting to enter this field at possibly the worst time, with the worst qualifications. No YOE, no degree. I do have friends in the field that may be able to help but it's far from guaranteed.

Only thing I have going for me is that I have many years of non-professional programming experience and multiple great open source projects but at this point, I think my only hope is accepting anything. Any pay, any location, remote or in person. I'm already working near minimum wage jobs, so it's probably better to work something relevant on a resume.

I'm also in Canada so, it was sparse to begin with.
Seriously. How has someone not gotten high at least once in their life?
I just finished reading and I've run into every single problem listed here at some point in my career. These are all really solid tips, and it's also kind of validating to see that some of the things that tripped me up in the past are apparently pretty common tripping points.
> But it's difficult to have much sympathy for companies that invested large sums of money into SVB without doing their due-diligence

What due diligence would a bank customer do that would uncover the sort of escalating risk profile you've outlined? I ask as someone very far from finance and banking.
Did you know that AUTOMATIC1111 got strapped off of 4chan?

Go to 4chan right now, and poke around their technology and video game boards. There's so much chatter about LLaMa. The last time I saw that much chatter about a technology was when eth was 3 dollars a coin. The communities exist, the general public just isn't aware of them.
> This whole story is so bewildering, probably the only bank I can think of that was killed by its own customers (flaky VC herd) despite being generally healthy

So essentially it was all just panic. Scary how fragile our financial systems can be in the face of herd mentality and irrational behavior.

Hope that panic slows down and First Bank doesn’t have to go through the same as SVB (people were lining up to withdraw their money today).
Something Broke the Silicon Valley Bank Failure
It's not that people are calling it an exit scam, rather they're talking about uninsured deposits as if they're completely gone. I feel that worry descends straight from cryptocurrency exchanges blowing up, where there is generally no assets left. (I agree I overspoke by calling FTX an "exit scam", when it seems more like gambler's ruin)

AFAIK the FDIC doesn't look kindly on people who liquidate their accounts during a bank run [0]. This has two purposes. First it spreads a smaller amount of pain around to all depositors, rather than a larger amount of pain for some depositors. And second, it discourages bank runs in the first place.

And honestly without the meme behavior SVB might not have collapsed. I don't think talking about holding the bonds to maturity is a great general appraisal of the situation. But on the other hand it seems SVB had lots of depositors that were actually content to park a lot of cash and not chase high yields, so it could have actually worked out if not for the run.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35097028
The problem is that the assets weren’t all marked to market. So selling off immediately will mean they’re taking a substantial hit compared to holding them to maturity.
Our (my) favorite villain for one:

> Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Coatue Management, Union Square Ventures and Founder Collective all advised their startups to pull their cash from the bank, people familiar with the matter said.

https://fortune.com/2023/03/11/silicon-valley-bank-run-42-bi...
How would the strict separation between savings deposits and investment banking from Glass-Steagull (1933) (which was repealed by GLBA in 1999) banking regulations have prevented this?

From "1999 Repeal of Glass-Steagall was the worst deregulation enacted in US history" (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30206570 :

> Yeah what was the deal with that dotcom correction in the early 2000s? Did banks invest differently after GLBA said that they can gamble against peoples' savings deposits (because they created a 'sociallist' $100b credit line, called it FDIC, and things like that don't happen anymore)

> Decline of the Glass-Steagall Act:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_Glass%E2%80%93S...

> Dot-com bubble: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
Big fan of sops after previously using transcrypt. The latter was really painful for git newbies, painful to upgrade, and we've even ran into issues with differing versions of openssl on client machines.

sops is more contstrained but is generally easier to grok. It also integrates with GCP KMS which is super nice for us.
Because the issue here was that it was a classic run, it was not insolvent it just was not liquid enough that it could survive well north of 50% of its customer base (I am willing to be in the 70 or higher range) pull out every penny of their deposits. Not even JP Morgan could survive that kind of a run

This is both why they failed even though they appeared to be still healthy and also impossible to find a buyer. All the money already ran out the door. The enticement to buy a failed bank is getting all the deposits and new customers, but there's none of that left

However, I also think this is why other more general banks are not in as much danger as everyone wants to imply. 10 VCs (or less) called their portfolio companies and told them all to pull their money. A bank with a much more diversified customer base does not have that risk
Lobbying is a legal form of corruption.
company went under in December, i got one interview out of like 30 applications and to be quite fair i messed up a really simple Python question cus of nerves so i obv didn't get it. idc I'm chilling and I get time to shitpost so there's no rush.
Stanford President and Law-School Dean Apologize to Judge Duncan
I have a Keychron Q1 that has a knob for volume, and it's very hand for sure! Common use case is when boosting people's volume when Zoom speakers have a quiet mic, for example. Or for when a musical breakdown is impending :)
Got laid off mid-January from a smaller unicorn. 4+ YoE. I applied to ~80 places (mixture of cold applications and referrals), got to first rounds with maybe ~20, ended up with 5 offers (and pulled the plug on a few interviews due to fit or lack of interest.) 4 were startups of varying sizes, 1 was non-FAANG big tech, which I ended up taking for stability and WLB. Total time from getting laid off to signing the new offer was about 5 weeks.

Overall, I think things went ok for me because I have a fairly solid resume and a great network to lean on, and was able to do well in interviews. I also mostly applied to senior SRE and infra roles, which sounds like it’s harder to hire for than general SWE.
And the wealth gets more concentrated in the process.
The bonds (largely mortgage-backed securities) did not decline in value. If they were held to maturity, they would pay full rate.

The issue is that the bonds can’t be sold now for anything like npv, because nearly risk-feee government issued bonds pay 3-4x what these bonds will.

That makes them… discounted
Can you try it on a few and report back? Would be tremendously curious
I honestly haven’t seen anyone make those claims.
I’m sorry you feel that way.

I have never hired someone to pretend to be my friend, nor do I know someone who has done that. As I see it, having a true network of friends and professional connections is precisely what guards me against “fake” people.

If you’d like to reach out (email in profile), I’d be glad to lend some advice.
The belief would be that USDC could repeg while being under collateralized. If there is enough holders of USDC who don't mind that and enough USDC locked up in various smart contacts, wallets with lost keys, or there being people who have missed the news, then Circle may have enough liquidity to continue operating USDC despite not having enough funds to cash out all USDC which technically exist.
Use the simplest USB dock with the least amount of ports for your specific use case. Simpler docks have less physical room and lower baseline power to hide malicious mods. e.g. this StarTech dock costs 50% less than one with ethernet. It can be used with a USB-ethernet adapter, which allows both the dock and ethernet adapter to be evaluated separately, https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09DGRJMYK/

We need crowdsourced behavioral fingerprints and open-source test suites for peripherals which may be subject to supply chain or shipment interdiction. Measure power consumption and response latency baselines, when idle and with reference workloads. Fingerprint units of the same model procured via multiple supply chains: brick & mortar, online, different couriers, new/used.

More generally, there is ongoing work for integrity verification of devices, including PCIe device authentication [1][2], USB device authentication [3] and SPDM for remote attestation between DICE-RoT and system firmware, before allowing a device to communicate with the system.

[1] PCIe component auth, https://pcisig.com/pcie®-component-authentication

[2] Intel PCI Express Device Security, https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents...

[3] https://www.zdnet.com/article/usb-type-c-gets-authentication...

USB data blocker with transparent case for physical inspection: https://portablepowersupplies.co.uk/product/pure-usb-data-bl....

Do we need transparent docks?
If you deposit in an FDIC-insured bank, the bank pays premiums to the FDIC so you are "paying" in the sense that that money might otherwise be used as interest on your deposit (but let's be honest it probably wouldn't).

Moreover, the advantages that come with FDIC insurance are more than worth it to the banks (otherwise they wouldn't participate) so on the whole they probably have more money under FDIC than they would without it.

Part of the problem is that people think "It's a Wonderful Life" describes how banks work (banks take deposits and lend them out) but that hasn't been true for almost a century (because of exactly what happens in "It's a Wonderful Life"). Weirdly the deposits a bank has aren't really important to the bank's health one way or the other; they're just the regulatory price the bank pays for being allowed to originate loans.
Completely aside from Avatar, I'm hoping the tech for things like underwater motion capture and this water modelling brings about a renaissance in underwater themed games.

I'm looking at you Monster Hunter and also Blitzball >.>
The short answer would be because the SVB brand is essentially owned by the bank's unsecured depositors at this point. You have to balance their recovery against the moral hazards of too earnestly sweeping failure under the rug.
This makes Tan's/YC's histrionics all the more puzzling
The Laughing Man is an antagonist in the 2004 tv series, not the original film.
How much would that example cost, for a sense of scale?
To be clear, what you're describing when you say "invested large sums of money into SVB" is the act of keeping your money in a bank.

If you think that we should treat the act of keeping money in banks as a risky choice, then fine, but there will be fairly substantial implications to that.
I don't know if they have a similar thing where you are, but we have the Royal Flying Doctor service in Australia. Essentially, it's someone who flies a doctor into remote locations when they're hours away from a hospital, or an ambulance won't be able to make it.
I hope this isn’t something to say in bad taste but do you think the whole SVB debacle will have an impact on that?
As ever, the markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
> we would have to get rid of the tendency of these models [...] reply with something a bit more sexist/racist/

If you don't want it to be racist, don't say racist things to it. Also, it'll be fairly clear where the racism came from - like a parrot and their owner.

AIs that can tweet, like MS Tay, and that remote-work chatbot, get a lot of attention when they melt down. Private AIs on your phone don't seem like they'll caise any concern with the phone-using public.

I think we'll appreciate the benefits more than we'll mind that others can make it say dirty words.
that doesn't answer the question - it just answers what happened ; that DoE has some resources and it was used to do this investigation. It didn't answer _why_. It could be that nobody can tell why, of course.
I love how many here are suddenly pretending that every mid-sized business in America both can and should be able to perform a deep and ongoing due diligence of their bank, including I suppose various macro stress tests and Monte Carlo simulations, using the limited information available in public filings, and not only this, but that this absurdity is actually desirable.

Please. This is not a serious argument.
I’ve just done jumper wires from pcb to pcb in situations like this. Six wires? Not even worth trying to salvage that ribbon cable.
It would be safer for all if the FDIC sticks to what it does best and doesn't take on additional risk outside its mandate as a favor to irresponsible businesses.
"It's dangerous to prophesy, especially about the future"
fyi if you specifically are having a hard time finding a job, I guarantee it’s your attitude (showcased nicely on HN) and not because of nepotism.
This has literally been an issue with banks for all of modern society. FDIC insurance did not materialize randomly.

There are many answers: multiple bank accounts, holding other securities like treasuries (which are guaranteed by the US government), bonds, stocks, etc.
It looks like AT LEAST 80-90% of the deposits will be returned, possibly 100%

Truly strange why they are lobbying so hard for government bailouts of the remaining portion, when there might end up being no remaining portion.
Any suggestion for boosting that when you live in a non tech city? Spam LinkedIn cold messages
I think there are plenty who haven’t, probably lots for religious reasons. But to not have heard that term is very surprising. There’s even a movie, half baked.
probably not if gap is so large: 7B vs 175B.

Also, all those benchmark are trash because they can't track data leaks in training data. For example they trained llama on github, where GSM8k eval data is located, of course model will perform well on GSM8K, because it memorized answers.
It would be a bad idea today to use RAM as a SATA drive. NVMe is much more performant. SAS is available in 12G and 24G. Better would be to utilize DDR3 or better as an NVMe drive or even birfurcated NVMe device. The RAM drive is a good idea too if you have spare RAM or DIMMs. Compressed ZRAM in Linux makes it even better.
I was laid off about a month ago (senior software engineer). I remember the whole job search for my last position, back in June 2021, lasted all of about two weeks. This time, it feels like there's significantly fewer interesting positions open, and the ones I apply to aren't even leading to HR screening calls. I've probably applied to about 30 positions.

The one place that did call me back gave me their take-home coding test, but their automated grading system said I failed, so they sent me a rejection email with no details about what their automated system didn't like about my code and then never responded to my request for more info.

I've really enjoyed the first month or so of unemployment, getting to hang out more with my spouse, do hobbies, work on the house, etc., but the anxiety about running out of emergency fund runway is slowly creeping in. We've got about another 4 months before things get really dire, not accounting for unemployment checks. With UI, we can probably double that before we'd need to dip into investment accounts.

For sure a more fortunate position to be in financially than most get, but it's still really unnerving not knowing when/if I'll get another interview. I've been consistently employed full time since the moment I graduated high school (about 10 years ago), so this is literally the first time I've ever not had a job in my adult life.
Rippling used their corporate reserves to do so.
It wasn't pure panic. The withdrawals started because it was announced that SVB was liquidating some of its assets at a loss despite SVB having recently announced that they had no need for such actions and were perfectly fine liquidity wise.

Your bank is supposed to be zero risk, so it's is not irrational when your bank even hints at liquidity issues that you get out.
How LLMs work: common misconceptions, components and processes
How is withdrawing your cash before everyone else withdraws their cash irrational? It's the Nash equilibrium.
Oh so my pet hamster 'DROPTABLE' doesn't do the trick anymore?!
LLMs have been interesting - I need to update my resume to focus on it. I have experience working on models like that since 2018 and are frankly less interesting than some alternatives (to me).

My guess is a lot of companies / hiring managers are searching for key terms. Screening is likely not from people who know what they’re talking about
> Bankers think that banks exist to make themselves a lot of money, not to serve customers.

the business of a bank is to make money. If serving the customers make them money, it will happen. If there's some other activity which makes even more money, that activity would be done instead (or as well as).

Does the farmer that grow your food also exist solely to serve you food?
Following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in March 2023, the management of SVB Securities planned to buy back their firm from the parent group.

Not really sure how much of an influence they had in the lobbying, but still hilarious.
Looking at where inflation and interest rates were going, they were far from healthy.

This was inevitable, as they locked away too much capital in bonds that were losing money every month in a way they can never recover.

It’s the wrong way to bet when interest rates have been low, but are going up soon.
Ask HN: What are the little freezes while typing normally on a laptop?
This is an issue I'm having on a Latitude 7490 i7-8650U, 64GB RAM, SSD, currently running Manjaro...

While typing into Chrome every once in a while (ctrl-l, type search term) the input freezes for a couple seconds, like in the middle of typing the word Germany, it's like G-e-r (freeze) m-a-n-y

This seems off for "system capability" reasons, because A) none of my other laptops do this, even the old Lenovo T420 doesn't do this and B) I guess all it's doing is looking through my Chrome history.

The pauses also happen at other times when using different typing tasks in other apps. But I haven't found a good way to replicate this so far.

I made a 70GB swap file on the off chance that it had something to do with it, but the pauses still happen.

What might be some good places to start in troubleshooting? Is there some system caching mechanism or something else I should look into?

I'd be interested if this leads to more understanding of what's going on behind the scenes, so thought I'd ask here. Thanks.
Have someone look over your resume and see if it can't be improved in areas like readability.
Fugro's geophysical suurvey division runs million+ line kilometre surveys across the planet - from planes, ships, and ground vehicles.

There's work there for pilot-operators unflustered by aquisition software and instrumentation.

A lot of that work is flying dead straight lines @ 70 m/sec for 20-50km at 80m ground clearance with minimal deviation and a gut twisting turn at the end to drop into a parallel line on the return leg .. for max flying hours per day.
> Sounds pretty fair and expedient to me.

The problem is we don't know what "some percentage" and "not many days" are. If you said 99% on Tuesday, no one would care. 50% in May would suck.
one does not have to be in dire straits to be sacrificing for more money.
> The bank was capitalized fine (albeit with underperforming treasury assets given interest rate increases)

That’s an “albeit” you could drive the second largest bank failure ever though. If I have $100k of net assets and I lose $10k due to interest rate increases, I’m fine. If I have $100k but I lose $150k due to interest rate increases, then I’m only fine if I have some other source of income before whatever debt I have comes due.

SVB was only capitalized fine in a universe in which they could maintain a large non-interest-bearing deposit volume, and make adequate profit on it, for long enough to erase the hole in their balance sheet before their bonds matured and they would inevitably be forced to realize their loss. Or if their implicit gamble that rates would go back down would pay off. (Of course, the latter also reduces the income from said non-interest-bearing deposits.)

I don’t know how bank stress tests work, but I sure hope they would notice that the bank’s liabilities exceeded their assets even assuming said assets could be sold calmly and at favorable prices. And no, “I’ll hold them to maturity so they’re worth 20% more than they are actually worth” should not be part of that calculation.
Is it really just panic though? If their assets marked to market were of greater value than their liabilities there would be no reason for a panic in the first place.
I’m assuming that "AI research engineer" implies a PhD, but I’m curious what your progression was. How long were you in academia before moving to industry research?
Fascinating. Thank you for sharing. In my country there is no insurance for deposits, although sometime this year they plan to introduce mandatory insurance up to ~$60,000 USD.
The bank chose to make risky investments with the deposits it held. That's on the bank, not the fed.
The suggestions in this thread are decent, but I haven’t seen a mention of prioritising what you know.

What’s your goal?

If as you mention you have an app to prototype and you want that prototype as fast and simple as possible, then you can’t use tech and tooling you don’t know.

Any time spent learning the new tech, is time you could have spent on the prototype.

With that lens, you can see the variety of suggestions here are what people know best.

If you goal is to learn a new tool, or to learn a new tool alongside a prototype, you have to trade off speed. It will take a bit longer.

Spend your novelty tokens wisely.
>Honestly starting to think the right idea might be to stock up on food, water, gas and toilet paper like I'm worried about another pandemic and go bury $10k in the backyard.

If you are saying that you should take additional personal steps to protect yourself from downside risks, the answer is yes. It's not a foolish way to live and in the long term, the benefits outweigh the costs, similar to being adequately insured.