skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The Guardian comes with a certain bias for disaster-mongering"

Perhaps so. But from my perspective of Australia the UK looks as if it's on the slide (I'm not smug when saying that as I reckon things here aren't much better, we've always been a mob of ostriches).

My family/cultural heritage is mostly UK so I have no pleasure in watching the decline. I've also relatives in the US and France and I've lived and worked in both Europe including the UK and the US so I view what's happening from a broad Western perspective and I'm very gloomy about what I see.

It's too complicated to give a quick summary of the problems but if forced to do so in a sentence then I'd say it's cultural. The West is being driven apart by widening ideological views, there's less cohesion, fewer common values and aspirations now than there once was.

On the other hand, the exact opposite is happening in Asia, people there know their time has come and that confidence and optimism drives cohesion and common values.

BTW, I've also worked in Asia for a short while so I've some feeling for what's happening there.
Smart Money staying out as USDC stays off peg
Back of napkin estimates:

For lossless CD-quality audio you need about 160kbyte/s.

So on a gigabit network (125Mbyte/s), you'd need over 99.999% packet loss in order to not keep up.

So they're comparing to an almost completely faulty cable.

I feel like a lot of audiophile stupidity is not understanding scale.

There is a difference between the fancy speaker cables and acceptable cheap ones, but it's so ridiculously minuscule as to be completely inaudible compared to, say, whether or not the listener is wearing socks or not.

And that's not an exaggeration, that difference will literally be more than the difference in cables, probably by an order of magnitude.

The only real difference between the cables will be at frequencies over, say, a GHz. ie RF frequencies 50x higher than cats might be able to hear.

But the audiofool will say, "see, there's a difference - I want my system to sound the best".

And they focus so much on ridiculously overkill cables, amplifiers and stupid stands, yet seem to often ignore room treatment which could really make a difference. It's often massive speakers in horribly reflective minimalistic rooms, driven by amps running at 0.1% of their power rating.

Another thing is not understanding tradeoffs. Everything is a compromise, so when you buy the amp that's rated at 2000W but only run it at 2W, it won't measure as well as the same quality amp that's rated at 50W, also running at 2W.

Similarly a speaker with a max rating of 500W running at 2W won't be as accurate as a speaker with a max rating of 50W running at 2W, because physically the material the speaker is made out of has to be more resilient/less flexible to handle that kind of maximum power.

But they focus on one particular thing (usually the expensive thing) to the detriment of other things.

Also not understanding wattage.

Because sound is logarithmic, it is really eye-opening how little power you need for quite loud audio. Most systems you wouldn't want to listen to at over 5W.

Eg for, say two Kef R7 speakers which have a sensitivity of 88dB, at only 5W, from 3m away is 94.4dB.

That is LOUD.

At 2W, it's 90.5dB. Also LOUD.

https://mehlau.net/audio/spl/ (+6dB for two speakers)

You don't need a 5000W amp. But they don't understand any of this so they just think higher number and more expensive equals better.

It's like buying a Mack truck because you heard it carries more than a hatchback when you're going to the supermarket, and thinking it must be better because it's more expensive.
Not sure how involved pg was with this post as its stated author Garry Tan
Very cool. I tried building some demos, looked at the code.

I agree with the comment about being somewhat like SwiftUI (which I like, even though I have only published one app to the App Store).
That's been happening already with Replika: https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-03-01/replika-users...
It's one of those things where you know it when you see it. I got 18 year old CMU students showing up knowing how write x86 SIMD intrinsics or ones with LLVM JIT experience. Dirty.
They are UGLY though...
> > Startups already had a difficult time with traditional banking

I have seen this statement a half-dozen times in the last 3 days.

Can somebody explain in detail what are these hard times that a startup faces at Wells Fargo, BoA, JPMChase etc?

KYC? If Silicon Valley Bank was skipping that then they were against the law

Wires being signaled as suspicious? I doubt it, maybe the startup is new but everybody knows who the Founder's Fund is... or Blackstone or CVC. When they send the big equity raise checks banks look at the recipient but also at the sender.
> I think we are growing concerned their AI vision systems might soon allow suicide drones that can target US politicians.

Utter nonsense. This is hardly a meaningful barrier to attempting assassinations of US polticians.
Excellent explanation; I think understand the whole situation better thanks to you.
"i've "known" this guy for ~10 years now"

Ha. I have one of those too. His wife keeps getting it wrong too, so I get emails asking my opinion on various purchases/kitchen renovations. I used to reply "wrong email address", now I just give my opinion.

I hope he likes the kitchen counters he "agreed" to.
They're mad at the match, but they aren't mad at the powderkeg.

SVB didn't have a Chief Risk Officer from April 2022 through January 2023. They were flying blind. While the Fed raised interest rates, the bank seemingly moved forward without any risk assessments.

A new Chief Risk Officer was named in January 2023. The top insiders then sold tons of shares in February, suggesting that they all realized something was wrong. In the next public report on March 8th at 4pm, they announce a capital raise to offset their now booked losses. This sets off a bank run on March 9th. And the rest is history.

-----------

Maybe instead of blaming the bank run on March 9th (the lit match), they need to focus more on the 10+ months of poor risk assessments and blatant insider-trading in February (suggesting that the higher-ups discovered the issue and acted upon it for personal financial gains).

--------------

Sure, the email / press release on March 8th was poorly written. So poorly written it set off a bankrun. The CEO deserves some of the blame here for such shoddy writing that set off the stampede.

But that wasn't the issue. The issue was all the "dry powder" that the bank accumulated over the past year.
They currently only supports a single input/response format of input right? Multi turns will be more challenging to handle.

I am optimistic for 30B or 66B to catch up with OpenAI, but 7B is unlikely to have the same quality.
I'm not going to throw shade on earlier eras of computing. I study them intensely.

However, I will throw shade on pegging things to those eras when everyone else has moved on.

It'd be like having to grapple with near and far pointers still because that was a reality of the 16-bit world. I remember them, it was a brilliant system for the limitations but they've been gone for 25 or so years and good riddance. They were also bastards.

Also when I see these things, it's like I've been in some kind of mythical suppressed memory therapy as these horrid events from my past come forth to haunt me again. One man's competency is another man's post traumatic disorder
I am not convinced by this argument* because banks can already do that. I don't think that bank are "required" to invest client's deposits, so they can already just stash paper cash in a big vault. It is clearly a dumb strategy for a retail bank.

This proposal for narrow banking seems to employ the government as this vault, sort of like treasury bonds that can be freely withdrawn, which seems a more significant difference.

* I am not denying that this is what the feds claimed and/or believed
It’s also standardized, so you don’t have to only pick ports that Framework decides are valid. You can also add 3rd party ports of your own choosing.
<checks URL>

not reddit!
Improving user privacy by requiring opt-in to send X-Requested-With header from
shit hasn't the fan
The only quote that used directly violent verbs were:

> A spokesperson for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office said on Wednesday that Beijing was recommitted in the new year to “safeguarding sovereignty and territorial integrity” and “smashing plots for Taiwan independence”.

That quote links to another Al J article where the keywords “plot” and “smash” are not present.

These nation states talk all the time about how “X will not go unpunished”. But most times that’s interpreted as things like sanctions or other supposedly non-violent means.
Love that hallucinated ChatGPT API example there.
It makes things marginally safer for you as a depositor because of how the FDIC insurance is structured. But it doesn't meaningfully reduce the FDIC's risk as the deposit insurer:

1000 businesses, 10 (same size) banks
Scenario A: each bank has 100 depositors, each storing 100% of their deposit with the bank
Scenario B: each bank has 1000 depositors, each storing 10% of their deposit with the bank

In both scenarios the total amount deposited at each bank is the same. The risk to FDIC if an individual bank fails is actually higher in scenario B. But the deposit insurance limit rules push us towards scenario B.
Superintelligence Newsletter
EV Charging App Is Trying to Help Both Drivers and the Grid
What bugs me most is the "your email address is compromised" messages... they're meaningless... my email address is nearly two decades old, I'm sure it's on many lists. But without any indication of where/how or if there's a password associated with any breach, it's just noise.
As bad as Experian is, at least the baseline product works for free unlike TransUnion.
Ask HN: Unsure about book ending, especially about minor chars. Suggestions?
In this novella, the “protagonist” wins cause his visions come true. But what should happen to his “driver” who was disadvantaged by birth and other similar characters who were just following orders. Are plot twists too on the nose these days?

I’m trying not to use ChatGPT.
Car tire debris: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/03/coho-sal...
Please file an FTC complaint. It’ll get to the right people.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2021/10/...

https://www.ftc.gov/reports/bringing-dark-patterns-light
There was a bombshell report about an immediate moratorium on crab fishing in Alaska, that came out of nowhere, seemingly. About a month later there was a (very, very quiet) report justifying the moratorium. The short version is that effectively scientists had been asking for reduction in fishing in the area for decades and finally the remaining stock in the area was so low it was critically endangering the ecosystem there. So they finally put in a hard stop after years of kicking the can down the road.

I suspect we'll see additional cessation of fishing in other areas as it further unravels that we've been chronically overfishing for decades.

Britain after WW2 overharvested mackerel from their seas for so long that they had to put permanent fishing quotas and even today the mackerel have not fully recovered from overfishing over half a century ago. Anglers have an enormous impact on fish and wildlife stocks.
>It's objectively hilarious that the top VCs put on their "banking expert" hats and misdiagnosed SVB's public statements so badly that they created a run on their own bank.

I appreciated another comment that shared the same sentiment, but said something along the lines of, "Tech companies DDOS'd their own bank".
Is it "generational knowledge and battlefront experience" or just "getting used to the (shitty) way things have always been" and Stockhold Syndrome?
> the loss of the depositors money

What loss? Their assets were higher than their liabilities.
This is a classic prisoner's dilemma and has been studied to death already. Pulling your money out is rational behavior as soon as there is any risk that you won't be able to in the future - yes, even if that behavior is what causes it.

The subtext of your comment is that it would have been smarter to leave money in the bank. That's not how the world works.

There's an interesting discussion around how social institutions can coordinate mutual non-defection (hint: it probably looks a lot like the recently announced "government guarantees deposits"). But "lol dumb VCs" just shows lack of understanding.
Why not round-robin the dollars, so the people with the most uninsured cash take most of the hit?
The credit agencies suck in every possible way. They should be legislated into obscurity.
> That normal behavior triggered the insolvency.

Its not normal to have 42 billion withdraw in a day, net. That's 20% of total assets. If your hypothesis is correct, then all of the companies using SVB would have spend all their money in just over a business week.
Nevermind, i see it. I apparently can’t read.
The whole world has not shunned Russia over the invasion.
My worry from debating Chinese nationalists is that they think war is necessary, that it will go their way, and that it will end.

I totally understand China wanting to be superpower. They seem to think that the US is coercing everybody, including allies, by force. They think that if US is defeated and they can replace them or at least coerce the local area. I wish they kept using soft power, that was working well for them.

They talk about Taiwan falling immediately and nobody helping them. China is stronger now but even alone Taiwan could put up a strong fight. Excluding big change in politics, the US will defend Taiwan. China could still win, but it would be uncertain. They also ignore the consequences like cutting off trade with most of the world.

Finally, I'm most worried about how the war ends. If China succeeds in invasion, then war will probably end. But do they realize that trade will never return to normal. Or that South Korea and Japan will build nuclear weapons if US commitment wavers. Also, that there are actions, like attacking US mainland, which will escalate the war and make it hard to end except in nuclear war.
The publicity from the cancelation seems like a really valuable aspect too
> A Tangent, but how long before we will see half the population having relationships with their AI assistants like in the sci-fi movie "Her".

I don't know about half, but some people are already having relationships: https://replika.ai/

> Maybe the downfall will not just be climate catastrophe but hyper isolated people living alone with their ultra realistic bot friends and family without any desire to experience the ups and downs of actual social experience.

I think the danger is that bots are not necessarily ultra realistic, at least on an emotional level - they can be 100% subservient and loyal to you.

Also - we already chide parents for letting their kids grow up stuck to a device. Imagine if children could actually have an imaginary friend? Would that AI share the same culture and values as your family?

I suppose there could be some upsides but this is very uncharted territory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...
The fact they can leave things as serious as this https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/344919 unfixed for almost a year and a half basically makes them not suitable for serious use in my opinion.

And since my opinion often matters they continue to lose business.
Ignoring the fact that 8-year-olds do not receive medical treatment for gender dysphoria, is the existence of Munchausen's by proxy also "a serious hole in the argument" for providing children with medical care in general?
It might be helpful to read this recent HN submission and its comments:

> Stop the Medicare “Advantage” Scam Before Medicare Is Dead https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35001728
Looks cool. Any chance you would provide a docker-compose.yml file for self hosting? Right now it's not really simple to do so.
Another great option is https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui

The 7B model will run without changes on a 3080. The 13B 4-bit model also runs on a 3080.

This Reddit post has the instructions I followed: https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/11o6o3f/how_to_...
I dunno… I kind of miss the days when every site wasn’t statically pixel perfect and text just sorta flowed around and did something sensible based on your browser window size, zoom level, etc. It allowed people to focus on the content over the presentation. But I can also understand the apprehension —- it feels like a recipe for arbitrary fragmentation.
> The problem is what kind of algorithm.

...and how its outputs are interpreted. Ultimately it's less about what kind of algorithm and more about how it's used, or in this case abused.

As another user mentioned, that 16.6 days should have been the mean or mode of a posterior distribution, from which you could obtain 75% and 95% credible intervals, or at least a conditional expectation accompanied by an (estimated) sampling error and traditional 75/85/95/whatever% confidence interval.

Crossing the 17-day line could have flagged this person's case for manual review. Even if the 95% credible interval was 15-18 days, anyone who understands how statistical models work would understand that manual review is a more sensible reaction than automatic cutoff, unless you simply don't care about the 5% chance of falsely denying people health coverage.

The fact that the model is statistical is not more problematic than a chain of if/else decisions. The problem is the fact that good statistical practice was disregarded in its usage. And as others have said, there was no intention of pursing good statistical practice here, and no reason to ascribe any benefit of doubt to any decision-makers involved in deploying such a model/algorithm. It's just a fig leaf for wanting to deny people health coverage.
> Let's be honest, very few of the VCs calling their founders telling them to pull their accounts had any clue about what "held-to-maturity" vs "available for sell" meant in the context of SVB's investment portfolio

Uh, the fact that they knew what it meant was why they freaked out. They knew the bank was not liquid.

Plus you don't need to be a finance professor to know that if a bank is having trouble doing normal bank stuff like processing transactions, something is wrong. And a lot of people were going to notice that in the next few days. If it wasn't Thiel it would have been someone else the next day realizing that the bank was screwed.

Don't blame people for starting a bank run. Blame the bank for making a run the rational thing to do for anyone who cares about their money.
As long as you're interacting with it at a decently high level it's honestly really easy code.

I watched a friend of mine who went from maybe some python courses to writing some really impressive ML stuff as her first project within a few months and with some help from some people who know their stuff a bit, which I found pretty impressive. I think as long as you're building things on top of what's available out there that you can find tons of utility in all the solutions that have been coming up in the past years without a ton of effort. Try dipping your toes into something simple like object recognition and you'll find it's pretty easy.

If you're talking about getting into the field on a level where you're actually developing these technologies themselves then I hope your math is around college-level. Reading deeper into the docs of the tools I'm using and they're showing calculus and linear algebra to me. I don't pretend to understand it very well.
FWIW I worked at Amazon in one of these teams and it's not something I found very interesting. You get thrown a random binary that some ML researcher compiled with instructions to host-it. No sense of ownership over the product, you're just an Ops frontend for a researcher so they can do the fun stuff building models and you're dealing with the pagers.
VC Chronicles: Tell Founder Stories about VCs
The SVB collapse caused VCs to show their true colors both pro and anti-founder. Linked is a site for founders to anonymously share their experiences of VCs. More features to come if founders use.

https://vc-chronicles.vercel.app/
I find your comments very hard to follow. You seem to be conflating depositors and investors, liquid assets from illiquid assets, taxpayer dollars from FDIC insurance funds, and so on.

I was trying to make a small point that if the FDIC unwinds the assets of a bank in a liquidity crisis and the resulting cash exceeds the $250,000 limit for the depositors, then the depositors should get also get that additional money (side note: I think employees are even higher on the creditor list than depositors). You seem to be saying that the depositors should not get anything because "caveat emptor" and that would be a bailout. Then who should get that money?

I don't know if the cash value of SVB assets will satisfy the $250,000 insured deposit value or not, I haven't followed the story closely enough. All I'm saying is that any excess that is available should be distributed to the depositors and doing so is not against "capitalist philosophy".

If you want to focus the conversation on the scenario where the cash value of the assets turns out to be insufficient to cover the insured deposit amount, then we could dig into where any additional money is coming from (FDIC insurance fund and ...) or what the moral hazard of making depositors, never mind investors whole might be.

I was just trying to sort out those scenarios a bit for clarity.
Be that what it may, declaring some bonds to be "held to maturity" is common practice in banking.

However, for _these_ bonds, and so much of it, to be declared "held to maturity" is a mistake. There's always wiggleroom in how accountants add up the numbers. They messed up on this part.
Stranded on a mountain, he tied his phone to a drone to text for help
It behaves like a kid you send to the store with a 100 dollars
Yes, they actually run at near main-line speeds in the UK (60-80mph). Riding one of those at that speed (particularly at night) must be an awesome experience.
Yes. As the other commenters said, and perhaps I should have been more explicit. When you look for python web application frameworks, there are the traditional answers like django and flask... but when you try to find something that's more "webui included" there are also a lot of newer solutions (as mentioned, like Gradio) that are specifically designed for ML. As anyone in the Python world knows, it's a super popular use case for the language these days.

I've just happened to run across a few of them recently as I was looking to see what else was new out there for easier ways to build quick and dirty web apps.
Bonds of any kind are not safe if you need the capital before they mature (which SVB did) in the face of interest rate increases. The longer duration the bond, the harder it hurts when interest rates increase.

There are financial instruments like interest rate swaps specifically for banks to hedge against this exact scenario.

Let’s not extrapolate some simplified personal finance advice to financial professionals who should have known better
How about “Declutter web pages, remove ads and trackers”. Then the thing being improved (web pages) is also mentioned at the start and not only at the end.
https://archive.is/VThw8
Well it's all moot, the fed stepped in and we're all safe.
I guess your definition of "feedback" is different than mine. Maybe that's a Tesla thing.
> The other good news is that it will probably net out to costing little to nothing in the long term

If it cost nothing with no risk, surely a larger banking institution would have been willing to step in to solve it.

> Seems very much relevant to what the FDIC was created for

The FDIC was created to be an insurance corporation, not to bail out banks at their discretion.
Code already is Lego.