skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
NGINX was great for us for a long time. But there comes a time where your needs and their future plans diverge. We couldn’t keep maintaining a fork and we had features that would have meant a huge effort to shoehorn into the NGINX architecture.

And NGINX is written in C and we really wanted to use less memory-unsafe languages after Cloudbleed.
The Planck length is often confused to mean the smallest discrete unit of space, but it's more like the size of the smallest 'window' through which information can travel without becoming a black hole. The endpoints of that 'window' can be at arbitrary coordinates, so in theory you can make arbitrarily precise measurements.
do you read every release note to see what security improvements were added to phoenix template? yeah, nobody does.
How does preferential voting favor bigger parties? It does the opposite.

Use of the word gerrymander in this way ("having boundaries at all is gerrymander") is meaningless.
You get back your money plus a garbage interest rate relative to what you could've gotten if your money were available now though. That is why it is cheaper, it's not like it's an irrational market dip due to a panic, where the time-value will eventually recover. Unless interest rates go back down very soon the time-value on this thing is definitely a loss.

And yeah as a bank it's an extremely stupid move to put 40% of your money into an entirely unhedged bet that interest rates will not go up for 10 straight years. Maybe the Fed didn't handle things as well as they could, and similarly maybe VCs exacerbated the problem unnecessarily, but I don't see how the lion's share of the blame doesn't go to SVB here.
I think the chief risk officer at this bank left last year, they may have been the person who got the bank into these positions. it will be interesting to see if there is news coverage about that person's role in the crisis.
almost as if you wanted ecto packaged system wide, like, say a distro maintained package? ;)
So USDC is currently trading at $0.93. Which, if you believe in Coinbase, is free money. And if you don't, then its very bad news for the company and possibly worse news for the banks that are keeping the USDC reserves, because they are about to have a massive bank run on monday.

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/usd-coin/
The discussion centers largely around the trade-off between program efficiency and developer productivity but one thing I thought that's missing that's also incredibly important is simply safety.

Today a lot of applications are concurrent, networked, distributed and built in ways where high level or performance impacting features make sense to make sure your program remains in a valid state.

Casey seems to take so much of his advice from his experience on game engines, which are an incredibly forgiving domain in many ways. You can have some bugs, you can drop some things over the network, it doesn't matter much. But you can't really do that in many other applications. If you had a big codebase for an application that is safety critical, going at it with his style of low-level programming you might make some very costly mistakes really quickly.
Such is life. Everyone has their own lives to deal with that they can't be bothered with old stories.

That's why I'm so glad my grandfather wrote a book about his life when he was in his late 60s. You'd think it would be boring, but his life as an immigrant to Canada from Finland was fascinating, and he only included the interesting bits. The book is only about 150 pages of easy reading, and even people who barely knew him have enjoyed it. So I'm quite confident that he at least will be remembered by his descendants.

A couple of years ago I even digitized it into a website, which makes it so easy to share among the family.
Something like 60% of their assets were these bonds in December. They very well may have seen the other 40% withdrawn already by startups that can't raise anymore leaving them with this pile of 10 year 1.5% bonds.
> Australia was only recently allowed to include batteries on solar.

Source? Tesla Powerwall was introduced into the Australian market in 2015. From what I understand, other residential systems existed before that, but they were uncommon. In 2019, they significantly tightened the safety standards, but the impact on people running approved off-the-shelf systems (such as Tesla's) is modest (tighter rules on installation locations may cause issues for some people, especially smaller properties–although those rules only apply to new installs, existing installs are grandfathered), most of the added burden is on those rare people who have bespoke systems.
A ponzi scheme is just one step along the path to true decentralization.
Percentage wise I would bet crypto is way riskier.

In gross terms, crypto is tiny compared to the dollar/euro banking system, so it's likely to be a much smaller number.

Interestingly, for those who use crypto as-designed, the percentage lost to bank runs is almost nil since you 'hold your own coins'. It's people who leave their money on crypto exchanges that lose their coins.
If you're a founder and you're caught up in this from a payroll perspective, I highly recommend you scrub to 12 minutes, you my have some real personal/criminal liabilities if you don't handle the situation correctly.
It's unfortunate that economics is pushing many people to work 12 hours a day, leaving them with little time for anything else. These long work hours can take a toll on both physical and mental health, and many people are struggling to make ends meet despite their efforts.

In countries like India, unemployment is a significant challenge, and for those who do have jobs, the wages are often insufficient to afford basic necessities like housing, education, and healthcare. This situation can be especially difficult for families with children who are trying to provide a good life for them.

This comment lacks either empathy or ignorance.
The anecdote would have had as much impact, for me, without the hints as to the which parties were involved.

If you are writing an anecdote about someone you know named Sandra Smith who worked on borg at Google then you should call them Charlie and say they worked on infra at a FAANG. Anonymising them by saying they worked on a certain Star Trek themed container tool at a didn’t-be-evil search engine wink wink isn’t meeting the bar for anonymity. Anyone doing that is kind of thumbing their nose at anonymity — I know I’m supposed to make this anonymous but here are some hints so we all know who I’m talking about.

The people closest to the subject of the post — the ones where the impact of having their story shared with thousands of others is going to hurt the most — will see straight through it. You might as well call them Xandra Xmith who worked on xorg at Xoogle.

Outing people in a way that means their closest associates know who it is, even if strangers don’t, feels tasteless. For me, that’s what makes this blog post feel like gossip. Again, I don’t know the details — everyone involved could be just fine with this story being public.

(Thank you so much for asking your question in the spirit of HN. It adds value to something I perhaps should not have said in the first place.)
this bank stuck out as troubled far before this event
I didn't realize you can do that with uBlock Origin. What a pleasant surprise!
My eyesight rapidly deteriorated once I reached the second paragraph.
It is also kind of an abstraction over cash and treasury bonds. A more liquid fractionalised cash/bond unit.

Though that seems to have been the problem here.

The original idea with a 100% collaterilised peg was that the entire reserve would be cash. Somewhere along the way treasury bonds were considered cash equivalent. Which on the face of it seems sort of reasonable but clearly they do have a different risk and liquidity profile. This allows the centre consortium to earn a yield.

So I'm not sure I think a USDC is a dollar, but also I'm not sure it's particularly different to what banks do with deposits to earn a yield.

One difference is you can reinvest the same USDC to earn a yield while the underlying backing USD also earns centre a yield.
> and given that we are a country of common law,

technically, Quebec has civil law [1] for a portion of their legal system. If we're being pedantic :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_law
"Fiscal Theory of Money" is a nice story. Economists often tell worse stories about money (Graeber).

Fiscal Theory of Price Level seems to be inspired by Fiscal Theory of Money.

"The literature on the fiscal theory of the price level (FTPL) integrates discussion
of monetary and fiscal policy, recognizing that fiscal policy can be a determinant,
or even the sole determinant, of the price level"

Christopher A Sims: Paper Money

https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_A._Sims
That doesn't make them stable. The 2008 financial crisis was literally caused by big US banks. They then had to be bailed out.

This is not a symptom of a stable banking system. It's a symptom of the banks having a disturbing amount of power over the government, which is not a good thing. They were able to conduct what is essentially fraud at a massive scale with impunity because they knew the gov would bail them out when shit hit the fan.

I really don't understand what's so "stable" about this.
If anyone doubts that this is just a theory, I can confirm it. I live in third-world countries and use USDC exactly for this.
There's something deeply ironic about a flight to safety in the form of Tether, which has famously been described as being "quilted out of red flags".

But if you can't redeem it and it's not backed by anything remotely approaching normal assets, I guess you can't have a bank run on it either... until the music stops and the insiders propping it up run out of chairs.
I couldn't find anywhere in the article where it gave an amount of the short position. Did this guy bet the farm on it? If so, he deserves praise (and the returns) for his insight. If, on the other hand, this was just one of dozens (or hundreds) of small short positions his fund invested in, then not so much.

Anyone can bet small amounts all over the roulette table and then only tell their friends about the ones that won while ignoring all the ones that lost.
The furniture in my house is awesome! It’s from a now-nonexistent Restoration Hardware outlet store. We’d get everything at 60-75% off by waiting until they added to the normal discount. It would be lightly marred if at all. Liberating! Never minded if the kids got to it because hey, it’s already used.

Prefer to buy slightly damaged or store demo musical instruments for the same reason.
Bank accounts were paying .1% interest at this time. SVB could've bought 1 year bonds and made .5-1% easily. That's a billion dollars...
They didn't think they were gonna sell the assets before maturity. In that case, buying those makes sense.
The sad thing is, there are no other alternatives. I want to move to another platform, but they are littered with tracking and nonsensical ads. Additionally, the hardware is generally abysmal.

The good thing is that Microsoft made Windows Phone, and it was somewhat flawless. Unfortunately, they later killed it :(.
It is debatable if Clean Code actually improves the programmer efficiency and programs readability. I find people applying it religiously often create over-complex designs like FizzBuzz Enterprise.

Even Uncle Bob's examples are not the state of the art in readability:
https://qntm.org/clean

The main problem seems to be that Clean Code is mostly a premature optimisation in code flexibility. It makes code more complex and objectively worse in hope it would be easier to extend later. Unfortunately we often dont know how the code will change, and in practice the code has to be significantly changed/rewritten anyway when a business requirement change appears.

IMHO optimizing for simplicity and readability has served me the best. Instead of avoiding the changes in code, it is better to write code so obvious that anyone can safely and easily change it when really needed.

And finally, performance of the program vs performance of the developer is a false dichotomy. So many times I've seen a more readable, simpler code turned out to be more efficient as well. You often can have both.
I remember listening to an episode of Odd Lots a couple of months back discussing how someone was using the the Fed Discount Window.

https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cub21ueWNvbnR...

I'm not finance savvy enough to determine if this fits, but I've been wondering if some kind of event might follow
> How does preferential voting favor bigger parties? It does the opposite.

It depends on what you are comparing it to. Preferential voting (aka ranked choice or alternative voting) is less favourable to bigger parties than first past-the-post is. But it is more favourable to bigger parties than other systems such as single transferrable vote (STV) or mixed member. The biggest reason why Australia hasn't moved to STV or mixed member for the House of Representatives, is that doing so would benefit smaller parties at the cost of the bigger ones.

> Use of the word gerrymander in this way ("having boundaries at all is gerrymander") is meaningless.

An STV or mixed member system would still have boundaries, but would be less advantageous to the bigger parties. Why isn't choosing a system which is intentionally more advantageous to the bigger parties a "gerrymander"?
There are two coding sessions streamed so far, very interesting to watch

George Hotz | Programming | can we fit a LLaMA inside a tinygrad? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kRDs9BW2NU

George Hotz | Programming | ChatLLaMA: get in losers we're building a chatbot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nctqc8FBJ2U
Nitpick: you are correct about the party name but in Australia in general they use the English spelling.
Can’t they just not honor the run, so that they can honor it in the long term, rather than selling at a loss and not being able to honor 20% of them?
How about we also address the issue of hospital working conditions? Nurses shouldn't be forced to work more than an 8-hour shift. While there may be some issues with knowledge transfer during shift changes, there are solutions available that may increase costs but are necessary to prioritize the well-being of healthcare workers.

In the case of Apple, it appears they are being driven by greed, and the transfer of knowledge to work in their factories is generally unnecessary. I require people to not support greedy corporation.
At some point in my programmer career I figured out that optimizing for human comprehension, a.k.a. "clean code", is a valid goal.

I watched Casey's video in full and agree with all the points he made. But as others pointed out, he focus on squeezing every bit of performance in the context of real-time video game logic, and this isn't representative of every programming problem.

As an addendum to Casey's video, another popular technique for squeezing more performance is to invert the normal array-of-structs to a struct of arrays, as it tremendously improves SIMD/vectorization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AoS_and_SoA

For a lot of things that I work on, simply having correct, complete, working code is most of the battle. Execution performance takes a backseat to development time, data acquisition time, human analysis of the problem space and generated output, etc. So by default, I follow Knuth's advice that premature optimization is the root of all evil. I write clean code but go into Casey mode when the numbers justify it.
BTC crashed, stable coins crashing . Financialization means new, unforeseen risks are constantly showing themselves due to the intricacy of the interconnected system. Failure of stable coins will probably lead to sub 10k $btc for sure. Already BTC crashing now on this news after an attempt to rally. FTX was just $20 billion, stable coins combined are $150 billion....
I would argue that `since 2020` is still too frequent for most people
This was always special to me, especially as a metalhead- they managed to capture the emotion of this song / part of the song so well, tech and style, fantastically combined.

Always love how they timed the surprising animation of the mask at the end (maybe face, don’t remember right now) too a smile in time with the emotional lift at the end of the song…

Gotta watch it later in full blast! :D thanks for reminding me!
It's true. It's easier to make mathematical connections with algebra, combinatorics, etc. when you're reading short formulas and not being not knee-deep in hand-written SSE asm.
Recent and related:

“Clean” code, horrible performance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34966137 - Feb 2023 (906 comments)
Casey isn’t arguing with hypotheticals. Right in the discussion they explore a perf bug in the GitHub UI. So don’t strawman by drawing borders around sensitive domains. Because clean code ideas are still producing buggy code.

(I am making an assumption that GitHub UI uses clean code ideas, but I feel comfortable doing that.)
I had to kiss asses and say hi to people that I really didn't want to see or know in person.

If our environment is filled with people like that - maybe we should just move on, you know? Even if WFH masks this pain somewhat by requiring us to not plant our lips physically on on their asses on a daily basis, but merely astrally, via Slack and what not.

Being as the underlying rot is still there on some level, and ultimately, just as toxic.

(I know, I know, I know - eventually it pretty always ends up being "like that". No matter how rosy everything smells at the onset).
> preferring inheritance hierarchies to if/switch statements,

And then he goes on touting readability right after that. Bold.
There's something to be said for everyone knowing the risks of doing business with you, and behaving consistently (consistently badly) so that those risks don't change. That's the regime of Tether. Nobody will even be mad when the rug gets pulled.

The federal reserve could stand to learn a thing or two, honestly.
Who want to bet that this will be "Money washing In africa" headline in just few years ? \s
Too bad she wasn't a veteran.

(Context: Canadian VA was caught pushing MAID on its veterans.)
I'm with @ skissane on asking for a source here.

FWiW myself and friends put a solar power system with recon'd Telstra batteries together for an off the grid house out the back of Bridgetown (W.Australia) in the mid 1980s.

Given it was private land and farming jack of all trades engineering maybe it was "illegal" - but I recall no mention of that at the time in any of the magazines we read and ears we pulled.
The big one is that many countries do offer foreign currency accounts, but don’t properly hold reserves for them, so the security is there until it isn’t.
I have always assumed that the situation is that someone (NGO a or government) pays for the installation but nobody pays for or trains on maintenance.
Clean Code led to the development of the VIPER framework, which is a crime it must answer for.
I didn't interpret their nitpick as saying anything about the spelling of the word in general – also "British spelling" is the usual term, I've never heard anyone call it "English spelling" before. In Australia, we use British spelling for most things, including the word "labour" in most contexts, but the party name is intentionally spelled the American way, due to US influence in its early history. The initial capital is a sign they were talking about the party name as opposed to the common noun
this guy is not comprehensible. i do know who he is, but wow... how times have caught up to, maybe both of us i guess.
Won’t we see “24hrs platforms to prepare trading” where transactions would get ranked and bet upon, until the auction-of-the-day, so, the platforms would act as the stock exchange and the actual auction be relegated to clerk approval of existing transactions?
Why the downvotes? Is this not why fractional reserve banking exists? Please correct me if I'm wrong. Without it, the Fed would have very control over inflation/deflation.

By the way, I'm not arguing against the Fed. I'm against fractional banking, or at least feel they should require banks to offset their liabilities more than they do today.

We're literally discussing an example of why the current system isn't good.
Bumblebees learn new 'trends' in their behavior by watching and learning
It specifically says at the end they refuse to give the amount.

Given the research involved, and a well known firm, I'm sure it wasn't pocket change.
I think you are selective here. There are lots of coins that have lost value permanently (FTT, luna etc), I also remember reading that there are lots of coins whose network has simply shut down due to lack of interest (no source here, though)
Tech companies usually die quietly. Paul Graham wrote an essay around this: http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html

Startups tend to be 3 or so people, and often die when one does another thing (e.g. consulting) and another does something else (starts a second startup or does a degree).

Larger companies tend to just scale down. Not exactly layoffs, but salaries don't go up. The core members start quitting, and then the other staff see it as a hint that things are bad and quit too. They stop hiring new people. Core seniors are replaced with juniors or external consultants. These later gets replaced with the CTO. CTO eventually decides to try something new and exciting. Eventually there's nobody left.

There are some that just run out of money and declare bankruptcy to avoid paying salaries, but this is rare. Most are gently closed down. Airbnb pivoted to cereals. One place I worked in simply didn't renew contracts for anyone and only paid the CEO who didn't close it or take salary. When my startup ran low on money, we just sold it to someone who could reuse the tech and user base. Some startups IPO, which was a bold move once, but now part of the playbook.
Yeah but it's important to understand why it's down 20%. Some commenters are acting like this was 100% irrational panic and SVB didn't do anything wrong, it's just too bad they couldn't hold out for awhile.

What they actually did was put 40% of their deposits into a long term bond that would start paying a shit rate if interest rates went up. The invested money is borrowed from depositors so the only thing they really "own" is the interest. In order to keep depositors in a high interest environment it will require paying out some amount of interest too. But they have locked themselves in to gains at a now small interest rate.

This was a risky bet for the bank from the start and there's absolutely no way they would make the trade they did if they knew interest rates would go up, even if they also had a guarantee that there would not be a bank run. This isn't a simple liquidity crisis or even somebody trying to stay solvent until their GameStop puts pay off.
1% of 100 billion dollars is a billion dollars. They would rather have 1.5 billion than .5 billion.
The bonds themselves were liquid. The bank didn't want to liquidate them, but that doesn't mean that they weren't liquid.

This was a liquidity crisis (bank run) which sparked a solvency issue, not a solvency issue.

No. SVB had liabilities significantly in excess of the value of their assets. They were, by definition, balance sheet insolvent.

The "hold to maturity" accounting practice made it legal for them to pretend that the value of their long term bonds hadn't changed, but that's just an accounting figleaf; the actual value of those bonds had factually dropped.
From: https://www.computerenhance.com/p/clean-code-horrible-perfor...

> The speed differences range from 20-25x — and of course, none of the AVX-optimized code uses anything remotely like “clean” code principles.

If clean code limits your default performance to 20 times worse, those high level optimizations might not even be worth it.