skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is misleading to call email a plaintext protocol, because most email operations are encrypted in current practice (same as web browsing, despite HTTP 1 being a plaintext protocol).

SMTP (the delivery email protocol) began supporting encrypted transport in 2002, which means that for over a decade most email has been encrypted in transit [5] (as well as during retrieval, because of POPS/IMAPS and HTTPS-secured webmail). The method is TLS (same protocol used by HTTPS, all of our web browsing traffic). Competent mail servers and services, such as exim [1] and GMail [2], let you choose to abort delivery if the destination server does not support encryption (or, since you are concerned about state actors, if there's a STARTTLS-stripping server in the middle).

Furthermore, DANE [3] and TLSA [4] can be used (requiring DNSSEC to be set up for the domain) to bind a mail server record to a specific TLS certificate, further reducing meddling opportunities by state-level actors and allowing a "we do allow insecure mail delivery, but since this destination has DANE it is implied they have TLS and we will fail delivery if TLS cannot be established with this destination with the DANE-specified parameters".

[1] https://www.skytale.net/blog/archives/32-Outgoing-TLS-verifi...

[2] https://support.google.com/a/answer/2520500?hl=en

[3] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6698

[4] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7671

[5] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/winding-down-starttls-...
The Wells Fargo Active Cash card is 2% cash back on everything which is nice for lazy people like me who don't want to remember rotating categories.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_Deposit_Account...

https://www.intrafinetworkdeposits.com/

https://smartasset.com/financial-advisor/cdars

$50M max coverage through participating FIs
Just because they exceed the FDIC threshold (i.e. they're over 250K) doesn't mean there's a lot of risk - it just means there's more than zero risk and you have to do some diligence.

Those deposits are backed by the assets on the balance sheet at SVB. They went under because they ran out of liquidity, not because they're massively upside down or their assets are crap. Those assets are largely medium-duration treasuries (10Y IIRC). They will pay out face value as they mature (they are the definition of risk free), and the losses on their balance sheet being reported are marked to market. Assuming they have to sell them immediately - which they did have to in order to meet withdrawals.

Now that the bank is in the FDICs hands, those medium-term treasuries need not be sold, and other liquidity options exist to make un-insured depositors mostly or entirely whole. One such option is just selling all accounts to a big guy like JPM, the way WaMu was handled in 2008. Or the FDIC can swap the treasuries for cash and since they have no time pressure, just wait until they mature.
The problem in 2008 wasn't really MBS it was the way they were packaged.

You take a collection of n mortgages and rank them by how likely they are to default, and then you divide them up into say 5 different securities each containing n/5 mortgages. The top 20% will be considered the least risky and the bottom 20% the most risky, and yields will reflect that. There are also rules on what risk level different asset managers are allowed to take on, so random retirement accounts wouldn't take the bottom 20%. No problem yet.

But then some "spherical cow" style math was applied to these things. If mortgage defaults are independent events then mathematically you can smooth out the risk even from the high risk ones by just grouping a bigger number together. So they took say 5 different shit tier mortgage collections, lumped those mortgages together to create another pool of size n, and repeated the process. Now the top 20% of that pool was given a very low risk rating, yet it still paid a greater yield than the original pool's top 20%, so why wouldn't an investor want to get in on this high yield safely rated security?

And it didn't stop from there, the bottom say 20% of those pools were again pooled together to create more supposedly safer securities.

This could've held up for a long time in a vacuum, as long as mortgage default rates didn't change too much. But part of what incentivized this system in the first place (and in turn what this system incentivized) was to hand out mortgages like candy basically.

So it was a house of cards waiting to fall, and once some of these securities faltered it also caused a bank run on a wider set of MBS structures that probably could've held out if not for the panic. Plus big failures like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns had impacts on firms that went beyond MBS activity, so there were some crazy cascade effects too.

Anyway, there's nothing inherently wrong with MBS, it's just important to know what you're buying. This situation is weird because it's not that the security itself is unsafe, it's the context in which they are using it that is risky. Though I suppose it relates on the high level that they probably thought "this security is rated very safe and it gives relatively high yield" without an actual understanding of the risk involved in their use case.
I was surprised to find out that Docker now installs as a VM by default even on Linux, unless you choose to install the Docker Engine manually.

https://docs.docker.com/get-docker/
I think the point is that quebec has a longer history of invoking the notwithstanding clause, where in other provinces it is slightly more taboo. And even when invoked in other provinces, it often ends up not really being used (either turns out not to be needed, law not brought into force, or law declared unconstitutional despite notwithstanding clause).
OpenAI, the clean coal of machine learning.
Friday, they became FDIC employees. How long they remain FDIC employees is probably an open question, depending on role and the ultimate disposition of the bank
Can't help but revel in the fact that these crypto ponzi schemes are so dependent on the very banks all the cryptobros denounce, as evil holdovers from the past that will be obsoleted by their scam tokens (that no one outside their bubble even knows how to use).

It's so ridiculous I just have to kind of admire it. It's like a cathedral of human hypocrisy.
I think the issue is way worse than all this, and way harder to solve - we're basically on the edge of the roaring 20s. inflation is high because companies are increase profit margin, and companies are increasing margin because there isn't enough competition. Companies would never voluntarily lower profitability, and are rewarded for short term actions, incl. layoffs, which are gutting long term stability of these companies. People, businesses, governments are increasingly indebted compared to prior generations. Housing in productive cities is way below demands, while there's empty houses in Detroit and Cleveland. Even with remote work (which is being clawed back), this isn't stabilizing and there isn't enough housing (esp. affordably). It takes years before that much housing can be built, assuming we legalize it (YIMBY v NIMBY). We don't have a strong growing population without immigration so there is no future generation big enough in this economic Ponzi scheme.

The working class (with housing and all that) are screwed, while the rich get richer. Eventually there's no where left to turn for profitability though - and no more debt Wall Street can issue to keep the spending up. Then what?
I don't know. Centre is publishing the individual short term US treasuries numbers of every single short term US treasury they own. They've got $9.8 bn at various US banks, minus potentially the loss on $3.3bn they may have to take now but even a $1bn loss and that'd still make USDC backed 0.975:1 or something. Not taking into account the insane yeld they're making on the $30 bn of short term US treasuries they have (for their clients, but I think the yields are for them).

That compared to a bunch of shady people in the Bahamas, deeply tied to the SBF/FTX fraud...

But yup, today, tether looks unaffected.
It was adopted without quebec, but its not like it was done in secret. Quebec was present for the negotiations.
Both WFC and BAC aren't really customer friendly, however, they have a lot of branches and atms.
Any recommendations for an alternative bank (currently with Wells Fargo)? Online-only is fine/preferred. My main use is for bill pay and debit card.
Or collapse. Ofc it's possible that's "toe-may-toe/toe-mah-toe" though.
> [6] This injustice ends today.

No it doesn't. Unless such actions have consequences for the police and prosecutors beyond their case being thrown out, this injustice persists. To claim otherwise is like saying the injustice of a robbery has been rectified because the robber was not allowed to keep the stolen goods. That's not what "justice" means.

What the judge is really telling police and prosecutors is: You failed this time, but by all means keep trying.
capitol one , ally
Reuters: Li Qiang becomes China's premier, tasked with reviving economy
Li Qiang, the former Communist Party chief of Shanghai, took office on Saturday as China's premier, the country's No.2 post, putting the close ally of President Xi Jinping in charge of reviving an economy battered by three years of COVID-19 curbs.
Debuggers are chronically under-invested in. A lot of the pain points could be fixed just with more money and staff. It's a chicken-and-egg situation --- people don't use debuggers that much, for various reasons, so there isn't the investment, so debuggers don't improve, etc etc.
I can't imagine that going well.

"No we're taking your $50k life savings back so we can give it all to a client that had $5mil and deserves your $50k life savings more than you do"
There's more here on Westinghouse's robots – https://youtube.com/watch?v=YV_JmTS8EsY – including footage of Elektro, a robot that... smoked cigarettes!
I have a line of credit from them - will that terminate. The line of credit rate is dependent on me making deposits there and a min deposit.
Chase is big and boring and seems ok.

Although, worryingly: https://twitter.com/jimcramer/status/1634222320398086145
I am not implying she is to blame at all.
I do love a CRS report, but that was written before Dodd–Frank imported the bankruptcy code rules for preferential transfers into FDIC receivership.

> The Corporation as receiver for any covered financial company may avoid a transfer of an interest of the covered financial company in property [...] that enables the creditor to receive more than the creditor would receive if [...] the covered financial company had been liquidated under chapter 7 of the Bankruptcy Code... (12 U.S.C. 5390(a)(11)(b))

It also calls the 90-day clawback period out explicitly.
Circle Confirms $3.3B of USDC's Cash Reserves Stuck at Failed SVB
Circle used SVB, not Coinbase

(I'm no expert though, correct me if I'm wrong)

Edit: Parent comment is now correct
> millions of people regularly die on the other end of the desertification caused by that desert

This is speculation, not argument. Regardless, also in the article you’ll find how solar farms are cordoned off areas, razed clear of vegetation, and impassable by anyone, while using up water reserves used by inhabitants. Even by some consequentialist end-justify-the-means argument, the ends don’t look good for the people living off that land. Once again, you might not care about that, but that’s not my point
How is a stable coin a Ponzi scheme?
> I'm curious why this is not the case here.

SIVB trading was halted during premarket at 8:35 EST due to pending news, and never resumed trading.
That stinks, and I feel for them. Let's hope people will learn a lesson from this - never keep all your eggs in one basket.
That’s kind of amusing. By using a traditional bank to store their gold standard bullion, they had exposure to centralized banking risk, which was realized, and caused the crypto to get locked in.

It’s like some sort of wacky deadlock condition.
Unemployment is supposed to go up as interest rates go up. Not all downturns are as extreme as the great recession or the Great Depression
Not sure if you've read Chris Hadfield's book (Astronaut's Guide to Life On Earth) but he talks about a similar system. In his words you can be one of three team members:

A Negative One -- You're a drain on the team and other people have to cover for you. Not so good if you're in space with limited resources.

A Zero -- You're capable and have your own shit covered. Most people in space are a zero.

A Plus One -- You're contributing to the success of the mission and helping others succeed as well.

He talks about arriving on the international space station and just making sure that he was a zero. And taking over as mission commander and on the first couple days, just trying to be a zero because the plus one fancy heroics can come later.
This is a personal pet peeve of mine in poor design. colors are fine, nothing wrong with colors, but never depend solely on colors to differentiate state, always include some sort of bug or indicator that works without color, it may be a form that was photocopied, it may be(as in this case) a terminal with color turned off, hell it may even be someone who is color blind.

For the advanced class, interactive choice widgets need to have unambiguous state, cell phone slider buttons are notoriously bad at this.
This seems like a great opportunity for investors to signal to founders what type of partners they are in times of need.

Zach Coelius nailed it:

> I am telling all my companies that even in the worst case scenario and there is no buyer (highly unlikely), they will still get the vast majority of their money back and this just becomes a short term issue.

> I, for one, certainly plan to fund my companies through this.

https://twitter.com/zachcoelius/status/1634272357132165121
You only get paid to take on risk. If SVB hedged away the interest-rate risk that they take on by buying long-term bonds, they would no longer be taking on as much risk and thus no longer potentially earning as much profit.
“Clean Code, Horrible Performance” Discussion
Agreed, and he really lost a _lot_ of respect from these tweets today
FRB expanded their business by catering to the HENRY population (high earner, not rich yet). So they've got a lot more customers now with medium-large deposits. This should actually make them less vulnerable to bank runs. Some techie with $40k in their account is well protected by FDIC.
"It may go down" vs. "Save X hours of dev"

Depends what you're building, but likely a good trade if it's an MVP.

At $30/mo you're already ahead if it saves you 1 hour of dev time.

Most of the time, I don't want control over my infrastructure (boring, low value); I'd rather focus on building features (fun, high value).
based pretty much on the fact that since they are completely free to do whatever they want, they are actually free of risks like this

i mean, circle at least shows their reserves, usdt has never done so...

it resumes to: since you wont ever see how bad their finances are, you just assume they are good.

the perfect crime
On the one hand: 100%. Agreed. Engineers experience enormous cognitive dissonance because companies & managers don't understand the very real problems they face. This article both say it, but under the title of being a mistake of engineers:

> Over the years, I’ve seen several engineers on other teams become less productive and then leave the company because they weren’t happy. Each time, I didn’t pay attention and stayed focused on my projects.

Yeah, most companies have a very very difficult time understanding the deep intricate knowledge-worker problems their expert knowledge-workers are deeply entailed into & care omg about. Only like 20% of these companies/managers even bother to figure out what the real intricacies are. It's fucked up. Yeah the engineers are distressed. But this is like >80% a problem of orgs not actually knowing wtf the situations really are. I've seen plenty of scrum teams have retro after retro where we identify real challenges, where we do good retroes, but as an engineer, our power to make anyone care at all or give a shit is limited. We can try to talk to someone we want to stay, but 9 times of out of 10, we have nothing to offer, no way to help. Trying to figure out how to make the org responsive or understanding is the challenge.

There is some good advice too, for engineers: Get to know your coworkers. Yeah. Do it. Don't just leave it to the managers & org. Culture never is top down, it's always a net-product. Links have to be forged at all levels. I think this is a huge challenge especially in the new hybrid/remote world.
Pay me enough and as long as I won’t be held criminally liable, I will take charge of fixing a hybrid ColdFusion/Java Server Pagers website running IIS on Windows NT with an Oracle back end.

I’ll probably fail spectacularly. But I will still have money in the bank.

Just not that bank.
He's saying entrepreneurs are special-- they are the job creators, they are the Atlases of Ayn Rand, etc-- and thus deserve to be bailed out by grandma paying more in taxes
> Treasuries can and do lose value. They are not like cash which does not lose face value.

> Long term treasuries have declined 40% in value since they peaked in 2020.

This is inaccurate. What you linked to (TLT) aren't bonds, these are bond funds. The way a bond ETF works is that they have a stack of bonds that track the benchmark interest rate. They periodically sell off their old bonds and buy new ones, they don't just sit on them and wait for them to mature. That means TLT's NAV goes down when interest rates go up because they're selling lower interest rate bonds, and buying higher interest rate bonds.

Treasuries cannot lose value just like cash. They are as good as cash in almost every context. You can always sit on them until they mature and you'll get the full amount plus interest. You cannot lose money this way.

Where you can lose money though is if you have to liquidate them sooner. Why would someone buy a 3% 30y treasury for $X from you when they can get a 4% 30y treasury from the source for the same price? You have to sweeten the deal by paying out the difference in rates. This is where you can lose money.

SVBs issue was a mismatch in durations. They had too many demands for money out now, and too little available now. They have plenty of money coming in the future, but that's too late.
If a bank loans you money and you use it to build a house, or start a restaurant, then in due course there will be:

- new money, created by the loan; and
- a new, valuable asset — the house or restaurant — worth very roughly that amount of money.

Case by case these won’t always balance, but we trust private banks and borrowers to get it broadly right in aggregate. It all works out except for when it doesn’t.

But somebody had better be creating money in a growing economy. Otherwise the stock of desirable stuff will grow while the stock of money remains constant. And once that happens, people start hoarding money rather than doing the hard work of investing in new productive assets. But creating new productive assets is where the growth comes from, not to mention a big chunk of the jobs.

I doubt bank-created money is the only way to avoid deflation and depression. But it’s about the least centrally-controlled alternative I can think of.
Most of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet is Treasury securities. If the Treasury stops issuing those securities, then the Federal Reserve don't have anything to buy.

Saying that the Fed can arbitrarily create and destroy money misses the point, that they then have to buy SOMETHING with those money, and there are strict rules about what they can buy, and it just happens that the Treasury controls the supply of the primary asset class that the Fed is allowed to buy. Once you clear out all the dance and ceremony, you arrive at the conclusion that the Treasury issues new money by issuing new securities.
Coinbase pays 4% on holding USDC on their site... so at least some portion of that yield is going to their customers.
Yikes—you broke the site guidelines really, really, really badly, dozens of times in this thread. That's definitely not ok and I've banned the account.

I'm sure you know a lot and I normally wouldn't ban an account without warning at least once first, but the way you behaved in this thread was just way too extreme. I know this sort of no-holds-barred flamewar is standard in some systems-oriented communities and I don't have any judgment about that, but HN is much larger and we can't afford to have accounts posting like this—it would lead straight to the self-incineration of this site (by masses of people who likely know a lot less than you do).

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I agree with this. I don't know why people somehow blame the lack of new nuclear energy in the US on environmental groups.

Environmentalism in the US the past 50 years certainly hasn't been able to stop energy interests from exploiting coal, oil and then natural gas after phasing out coal. Were nuclear power to be comparable in price I would have no doubt it would have been built.

Though environmentalists have pushed a long time for renewables (and certainly were a force pushing for research to be funded) it wasn't until solar and wind prices started the s-curve of price improvements til we saw big installations.
If copyleft means restricting freedoms on what you can do with software and preserving those rights on derivative works (GPL) - then 100% no, those people need copyright laws to enforce that.

With no copyright law I could take any GPL software, modify it, sell it as my own and nobody could force me to give up the code.

If copyleft means permissive (MIT) - then it's not a hostile environment. You are free to create and share permissive works with no hostility from anyone else.
He really lost a lot of respect from these tweets
That's the thing about frauds. They look really good until all of a sudden, they don't.
ORiON, MYTH, CLASS, CORE, PARADiGM, Motiv8, TRPS, RiSC, PGC, and more.

Wrote about my experience here: https://medium.com/@merket/everything-i-know-about-founding-...
>A United States magistrate judge in California, Virginia K. DeMarchi, ordered Daniels to pay YouTube $38,576 for asserting a First Amendment claim that “clearly lacked merit and was frivolous from the outset.”

>“None of his arguments are persuasive, as he articulated no plausible legal theory—novel or otherwise—for holding private entities liable as government actors in the circumstances presented,” DeMarchi wrote in the order granting attorney fees to Alphabet

I'm curious to see a breakdown of how that $38,576 was necessary to spend to defend against a clearly frivolous suit.
https://archive.ph/pwQXA
How is a stablecoin stable? They're stable until you get rugpulled.
Kudos for your efforts to preserve and upload your picks to archive.org.

It's such a bummer that public libraries won't have these physical objects on shelves in a discoverable form and place, where people can just stumble upon and page through them.

I've picked through a couple public library "removed from circulation sales" and always find at least one gem there's no obvious good cause for removal. It's hard to not become a hoarder in such situations.

Already brought two such finds home: Bombs Over Bikini [0] and Alaska Crude [1]. They're tiny, and dense with historically relevant photographs. It seems strange to remove them, I suspect it's partly because their contents are dark/depressing/embarrassing to the nation in hindsight. But that's arguably their value IMHO.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18354016-bombs-over-biki...

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25135337-alaska-crude