skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Libertarians are, and always have been, ridiculous. It's nothing more than Reagan-era deregulation. And just like trickle-down economics there is a mountain of evidence to show how ridiculous it is that gets ignored.

Watch this space. The narrative ofn this will shift to how the FDIC's actions were unnecessary once the capital-owning class realizes they got hosed here. The depositors got paid, banks (through the FDIC insurance fund) paid for any shortfall and SVB shareholders were left holding the bag.

We could tackle inflation with taxation. We certainly can't have that. So we're left with interest rates. Well, VCs like--even depend on--zero interest rates. So they don't like that either. But it's better than getting taxed. So Sacks, Calacanis, Elon and the like will chirp about this on the timeline and frame it as a government failure.

These libertarians are really just conservatives. That too is self-serving ultimately. Don't lose sight of that.
H1-B grace period to be extended from 60 to 180 days
I think this essay best summarizes the benefits of starting a blog:

[1] https://www.benkuhn.net/writing/

Personally, I’ve found 2 major benefits for publishing my essays:

1. Any time I encounter a problem, I write it down as an “essay idea”. Most of the time, I solve my problem without anything interesting to write about, but sometimes I have an “aha!” moment to analyze. People trick themselves into thinking they understand something, until they start writing. Deep writing makes it extremely clear when you have no idea what you’re talking about. And so the writing process helps me solve problems, and hopefully helps other benefits from my findings.

2. Conversations become more interesting IRL. When I go to parties, people who read my blog love hunting me down for follow-questions and ideas. And I sometimes get summoned into circles with “Oh, Taylor recently wrote an essay on this! Where is he? Call him over here!”

[2] https://taylor.town
Well, then you expose yourself to gold price risk. Until the fed loosens their position on narrow banks or directly provides deposit accounts to consumers, this won't happen.

However, thanks to the yield curve being inverted, you can approximate this and make decent interest by rolling 4-week T Bills and putting all of your purchases on a credit card (effectively giving you net 30 payment terms).
I automated applying for apartments in my city's public housing program as they regularly get hundreds of applications within a few minutes and automatically take down the ads again, often before their email notifications even arrive. That way I at least got invited to some viewings without having to check it every few minutes throughout the day, as many people I know have been doing for months. I don't see how that can be considered ethically bad. This is in Berlin.
_Everybody_ in banking is supposed to be aware that if the interest rate goes up the spot or mark-to-market value of a bond goes down. This is not something complicated like Black-Scholes.

Everybody in banking is able to see the inflation prints and aware that increasing inflation may cause the central bank to raise rates. A bunch of people failed to spot this and have since been sacked and/or lost their equity in SVB.
Everybody agree that there are several of overpaid BS jobs out there.

Two things can be true.
There's no general agreement among libertarians on what's the best money.

I'm against a gold standard because it's dumb. Gold standard worked in a time of industrial revolution, which cancels out the negative side of gold standard. Costs and prices went order of magnitude down and then there was more gold for everyone.

Literally the steam engine and electricity and light bulb and radio were brought at the time of gold standard.
Do you remember SCO?
Lovely old science fiction story of a young man, taken from the classroom on his one day of 'school' at 18 when everybody gets 'taped' with their job knowledge. They say he's incompatible with the machines, and will have to become educated the old way!

He spends a life reading textbooks, studying with others like him and watching his cohort succeed and fail with their taped knowledge.

Ultimately it occurs to him, who wrote those textbooks? It was people like him. The people creating the training data.
Hardware is the only real monopoly as NVIDIA has held the better ecosystem for builders with majority hardware sales, not unbeatable as we see low sales in industry and automotive.

AMD is doing more having added to AI hardware (WMMA) into the 7900's line of cards and the MI300 chips could be a best of both worlds AI solution bring CPU/GPU/Memory together.

Lastly dedicated AI hardware from Cerberus and Tenstorrent would break up the market further and put pressure on NVIDIA.
Their problem wasn't customers defaulting on loans, wasn't criminal money laundering, wasn't crypto meltdowns.

Their depositors were simply more flighty than average.
Feeling OLD. When I was a kid (1960s) giant squid were just folklore. The very idea of giant squid retained that feeling of mystery until, well, recently.
David Sacks wants to run for President. He watched Trump's election closely. He wants to be the smart guy that uses the idiot's playbook. He is working hard to get placed on as much media as possible as a commentator. He is connected to many of the richest and most powerful people in the country.

He is, at the end of the day, a bored billionaire with some very pedestrian ideas. He does go to great effort to shout them louder. He does seem to have some serious ego issues, but I guess what politician doesn't?

I think the hilarity of Calacanis literally tweeting his own similar ideas is that it was a transparent attempt to be louder. ie: he just didn't feel heard about his ideas, so they needed amplification.
"Please write 300 pages about ancient Sumerian culture and religion, and pepper it into a dystopian sci-fi story"
-1000.

Of course your banker calls - in fact, what OP should've done is email the banker beforehand, "headsup: big day! We just closed our series A financing with <fund>. I've got $x coming in by wire." and they respond "congrats, I'll be on the lookout for it." You don't want to surprise your TradFi bank or banker, and you do want to "build a relationship" with them.

The WHOLE POINT and the key feature of TradFi banking is the personal relationship. No, you don't need to invite your banker to your kid's graduation. But yes, spend 15 minutes playing get-to-know-you in an RL branch, talk a little about the business (source of funds, what you do, types of customers, etc), bring them treats you know they like (important: must be tiny$) and then when Stuff Happens or You Need Something, the banker is suddenly your ally in dealing with the banking system. Remember, when you deposit $1M+ you're now part of "the club" and the bank and banking system is there to help you.

I've had a private bankers at multiple institutions for decades and have numerous stories where they untangled messes, worked around the pandemic, helped me "skip the line" and more. Friends tell me about wasting hours on banking issues but I've rarely experienced that, thanks to my private bankers. When things do get messed up, my banker explains what's going on, e.g. "yeah it's stupid and affecting other customers too - bank policy is ridiculous this year, but I'm sure they'll fix it because everybody's complaining and threatening to leave." And sure enough, a few months later it's fixed. Like Google, you report serious bugs and then wait, and if the fix is feasible and affecting other people, they eventually get fixed.

There are downsides: bankers are human and don't work 24x7x365 so you need to also make friends with the branch manager or an assistant, and of course TradFi isn't crypto and you can't transact at certain times/days, e.g. wire cutoff deadlines. Also, bankers retire, get promoted, move branches, etc so you need to plan to rebuild the relationship every 5-10 years. Finally, bankers vary in quality and "fit" - if you don't get someone you like, ask around. I once had a kickass banker but she switched branches and her replacement was too junior to help me, so I begged a little and got my account reassigned to her & her branch and life is good again.

tl;dr: TradFi is your friend if you play by its rules and work the system.

DM me for intro to a kickass Chase banker - direct referral in NYC, otherwise she'll refer you (so far, her referrals have been solid, but YMMV by location)
SVB failed because of an interest rate bet gone bad. If they invested in short duration treasuries instead of long duration, none of this would have happened. The main difference is their bonuses would have been lower the past few years.
My vague recollection is that, after DabbleDB, they were working on a new product - some sort of analytics dashboard (?) - they did an early demo of it, and I gather someone at Twitter saw this and thought "oh wow, we need those guys working for us".

I suspect DabbleDB as a product, and its existing user base, was irrelevant in this decision.
> They failed specifically because of business they were servicing.

This is so disingenuous. They failed because they made risky investments, interest rate hikes put their investments in jeopardy, and when they tried to raise extra capital (responsible thing to do), people were alerted of the problem and left the bank (responsible thing to do).
We don't need NFTs for that, though. We could have an old fashioned Web 2.0 site for a digital skin marketplace. We could have SDKs for game devs that allow them to integrate with it.

The NFT spec doesn't even guarantee the basics of what it needs to support.
> dollars in gold equivalents and redeem them for dollars at will

These are not the same thing and I would expect people on a tech website to know that it's not 1971 any more.
I got promoted twice in two years at Facebook, back in the day. Definitely possible. Mind you, my manager lated admitted that I was under leveled but the comp worked for me at the time.
It's not practical. The NPT is worthless, because multiple countries just ignored it and built their nukes anyway.

North Korea is dirt poor and they managed to get nukes. Most countries could do the same.
What metaverse? Meta says its single largest investment is now in 'advancing AI'
I'm surprised no one is publishing tiered perks/pricing on a website for founders to browse. That's how they like to interact.
I like it too for now. Htmx + Caddy (goodbye nginx), Bulma (css) and Fastapi (python backend). All this for a student management SPA. My day job as a school teacher means (A) I have to deal with outdated monolithic webapps daily, and (B) I don't exactly have all the time in the word to write software. This stack has been a godsend.
Does it matter ?

They are companies - they just go to court with that. They are or should be prepared to deal with this stuff.

What I'm saying is that this bank run has nothing to do with small depositors withdrawing their money here.
Calling one of the most well-paid and priviledged group of employees im human history, developers, tech workers is an insult o every labor movement in human history. As soon as you have posh white collar office job, you stop being a worker.
What work needs to be done? Provision a server somewhere and host it. AWS has one-click "give me a docker hub" and "give me a git hub" products.
This would make a nice coming of age story but then the taping in question would have to occur some time during the character's childhood.
I heard it was pretty hot
(sorry, couldn't resist)
Salesforce probably has SOAP and RPC and XML DB features, so that's not such a high bar to clear.
It's pretty bad. I didn't renew my VPN subscription last year and this was one of the major flaws—especially with so many websites centralizing behind Cloudflare as a proxy without thinking about it.
Who is pretending what about some made up thing that didn’t happen?

The failure of SVB had nothing to do with extending loans to their client base.
In addition to that piece, Matt Levine also did an excellent analysis https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-03-14/svb-to...
> We are overpaid for incredible working conditions and devs basically became capricious divas, despite the fact 90% of them are plumbers, and many not very good ones.

You forgot to write "in the US".
How to Build an Error Handling Layer in Node.js
Very astute.

May I suggest replacing Commercial Radio with Cryptography for the 1930's (between the Wars)
Intercom launches AI chat bot powered by GPT-4
I have no affiliation with Intercom but I was taken aback by how much better this bot appears to be compared to any chat bot I've seen before. They have an interactive demo on the link I shared there to test it out and I've been unable to break it thus far. With chat GPT version 3, it would regularly "hallucinate" where it would confidently provide wrong answers. That doesn't seem to be the case here, which was probably one of the biggest blockers to businesses adopting it for their web messaging.

Intercom cofounder Des Traynor's announcement: https://twitter.com/destraynor/status/1635705915595685902
Why is cloud-init so hard to find? You just made me learn about it, and it seems like the obvious thing to use for VPS initialization.

Shouldn't the hosting provider have pointed me to it from the start? So weird!
Quite sad to know that the dynamic nature of Python is preventing the speedups in the first place. I really hope there'll be a built-in optimizing JIT compiler without the limitations of PyPy, Codon, Nuitka, Numba, etc.
This is the gaming of the system that is resulting in the government FULLY covering the bets of the rich. They could have bought insurance, but running a bank is cheaper.
Low-background steel is actually pre-nuke tests. That's what they scavenge sunken ships a lot for.
As always, Godzilla can be depended upon to save humanity, at least in the final accounting. On the way there he might trash a few cities, but all in all he's worth it. Giant squid, your days are numbered. Drop that delicious deep sea diver and go back to your lair.
>IT companies make millions per employee,

Mostly they don't. Not even close.
Isn't Azure OpenAI suppose to do this? (not locally, but private)
It was always unbelievable too me how much they hosted for free. I recklessly pushed over 100gbs of containers the last years, all free. Never made sense to me, even google doesn't do this anymore.
I don't think any of those things you fear came to pass after El Mirador was discovered. Why would this site be any different?
Are you really using Google Docs as an example of the best that can be done ? (Assuming it's even a morally acceptable example, we are on Hacker News, aren't we ?)

(Also, this isn't so much about the best that can be done, but about what your median developer is able to do and/or median user is going to have to deal with.)
"Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. "

I'm reminded of the Paperclip game (https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html). While the goal of this superhuman ai was to create as many paperclips as possible, a normal person living in this time would be completely oblivious to this goal and would continue to imagine a rich fulfilling world around them, complete with values and dreams. Spoiler warning: in the end everything is obliterated for more paperclips.

We have no idea the direction things will go, and we maybe can't even use our prior reasoning to guess where this tech revolution will lead us, but I'm happy we're witnessing this in an open society where such tech is more or less available to all. It's hard to think of a more promising scenario than what we're currently faced with.
Not necessarily. If insurance companies were allowed to set prices based on the bank you're deposited with, then what's currently a political process could become a market-based process. Have assets that are exposed to interest rate hikes? Higher insurance rates. Have assets that hedge against changes in the interest rate? Lower deposit insurance rates. Won't let us see your asset mix? Assume the worst case scenario.

So in this universe, when you go to get insurance at SVB, you see that it costs you 1% per year, which seems high to you. You go to the insurance company's website, and see that insurance for Chase is only 0.5%, so you switch to them instead. SVB is pressured to change to a less risky strategy by the market, not b the government.

(NB I'm not a libertarian, nor am I recommending this approach; I'm just saying that in theory such a system could work.)

EDIT: Upon reflection, this might just punt the issue down the road: Suppose SVDI (Silicon Valley Deposit Insurance) gives you a rate of 0.1% per year at SVB. Everything is fine until SVB fails, and then it turns out SVDI didn't have enough capital to back their insurance, and you lose anyway.

Maybe there are ways you could fix this, but my preliminary conclusion would be that you need some kind of regulation somewhere.
This has been happening recently with Helm chart repositories etc. Maybe it's time people started hosting their own Container Registries?

The huge bandwidth requirements are an incentive to keep images small.
Consensus on a new repo for public community images would help, but it isn't the biggest problem (as the author notes, GHCR does that already, and GitHub seem pretty committed to free hosting for public data, and have the Microsoft money to keep doing so indefinitely if they like).

The issue I worry about is the millions of blog posts, CI builds, docker-compose files, tutorials & individual user scripts who all reference community images on Docker Hub, a huge percentage of which are about to disappear, apparently all at once 29 days from now.

From a business perspective particularly, this looks like suicide to me - if you teach everybody "oh this guide uses Docker commands, it must be outdated & broken like all the others" then you're paving a path for everybody to dump the technology entirely. It's the exact opposite of a sensible devrel strategy. And a huge number of their paying customers will be affected too! Most companies invested enough in Docker tech to be paying Docker Inc right now surely use >0 community images in their infrastructure, and they're going to see this breakage. Docker Inc even directly charge for pulling lots of images from Docker Hub right now, and this seems likely to actively stop people doing that (moving them all to GHCR etc) and thereby _reduce_ the offering they're charging for! It's bizarre.

Seems like a bad result for the industry in general, but an even worse result for Docker Inc.
I never said that it wasn't actually open source. I just said that the openness hasn't actually created meaningful competition, because there is a single company in control of the specs that abuses that control to create a moat.

For a concrete example, the bitmanip extensions (which provide significant increases in MIPS/MHz) were used by SiFive in commercial cores before ratification and finalization. No other company could do that because SiFive employees could just change the spec if they did. They're doing the same thing with vector/SIMD instructions now to support their machine learning ambitions.
Is there any progress on podman for Windows or any other way of running containers on Windows? I cannot wait for the day the development community doesn't need to rely on anything from this company.
Well, it's worth exploring with a minimal amount of money and not by somehow squeezing in money from pension funds and the like.

They can do that research as part of PhD dissertations.
Compilers do however guess that you don't want something - it's called compiler warnings. Linters do that as well. To me what you describe is more about how we communicate with compilers than an inherent limitation.
Is it amusing or ominous that Chief Diversity Officers and Collateralized Debt Obligations share an acronym? :)
I am already lifting weights regularly thank you. But it will not quell the disquietness of the mind. I suppose I can approach learning other hobbies with the same mentality: focusing more on self improvement than the practicality of it. But alas I am no such saint. There's just so much time needed and time is exactly what we don't have right now.

I have this feeling that humanity as we know it will die out within the next few decades. It's bleak thinking I'll have to distract myself with sports and other hobbies while observing the end of mankind.
This is true. I think it was hard to reason about how important the internet would be because it was expensive to get on and it needed Google to make discovery exponentially better. It took a long time for access to become cheap enough to be almost ubiquitous in a developed country.

ML, AI, whatever, is clearly usable now. But it has limits. And I think it's clear that it's not fully baked relative to the promises. We certainly don't have a Killer App yet.
It’s in poor taste, at the least and leads to decreased credibility by slurring the subject rather than addressing it head on.

If instead the headline had read tech hoes, to riff on urban subculture appropriated by pop TV, instead, people would also treat it accordingly. But this publication consciously decided to run with this headline.

It certainly speaks to their bias, if nothing else.

That said, these investors and founders who are fair weather libertarians deserve to be criticized, no doubt, but we can do so without banal insults. It's an article, for god's sake, not a random comment on some random blog or an instigating tweet.
Lots of business use no code website generators like squarespace and wix.
This is a very nice moment. Meeting each other on the internet after all those years. Nice.
With a assumtion of unlimited time even a computer can decide the halting problem by just running the program in question to test if it halts. The issue is that the task is to determine for ALL programs if they halt and for each of them to determine that in a FINITE amount of time.

> What makes you certain there is an algorithmic analog for all human reasoning?

(Maybe) not for ALL human thought but at least all communicatable deductive reasoning can be encoded in formal logic.
If I give you an algorithm and ask you to decide if it does halt or does not halt (I give you plenty of time to decide) and then ask you to explain to me your result and convince me that you are correct, you have to put your thoughts into words that I can understand and and the logic of your reasoning has to be sound. And if you can explain to me you could as well encode your though process into an algorithm or a formal logic expression. If you can not, you could not convince me. If you can: now you have your algorithm for deciding the halting problem.
The regulators had the regulations changed out from under them by Congress (at behest of the banks). They can’t regulate what’s not in the law.

As far back as 2019 the FDIC was sounding the alarm about regional banks. In 2020, SVB’s risk committee told them to change their asset mix, they were over ruled because it would lower profits.

If we are going to allow lax regulations fine, then the market (including depositors) have to do the regulation, but you can’t blame regulators in that case.
It is.

Bitcoin went up a fair bit during the SVB/SBNY crisis.
Well don't know if I'm a dick, but my code have proven its author to be an idiot many times :)