skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Neat.

I was half-disappointed that they didn't use scmutils (like Sussman & Wisdom) : (
> I should have explained better. My sense is that right now there is an implicit expectation in the market that the 250k threshold is no longer relevant, and that the FDIC is implicitly insuring everything that looks remotely like a deposit, regardless of the amount.

If rich people think that, I think they deserve to be taxed at more than 80%, because that's stupid.

FDIC move was perfectly rational and cost-optimized. Had they not done that, there would have been more bank runs, and they would have to actually pay out 250k/account on many more accounts than just SVB's, while ""saving"" SVB cost almost nothing.
Well the subject matter is someone baking a cake for “pi day” - I think colloquial English is probably fine in this context :)
Yes, the hypocrisy is part of it, so I have no doubt hypocrisy was the trigger for the expression of the anger. People are angry everyday because we are being kicked out of housing and looking at rising process of everything else and we get zero bailouts.
Let me put it this way: why should companies use value based pricing and extract ridiculous amounts of profits from consumers for their mediocre services, that goes into the pockets of just a few shareholders, whereas the labor of workers who actually produced the stuff be rewarded by a completely different logic (akin to cost based pricing)?

When workers have some actual leverage, suddenly the free market is a problem and not a magical fairy anymore.

If companies on the market can sell overpriced garbage to enrich their shareholders, surely you can't seriously complain about laborers being overpaid, even if they are. Its all the same game.

The whole system is totally unfair and unreasonable, developers being overpaid is not the problem and such a minor thing to focus on.
> A couple of percentage points change in interest rates is not a thing that should bring your bank down. If it does, you have failed, no excuses.

In context, it's even more egregious — Rates after that "couple of percentage points change" are still historically quite low, it's just that we've had a completely aberrant run of near-zero rates for the last decade or so. It was a matter of time until this correction happened, so preparedness was about "when", not "if", it happened.
> The article is an attack on Peter Thiel, not SVB.

I don’t understand this comment. The article doesn’t pretend to not be an attack on people like Thiel. It’s in the title. So what’s your point—is Thiel above criticism?

And since you imply that a publication somehow automatically loses credibility on this topic by leaning left, here’s a Financial Times opinion piece with a similar premise: https://archive.is/6MBEL
Did you try the Pharo MOOC? It's a good starting place: https://mooc.pharo.org/

About information and documentation, lots of free books are available at https://books.pharo.org/
> I'd much rather live in a world where I can briefly use a web app to do some task than be forced to install a myriad of native desktop apps that have unsandboxed and unpermissioned access to everything on my system.

I just use a vanilla install of chromium for this.
If you are going to use a top 5 popular programming language like the rest, your results are going to be average. And average start-ups don't survive.

This sounds like cargo cult thinking. It also sounds like thinking that will hamstring you as you either search for developers with obscure language experience or spend time bringing them up to speed on the language you use before they can even begin generating business value.

With Lisp, you can at least say that it might select for smarter developers, or at least ones with a more rigorous CS background.
What seems to be a restricted model operates in Australia [1]. Not sue how closely it follows the API standards.

[1] https://www.cdr.gov.au/
> We are overpaid

Compared to what?

Directors of HR, product managers, lawyers, managers of all kinds, etc. all make similar money.

Software engineers are paid what they're paid because their work allows companies to scale their products to serve more users.

This "paid too much" is nonsense, we can barely (if at all) afford houses where near where we work.
It didn't correctly explain why it was funny though: which is that it's a squirrel "taking a picture of his nuts", nuts here being literal nuts and not the nuts we expect with phrasing like that.

What is funny is neither GPT-4 nor the host noticed that (or maybe the host noticed it but didn't want to bring it up due to it being "inappropriate" humor).
Kindly answer this query, you can help me to get started in this too.
An Optimised Flow for Futures: From Theory to Practice
I did read the article. I think I'm less in favor of that style than he is (or at least was), but even he said that the problems it addresses arise from subroutines not being pure functions and so isn't a proponent of it in the case the comment you replied to was describing. And when not writing in that style, inlining is for the compiler to do.
The simplest answer is "excess deposits insurance". Banks (or third-party insurers) could charge a monthly insurance fee for balances over $250k that provides insurance over the FDIC $250k cap. This allows everyone else under the $250k cap to bank without paying fees (the bank already paying insurance on those as per FDIC), and provides greater coverage to those above the cap. Think of it like an Umbrella Insurance policy. Some banks might provide the insurance for their most favored clients if they so choose, or embed the insurance inside other services.
You can do it with renewables + storage, and not expensively compared to nuclear.

https://model.energy/
It's only nihilistic if you think there is something inherently magical/nonphysical about human cognition.
I used sqlite3 in production as part of ETL pipeline, works perfectly fine for years even as the volume scaled up.
> I did not know Smalltalk even existed

That's sad, because Smalltalk is the grandfather of modern (or arguably all) OOP languages and is referenced in a lot of famous OOP books. I've never used it, but I remember a lot of folks talking about it in very reverential terms when Java first came to the scene. From what I understand, it was largely killed by bad commercial choices that restricted adoption until it was too late to matter.
In that it's theoretically possible of course.

The problem is inflation and the lack of interest rates means that just holding cash is a losing proposition (inflation will eat away at it).

With inflation running at 9%ish percent if you hold 20K for 10 years at 9% inflation, it's real worth at the end will be ~8.5K.
This idea is fairly popular with libertarians and people have tried to set up so-called narrow banks that do this, but the Fed blocked them from doing so because they consider it to be too important that banks invest their deposits and make loans. That is, the non-existence of the kind of bank you're talking about is the direct result of government intervention, and in fact pretty much all this crisis is (the bank failures were caused by the Fed's interest rate policies, banking regulations pushed banks to focus on default risk over duration risk, etc).
In what way is copyright "banking the bets"?
That was my question, too. What instructions have been undocumented for five years? What non-standardized extensions exist in SiFive cores?
What if like me you're chronically afraid of dealing with Asbestos in any shape, type, or form?
Server with GPUs are expensive because no provider wants to turn their datacenter into someone else's mining rig. You can get them, but they'll cost you.

In Hetzner's case, you'll find some with GTX 1080 (https://www.hetzner.com/sb?additional=GPU), but they'll cost you at least double of what they'd cost without one.
Thank you for the explanation; I think I see it now.

Here's another way of seeing it which I think may be effectively the same. Suppose that there are 100 doors in a circle. You pick one and then all the doors are opened except for the one you picked and the next door along. If the car hasn't been revealed yet, it seems intuitively right that you have a 50-50 chance of winning whether you stick or switch at that point.
Rabarbar – Generate website screenshots in Docker (headless)
Not Invented Here Syndrome
So the Fed is supposed to keep its interest rates at 0 forever just because some banks based their business decisions on the assumption that interest rates will stay at 0 forever?
We just lived through this 15 years ago, and that’s not what happened at the time in a situation where many, many more banks were exposed to significantly higher risk.

SVB had a short-term liquidity crisis, followed by botching a funding round to solve the crisis (along with some internal issues). They were a relatively small bank whose assets likely would have been gifted to another bank in exchange for covering the liabilities.
Just scrolling through the article, trying to get a sense of what it's about. I see Territory and Maps (was Korzybski the man who mapped The New World?), it quickly shifts to the Bene Gesserit, and then finishes with stuff on Consciousness. Lots going on :) I thank the comments for a clearer depiction of the article's contents.
The article assumes an audience sophisticated and informed enough not to require extensive evidence that Peter Thiel is a libertarian, or that he and associated VCs are generally opposed to government regulation, because those assumed to be established facts. The quotes aren't intended to prove these facts, simply to provide a flavour of the types of rhetoric and attitude they have historically displayed.

So what exactly is your argument here? That Thiel and co. aren't libertarians? That they are generally pro-regulation and government bailouts? Or that the article's thesis is invalid simply because it didn't meet your standard of empirical representation, regardless of whether it's true or not?
I can always recommend Sports and other physical activity.

“Enjoy your body, use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it, it’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.”

― Kurt Vonnegut
Built this site to teach myself how to use the GPT API. A friend said I should post it here.

It generates bio's for a variety of social media sites (The Twitter and Tinder ones are my fav).

Let me know what you think and if you have suggestions on what I should do with it.
Larson and other vaccine acceptance researchers who spoke to Science all emphasize that COVID-19 vaccines clearly prevent severe disease
You do realize your browser already supports 2-3 site specific storage mechanisms like index db, cookies, etc... right?
> even if tech salaries merely fall back to 2015 levels

They're still at 2015 levels now, adjusted for inflation.
Don Hertzfeldt's Simpsons couch gag seems like an end result of AI training AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i2l-LQ-dXI
I tried it out, but didn't find it all that helpful. Maybe part of that is just getting used to it. I'm also worried about the long-term effects: I have a much better understanding of things if I write it myself. There's a kind of "practice" involved every time you write something (code, documentation, prose, music, anything) and I'm not so sure losing that is a good thing in the long run. Proof-read a thousand books probably won't make you a great author.
I always found it interesting that 99% of all high value SK targets are less than 50 miles from the North Korean border.

A chip factory located further away, though a good idea, will hardly put a dent in the earlier observation.
As a follow on point to my other reply comment on review, the comparable stock on that list is Google - and the graph probably shows that the market actually underestimated Meta's 'potential' compared to Google.

2010 Meta 'Potential'
vs 2010 Google 'Potential' - c$50bn vs c$200bn

2022 Meta 'Potential' vs 2022 Google 'Potential' - c580bn vs c$800bn

Meta grew >10x across the period, while Google grew c4x

I don't personally buy that Market Cap = Potential, but you would be twice as rich if you invested in Meta according to that graph than if you invested in Google, and you would have also done better investing in Meta across that period than Apple according to the graph you sent across.
What would an academic do with the parameter count? It’s just a marketing number
Right, that makes sense. Thanks for the explanation!
Nowadays "several gigabytes" can also be read as "almost a percent" for a 1TB disk, which for an app so central is not outrageous to me. Well maybe it could be less for smaller 256G disks.
Ridiculous that the phrase 'tech bro' is allowed here? Why wouldn't it be allowed here? It's ridiculous the things people try and censor...
I appreciate that this might be a little tone deaf, but what the article is accusing Thiel of isn't hypocrisy. It is a completely consistent libertarian position to observe that government intervention gives people an unfair advantage and then attempt to take advantage of that advantage if people make it clear they aren't going to change the situation.

I'm of a very libertarian bent and think the money printing is stupid, but I'm careful to position my assets to take advantage of the money printing. That is not necessarily honourable, but it is consistent.
Read the RISC-V foundation website. There are numerous "ratified" parts of the RISC-V instruction set that are not in the latest "compiled" spec document.
The last one at least was literally just a Twitter post with no other context.
Still learning Haskell, don't quite get what you are saying. But I will probably figure it out someday.
In my experience getting a company to function is mostly about things like people, vision, marketing, and when it comes to coding that starts with understanding how data should flow so the next step is usually not decisions about a language or database but what existing contextually relevant data processing tools to leverage. Often the best libraries and frameworks to consider support several languages but that is not always the case. And different product elements may use different tools as needed with the user interface being inevitably necessary and a world in itself that does not necessarily strongly shape how the back end generates, stores, and finds data.
Unfortunately screaming "that's not fair" doesn't tend to achieve anything. This is Microsoft. This is what they do.
Depositors are not investors in a bank. They just want a checking account and to make payments. Why should they have to waste time spreading $250K chunks around multiple banks? It's inefficient.

Equity and bond investors are the only ones who should lose their shirts when a bank fails.

If we're the have a distributed payment system, then full deposit insurance and a flexible lender of last resort is the only sensible approach.

The alternative is everybody has their payment accounts at the central bank, which will then mean, by accounting identity, that the central bank will end up as the only depositor in every bank.

Which given that the central bank is the regulator who should be checking asset quality is perhaps the way to go. That way when a bank fails, the entity responsible for ensuring they don't stands the loss.

We need heterogenous banks who will lend on different criteria. Otherwise we'll end up in the situation where only the propertied will get bank liquidity.

However heterogeneity means that some banks, like SVB, will inevitably fail when they get it wrong.
I mean, the singularity proponents see this as the golden grail, with the condition that N+1 AI trainee is slightly smarter then the N AI trainer.
The Silicon Valley Bank Rescue Isn’t What Glass and Steagall Had in Mind
Yeah, agreed. Reminds me of that XKCD... ah, here we go: https://xkcd.com/808/
Can we just get the big three cloud players to make a new public repo? They’ve got oodles of bandwidth and storage, plus the advantage that a lot of access would be local to their private networks.

Setup a non-profit, dedicate resources from each of them spendable as $X dollars of credits, and this problem is solved in a way that works for the real world. Not some federated mess that will never get off the ground.
From the twitter thread you linked:

> Any depositor who could read the WSJ or watch the stock ticker could understand that there was no upside in waiting to see what would happen next.

The whole point of regulations is precisely that I don't have to read a journal or scrutinise a stock ticker to watch my money. As it turns out I have more productive and useful ways to spend my time. Maybe he doesn't have anything better to do all day; but pretending that regulation are not needed because there is some way for some people to get some insight about what's going on under the hood is just not a receivable argument.
Partnering with Fastly–Oblivious HTTP relay for FLEDGE's 𝑘-anonymity server
Ask HN: Collection of Clever Scams
Recently watched a video from JerryRigEverything on a typical Youtube-comment scam (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iROF9Dd7FXA).

Would love to see a collection of clever scams you have come across so that it might become easier to spot them in real life and understand how they work.

This is how the mentioned scam from JerryRigEverything works:

- bad actor chooses Youtube channel with large following and possibly trusted relationship between channel-creator and viewers

- bad actor creates fake profile imitating YT channel (same profile pic, etc)

- bad actor replies to comments using fake profile claiming viewers have won something (e.g. iPhone 14 Pro) and that they should contact them via Telegram

- once chat on Telegram is initiated between bad actor and viewer the viewer believes they are chatting with the real Youtuber

- chit-chat followed by mentioning the gift again (e.g. iPhone 14) and asking viewer for shipping address

- then asking viewer to cover shipping costs (actual scam)

- then never sending anything to the viewer
I don't understand why bailing out DEPOSITORS is a big deal:

* when I put money in a bank, I am just depositing it, I am not "investing". If I wanted to invest (take risk for a chance of profit) I would buy bonds or shares etc. I expect the money to be safe and accessible.

* the "product" being sold by SVB is a bank account. It's low interest (if any at all) and comes with a bunch of charges (so most people will not even break even). If they were offering a 10% interest current account, that might be different. But until then no one has been compensated for the risk of losing their "capital".

If I leave clothes with a dry cleaner or tools at a storage unit, those are mine. I am not "investing" my clothes in the dry cleaner. The same should apply for standard, low interest, current accounts for individuals and businesses.

Maybe in the 1950s, people only used accounts for saving, and they were expecting a return and it was the main way for people to invest. At the same time people/businesses did most of their business in cash (literal folding notes etc). But the opposite is true now. People and Businesses need a risk free account to make a receive payments. They're not looking to be "on risk".
Your making an assumption that this is a selected-for trait. I could just as easily substitute many hereditary disorders.

As to why they are successful: cooperation is a more successful strategy than individualism, but cheating is a more successful strategy than cooperation if you can get away with it. Our societies have been largely shaped by cheaters for their benefit so they get away with it a lot, right up until the guillotine comes out.
Jim Blinn and Ed Catmull will both be speaking next week (March 24th) at the 50 year celebration of the University of Utah Computer Science Department.

https://www.price.utah.edu/ieee-milestone-events#graphics
>Quoting Searle himself, "The point of the argument is this: if the man in the room does not understand Chinese on the basis of implementing the appropriate program for understanding Chinese then neither does any other digital computer solely on that basis because no computer, qua computer, has anything the man does not have."

> I think the most succinct description of his error is substituting the (lack of) understanding of a part of the system (the man) for the understanding of the entire system (the rules and file cabinets, etc.). But I'm interested in learning that I'm mistaken.

As you know, there have been many replies to this thought experiment, and some of the most interesting ones (to me) go in the direction you went here, ie, where is "understanding" occuring? The most basic version of the Chinese Room does intend to make you see yourself literally as a man who does not understand any Chinese and is just asked to look up symbols in a list. Perhaps that man doesn't understand Chinese, but the room as a whole at least gives the impression that it does.

However, I think the most important aspect is not this "intuition pump" as Daniel Dennett calls it. To me, what is key here is that we can all agree that such a Chinese Room, or ChatGPT for that matter, does not necessarily replicate the fundamental mechanisms of human cognition. Then, it follows that other human properties such as awareness or qualia do not necessarily emerge from such cognitive architectures in the same way that it emerges from our brains.

To me, Searle's point is ultimately that we don't know enough about the human mind to be able to judge whether it can be replicated artificially. And now that we have almost literally developed a Chinese Room, we can see that clearly. The arguments you bring up in your last paragraph are a great example of that, it's just very hard to conceive that this thing is conscious at all, even though it is capable of producing output that could convince people of that.

Regarding Searle's quote that you brought up, I think "solely on that basis" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, but it does align with what I said previously. He is saying that simply producing intelligent output, like in 1974 translation would represent, does not mean you are reasoning in a human way.
Why is there no reference to this page on the actual Archive.org website?

Not on their main page (a la Wikipedia) or on their blog page.
I get that, however consider to put one of those tiny trackers on a $5 VPS. And have a once and for all solution for all your projects.

Shynet really is super lightweight.
As you hint, incredible demand for full stack developers created high salaries at businesses that viewed that as their core product. Businesses that built things that had software mostly kept paying what they always had. That voracious demand seemed to feed on itself a bit and grow on its own. When times got rough those businesses asked themselves if they were getting the expected roi on all those positions, and if they could be more efficient and do almost as well with fewer heads. They apparently decided they could. I don't find that surprising, software isn't infinitely improvable. Once you have a product done and refined, there simply becomes less to do over time. If the hours spent maintaining a site never decrease from initial development levels, you are doing something wrong.
All free tiers everywhere are going away, because someone always figures out how to run a crypto miner on them.
You have to wonder if such a case would have been brought if they hadn't relaxed lending restrictions during the pandemic. That seemed to really draw the ire of publishers.
That's not technically correct: you can use the multiprocessing library (or the concurrent.futures one, for a more ergonomic api) to spawn cpython processes over multiple cores.