Recent submissions

Comment · 2 years ago
They are though. It's that people tend to forget over time. I barely remember details of the last administration. A NYTimes article recently observed the same.
Comment · 2 years ago
I agree as someone who was previously excited about the idea. Although to be honest, I think people overstate the changes. They did not last. Lots of salesmen in this industry like any other.
Comment · 2 years ago
Best of luck to JPLers. I know someone who was laid off. These are some inordinately talented people.
Comment · 3 years ago
I get the strong sense of the latter. It’s not actually the SEC that decides what’s illegal or not - these charges they speak of are for the judicial branch to decide on. I don’t follow crypto much, but it sounds to me like there isn’t a legal ruling precedent yet for crypto securities (hence Coinbase’s broadcast lack of certainty), so how could the SEC even give a guidance as to what’s illegal or not when they don’t know yet? But it’s definitely their duty to find out and establish that legal precedent. Given Coinbase is thinking about moving out of the country, I suspect they actually do think it’s not going to go in their favor, and might be trying to publicly blame it on the SEC versus admit they could have an illegal business model. Even in that case, I don’t understand the complaint because they got a good run - if the SEC had been faster and clearer up front, that party may never have happened.
Comment · 3 years ago
Sleep well. Sleep is critical for structural learning (insight, generalization, etc.). Your hippocampus is theorized to randomly walk through memories to build these structural connections in your cortex during slow wave sleep.
Comment · 3 years ago
It wouldn’t be hard to stop. Chip fabrication is a concentrated industry with a high barrier to entry (indeed there are only a few companies in the world producing high performance silicon using technology made by probably even fewer companies). Restrict AI chip making and the materials needed, and you’ll restrict AI. I can see global treaties between large nations effectively controlling production in the same way that we have nuclear treaties that prevent proliferation or enrichment.
Comment · 3 years ago
Yeah this is bizarre. Imagine if a cop came up to you and told you to stop committing a crime. Being difficult and dismissing the assertion is going to land you in court. It’s your responsibility to know the law, and it’s certainly not the cop’s responsibility to spell out the public law for you before they can do their job. I don’t know what coinbase expected - actually I think they knew they had no case and are just delaying and trying to take the SEC down with them, given the attacks.
Comment · 3 years ago
Wonder why this took so long. This was done by an influencer so no way it was under their radar for long?
Comment · 3 years ago
Yep. I find it funny - though I feel bad for the small businesses that may have been oblivious - that a VC CEO is complaining when he effortlessly could have hired a financial consultant for a day to look into the first bank he encouraged his customers to use. A regional bank that had an obvious and alarming reputation of being the only place in town that would make high-risk loans to high-risk ventures. If anyone outside SVB was in the responsible position to avoid this situation, it was this CEO, and I’d suggest - if he truly believes in maintaining innovation and having those responsible suffering the consequences - that he personally go first in making his companies whole, rather than the taxpayer.
Comment · 3 years ago
> Are you suggesting tens of thousands of small business customers need to do due dilligence on the investment practices of their banks?

Honestly yes. All it takes is one financial analyst's time. I do it with my retirement plan for example, and I'm only a "small business" of one family. If there was demand for such info, I'm sure there would be a small community/industry for evaluating bank books like there is for financial planners (if that might not even be something a financial planner could already do).

And particularly with Y Combinator advising so many companies, I think it's on the side of negligence that they didn't evaluate the bank they were steering their companies towards. They were steering them there because they knew that tended to be the only bank that would deal with their high-risk companies - and it's too hard to believe that professional VCs didn't recognize that such a bank could have a lot of risk in some dark corner to compensate.

Comment · 3 years ago
I understand your observation but I respectfully don't think the conclusion is the case - at a large company I have seen an internal report that shows a substantial issue with productivity that points directly to a lack of in-person interactions as the cause. The Amazon CEO not citing data in his decree does not mean there's no data, or that the data is poor, or that the decision is based on a gut feeling. Amazon is a self-declared data driven company with 1.5 million employees - they absolutely have run the numbers on as big of a decision as this and I would be surprised that a decision as high-stakes as this (both execs and WFHers would agree) would not have due-diligence data to back it up. It is just not shown. The CEO is exercising his authority instead. I think after 3 years of being unable to fix these issues, the decision is final and hence the reliance on authority as an argument instead of data. Giving people data to try to pick apart would just be an unproductive activity that would only serve to damage efforts - it's not meant to be a conversation.
Comment · 3 years ago
I am confused by how this would avert some of the issues described in the article. It describes dustbowl conditions as evaporating water out of the ground. Does no-till drilling solve this?
Comment · 3 years ago
This was exactly confirmed by an internal study at the company I work for. Engineers that depend on collaboration suffered a significant drop in output artifacts. Those being largely junior or mid-level engineers. Staff engineers actually did better, although ironically they tend to be the ones coming into the office consistently (anecdotally).

One of the most surprising takeaways was that while engineers in the office more often claimed they felt less productive in the office than at home, in-office engineers tended to have higher productivity and WFH engineers when the actual numbers were examined.

Comment · 3 years ago
40:00 is the chandelier.
Comment · 3 years ago
Salesforce? I read Benioff’s comments differently. He gave an example of lower productivity in sales, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t apply to engineering. It was just an eye-catching example that 50% of sales wasn’t accomplishing anything or whatever it was.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton