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BukhariH

677 karma · joined December 8, 2013

London. Ex-Wise, Ex-Revolut, Ex-Lightyear & now building something big.

https://idesofmarch.io/

submissionscomments
BukhariH··on Claude Fable 5
> Data retention — For Fable 5, Mythos 5, and future models on Bedrock with similar or higher capability levels, Anthropic will require 30-day retention for all traffic on Mythos-class models. Retaining data for a limited period allows Anthropic to detect patterns of misuse that are not visible from a single exchange. Once you opt into data retention, your data will leave AWS’s data and security boundary.

Massive change for Bedrock users - Anthropic now requires sharing the data with them for 30 days.

BukhariH··on Companies ground Microsoft Copilot over data governance concerns
Recently, one of my friends asked ChatGPT about an internal tool with a funny name and ChatGPT seemed to know the meaning behind the name & options to run the tool properly for his usecase.

We googled around to see if there was any information on the web about the tool & there’s nothing on Google which makes sense since it’s a boring internal tool for a financial services company.

Ofcourse it could be a lucky guess or it could be an intern had uploaded the manual to GPT :D

BukhariH··on Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
He made the offer at a 40% premium on the April 1st close.

Twitter is a dying social network - sounds like a pretty good deal.

BukhariH··on Incident with GitHub Actions, API requests, Codespaces, Git operations, Issues
People tend not to be very kind when any product they pay for goes down.

At the end of the day - our companies also have people that rely on our software working in order to do a lot of societal good.

BukhariH··on Show HN: World’s first £3 flat fee (0% FX markup) money transfer service
Since, Wise & Revolut have been mentioned quite a bit and I'm an ex-Revolut & ex-Wise engineer where I built a lot of the FX infrastructure so I'll throw in my 2c.

My assumption of what you & Neeraj are doing based on your backgrounds: You've decided to build a smart order router for retail FX hence the slow transfers because you need to wait for the spot order to settle T+2.

Story at Wise Funnily enough Wise started in the early days with a fixed fee of £1!

Since all Wise did was match orders between customers so no money was actually moving borders hence no need for conversion or transfer fees etc.

But that fixed fee model was quickly scrapped when Wise started making the market between customers and improving the product experience by introducing rate locks (hedging costs), instant transfers (buffer costs) and actually started considering all the other cogs that go into making an international FX payment.

But there's one significant cost of high value transfers that's been a struggle for both Wise & Revolut to bring down even at scale:

The transaction monitoring, AML & support costs of high value transfers - a single high value transfer can easily cost £3 - £150 for all the due diligence needed to get it done.

If you're going to keep the product fixed fee - this is where you'll need to focus in terms of innovation.

The Story at Revolut Revolut has an Unlimited Zero Mark up FX with a single free SWIFT transfer (every additional international transfer is capped at £5) on the £6.99 premium plan.

But international payments is relatively a recent addition. The vast majority of the time when people are sending money to each other on Revolut, it's a Revolut-to-Revolut or Revolut to local own bank account payment.

Revolut's core strategy is to be the everywhere wallet so that when you're sending money to your family member in Romania from the UK - you just do it as a Revolut to Revolut payment which is bit different to the gap you're trying to fill.

And, there's very little interest at Rev to deal with high value transfers because the AML, transaction monitoring and support costs are too prohibitive when transfers between users are free or capped at £5 for SWIFT payments.

Is there a market for this product? A resounding YES.

This is something we realised at Wise - we weren't as competitive as we liked to be on high value transfers and even though they committed resources to improving this - in typical Wise fashion the progress is very slow.

Now I'm not convinced you'll stick at the £3 mark for long but there's definitely a large untapped market here.

I'm confident that you & Neeraj have what it takes to win in this market & will be rooting for you from the outside!

P.S. The app doesn't seem to be available in the UK app store?

BukhariH··on NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites
Not quite right.

The assets aren’t necessarily stored on OpenSea. You can see how OpenSea gets the metadata like asset url via the docs:

https://docs.opensea.io/docs/metadata-standards

If you scroll down you’ll see that the assets can be hosted on decentralised networks too like IPFS.

Also, not all NFT projects are built the same. I suggest you check out Pak’s Poets project - it’s a very exciting piece of performance art built around game theory.

Disclaimer: I don’t own any NFTs but that doesn’t mean I’m not excited by what they’re doing.

BukhariH··on Ex-Wise, Robinhood and Revolut team launch new stock trading platform
“The sector is hot hot hot — many more people want to invest and there really is no product to offer real free investing in Europe just yet. (While we acknowledge that there will be a few choices), I believe the key is to be more European here to win, that means offering sustainable investing choices (vs incentivising people with too much leverage, etc).”

-- Taavet Hinrikus

BukhariH··on Our restaurants are failing. Why should food delivery apps thrive?
In London these dark/cloud kitchens are becoming more & more common.

You might have already been ordering from them & not realised - they used to be marked as “Editions” on Deliveroo:

https://foodscene.deliveroo.co.uk/promotions/deliveroo-editi...

BukhariH··on Zoom CEO sold all of his common shares
Converting from Class B -> Class A opens a position in Class A.

Selling those Class A shares is still exiting a position in Class A.

But you're definitely right about the context!

He merely converted some Class B shares (non-publicly traded with 10X voting rights) to Class A (publicly traded) in order to sell them.

BukhariH··on Zoom CEO sold all of his common shares
ZM has two classes of Common Stock - Class A & Class B.

Looks like Eric exited his Class A shares but he still holds over $4B+ USD in Class B.

source: https://docoh.com/company/1773298/yuan-eric-s/insider-owners...

BukhariH··on Show HN: Cliplingo – turns YouTube into spaced repetition language learning
Currently working on my French - was super interested to use this but it's not working.

Looks like the request to:

https://www.cliplingo.com/lesson/start?id=18

Returns an empty video id: https://pastebin.com/8JemA2T3

Hopefully you can fix it soon - super excited to use it!

BukhariH··on System design hack: Postgres is a great pub/sub and job server
That's a very similar pattern to what I've been using at TW.

At the core of our implementation is this library to schedule the jobs to different workers: https://github.com/kagkarlsson/db-scheduler

Would highly recommend that library!

BukhariH··on Do Stocks Outperform Treasury Bills? (2018)
Well, if you’re a US based investor then it might not be a bad idea to pick up some of those -0.5% yield bonds when you consider the effect of currency hedging.

Conversely, for EUR based fund managers you’ll likely be better of sticking to negative yielding EUR denominated bonds vs treasuries.

Source:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/vineerbhansali/2019/06/17/tradi...

https://www.ft.com/content/85c56472-bdcb-11e9-b350-db00d5096...

BukhariH··on Stripe Capital
That’s a super neat app for excel a junky - bookmarked!
BukhariH··on Stripe Capital
It's pretty common to have a fee for a loan that's paid upfront like an arrangement fee.

But you're probably right in this case - Stripe likely include their fee in the monthly payments - updated the sheet.

Appreciate the feedback!

BukhariH··on Stripe Capital
Is the fee not charged upfront - that's why I excluded it from the payback period.

Ahh you caught the mistake with the interest periods! Thanks!

BukhariH··on Stripe Capital
I really love what Stripe are doing here - whilst yes the the APR can be quite considerably higher. That's fair since Stripe are taking on quite a fair bit of additional risk.

As the borrower this loan is significantly de-risked since there aren't any dreaded monthly payments you must make.

Here's my attempt at a quick interest calculator for Stripe Capitals loans: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RH9PpJ9kdB7X4xcZvqb7...

BukhariH··on What Netflix’s ‘Great Hack’ Gets Wrong About Cambridge Analytica
> So the billions spent on campaign advertising essentially has no effect? I don't buy that for a second, otherwise it wouldn't be a billion dollar industry.

So, it's not just about flipping voters.

It's also about encouraging people who agree your politics to head to the polls & discouraging the dissenters.

I didn't find their use of the data for marketing particularly novel but using that to create a campaign to discourage black youth in Trinidad from voting seems extremely unethical to me.

BukhariH··on Time Series Databases to Watch
At TransferWise we recently migrated to TimescaleDB for all our FX rates data.

So, there's two use cases for us:

1. We use it to ingest tick-by-tick FX rates

2. We use it to query historical rates e.g. whenever a users opens our homepage we query it directly from TimescaleDB

We've battled tested it pretty hard now & haven't run into any scaling issues - been very much plug & play.

BukhariH··on SpaceX gets Nasa’s approval to test launch Crew Dragon
> I've thought about trying to get a job at SpaceX

> if I were an American, but as a foreigner

IIRC, regulation limits SpaceX to only hire Americans so you couldn't get a job there even if you wanted & SpaceX wanted!

BukhariH··on Fintech startup Plaid raises $250M at a $2.65B valuation
The original one (expensive):

https://www.yodlee.com/yodlee/europe-africa

UK startups:

https://teller.io/

https://truelayer.com/

BukhariH··on Tesla’s Musk pulled the plug on a settlement with the SEC at the last minute
"he didn't start Paypal" - What?

Yeah, he absolutely did start PayPal which came out of merger between X.com (the company he founded) and Confinity (the company Peter and Max founded).

BukhariH··on TransferWise releases end-of-year financials publicly
Link to the actual report: https://lienzo.s3.amazonaws.com/images/TW_Group_financials_F...
BukhariH··on Behind the scenes at YC Demo Day [video]
Yeah! I’d have to disagree! I started watching TC videos because of Justin Kincaid’s TC Cribs but after he left I stopped.

Tito brought me back with his energy and enthusiasm.

BukhariH··on Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways
Honestly, I don't think you can point to any actual business reason for a native client. Slack makes majority of their revenue from large organisations buying thousands of seats in one go and a native desktop client is sadly not a huge selling point for the sales team.

At the end of the day Slack has to optimize for growth and there's a huge list of features that will bring more ROI than native clients which will require trebling the size of the code base.

BukhariH··on Facebook’s tracking of non-users ruled illegal again in Europe
Honestly asking... Does anyone ever click yes?
BukhariH··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2018)
Hey! They definitely should be there but here’s the link specifically:

https://transferwise.com/jobs/position/997301-full-stack-int...

BukhariH··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2018)
TransferWise (https://transferwise.com/) | Senior Java Developer/Full Stack Engineer | London, United Kingdom | Tallinn, Estonia (Visa Sponsorship Available) | ONSITE | Full-time

Hi guys! Bear with me since I'm not a recruiter: the Treasury team is looking to hire one or two senior engineers for either of our London or Tallinn offices.

Just a bit about what we do: as a core product team we are responsible for managing all the money at TransferWise. By “all the money” - I mean literally everything from customer funds (> 1 billion GBP per month) to the money we’ve raised from investors (396.4 million USD to date).

We track every single penny from the time it enters TransferWise to the time it leaves, we balance different currency routes to ensure there’s always liquidity available where needed and we safeguard customer funds to ensure our users are always protected.

Our team right now is built up of ex-Deutsche Bank, ex-JP Morgan, ex-Mircosoft employees so ideally we’d like someone who has some experience working in the finance world or at least you should be interested interested in trading (not hard with all the cryptocurrency buzz right now).

We run a Netflix style microservices architecture based on Java, Kafka, Spring Boot, React and some other exciting stuff that we’ve built internally.

Anyway, if you’re interested then you should:

1. Apply for one of the roles listed here: https://transferwise.com/jobs/roles/engineering

2. And definitely mention in your cover letter that you’re interested in working with the Treasury team

P.S. If you’re looking for an internship this summer then check out our internship bootcamp on: https://transferwise.com/jobs/roles/engineering which is a 10 week program open to everyone in the EU!

BukhariH··on Advice for First Time Founders
Sure, if you can find talent that’s willing to do that.

But trying to convince someone who has a cushy day job at a more developed company is going to be way harder without great severence packages.

BukhariH··on Advice for First Time Founders
Agreed! 18 months isn’t feasible. Even well funded Fortune 500 would refuse that.

At the end of the day you have to think of this as an employee benefit to convince people to jump ship from their current employers.

I personally think 3 months + 1 month for every year they’ve worked for you is attractive enough.

You can make exceptions if you’re trying to poach some high level exec.

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