thephyber

Is this comment... satire?

Your parent is referring to a nostalgia for the Silicon Valley hacker ethos from the 1980s.

I know you're being facetious, but his entire immigration policy is to deport a large part of the construction labor pool, so he was never had a chance to make housing more affordable.

The US world reserve currency status only happens by norm. When RU invaded UA the US cut off RU from most of their access to USD / US-allied banking. At that point, CN and the BRICS countries started working on a decentralized version of a "world reserve currency" which is partially implemented.

Investors know the US is going to lose this status if the current momentum continues and there are some possible alternatives.

Investors won't sit by and tolerate MONEY PRINTER GO BRRRRR if they have ANY alternatives and they have LOTS of incentives to find any.

There's a non-zero chance that actually following through on Bessent's statements about support for the largest sovereign buyer of US bonds would push us towards insolvency. You are just stating an opinion that we would stop short of it becoming such a large support program that it would push the US past the tipping point towards inevitable insolvency.

The news about Chinese bond attractiveness today:

https://x.com/macropaperr/status/2089255200918007854?s=46

Obviously we don't measure it in "how many traders", but what the effect their trading has on the instruments they buy.

The US Dollar is slipping from the world's reserve currency status and the US treasury is slipping from the default safe haven for liquid assets. The BRICS countries bonds are becoming more attractive as of this month.

The financial markets only bought US treasuries under those conditions because they were the least bad option during risky moments. There's no law of physics which says that will always be the same.

Trumpanomics is trying to weaken the dollar to make us more competitive as an exporter (along with tariffs which make imports into the US less competitive with domestic goods) and he is Trump's Congress is blowing away previous deficits, so investors are wise to reevaluate their previous risk mitigation strategies.

The Yen Carry Trade is now fully in reverse and both JP and US are going to see higher interest rates, causing both of their debt service to take up an increasing slice of the budget pie.

Investors are jumping into CN bonds now and are likely to look to the rest of the BRICS nations as the IS looks increasingly unable to manage a responsible budget, an economy that doesn't seem to be growing much, and sovereign bonds which have fewer buyers today than a month ago.

Yes, and...

The US sold Euros to do the propping of Japanese bonds without telling the EU. Not only did we spend a lot to save our biggest sovereign buyer, but we undermined our relationship with another. And we didn't buy the Japanese much time.

Worth mentioning that lots of buyers is jumping into Chinese bonds over the past week.

It feels like the BRICS are taking over as of this month.

Slippery Slope is the assertion that A therefore B therefore C therefore D.

It is frequently a fallacy because D isn't predetermined by A when humans are involved. If you believe in free will, each of B, C, D are independent decisions. Sometimes we stop at A. Sometimes we pass Prohibition as a Constitutional Amendment, and later roll it back.

There is no financial incentive for most companies to maintain extremely old URLs. There is no large visible cost known to the project manager at a company who chooses to migrate to a different CMS.

A common solution is to create placeholders at the old URLs with permanent redirects to the new URLs, but that doesn't fix all of the old hyperlinks, so it becomes extremely expensive to maintain backwards compatibility after 2 or more CMS changes.

There's a fine line between what you described and toxic positivity.

It's important not to ruminate on bad thoughts (when your proposal is a good replacement behavior), but it's also important not to bottle up natural human emotions as if they are unjustified or unreal.

A thought exercise: if it wasn't your behavior that caused your own despair, but your spouse's behaviors that caused you irritation / grief. Do you think it's better to paint a smile on yourself and ignore the underlying problem, or spend a few minutes feeling your emotions, describe the cause to your partner, then politely suggest a substitute behavior? The former builds resentment and bottles up strong emotions for an inevitable outburst down the road. The other diffuses the emotion, potentially alleviates the offending behavior, and doesn't betray what you authentically emote.

> if the success of the show 'Silicon Valley' indicates anything

That show was created by the creator of Office Space. They were both fictional and satire. Just because it was popular and there were some nuggets of truth in the jokes doesn't mean that every startup in Silicon Valley is as extreme of a cult as WeWork was.

Wait. Apples and oranges.

People who haven't even been interviewed let alone hired getting a company brand is one thing. But coworkers (and likely friends) getting a company tattoo after getting hired seems completely plausible, especially if it has grown successful into a unicorn.

No, bad logic.

This was a local professional tattoo artist from San Francisco doing a pop up shop at their company party, not some prisoner with a sewing needle. Professional Tattoo artists know how to minimize risks. They aren't taking pointers about how to do their job from some stablecoin microfinance startup tween.

Cringe? Yes, to you and I.

But it's kinda accurate. It is a pseudo-bank using crypto/ stablecoins to bring banking to Latin America. And it's 10 years late to the crypto game. It likely will be a cold dark road with a high chance of failure in an industry of gambling where mostly men are.

That said, the CEO is Venezuelan (who previously built a microlending platform for Venezuelans), so if I had to guess the job listing and the company party with tattoo is less cringe if you are trying to bring financial stability to people who live with hyperinflation.

There's hundreds of thousands of programmers out of work from recent layoffs. Getting a small tattoo to stand out in a crowd doesn't necessarily signal bad judgement. It's more likely to be a calculated sacrifice due to desperation. Other people might have a beer, talk with the artist while they are getting inked, then enjoy having a stupid story to tell others. I wouldn't do it in my current situation, but I don't know what I would do if I was homeless and hungry.

Also, you did the counterfactual wrong. You can't simply say "if I were that CEO" and then change the ethics of the situation and of the person and who has agency in the situation.

Don't get me wrong. I wouldn't want to work for this guy. But that doesn't mean I'm going to shit on people who would consider it, even if they have to do something I would consider degrading.

Group think. Monkey see, monkey do. It's actually remarkably difficult to be the only one to dissent unless you grew up in a culture where dissent is encouraged.

The people who work at a company all were filtered from the hiring process of the founder. If his filter included sycophants and suck-ups, he filtered out any dissent or critical thinking that could challenge his decisions. It's easy to get an exec team who doesn't diverge from decisions of the guy at the top, but obviously that much homogeneity / thought alignment comes with a cost.

Anyway, I'm glad this was publicized. Some rumored or one bad GlassDoor review can be easily overlooked; this will be a stain on the CEO's reputation for a while.

I can't imagine a basic analysis of the Kik account would require a terribly expensive expert, in theory.

Could the solution be to turn lots of local IT / programmers into potential experts to bend down the cost curve?

That is a hazard of the way evidence is collected for cases. If the state has a warrant and they find evidence of another crime while executing the warrant, that might be used to bring more charges. I don't know enough about law to know under what conditions it may be used or must be ignored.

But also, I read the article where it said that no corroborating evidence of any crime was found when searching his house or devices, so I suspect his Kik account is not likely to be full of illegal content if his other possessions weren't.

Your comment was already asked and answered several times in this HN post.

There was evidence of a crime, only the Kik account ownership evidence was thin. Any decent lawyer would have probed into that aspect of the case, but there are lots of comments here about failures of defense / prosecution / experts / legal system.

Rape is unfortunately a difficult crime to prove compared to lots of other crimes.

But I also suspect your statistic is not accurate and designed to make your point, not represent reality.

Overturning convictions presumes that the defendant was wrongfully convicted and that the scientist has the technical skill which is relevant in the case.

The problem is that these intersecting conditions make the number of relevant cases small, while having experts testify for defendants for cheap during mundane cases has MUCH higher demand.

I doubt any professional prosecutors would say this out loud. This is likely a disciplinable or disbarrable statement.

This is effectively a truth, but prosecutors are generally held to high ethical standards, where they are expected to drop cases / not bring cases if the evidence doesn't point specifically to the defendant.

That said, there are occasionally times when prosecutors have been caught hiding / burying / not sharing exculpatory evidence (something the police / prosecution found which would help the defense's case against the prosecution). The only reason to do so would be to sandbag the case against the defendant even when there is a shadow of a doubt in the prosecution's case.

In the US legal system, the defense isn't given access to the prosecution's evidence used in the case immediately. In fact, lots of plea bargains happen before the defense attorney knows for sure what evidence there is to tie their client to the crime.

Interesting.

I was actually dismissed from a jury panel partially because I said I don't know if I could trust the experts because my perception is that individual experts either repeatedly testify for only the prosecution or only the defense.

Alternatively, Anthropic employees have basically unlimited token / model usage compared to you and I.

Focusing on a better prompt is likely to get to the correct result faster than incomplete prompts and lots of "no change this ..." replies.

Also, I've heard anecdotally that LLMs will underweight the earliest prompt text once context gets too long, so reminding the LLM of the most important aspects of the prompt seems to be perhaps valuable and certainly what lots of humans attempt.

You are right, but your parent is right too.

If the police logged into his Kik account from his device, they would have seen the lack of connection to the case. If they simply trusted the Kik account contents from the subpoena response, then it was up to the defendant/experts to identify the issue and rebut the evidence.

It was a judge, not a jury.

And yeah, the trial lawyer failed to make the case, but if the defendant couldn't raise money for a defense, they he likely didn't have any experts to refute the prosecution's evidence.

I'm guessing there are LOTS of poor/rural parts of Canada (and the US) where convictions happen on less than convincing evidence.

Also, the legal system is made up of humans who are ALL fallible and subject to cognitive biases. Canadian police received the case from Wisconsin police, so there was likely too much trust and not enough verification. Same with the prosecution bringing a weaker case with very high confidence.

He was just acquitted last week.

Let the process play out. "News" is called that because it is new and things are still happening.