ahzhou

It'll be a haircut (my uninformed bet is ~10% loss), but definitely not zero.

> Are you (and the YC boss) suggesting that the government is more nimble than VC machinery at deploying capital when shit hits the fan?

I can't speak for YC. VC is almost certainly faster, but it's not built to wire money over the weekend. The issue happens when the FDIC insurance isn't enough make payroll on Monday. I don't think the government can bail anyone out in that time period either, but a lack of solutions doesn't make it any less of a problem.

> How is it unclear?

On paper, they have enough in assets (as of Dec), but there's no way to know if the market takes that price as the FDIC sells it off to cover the deposits in the coming months. Typically liquidating a position impacts the price of an asset.

VC firms don't hold capital either - LPs do. They may be able to do a capital call, but it'll take time.

Many SVB startups with more than 20 - 30 employees can't make payroll on Monday.

Edit: It's also unclear today whether the assets held by SVB can cover all the missing deposits, since they will likely need to be sold under market rates to liquidate all of them in the near-term.

I used to believe this was true, but I tested it and found that I was performed noticeably worse while high across a variety of tasks. The weed made me feel like a million bucks, but actually put me at ~80% capacity. I don’t know your brain chemistry, but I’d encourage you not to sell yourself short and believe that you’re only capable of performing well in an altered start of mind. You’re probably better than you believe.

From second hand experience, software experience is very helpful for automating parts of land surveying. The licensing is a pain though.

Most supermarket honey, China or not, is HFCS + honey.

A beekeeper told me that the biggest indicator of real honey is that it solidifies with time. Because of that, it’s usually sold in glass containers so that you can heat it up to re-liquify it.

+1B. Unfortunately no one cares about legal immigration in the US so all this talent is sitting around for decades and wondering why years or decades assimilation isn’t enough to walk through the front door.

One of the major competitive advantages of the US is that it brain drains the rest of the world through its education system and career opportunities, but that’s starting to dwindle after a decade of neglect. US’s loss and Canada’s win, I guess.

I agree with this as well. Efficiency is orthogonal to desirable outcomes.

My point is that things tend towards centralization because the market rewards efficiency.

Centralization is more efficient than consensus building.

While not common, I know of other Chinese diaspora in North America with similar stories.

Many graduates from post Cultural Revolution China left the country in 90's and found the language barrier (and accompanying discrimination) too high to overcome. The man delivering your fried rice might have a PhD.

Human history has shown us that intuition-based reasoning has been terrible for understanding bias.

You’re overestimating the signal companies get from any interview processes.

Sounds like you’re getting pulled into meetings without context. You should either ask the person who pulled you in to clarify the context or ask to be excluded and get heads down time back.

Static typing is machine and human readable documentation that is tightly integrated in the development loop. Like all documentation, it requires devs to spend a bit more time upfront create.

In large constant systems, code is read more times it is written. Documentation is usually worth the pain.

In small, transitory, or experimental systems, documentation may not be worth the additional burden.

IF mostly works because of “calories in calories out”. It’s very tough to eat three worth meals of calories in one.

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Scaling solutions invariably rely on parents. Ignoring parents seem like a great way to design broken systems.

/r/politics has definitely shifted from “OMG Ron Paul It’s Happening Narwhal Bacon!!!111!!” to dominated by progressives, but I think you’re seeing it through rose tinted glasses. After all, /r/atheism was also a default sub.

/r/all is populist as ever, but Reddit as a whole has simply fragmented. For politics specifically, non-progressives just live outside of /r/politics. Neoliberals tended to hang out in /r/political discussion, Trump supporters in /r/the_donald, neoconservatives in /r/tuesday, etc.

It’s not that crazy. People sometimes sell their baby off to finance gambling debts. Some parents are terrible and we shouldn’t be giving them economic reason to have more children.

Re: salaries of non-software engineers.

The thing that’s hard to intuit is that salary isn’t a reflection of the difficulty or importance of your job. It’s a reflection of economics. The skill set of a software engineer enables a better business model than that of a civil engineer. These superior economics get reflected in better salaries, even if the two people are equally skilled in their respective fields.

A construction company will need to spend cash on machines, permitting, raw materials, labor, and more to earn money. A software business needs to pay for compute and labor.

I think the best solution is K8s and some tool to help you generate the yaml files.

Terraform, CDK, and Pulumi all work similarly. At the end of the day, you declare a DAG that says how you want your infrastructure to work and use that DAG to come up with a list of changes you should make. Then you execute each of those changes via API calls and hope that reality on your cloud provider really does reflect the state DAG that you've built. CDK is better than the rest here, because it's got the best ability to measure the state.

When you work with K8s, on the other hand, you tell your infrastructure what shape it should be in with yaml files and then let your infrastructure figure out the best way to get there. When combined with something like ArgoCD, you've got a really powerful deployment stack.

The obvious downside is you've got to figure out how to get that all working.

Agreed. We use Pulumi and it's fine, but the state-managing feels brittle.

I think the state-of-the-art is Kubernetes + jsonnet, though you still need to suffer through the learning curve and you'll still need TF and company to provision some of your cloud resources.

Yeah, user error is more likely here, knowing the security in place at Google. That said, I suggested submitting it since the exercise of creating a repo will make it clear one way or another.

Win / win either way for OP. Learning opportunity or a bit of cash in hand for relatively little investment.

I tried turning off my Adblocker in 2012 to better support newspapers and whatnot. One of the sites I visit regularly immediately loaded something that my antivirus quarantined.

Never looked back.

Sounds like a security flaw. I’d submit it to a big bounty program.

+1. Bad reporting here. This seems to be mostly about consumer disclosure, not that what's happening under-the-hood is different that what your average security-conscious developer might expect after reading that Plaid doesn't sell your data.

That said I think the suit makes a compelling argument that the disclosures should be better.

Here's the actual suit. https://www.classaction.org/media/cottle-et-al-v-plaid-inc.p....

I wrote a post above on my take but TL;DR - I think that the suit is mostly alleging that Plaid doesn't do enough disclosure of what's happening behind the scenes. It suggests that Plaid might sell the data to unrelated third parties, but doesn't support it with any proof. It does support itself with proof that Plaid "sells" data to the app that is being connected to the bank.

Check the source material. Here's the suit: https://www.classaction.org/media/cottle-et-al-v-plaid-inc.p....

The relevant section is on pg 16, under the heading "Plaid Sells and Otherwise Exploits the Unlawfully-Obtained Private Data".

The suit alleges that "Plaid has admitted that it routinely sells the consumer banking data it collects. At a minimum, Plaid sells the data it obtains from consumers’ accounts back to the very app providers, including the Participating Apps, who use its services. [40] Plaid calibrates its prices based on the type of information being sold. [41]".

Footnotes 40 and 41 are, respectively:

[40] See Feb. 21, 2017 Response by Plaid to CFPB’s RFI, https://plaid.com/documents/PlaidConsumer-Data-Access-RFI-Te... (Plaid acknowledges to CFPB that it sells data to party “permissioned” by consumer).

[41] See Feb. 2019 interview with Zach Perret, https://www.saastr.com/build-a-platformecosystem/.

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IANAL. The suit alleges that Plaid sells the data, with the specific proof that Plaid sells data to the authorized app (Paypal or Venmo in your example above). The plaintiffs do provide proof in the suit that Plaid sells the data to third parties, but suggest that Plaid might, since they already sell the data to the app that users authorized.

At risk of misrepresenting their argument, the suit seems to claim that Plaid doesn't do enough to give consumers (think average non-tech savvy person) enough of a heads up on what's happening behind the scenes. According to the suit, a consumer using Plaid doesn't understand that they give banking credentials to a third party (Plaid), which uses the credentials and "sells" data to the app that is being connected to the bank.

The above seems consistent to what the Plaid CTO wrote. I haven't seen anything that indicates Plaid sells your data to unrelated third parties. That said, I agree with the suit - Plaid should do a better job of making it clear exactly how your banking information is going to be used.

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