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simonvc

389 karma · joined October 1, 2012

simon.vc
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simonvc··on I built a game for Claude and Fable to fight
I built a simple game with a self documenting API (HAL) and let claude and fable fight. Who won?
simonvc··on MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max
im running asahi fedora with niri on my M1 Air and apart from display port over usbc not working (it's coming) it's perfect.

not too annoying to setup if the first thing you install is claude-cli

simonvc··on I vibe coded a BBS bank with a real working ledger
Weekend experiment. Im the CTO of a real bank so speed ran vibecoding a pretty complete bank ledger with real double entry accounting, FX, open currency positions etc.
simonvc··on Google was down in eastern EU and Turkey
Adding some facts.

No-one in Georgia could access google, everything else worked. googleapis.com and google.com seemed to be the only thing affected.

If you VPN'd out you were fine. Hilariously, we use tailscale, so thought cool, we'll enable mullvand for everyone, but ofcourse, tailscale needs google social auth to login.. so the fix for our Tbilisi team was install nordvpn, connect to that, login to tailscale, disconnect nordvpn then tunnel out to anywhere.

I spoke to Benjojo (bgp.tools) who heard the incident "was a cable cut shunt near Sofia"

simonvc··on NSA spied through Angry Birds, other apps: report (2014)
Was drinking in a bar in Espoo in 2012 or 2013 and heard this from someone at rovio. At the time they used Riak db and basho were onsite and we asked why they didn't enable inter server encryption. "Because nsa pay us 10m not to". Guess nsa pulled the Riak cluster protocol off the aws fibre.
simonvc··on Tolerating full cloud outages with Monzo Stand-in
It's a risk that was very much understood and it's fully covered.
simonvc··on Ross Ulbricht granted a full pardon
i had a similar experience working in copenhagen. read an article about copenhagen sub orbital rockets, looked up and out my window and my eye landed on the rocket i was just reading about. weird.
simonvc··on Tell HN: John Friel my father, internet pioneer and creator of QModem, has died
+++ATH

QModem was the best (until everyone started pushing zmodem).

simonvc··on Tell HN: John Friel my father, internet pioneer and creator of QModem, has died
+++ATH
simonvc··on Engineers do not get to make startup mistakes when they build ledgers
Cool post, wish it existed 2 years ago when we started building Pave Bank, or 10 years ago when we started building Monzo.

If you're starting a bank or need a ledger these days (and aren't using a core banking provider that has one), then i usually recommend Tiger Beetle.

simonvc··on This morning for no obvious reason, I remembered the Fuel Rats
His name was Vile Rat. That was a weird, sad time.
simonvc··on Reflections on Distrusting xz
I worked on a project just like this once.. a mobile phone network build in the middle east before the arab spring. 10/10 would not repeat the experience.
simonvc··on Devin: AI Software Engineer
they just run other open models, so you're complaint isn't about Groq, it's about GPT-4 vs mixtral 8x7b accelerated
simonvc··on The Era of 1-bit LLMs: ternary parameters for cost-effective computing
The paper talks about LLMs a lot, but would this result hold for all Transformers? Are Ternary Transformers going to make things like Whisper faster/better?
simonvc··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2023)
Pave Bank | Building the worlds first programmable bank | Singapore and Tbilisi

3 founders, ex-Monzo (YC https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/monzo-bank), BigPay and VP bank in vietnam.

We're building a brand new bank on top of Golang, Encore.dev and Temporal..

Hiring Senior+ engineers in SG or Tbilisi.

Small smart team but making massive progress, we've built our core from scratch and gotten a bank license in less than 8 months. Raised a punchy (for Asia) pre-seed. simon@pavebank.com

simonvc··on Mixtral of experts
GPT-3.5 (unfinetuned) has been matched by many OW (open weights) models now, and with fine tuning to a specific task (coding, customer care, health advice etc) can exceed it.

It's still useful as a well known model to compare with, since it's the model the most people have experience with.

simonvc··on Unit: A visual programming system [video]
Can it do audio rate stuff? it reminds me a lot of PureData (or MaxMSP) but with a cooler interface.
simonvc··on GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview
vim mode in vscode is good enough honestly. i've not booted vim for anything other than quick hacks in ages.

99% of the time i `code` now instead of `vi`

simonvc··on JupyterLite: a JupyterLab distribution that runs in the browser
It really is. I guess this'll be quite useful for people on chromebooks and iPads as well.
simonvc··on Caring for the only known full kākāpō feather cloak
This isn't an artifact that was stolen, it was bought by or given freely to a doctor who donated it to the museum in the late 1800s.

All the greek and egyptian stuff should be returned though.

simonvc··on Stable Diffusion Finetuned on Pokemon
i wish there was a working guide on how to do this. I've been hacking away at trying to get the ldm-finetune repo to work with Stable Diffusions released checkpoints.
simonvc··on CLI tool for converting txn statements from Singaporean banks into a sane format
Yeah banks here are so far behind what real neo-banks like Monzo are doing.

I left Monzo in the UK and came to Singapore to join Bigpay. We're building a proper digital challenger.

1.1m customers in Malaysia and about 1/10th that in Singapore.

simonvc··on How can I verify someone owns an NFT in real life?
You use the python or JS web3 library to ask the users private key to sign a message you control. Then you "recover" the public key/address from the signed message. Then you ping infura and ask for the balanceOf the nft contact for that public address.
simonvc··on Ask HN: A cheap smartwatch with a supported SDK
Upvote for BangleJS2. Been wearing mine for a couple of weeks now and it's great. The always on transreflective screen is really easy to read in sunlight and the battery seems great (over a week). Being able to quickly hack watch faces using the online IDE is great, i've hacked mine to be easy to read when i'm usually asleep and only care about the time, not the date and other stuff.
simonvc··on An unprecedented wave of online bank fraud is hitting Britain
How is the world going to balance instant low friction commerce with the need to prevent instant low friction fraud...

I don't think anyone has answers, it's a problem that will affect crypto payments as well as Fiat payments.. I hoped Confirmation of Payee would help, but the massive increase in APP fraud in the last 12 months seems to dispel that notion..

Maybe the answer is money that doesn't settle instantly.. Kind of like how your paypal payments are "on hold" whenever you get them to give the sender time to realise they've been scammed. Maybe all payments take 2 weeks to settle, and everyone lives on free credit up to the unsettled amount..

edit: I worked at Monzo for 5 years, and was in the original Confirmation of Payee meetings as Monzos rep to Open Banking

simonvc··on Launch HN: SigmaOS (YC S21) – A MacOS web browser designed for faster work
Been beta testing this (full disclosure, angel invester) and i can honestly say i miss it when i'm not on my Big Sur machine. Vim keybindings are such a win, and Sigma does it better than all previous attempts at a vim-like browser because it's properly modal. You hit i to Insert (interact) with a page and escape to go back to controlling the browser. Or you can ignore all that and just use it as a tabs-on-the-sed browser.
simonvc··on Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum 2.0
Probably the NIH study that Nmn or NAD+ does improve glucose regulation in humans. (From memory, details might be wrong)

David Sinclair's lifespan book goes into a lot of details.

Ancedata, I'm taking 300mg of niagen daily just incase it works, and have felt great for a year. But it could also be due to lockdown etc

simonvc··on Show HN: Handel – A procedural programming language for writing songs in browser
Sonic PI on the web, with repl.it like forking/remix would be really something.
simonvc··on The NDB team on its revolutionary nano-diamond batteries
Came to hacker news hoping there'd be someone to explain why this is snake oil.
simonvc··on No to .io, Yes to .xyz
We launched fronted using .xyz but a few suppliers (equifax and others) couldn't send or receive email to us, or view our website. Be warned.
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