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safog

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Old man yells at cloud vibes. If these services were so devoid of value, competitors will spring up and eat their lunch. Capitalism still works. Silicon valley startups have made their money disrupting broken customer experiences in basically every single vertical. They are not immune from the same disruption.

Hi - could you tell me a little bit more about the interview process at HRT? Is it your standard FAANG-style leetcode / system design interviews? Or is it more math focused?

We're barreling towards an internet that requires an id before you can use it.

It's a bit upsetting but I don't harbor the early 2000s naiveté about the free internet where regulation doesn't exist, the data exchange happens over open formats and connecting people from across the world is viewed as an absolute positive.

Govt meddling on social media platforms, the filter bubble, platforms locking data in, teenage depression stats post Instagram, doom scrolling on tiktok have flipped me the other way.

Internet Anonymity is going to die - let's see if that makes this place any better.

FAO: People who're claiming GenAi will replace artist jobs.

It might happen but it's extremely difficult even using state of the art models like stable diffusion v6 to get consistent results. There's usually some part or the other of the picture that's broken and it takes a lot of work with prompting, blending, varying to get it to work.

Buy the subscription for 30$ or whatever and give it a shot. First you'll be amazed but then you start noticing the minor flaws and how much effort it takes to make it good enough.

It's still possible that some jobs will get replaced, not every NPC detail needs to be hand drawn perfectly, but let's see.

Big tech would much rather commoditize the telcos and treat them as dumb pipes. You don't have to eat everyone upstream of you, as long as you capture most of the value and leave some bits to the commodity suppliers it's fine.

On the internet, most of the value (ads, shopping, socia etc.) is captured by tech cos. The pipes (despite the net neutrality reversal) continue to stay dumb pipes.

They are sitting on too much deposits as is, but even without that fact it is purely greed - or, to use another phrasing, it’s the right business decision for maximizing profits. They literally have no reason to improve returns on deposits.

Can I look up deposit volume per bank somewhere? I assume even banks will care at some point. 1% probably not, 10% probably yes?

Why don't larger banks (who presumably have hedged properly) not pay a real interest on deposits at this point? I don't think it's just greed.

The current bank of america / chase interest rate on savings accounts is 0.01%. No rational buyer should accept that when a money market is yielding 5%. People are moving deposits to money markets. That should force the banks to bump up rates.

Maybe they lose more by bumping up rates than they do by keeping them the same and losing deposits but I struggle to see that.

I'm not sure of the mechanics, I know for a fact that most people are moving $ to brokerages and parking it in something like VMFXX (or equivalents in Fidelity etc.)

Do you know what the mechanics are when you put some money in to VMFXX? Who does vanguard get the treasuries from?

I don't think it's that simple.

Banks bought up a bunch of US treasuries at close to nothing interest rates during the last two years. This is where a bank typically parks their cash reserves because the audit requirements require them to hold a certain amount of cash and cash basically == treasuries.

Now they're holding a bunch of treasuries that won't mature for a while. If they simply sold them they'd have to book a bunch of losses (because as rates rose the price of treasurys falls). They don't do that and instead hope holding them to maturity will be fine to service their existing commitments (i.e., pay interest on deposits).

The problem is that they bought treasurys that yield close to nothing and they have to make a profit on those and pay out an interest to customers, so they take their cut from the 2% and pay the customers a 0.03% interest on deposits or whatever.

The customer sees that their savings account is yielding 0% and they could just go park their money in a money market account that yields ~5% (thanks to overnight rates being that high) and moves their money from their bank to a brokerage account.

Bank deposits fall resulting in a standard bank run. Sure well run banks maybe have their risk profile in a better place (didn't actually go out and buy a bunch of 30yr treasurys like SVB did and instead got more short duration stuff) but they can't just pivot to instantly increasing the interest rates to match the money market account and so will continue to bleed deposits.

It's not worth discussing this because the reasons are well documented.

You need to adjust for cost of living, universities, hospitals, non profits don't pay as much etc.

There is a prevailing wage determination check for granting a H1. That rule was revised a few times, that's the right lever to pull.

You could make the prevailing wage requirements == median wage for a given experience in an area. Right now it's the 35th percentile.

Seems like a home building problem then. Even if you're right (big if given out of country investment from rich Chinese ancestors was the cause of the Canadian housing bubble in the first place), you're ignoring the tax receipts and spending generated from high income techies who are only there because US immigration is shit.

There was also a lot of propping up of currencies that happened due to dollar strength. A lot of central banks sold UST they held for their local currency to stop currency free fall as rates rose.

This is a symptom of rates rising really quickly in the US than any de-dollarization I'd wager.

Engineers are getting paid 200k p/y out of school and you think there's some magical downward pressure on wages?

Even now companies are giving up on the legal immigration system and hiring outside the US. Canada has a much saner system. Gigantic engineering offices in India and China.

The US treats it as some zero sum game between citizens / immigrants and is losing out on taxes, economic spending (every HC outside the US is less spend in the US local economies).

Organic growth towards computing and digital does that. Time spent online is increasing, services are getting better, people are moving to the cloud from on-prem etc. etc.

It's not a zero sum game right now. The moment FAANGs are in a zero sum game trying to cannibalize each others' market shares I predict HN won't even have an argument around if tech firms are too big. That means tech has plateaued and has become a mature business like Coca cola or Kroger.

Google DeepMind 3 years ago

The cat's out of the bag now, it doesn't take a genius PM to work it out. Maybe a genius PM could've worked out how revolutionary generative AI is going to be pre- chat GPT release but I really doubt that a random MBA who knows nothing about AI can do that. Every single day there's a cool new AI application. The problem space is fairly fleshed out. It's a matter of executing.

How do you make enterprise tools better? (Photoshop + AI, Code + AI etc.) How do you make consumer tools better? (YT tools + AI) How do you make search better?

etc. etc.

It was never the happiest place on earth for a lot of the non-creative types. No idea how the creatives at Disney felt.

For instance, they used to have unpaid interns do full days at theme parks in-character and people would fly all the way from Australia for that privilege because, you know, you get to be Peter Pan for a summer.

It's sort of the same experience as Amazon. If you're a customer, it's the greatest thing ever. If you're an employee, not so much.