skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, I’m not blaming them at all! In retrospect they made the right move. Companies that moved funds early had a duty to their employees and investors, and did right by them.

I do, though, worry about the message it sends to say that everyone who didn’t flee is SOL. Fortunately, the fed seems to have played the same scenario out and did the right thing.
people aren't going to pull their money out now that the deposits are essentially guaranteed, that is the point. Business can go on as usual.
The wheel will not always land on zero. Everyone got lucky there was will to bend the rules.
If they have more than $250K in the one institution: yes, they should.

Better yet would be spreading their deposits around, but if they don't want to do that, they should take the necessary steps to evaluate the risk appropriately.
> Yellen has just broadcast that FDIC insurance is essentially unlimited, as long as you can threaten wider disruption to the economy.

No offense, but I thought we all learned the principle underlying this in 2008.
The FDIC can tell banks they need to pay more into it to cover the losses.
I don't understand this comment. 1) SVB was not managed by VC's. 2) SVB went under because they bought US Treasuries, not because they took risky bets on startups.
Bank Term Funding Program [pdf]
Yeah, someone who bought SVB's corporate bonds.
A LOT of them do. And late-stage founders as well. You know how people like Elon cash out their shares via collateralized loans? What bank do you think processes those loans? And SVB really didn't like to be transactional--they work hard to make sure your SVB collateralized loan is linked to a SVB checking account and a SVB founder-shares-backed mortgage for your 5,000 sqft mansion in Los Altos Hills.
Missing Workers from the Workforce
The Venn diagram showing federal tax payers and people with a bank account is a circle.
> Banks pay premiums to the FDIC for their insurance, and it's a requirement of all chartered banks.

Do they have special rules for when the FDIC decides to retroactively insure some bank's deposits for more than $250k per account holder? Because now everyone's insurance premiums will go up to cover this, won't they?
This. “Backstop” thing is to prevent systemic collapse, but otherwise it will spread the losses to other people who “did nothing wrong”. This is really shaping up as bad lesson here for wrongdoers.
If anything they’ll benefit slightly by being able to offer slightly higher rates.

Though hopefully the total cost after everything is worked out is vanishingly small - otherwise we have a much larger problem.
Why are VC giving money to a company who can't manage it?
12 U.S.C. 1817(b)(5) (starting on the bottom right of the page numbered 980, page 5 of this PDF [0])

[0]: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2021-title12/pdf/...
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1337
This is not a bailout in the historical sense of the word. Equity holders in the bank are getting nothing. They'll be wiped out. Senior leadership has been removed.

All this did was protect _depositors_, the people who put their money in the bank and thought it would be there tomorrow. And it's being done by dipping further into the FDIC fund, which is paid by banks. It will reach down to taxpayers likely through reduced rates or increased fees.
Multiple points the user made seem to be this tool working against Python.
Banks won't pay employees (lower salaries or lower increases), shareholders (lower share price or dividends) and/or customers (higher fees or less interest) will.
Does anybody know if these cloud instances of SPR have QAT and DSA? The accelerator story for this generation seems more interesting than the core CPU story.
Ok, so who's out there actually fighting to e.g. legalise secondary action? Serious question.
Haven’t tried this, but sounds super cool I must say
Hi - co-founder of Beam here. Appreciate the discussion about our product in this context. We've tried to differentiate our product from the other GDPR compliant web analytics by also focusing on product analytics proxies which are easy to implement and interpret. We think our funnel analysis and cohort retention tools can be very helpful. To learn more about why we built Beam, check out this blog post - https://beamanalytics.io/blog/why-we-started-beam
Yeah it's an investor who invested in a debt instrument offered by the bank. So CD holders will be made whole but holders of any corporate bonds won't.
Well it's a ballpark estimate, most sources I've seen put them at around 19-21%, with Paypal at around 30-40% and various other small ones at a few percent each.

If Visa and Mastercard manage to run their entire business on less than 1% from every transaction then I would expect Stripe to have at least 1% of pure profit from what they charge. I assume that's what JPM gets if they're the stockholder.

I mean printing money in the colloquial way of making tons of cash without any effort (which this frankly ought to be if the system is set up right), not with JPow's xerox.
I was reading this and came across "No losses associated with the resolution of Silicon Valley Bank will be borne by the taxpayer."

What does this "special assessment on banks" mean in practice? Do they just go to all the bulge bracket banks and demand that they buy the outdated Treasuries at a loss? How does this work?
THEY ARE NOT IN A TOUGH SPOT!!!!

They know (and it is obvious) that all deposits are going to be fine without any extra funds, wacko VC's and nutjob politicians are stoking the sort of flames that might cause a contagion so they are forced to make statements like this.

The fact that the statement is so milquetoast is certainly on them, but being uber-conservative in your promises is generally a failing/asset for bank regulators.
I am puzzled as well, why not define the function and call it wiki?
> you bail out the losers, there is no end to the loss

The difference here is that the "losers" made was supposed to be an incredibly safe bet. The people who made the actual bad bets are all losing their jobs. Shareholders are getting nothing (ish). It's the customer who's getting protected, here.

> I guess we still haven't learned the lessons from 2008

Not my observation, but it's more like we were fighting the last crisis. Stress tests were focused more on bad assets, not safe assets in an environment with rapidly raising rates. Regulation and oversight only work for failure modes you're looking for. A handful of short sellers spotted this earlier in the year, but what happened is only obvious in hindsight.
I love how © makes a and b pointless.
So do the Biden's...

> CEFC China Energy, which has close ties to the Chinese Communist Party and People's Liberation Army, paid entities controlled by the then-cash-strapped Hunter Biden or his uncle James Biden $4.8 million over the course of 14 months beginning in 2017, according to The Washington Post.

https://news.yahoo.com/hunter-biden-paid-millions-chinese-17...
Ok but that's a bad policy that makes no sense and I'm glad the fed, Treasury, and FDIC are stepping in to change it. Sad that congress hasn't done anything over the past few years, but better the problem be solved than letting faith in our financial system collapse.
I tried the 7b version. It goes off on a tangent for just about every prompt. Any one know how to avoid this?

For example:

<Prompt># Write a simple python function that
# 1. Ask me for a number in mile
# 2. It converts miles to kilometers

import </prompt>

<response>math, random #define a variable distance = input('Please enter the Miles:')
Average Gasoline Prices By State In July [CHART]
Gas prices rose last week as crude oil futures spiked higher amid concerns about tensions in Egypt and North Africa. The average national price of gas increased to $3.50 per gallon from Thursday, up 21 cents a day after the Energy Information Administration reported that wholesale motor fuels inventories declined last week by more than half-a-million barrels (http://www.eia.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm_table3.html)
</response>
FDIC gets its money by a fee charged to banks. Tax money isn’t going into this
Curious too. Let me know if you try it out. Technically I think it should work.
Hundreds of thousands of people out of work are threats to curry favor. VC's and businesses who deposited $175B into SVB have likely taken 5 - 20% losses on that. There are offers for 80% of deposits immediately and bridge loans to pay payroll for the foreseeable future until a couple months down the line when whatever left of the deposits is distributed back.

Do you advocate for immediately cutting Federal Funds interest rate? Because if not, every quarter point increase will cause thousands of people out of work. Every interest rate increase slashes the value of current assets, leading to try to "cut fat" to recoup value, just like what happened here, and because it's a bank, the wealthy see the opportunity to earn back their $10b - $20b loss by threatening the Federal Government.
> Do you think depositors should hire an accountant and economist to review their bank's balance sheet every quarter?

Basically, yes, but without the hyperbole - an accountant yes, an economist no. This is not that hard. Treasury management is a specific function of any company.

I definitely don't blame these startups for not being financial experts, but VCs absolutely should have been coaching their client companies how to manage their cash safely.
"...in my experience unless you are lifting a lot of weights 25 is the upper limit.."

I get you...

I'm 6'0" (183cm) and 212 lbs (96kg) (BMI=29). I'm at 17% body fat and am working toward 10%, but also have been lifting weights heavily. I just got down to size 32 jeans (82cm waist) but have a 48.5" chest (123cm) and 15.5" (40cm) biceps. I still wish to lose 15-20lb more, but then I'd be at 195lb and about 8% body fat -- with a BMI of ~27. (Assuming I don't add more muscle at the same time.)

It is a lot better than a 15 months ago when I made my life change - I was 240lb (109kg) and 38% body fat, and pushing a 38" (96cm) waist, truly obese. And I felt like shite.

I am surprised how much I have come to love weightlifting, rowing, and eating a diet better balanced towards low-caloric density foods (lots of veggies) and lean protein. And I am more surprised at how quickly my body changed, considering I'm now just over 50.
Does Signature failing mean crypto in the US is finally dead? Silvergate and Signature both going to $0 is a strong signal.

Why would any bank want to work with crypto after this?
Bank bailouts in 2008 were not made to bail out 'the shareholders'. They were made to bail out the sunken assets inside the banks so that those banks could continue operating, including still 'having' the depositors' deposits. Because if the bailout was not made, all of those deposits would go away due to there not being assets enough to cover the deposits.

That's what a bailout is. And this is precisely that.
It’s silly. Either way, the money’s coming from the insurance fund. FDIC claims insurance is “at least” 250k.
It's not a nitpick. We have a two-tier justice system and regulatory bodies mostly live in the tier that issues fines but doesn't send anyone to prison, and this is not coincidence.
VCs started a bank run by telling all their portfolio companies to pull out
the economics of the market still prevail. if they lower salaries, people will find jobs elsewhere. if they overcharge for their services, customers will go elsewhere (and there are alternatives--credit unions)

yes, consumers pay all of the taxes and fees that are charged to companies but it does not change the supply/demand equation in the open market for the services the banks offer. the price elasticity of the things you mention is not affected by a new tax on banks
I believe they're referring to the bailout YC (and others) were asking for- going so far as to arrange a petition last night.
Trading a 1% bond above market value is money printing - where does the money come from? It's obviously inflationary compared to not doing it.

If all the money was there the bank would just give the bonds themselves to depositors.
Interesting, with the caveat that the odor/reward experiment was performed on larvae at a development stage with 10,000 neurons, not 3,000.
1. FDIC reserve fund (from the premiums they collect)

2. "a special assessment" aka a tax on member banks directly
Pretty mild consequences considering the magnitude of their screw up. Doubt they're going to be missing any meals or have trouble paying the electric bill.
Sometimes I’d like to know his thoughts on our modern always-online culture
Biden administration decided to halt plans to weaponize space started under Trump. This mothballing decision was made in early 2022 and led to said reactions by Elon.
That stuff is implemented in Java by the Sux4J project (https://sux4j.di.unimi.it/). Happy to see this is getting into mainstream (I am the proud inventor of the name "static function" for the problem :). And yes, you can use it to build a MPHF (https://sux4j.di.unimi.it/docs/it/unimi/dsi/sux4j/mph/GOVMin...).

Note that also an MPHF, as a static function, does not store the keys. A static function assigning a different output (e.g., rank) to every key will always use more space than a MPHF because you can choose the order.
Personally, I think the main problem with jQuery was .data instead of having proper state management. If we used jQuery just as a library and not the centre of everything without any layer above, we might be perfectly ok with it even now in 2023 for everything that's 100* simpler than GMail (which most of webapps are).
You think that won't get clawed back if there was something illegal?

This isn't crypto, you can guarantee that these sales will be investigated extensively.
Hey, just want to say that BLC is a remarkable artifact -- to me it's an art piece in computational minimalism.

I actually got so obsessed with it last year that I worked out a variant of lambda calculus[0] in which, with some trickery, a port of the BLC interpreter could be squeezed into 194 bits.

Which would be only 2 bits more than the intriguing conjecture from your paper[0] says to be optimal:

> We conjecture that any self-interpreter for any binary representation of
lambda calculus must be at least 24 bytes in size, which would make E close to
optimal.

I wonder what are the assumptions behind this conjecture. Surely my trickery broke some of them.

[0] https://xtao.org/blog/last-intro.html

[1] https://tromp.github.io/cl/LC.pdf
People would have been paying much more through their bank deposits and mortgages if this contagion had been allowed to spread unchecked. Banks benefit from stability in the financial system. They'll happily pay a small special assessment to stem loss of confidence in the banking system.
> Banks use deposits to extend loans to other customers

"Money creation in the modern economy" from the Bank of England is worth a read - it explains why this isn't the case.

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/m...
A colleague said it best: Looks like freedom-loving tax-hating tough-love VCs have found communism this weekend.
LOL.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II
Curious there was nothing about silvergate?
Bingo. One of the core competencies of a SysAdmin is thinking critically about security vs convenience.
yupppp

at least they have to pay lipservice now and not just printing billions and handing them straight to the rich
No it's not because it only covering deposits.

If you want to call it a bailout it would be an bailout of investment/company money parked in SVB but _not of SVB itself_.

Furthermore SVB might still have enough assets to cover that (or most likely a very huge part of it), they just don't have enough cash/liquidity to continue on as a company.
I mean, you would be substantially increasing the size of government. The federal government currently employs about 3 million workers. The banking sector employs 1.4 million. To perform similar functions, the US government would need (at least) a similar number of employees. That is probably politically disagreeable.
The USD($) wants to commit double suicide, that's impressive
> At the same time, this is yet another example of changing the rules in the middle of the game.

No, its not.

The “rules” of the “game” authorize systemic risk exceptions, so applying them is not a change to the rules of the game. Moreover, civilization is one continuous game, changing the rules in the middle is the only way to ever change the rules.
A larger bailout
Which insurance company can pay out a $40bn risk event?
The decisions about "is this bank adequately capitalized to serve its depositors" should be made by the regulators, not by the market. We know what it takes to run a bank safely, and its really easy to both quantify and test. This is how the "too big to fail" banks are run today. No one talks about the moral hazard of elevators (make sure you inspect it before you get on) or airplanes (make sure you do your own pre flight check) we trust that the regulators have set up processes that make this infrastructure safe for the public to use. Even with a deposit guarantee, a poorly run bank can still be closed by regulators, a bank run doesn't need to happen for a bank to be shut down, just like an elevator accident doesn't need to happen to decertify an elevator in a building.
Not only put off by, but I try and actively avoid them these days.

I know myself too well. If I put the options and flexibility in front of me, I _will_ make use of them. Every time I hit something that's broken, doesn't work how I'd prefer, or is even moderately annoying... down the rabbit hole.

As to hopefully not to kick off a flamewar, I'll just say up front I'm wrong, an idiot, and I feel very bad about myself as I should--

But that was what finally got me onto an iPhone after over a decade on Android. I started with the ADP1 with all the hope and promise that an open platform brings. I was writing and replacing software on my phone, putting together shell scripts integrated with other tooling to automate things, etc, etc.

At some point life was just too damn busy and I stepped back and looked at all the things I want to do, and what would create the most value in my life... and messing with my phone wasn't anywhere near the top of my list. I wanted things to just work well out of the box and my choices in that matter to be basically inconsequential (if I can replace the dialer, now I need to spend brain space optimizing my dialer experience).

So I went and grabbed a phone where stuff purportedly "just works", does so in a way where I really don't get a say (I just have to learn to live with it--and I have), and more importantly when it doesn't work... there's fuck all I can do about it anyway. When it doesn't work I don't stress about it and it doesn't take up any of my time because it's not something I could fix even if I wanted to.
> changing the rules in the middle of the game.

That's literally how legal systems work.
Well you are bailing out unsecured depositors who should have known what they were doing.
Isn't the systemic risk exception exactly planning for cases like this ahead of time?
We should be working on benchmarking this kind of tool. Instead of saying "this version/implementation gives interesting results sometimes", we should get some kind of score out of it (like the score of a test). Then we can better compare different versions and also test if the version we just installed is actually working as it should.
How can they change the rules? Surely it’s already written into law… right? Are they actually able to unilaterally decide to tax banks to fill up their rainy day fund?

My guess is that they’re not changing the rules, they’re utilizing them. Either that, or they have far too much executive power over banks. Which would be shocking.
"I just hope nobody forgets how prominent VCs behaved during the brief period of uncertainty."

The point is that these VC's didn't act to support their investments, they flailed around begging for bailout (that they probably didn't need but they didn't understand banking well enough to know that or bother to consult any experts before making public statements).

They behaved badly and should be embarrassed and everyone should remember it.
I never thought Mnuchin was the most competent of all people but regardless of how this particular SVB saga plays out, Yellen has to be one of, if not, the most incompetent treasury Secretary of the recent past.

She came into power and the first thing she did was suggest a global minimum tax rate, as if that would have fixed the accounting tricks that companies use to reduce the actual tax they pay.

Disconnecting the Russian central bank from swift and an oil and gas price cap have been immensely damaging for the western financial system and the international standing of the dollar(and the euro).

We now have countries increasingly integrating with alternative bank messaging systems and an accelerating of US reserve sell offs, along with what seems like the initial steps of the creation of something like an OPEC alternative for gas.

Not only that, it seems that because they never coordinated the sanctions with the banks it seems like only ~30 billion of the supposed 300 billion of frozen Russian assets can be accounted for, meaning they got to pull their money out and meanwhile the Russian on the other just from 150 billion in return.

Get this incompetent person out the door before she destroys more of the USs financial system.

“We economists don't know much, but we do know how to create a shortage. If you want to create a shortage of tomatoes, for example, just pass a law that retailers can't sell tomatoes for more than two cents per pound. Instantly you'll have a tomato shortage. It's the same with oil or gas.” - Milton Friedman
Blowing up dozens of satellites would start a chain reaction that if left unchecked will eventually bring down all of them. But I doubt it would happen over a timeframe that's useful for this war. We arguably are already in a Kessler syndrome situation where fragments are created faster than they deorbit, but like any exponential process it starts out incredibly slow.

Space is big. The average breakup seems to create about 300 fragments [1], so if Russia blows up 100 Starlink satellites that's 30,000 bullets that have to randomly hit another 3500 objects spread over an area roughly the area of the surface of the earth. Except that it's worse because space is 3-dimensional and most bullets will spend little time at that altitude, and eventually deorbit. Over a decade it will do a lot of damage, and at some point things will escalate to a point where it's hard to handle. But Russia needs results within weeks or at most months.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_debris_producing...
The bank lost money. Where does this new money come from?
SVB depositors to have access to all money tomorrow
Minority Report here we come!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bXJ_obaiYQ
Who are the kids in this analogy? It seems like what's at issue is whether or not depositors are protected (executives, shareholders, and creditors are all getting the shaft). Do you think depositors should have made different choices, and if so, which?
The banks don’t want the competition but in theory it could be done, perhaps through the USPS, and as a modified form of I-bonds or something.
SVB and to Build on the Shoulders of Giants
Note that some smart people in Karlsruhe developed a highly parallel construction procedure for RecSplit, so now you can build large low-space maps very quickly.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.09562
Not really. If 5 or 6 more regional banks fail next week due to depositors seeking the safety of big banks there won’t be enough money to guarantee deposits for more banks.

If they didn’t guarantee the SVB depositors that outcome would have been almost guaranteed, the train wreck would have impacted de-risked companies too, because the entire regional banking system would implode.

Not acting now to stop contagion because of some idea of fairness is short sighted.