skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm talking about the report that was required under Section 7311(b) of the FAST Act, Public Law 114-94 [1]:

(b) Emergency Braking Application Testing.--
(1) In general.--The Secretary shall enter into an agreement
with the National Academy of Sciences to--
(A) complete testing of ECP brake systems during
emergency braking application, including more than 1
scenario involving the uncoupling of a train with 70 or
more DOT-117 specification or DOT-117R specification
tank cars; and
(B) transmit, not later than 18 months after the
date of enactment of this Act, to the Committee on
Transportation and Infrastructure of the House of
Representatives and the Committee on Commerce, Science,
and Transportation of the Senate a report on the results
of the testing.

and the review required under 7311(c):

(c) Evidence-Based Approach.--
(1) Analysis.--The Secretary shall--
(A) not later than 90 days after the report date,
fully incorporate the results of the evaluation under
subsection (a) and the testing under subsection (b) and
update the regulatory impact analysis of the final rule
described in subsection (b)(2)(A) of the costs,
benefits, and effects of the applicable ECP brake system
requirements;
(B) as soon as practicable after completion of the
updated analysis under subparagraph (A), solicit public
comment in the Federal Register on the analysis for a
period of not more than 30 days; and
(C) not later than 60 days after the end of the
public comment period under subparagraph (B), post the
final updated regulatory impact analysis on the
Department of Transportation's Internet Web site.
(2) Determination.--Not later than 2 years after the date of
enactment of this Act, the Secretary shall--
(A) determine, based on whether the final regulatory
impact analysis described in paragraph (1)(C)
demonstrates that the benefits, including safety
benefits, of the applicable ECP brake system
requirements exceed the costs of such requirements,
whether the applicable ECP brake system requirements are
justified;
(B) if the applicable ECP brake system requirements
are justified, publish in the Federal Register the
determination and reasons for such determination; and
(C) if the Secretary does not publish the
determination under subparagraph (B), repeal the
applicable ECP brake system requirements.

[1] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-114publ94/html/PLAW...
My understanding is that it was in fact both:

1. If they had more short dated treasuries, they could have used them to fund drawdowns, and would not have had to sell their long dated treasuries, that went underwater as interest rates rise.

2. If they had not been overly exposed to one sector, a sector that largely existed due to 'free money' of zero interest rates, then large scale draw downs would not have happened as interest rates rise.
"many kids in the 3rd world don't have better alternatives: if they don't work, they starve. Is that better than child labour?"

That is the sin of their parents. Giving birth to a lot of children when you can't feed even one properly is a grave sin.

Sadly prevailent in many 3rd world countries.
The founders do need to wake up though.

If you don't understand the basics of the US banking system then not sure you should be running a business.
You could let the user pick
BoA was never at risk of failing. They stepped in to buy Merrill Lynch because basically the treasury ordered them to, but they didn't need TARP to absorb the continued losses in that unit, and paid it back with interest as soon as they were allowed to.
Yeah, it tastes a bit different after 2008. There's only so far you can push people before it snaps back.
Basically lobbying the government for a bailout so that their startup investments don't go to zero.
Taking a bit of a longer term view into why this happens, I feel the Fed (and Treasury/FDIC/OCC) needs to do quite a bit of soul searching:

1) After the crisis the new Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) regulation required banks to hold a lot of "high-quality-liquid-assets" (HQLA) for every dollar of deposits they have. Kinda like reserve requirements...

2) HQLAs include liquid assets (cash, Fed reserves) plus treasuries and agency bonds. Well cash pays zero so of course banks will be investing in the juicier long dated assets. This is the first mistake by the Fed (and Basel) who took the approach "treasuries have absolutely no risk" which ignores interest rate risk.

For instance; say you bought a ten-year zero-coupon treasury when rates were 1; that's valued at 1/1.01^10 = 90.5 cents on the dollar. But if rates are now 5% that's worth only 61.3 cents of the dollar (!) but you are allowed to ignore this loss...

3) The way we allowed banks to hide these losses in the now popular Held-to-Maturity (HTM) category instead of Available-For-Sale (AFS). Any security put there can be valued for capital regulation purposes at the amount you paid for it, instead of it's actual value (i.e. market value). So in other words, we first incentivized banks to invest in these risky securities and then provided a way to hide the risks from capital regulations.

4) To make it worse, if you as a bank realize that "oh shit I have too much of this crap" there's another regulation disincentivizing you from fixing things. If you even sell $1 of the HTM bucket then ALL the assets of that class move into AFS and you are forced to realize all the losses. So you will only sell HTM at the very end, as SVB did.

5) Lastly, the govt flooded the markets with cash over the last years (zero interest rates) so everyone (firms, households) had lots of deposit. Lending opportunities were much lower than deposits so they had to put the money into these securities.

6) But central banks did QE, which drove the price of these assets very high (and thus the yield very low). For instance, SVB had agency bonds with 1.5% yields. So, to recap, banks were incentivized strongly to buy these securities which the govt made sure had terrible yields.

7) Then, once COVID ended and inflation started it was time to do quantitative tightening (QT) where the govt became a net seller of these securities, driving their price to the ground, creating huge losses for banks.

And that's where we are now. Most banks have HUGE HTM positions of mostly long-dated bonds, with huge losses, not because they are all idiots, but b/c that's how the incentives were aligned. And now we are paying its cost, including the cost of QE/QT.
Why do you find it believable that they asked for government intervention to protect "the innocent" as opposed to simply acting to protect their own private financial interests, which seems to be the simplest explanation?

I'm not even convinced that the depositors made whole here were innocent--they accepted a known risk by exceeding the risk-free FDIC limit. The sad part is that in our society, we have no qualms about literally turning working people out into the street when they make financial missteps, but the already-wealthy receive prompt intervention from the highest levels to protect them and other wealthy people from the consequences of their investment decisions.

What argument is really left for this kind of intervention, besides appeals to the trickle-down system where the rich must be vigilantly protected since the rest of our society is set up to be disrupted when they fail. The whole system is morally and politically bankrupt.
They triggered the rush that exacerbate the downfall.

If nobody is rushing, SVB could probably find ways to sell something before it's too late.
I'm guessing the FDIC can just hold them to maturity. The FDIC also has immediate access to a $100 billion loan from the treasury via statute if they needed cash.

Over the lifetime of the bonds/loans, they might even make money like what happened in the TARP program.
“Riskier” and more complex banks do have higher FDIC fees: https://www.fdic.gov/resources/deposit-insurance/deposit-ins...
not credible ones. google "ex post facto law" if you are confused about this.
Most cases of Polio are actually caused by vaccines - it's not a case of confusing cause and effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio#Epidemiology

This is only the case because the vaccine has been so effective that the disease is close to being infected, and a vaccine-caused case is much less severe than a wild case, but they're still looking into a different vaccine type that will lower the risk of vaccine-caused infections.
Because last time when we were ceding territories of other countries to appease a dictator, it was year 1938 and we were ceding parts of Czechoslovakia. Guess what? It did not worked and WW2 started a year later.

Really, is it so hard to learn from a recent history?
There aren't any losses to the deposit insurance fund yet. If this increases confidence then it will instead reduce how much is taken from it.
Probably not, but it is rather exhausting to see this happen again and again and seeing them get bailed out without consequences every time. At least something would be different.

Maybe it's just hearsay but it feels like every person on wallstreetbets who got lucky with options then got the IRS knocking on their door accusing them of everything in the book. They've said it themselves that with the cost cutting in last decades they don't have the resources to build cases against large players anymore. They go after people they can reliably force to pay up without having to fight them too much. Al Capone would've gotten off scot free in today's world, just like most of congress does despite singlehandedly outperforming the best index funds out there.
> The difference here is that the "losers" made was supposed to be an incredibly safe bet.

It's not a bet if it's impossible to lose.
You can take me out of the Haskell—
pretty much this. hard pass on signing this nonsense.
Personally, I would love to give Nushell a try but having to install another package manager (Homebrew) first…
That's how VCs and certain founders have been portrayed by mass media and even on HN for many years.
If you have more than 250k in the bank you should be smart enough to split it into multiple accounts or hire someone to do treasury management.
I suppose the veracity of history could be an excellent block chain application.
I wonder if not using the vaccine would result in more or fewer total cases over a period of time.

(None of which is to say we shouldn’t always try to design safer seatbelts and airbags)
"RE: student debt forgiveness, I think folks shouldn’t get a bailout (banks, airlines or students), as bailouts remove accountability for actions"

~Jason Calacanis, Twitter, Jul 27, 2019

link to Tweet: https://twitter.com/Jason/status/1155224393028476933
If I put at risk the financial stability of the United States, then yes.
Money is fungible. You could take any amount of money from banks and argue that they’ll pass on the costs to customers.
Did you miss the part of this press release where they announced that Signature Bank collapsed today? That makes it pretty clear that the contagion was real. Treasury’s actions make it abundantly clear as well.
It’s pretty astonishing reading the comments in this thread just how many people have not read this press release. It’s not even a complicated message!
For the third time, I understand people have this belief. But restating a belief without adding evidence doesn't convince me you're right. If anything, it's the opposite.

We could be in the eye of a hurricane. Or we could be in any of the non-hurricane locations on the planet. I think the latter is more likely.
That risk still exists next week.
> But in my opinion YC doesn't want the petition on the front page probably because they don't want to have to explain the comments to Congress

In my opinion they probably didn't want it on the front page with that title ("Y Combinator is asking for a bailout") because it looked desperate. I don't think that's why it disappeared though. Apparently some others didn't want it on the front page with the revised title ("Urgent: Sign the petition now") because they didn't like the idea that YC would get some special treatment (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35115948).

Weird story altogether, and some people who would actually otherwise be aligned ended up doing a bit of friendly fire.
If you completely removed profit incentive from
some subset of the internet would we really be worse off?

Solo hobbyist and crowdsourced community efforts have always existed online and those of course would continue to exist just fine.

Lots of other stuff doesn't happen unless folks get paid.

Journalism (actual, primary-source journalism, not talking about somebody else's journalism on your blog) takes time and money.

You have to go places, sometimes thousands of miles away, see things, talk to people, and sometimes you spend three months or six months working fulltime on a story and it doesn't pan out. That costs money and lots of it. You can't do it in your spare time while you work a day job.

Citizen journalism is cool, and vital, but it can't do everything.

It's also awfully tough to create art for free in your spare time. It can take a lot of time or money. Certainly a lot of great art was created that way, but think of the great works of art that have survived for decades or centuries. Shakespeare. Michaelangelo. Van Gogh. Dudes were getting paid for making their art full-time, either by selling it directly or via patronage. You think Shakespeare's plays happen on some hobbyist basis while the guy works fifty hours a week shoveling mud or tending sheep? Probably not.
SVB and Signature bank that have both collapsed in terms of $300 billion

This is not correct. SVB, for example, owes depositors ~$150B but they also have assets of almost $150B. The hole that FDIC needs to fill in may be less than $10B; it may even be zero.
> I hope it is clear to all of us that avoiding the economic disruption of a cascade of bank failures is in our interest.

Very clearly there is a large chuck of this forum that doesn't understand that.
> A ton of the prominent VCs were writing out checks from their personal bank accounts

Is this true? I've been following this story pretty closely and haven't heard anything about that.
Yeah, but what are the specific cash amounts we are talking about?

Such extreme exposure to interest rate risk would've blown up in some other ways - say, a large client processing a routine payroll, executing stock buyback, or investing in an entity that banks elsewhere.
I like this to an unreasonable degree. Really nicely done.
Deposit money in a bank and expect to be able to withdraw it later as agreed seems compatible with borrow money for education and expect to pay it back later as agreed.
I guess they mean that if it's not coming from the existing money pool (i.e., taxes) then a new money will be printed (i.e., inflation)
Working at Wendy's at least has some worth on your resume (e.g. learning about customer interaction).

Working on construction/in meat factories won't have any of the same worth while being (severely) physically dangerous/damaging for kids.
Part of the issue is a common one: assigning blame for actions taken by individuals to the collective. It’s a nasty internet trope. But these things are true:

- the crisis was at the most caused and at the least exacerbated to the point of no return by the advice that some firms gave

- the general zeitgeist amongst certain firms and from particular individuals in firms leaned towards libertarian ideology, which seemed to go out the window when ish hit the fan. I can really only find one prominent example of this, so I don’t know if it’s fair to paint all of VC-land with the same brush

- it is probably the case that there are members of firms in both group one and group two, which looks bad, because panicking at the last second looks bad, especially when your panic screws (for your own benefit) a business partner of decades who was essentially only in a risk zone because they chose to do business with you. That’s an oversimplification of course, but it all is
Also check out https://docs.border0.com/docs. Super easy to get going, and supports HTTP(s), SSH and Database protocols such as mysql and postgres.
Ideal for private resources, as it has a nice policy to control who should have access to what, when and where. Finally you can use Google and Github for authentication.
Hence the comment about seatbelts.
> I believed that VCs and startups were mostly good people trying to do the right thing.

I have not seen one human being that didn't turn around because of greed.

We are all vulnerable
By any chance were those largest players part of bank run on SVB?

[0] https://twitter.com/tomharari/status/1634577650856632321
Would you mind to share the post?
> What interests me is how anybody could ever come to believe otherwise.

Probably because some popular "treatments" for the condition often attempted are far worse than obesity itself. Yo-yo dieting, amphetamine use, serial liposuction, binge eating and throwing up, et cetera.
Works great!
However, i had Python 3.11 set up as default python3 in path, and since there is no wheel for torch for 3.11 yet, the script failed.
With 3.10 it worked flawlessly.

Small improvement: the node script could check if the model files are already present at the download location and not download them again in this case.
> 1) SVB was not managed by VC's.

I think this is very much in question. Silicon Valley Bank was absolutely part of a cohesive microeconomy. There's no other explanation for the absolutely uniformity with which all those startups were using it for what should have been 100% commodity banking services. Those startups all banked with SVB because their VCs told them to.

And the VCs told their startups to bank with SVB because... we don't know yet. But any time you have a signal this strong, there's a driver.

Add to that the fact that the moment all those startups seemed likely to lose banking services, however temporarily, those same VCs freaked the fuck out of their minds on twitter and started shrieking in all caps about the end of western capitalism. That's not mere concern for their poor startups (most of whom were going to fail anyway, after all -- they're startups!). These VCs were exposed to the SVB failure. They were leveraged somehow and about to get caught holding the bag.

There was some kind of insider dealing going on with SVB. It wasn't just a bank. We for sure know that much. Whether we have criminal fraud or not is an open question.
Korn Ferry’s Personas a Simple Starting Point for Describing People [pdf]
> In the history of the FDIC, no depositor has ever lost money, regardless of balance.

This is false. No depositor has ever lost insured money. Uninsured money has been lost.

E.g., Washington Federal Bank for Savings failure in 2018 [0] has resulted in dividend payments for uninsured balances covering only 41.66% [1], and that took nearly three years.

[0] https://www.fdic.gov/resources/resolutions/bank-failures/fai...

[1] https://closedbanks.fdic.gov/dividends/bankfind/Dividendinde...
It's a plausible position to take.
Or…art and literature enter a new two-tiered era with artistic and literary works made by humans, with other humans as witnesses to some or all of the process, becoming extreme-premium-items alongside AI-generated works, which are likely to become the fare of mainstream society, if the current wave continues unabated.
It seems to me that, just like just-in-time inventory control, we've chosen an economic model that maximizes growth but also incurs significant risks to stability.

And with a global economy, and global Internet, and social media giving everyone around the world an opportunity to escalate internal dissension, those risks are escalating.

I have no idea what the right answer is.
I for one just don't like to see the rules change every time the rich need a little help.
I’m inclined to believe that may not be entirely true [1]. It seems there is some evidence of depositor losses but they have been incredibly rare and insubstantial.

[1] https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/129772/has-anyone-...
At the same time, this is yet another example of changing the rules in the middle of the game. Yellen has just broadcast that FDIC insurance is essentially unlimited, as long as you can threaten wider disruption to the economy.

No, that's been the implicit rule since 2008 at least (arguably earlier). If anything, not supporting all depositors would have been changing the rules mid game and so would have lead to massive disruption.

The thing a lot of people aren't getting is that the rules of the game haven't been the law but what the Fed does for a while.

Certainly, the game as it's played favors the wealthy, yes. That should be changed. Knocking everything over by suddenly changing expectation wouldn't change things, just disrupt everything. But also, it wouldn't happen anyway 'cause the game is too important.
> Having your bank account randomly disappear isn't one of the risks that anyone should have to take.

But that is the risk founders chose when they put their money in (a) any bank and (b) specifically SVB.

Your money is only insured to $250k. SVB had no CRO, lobbied against regulation, made no efforts to comply with Basel 3 and was engaging in risky bets that many had previously warned about.

CEOs have a fudiciary responsibility to understand and mitigate risks. And expecting taxpayers to bail you out (either directly or indirectly) when your incompetence causes harm is simply not fair.
Yes, regular people get their bank accounts automatically protected, and the capital owners had to sweat for a few days.

The bank is not bailed out, it's out of business, its shareholders get nothing, and its execs just lost their jobs. The bank's customers got bailed out.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/108602660933816... - "Slaughterhouses and Increased Crime Rates: An Empirical Analysis of the Spillover From “The Jungle” Into the Surrounding Community"

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34231439/ - "The Psychological Impact of Slaughterhouse Employment: A Systematic Literature Review "
Hyundai and Kia put their customers in such a shitty situation by not including a bare-minimum security feature (engine immobilizer) in many of their recent cars. The teens are definitely in the wrong, but there's some blame to be placed in the companies.
>absent regulatory requirements they would perform no risk management.

did SVB do any risk management either?
No. Both suck.
Does anyone know how to avoid downloading the model weights when doing `npx dalai llama`, and instead telling the install process where they are on my drive?
It's really in the banks' collective interest to do this. They can pay for more insurance, or people can lose faith in the banks. The latter situation is much worse for them.
And people don't question these portrayals? That's the surprising part.
Most people are driven by greed and self interest. Especially VC and Startups, otherwise why did they join the business?
I realized it on my own in an intuitive sense, my writing before I properly learned it shows this use but eventually I read some things on punctuation and fixed my naive use of the em-dash and other punctuation marks. I think "raising the voice" might be the old fashioned term but I can not remember the more current term or even if there is one, put some time last night into trying to find it but search engines are nearly useless and return page after page of sites conflating voice and tone or prescription punctuation guides which just list uses with no care about consistency in style.