skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> how do you interpret this part? what is an example of somebody who would be an unsecured debtholder? as in somebody with a stake in SVB the buisness?

Bondholders, not just shareholders.

The implication is that every security here is wiped out: https://ir.svb.com/shareholder-and-bondholder-information/of...
No, because your friend isn't a tightly-regulated institution whose proper functioning is integral to the core of our economic and financial system, and as a "client" of your friend you have no reason to generally expect that your friend will be trustworthy.

And yes, I do think we should have some kind of public fund to help victims of theft and fraud. I can think of many worse uses of my tax money.
exactly what the parent comment said - an incentive to not take steps to reduce your risk, leading to more situations like this
Thanks for the tip. I tried 404fac0, but got:

"The search for extraterrestrial life will most likely conclude adv provinß wojewłożGener Wikipédia Świirc Patrickvidcido protectsobDra"
The typical bailout doesn't zero shareholders. Here, shareholders were zeroed. You can call it a bailout of depositors, but the association with bailouts that didn't zero shareholders is bogus.
I don't see where authoritarianism was mentioned...
Ok. Lets say next week a larger bank, is shown to have made some other risky bets...Are you still in to make all depositors whole? Let's say JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs?
Does realizing this, that they were always like this change your perception of the last decade in any particular way?

I'm genuinely very curious. I've always considered them a bunch of smarmy opportunistic cutthroats, but that shift must be jarring right? Again I don't mean this negatively, genuinely interested in how it changes your understanding of the "startup era," pandemic, etc.
What? The FDIC controls the premiums, because the FDIC is the insurer. Moreover, the FDIC is not actually paying out any insurance claims here! SVB is being acquired, and the acquirer is providing access to funds on Monday, not the FDIC. There is no cost to the taxpayer here, and the FDIC is not raising premiums as a result of this either. It didn't pay out any claims (and wouldn't likely raise premiums even if it did).
Where do banks get their revenue and profits from? It’s really immaterial; if depositors weren’t taking a haircut, all of us do in some form or another, it’s simply the optics that change (banks, the Treasury, the Fed, whatever).

C'est la vie.
Bank offers you very favorable rates for cash, better than competitors.

You put lots of cash into bank account, "what could go wrong?"

Bank implodes.

Federal government bails you out and goes to collect the money to do so from other banks who offered more reasonable rates and thus didn't get your business.
Imagine what the world would look like if you got what you're asking for. Tens of thousands of extra dollars of overhead to open a bank account? To save literally nothing directly for taxpayers, and a few dollars per account for banks? I would strongly prefer to he socialized insurance and safety net in this case, and I'm a die hard capitalist.
People saying that depositors need to be ratfucked reminds me of a guy writing about living through the great depression. First he knew about it was one morning when his dad showed his mom the paper with a headline about the stock market crashing. And saying 'good that'll teach those guys'. Six months later his dads tailor shop went under and his dad never had stable employment after that.
See... I told you this would be resolved quickly.

Trouble is that Silicon Valley should have learned the lesson that dogpiling into the same bank is systemic risk.
Again, publicly available information (from months ago) resulting in a thesis - not any different than that of any short seller, talking television head, Twitter account, or “newsletter” predicting anything throughout history.

This thesis happened to be proven correct in this instance. Now let’s go talk about the thousands that have been wrong.

I didn’t and don’t support any conspiracy regarding Thiel in any of this. I don’t think that conversation is productive.

What I am saying is the timing is interesting and anyone who thinks the playing field is level with a 25 year SV power player veteran billionaire is delusional.
Are people really opposed to the commercialization of the internet, or just intrusive advertising?

People are using the terms interchangeably here but I would draw a fairly sharp line between intrusive online advertising and other aspects of internet commercialization, and I think most people would as well.

I love being able to buy physical goods and online. I think most people love this. I think you could ban ads from the internet tomorrow, and most online retailers would continue to flourish just fine. Though it would be harder for new retailers to break into the game.

I also love various online services. I love being able to schedule a trip to the dentist or access my bank account online. Again I think very few people object to this.

It's really only content delivery and search that are hopelessly entangled with toxic advertising that is necessitated by the fact that people expect those things to be free. I know those are a couple of enormous "onlys." However, to return to your point:

The irony off posting this on a VC website that make
money off the commercialisation of the internet.

They get a lot of press and mindshare, especially in SV, but the majority of internet-adjacent companies and engineers are not involved in the search, content, or advertising industries.
Also, imagine the case where you do this and you're wrong. You panic but you're in the minority and there's no bank run and a week or two goes by and the bank is still fine.

Now you've got a weird thing to explain and no vindication.
The thing I'm most confused about in this comment is that you ever believed that VC's and startups were some kind of noble class.
It is a bailout - the 2008 bailouts were done to save the deposits and investments inside the banks, not 'the shareholders' as so many seem to try to use as an escape argument. Its because if the banks' hollowed assets were not 'made whole', the depositors would not have their money anymore.

Precisely the case with SVB as of this very moment - a sunken bank that does not have enough assets to cover its deposits is being bailed out by the state.

By the state and taxpayer money, make no mistake - even if the funds will not directly come from the US govt., the fees that they will impose on the banks by using the nation-wide bank insurance fund will eventually get imposed on everyone with a bank account in the US by those very banks in turn. So again, the public will pay.

Actually, its beyond using taxpayer money - if you are a taxpayer and your children have bank accounts too, they will also pay the fee instead of just you paying a tax.
No more polio! We can stop getting polio vaccines!
Doesnt this just push the can down the road? Interest rates will likely be higher not lower in 1 year so their bond portfolio will be even more underwater.
Is the naming getting out of hand for these projects?
> So 3 out of 7 Circle USDC bank partners failed in a week.

It's almost as if when a company (Circle) had actual assets under management, it was very hard to find honest banks able to deal with actual billions without fucking it up and you're better served yourself. Like Circle which decided to put 80% of the USD it holds to back USDC in short term US treasuries: 80% not at banks, 80% not in long term investments... But 80% in the one most stable and safe asset of them all. And Circle got in trouble for the 20% in actual USD which they thought they could entrust to banks.

Kudos to Circle if they get out of this fine because it certainly seems hard to do business with monkeys.
It seems the only reason all of these competitive models are getting released is because you have a number of big players probably freaking out that somebody else is going to break out into a huge lead. So while the flood gates are open people should be quickly figuring out how to do as much stuff as possible without any centralized company controlling it. I would imagine everybody assumed the models released these days will be obsolete before long so it’s low risk. But this is like early internet days.. but this time we should assume all of the centralized servers are user hostile and we should figure out how to work around them as quickly as they roll them out. The author and others are doing great work to prevent this stuff from being locked away behind costly apis and censorship.
Any recommendations of tactical RPGs that are available on Steam??
Sure, you can view this as a bailout of rich people. However, the bail out is also effectively being funded by rich people, so I don't really get what your complaint is.

Put another way, the depositors are being made whole by the FDIC's deposit insurance fund, which is in turn funded by the banking sector's insurance premiums. So, the money here is basically being taken out of the banking sector's shareholder pockets (read: rich people).
Reminds me of a knee-jerk post someone made here promoting credit unions. They didn't intend for this reaction, but credit unions actually have the same risks as SVB because their member pools aren't diversified. The ironic lesson was that you should bank with JP Morgan, Citi, or BofA.
3. SVB’s assets. They actually have enough assets to pay, but it will take time for those bonds to mature.
How expensive, if you would actually run the numbers for your use case?
> This is going to put every regional bank on the map for short sellers as equity holders are being wiped out in these cases without depositors being affected. Why would anyone invest in any regional bank with the risk of a equity wipeout day to day?

Why would anyone invest in any business when the risk of bankruptcy exists (FDIC bank takeovers and their resolutions, with or without application of systemic risk exception, are in effect a specialized form of bankruptcy, with a different set of priorities for who gets a haircut, but equity holders are always low on the list for either these or conventional bankruptcies.)
I can't seem to select a render mode. It never gives me a chance to enter a number, I see the prompt ">" and then it immediately tells me I gave invalid input.
IIRC banks pay a fee to the FDIC in exchange for providing insurance, and because the FDIC is not funded by taxpayer money, the fee simply goes up when needed.
>how prominent VCs behaved

How did they behave? Try to pull their money out of a failing bank?

I would too ...
One of the key components of a bailout is that the company still exists. In this case, the company does not exist any more, and all shareholders have lost their stock.

So whilst there may be some superficial appearance of a bailout (and we don't yet know how much that is, as we don't actually know the value of the assets that are recoverable), it is inaccurate to say that this is "100% a bailout".
> At some point the can won’t be able to be kicked down the road anymore.

No country other than New Zeeland bothers to properly account for the asset side of the national budget. Increasing liabilities is fine if there's a corresponding increase in assets. But most countries are basically guessing about the second half. (This is also why we see so many wasteful privatisations where national assets are sold off for way less than they're worth)
There are thousands and thousands of banks to choose from. Why did they pick this particular bank? High rates? Connections to the right people? It's not like it's the only bank in the Valley, much less the country. They chose to be with that bank above all others. That was their freedom, their choice. Now everyone with a bank account anywhere will have to pick up part of the cost for that choice.
This is one of those situations where the Federal government is doing what it should be doing: protecting depositor funds, making banks pay for it and shareholders are left out in the cold if there's nothing left over.

Also, the speed with which this is happening going from SVB insolvency late last week to an asset auction today and depositor fund access tomorrow is astounding.

Most of this protection comes as a result of the Dodd-Frank Act passed in 2010 in the wake of the GFC. Senate and House Republicans largely voted against the bill. Remember that.

It's also worth remembering that this is a huge example of how ridiculous libertarianism and deregulation is.

Another takeaway is how central authority is a feature not a bug in the financial system. Just compar ethis to FTX or any other crypto collapse.
> prominent VCs behaved during the brief period of uncertainty

A ton of the prominent VCs were writing out checks from their personal bank accounts so that founders could meet payroll.

> For some silly reason I had some respect for the startup industry before this, now I see it as a joke

Wait seriously? You somehow lost more faith from this than you did from

- crypto
- Adam Neumann
- $100m seed rounds

and like 30 other things???

> But it's important to remember that they no longer automatically deserve any credit for taking risks and doing something new.

What are you even talking about?

Having your bank account randomly disappear isn't one of the risks that anyone should have to take.
PR to Change the LLaMA Models' Licence to Apache 2.0
Not much of a choice. Guarantee of the system takes highest precedence.

Although this problem was caused by bank malfeasance and yes this does imply de facto unlimited insurance, unlimited depositor insurance is kinda the whole point and is not itself a bad thing.

Yes, moral hazard is a huge consideration, but I don’t see depositor protection as encouraging future failures of this type, by encouraging bad risk taking by mgmt.

Rather, if banks bet their customers money unhedged on endless zero rate policy, as SVB did, there should be regulations that prevent it. Trace back to lobbying to exclude SVB from dodd frank regulations also at the heart of the crisis.
Can you talk about your two books? Fiction, non-fiction? Genre. I'm always curious to know more about successful writers and what they did - even if I'm not wired to do the same.

I self-published one book and am working on a second. I have done zero marketing as I wrote the book primarily for myself. Those who have read it really enjoyed including people who are extremely blunt about their opinions.
"All depositors of this institution will be made whole... As with the resolution of Silicon Valley Bank, no losses will be borne by the taxpayer. Shareholders and certain unsecured debtholders will not be protected. Senior management has also been removed. Any losses to the Deposit Insurance Fund to support uninsured depositors will be recovered by a special assessment on banks, as required by law."

-- U.S. Treasury secretary Yellen
Do you think software engineers who write code with bugs that take down their company should miss meals as a consequence?
A lot of people are asking “how is this not a bailout?” right now. I would caution against dismissing them, it’s a legitimate question. Pointing to the “Taxpayers will not pick up the bill” line counts as dismissive: this is a press release, and it’s from the government, that’s two strong reasons for some skepticism.

So, in earnest, how is it not a bailout? Feel free to offer your answer! Mine is:

“Banks are required by law to pay for insurance on deposits they take. FDIC stands for Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, and they are the ones that manage the Deposit Insurance Fund, which is where that insurance money goes. The FDIC is going to take from that fund to pay out all the depositors in SVB in one go on Monday morning, and then over the next few weeks and months it is going to sell off SVB’s assets and put the proceeds back into the fund. SVB has plenty of assets, so the FDIC expects to recover 99% of the money. If there’s a shortfall they will charge the banks a little extra in their next insurance payment, but keep in mind we’re talking about at most a few billion dollars spread over every bank; they are unlikely to pass on a small cost like that, but even if they do pass on the cost to the taxpayer it will be something like $10 per person maximum.”

Edit: if we take things like https://twitter.com/josephjacks_/status/1634569997266870272 at their word, the FDIC will likely see asset sales produce >100% of deposits, so absolutely no bailout of any kind. A good reminder that SBV didn’t die because they lied about their value or invested in financial instruments that exploded; they died because they didn’t have the cash on hand on the one day it mattered.
Signature just closed
> I really wish we could plan for these entirely foreseeable events ahead of time.

This is unlikely TBH. When a system this complex and a global clear visibility if offered to no one on the planet, foreseeing ALL risks isn't a possibility.
Silvergate was already getting wound down, and unlike SVB and Signature didn't need a fed backstop.
As opposed to what? Regular shells which break down even quicker?

And there's no hard constraint that would require this to "break down at some point". A well designed shell could also be a "real scripting language", all-in-one.

But the horrible CP/M and POSIX legacy of shell design doesn't help with that.
It is absolutely in the collective market's best interest to retain confidence in the bank infrastructure of the nation. There were already people lining up at First Republic over the weekend, Signature Bank was shut down as part of this same announcement, and almost certainly more would have come in the following week.

The collapse of a ~$200B bank was going to have significant ripple effects that would almost certainly have exceeded the fees that banks will pay to fill in any shortfall resulting from this backstop, whether they're ultimately charged down to account holders or not.
It's all speculation of what _might_ happen. I've yet to see a company close or lay off anyone due to SVB.
Vivek Ramaswamy? Is that you? He's currently on Mario Nawfal's Twitter space saying this exact thing lmao.
> let cart = Cartridge::blow_dust("path/to/rom.nes")?;

I chuckled.
Not yet, data collection takes time. On that link above there are stories of people who got long covid on their 3rd or 4th infection. If that could happen with repeated infections, would that lead to mass disability over time (e.g. 25% workforce with ME/CFS unable to do pretty much anything)?
Not the taxpayers, all the other banks which are funding FDIC have to pay:

> Any losses to the Deposit Insurance Fund to support uninsured depositors will be recovered by a special assessment on banks, as required by law.

So even those that were not insured will now be retroactively insured, and the better-run banks will have to pay for it, won't they?
Add something like this to your instructions: "Make sure you have Node.js installed on your computer."
You could be happy for most of the workers of the bank too... it is not like the tellers and loans officers were managing the systemic risk of the bank! I am happy for them if they have jobs tomorrow if they were doing their jobs well given that we know that the C-suite and board were screwing stuff up.
This is a simplification, but: the bank should have to offer depositors an interest rate (or other value-add, such as competitive services) that makes it worth their while to trust the bank with their deposits. A bank that makes very conservative investments/loans can only offer a low interest rate to depositors, because they earn less profit on the spread, but their depositors will accept it because of the safety of the institution. A bank that makes speculative investments/loans can offer a high interest rate to depositors, because they earn enough to offer it, and they'll need to, to attract depositors away from the safer conservative institutions.

A bank that can offer a government-backed guarantee to depositors can offer a low interest rate while making big profits, and pay big dividends to their shareholders and executives, steal market share from their conservative competitors while making themselves more systemically essential in the process, and leave the public on the hook if they fail.
They should claw back SVB CEO pay and televise the moment the funds move. Show the CEOs number going down and some other public number going up. Bonus points if his face is televised at that moment at well

That's all that's really necessary in terms of handling moral hazard and public perception that this is yet another bailout. Let ppl see the CEO suffer and they will be fine with having taxes foot the bailout bill. It's sad but a spectacle is necessary here.
Seriously, I really wished this were an inflammatory hippie talking point but unfortunately it isn't: the truth is that for saving the rich, the whole system moves. When the financial world is at risk, there is never ever a lack of money for bailing it out.

Now on the other side, the federal govenment has no money for paying its own employees decently: https://www.govtech.com/em/preparedness/low-pay-high-risk-le...

I'm not even american, but it looks like it's like that everywhere.
JetBlue merger with Spirit not cleared for takeoff – Justice Department sues
Silvergate is tiny (assets-wise) compared to SVB and Signature and not worth a mention as it poses no systemic risk.
So bailouts again....
Large banks have different rules and are scrutinized more carefully.
I would argue that power users can also be fluid thinkers and be able to adapt to changes... But I've been proved wrong about this over and over and over. I agree that there are a whole lot of changes in Windows 11 and the upcoming Windows next preview that will ruffle the feathers of a lot of users who are slow to update their operating systems and update their habits. Only thing that I could suggest is don't disable any of your analytics hopefully send Microsoft a good signal with different usage patterns so they go back and make things the way they used to be or at least have options.

I'm an insider right now on the canary branch of windows and have been an insider testing the bleeding edge versions of Windows 10 before the windows 11 transition and windows 11 when it finally came out and I feel your pain... But also I've gone back to use Windows 10 on other computers that I have and it feels like an old operating system to me now so my brain is completely changed and has adapted to Windows 11 at this point.

Edit: my brain is so broken and has so accepted Windows 11 at this point that I even formatted my steam deck and installed the latest Canary build of Windows on it and am greatly enjoying it.

Edit edit: the amount of things that have changed and become inconsistent in the UI of Windows 11 is offset for me by the amount of things that are more compatible even when it comes to older software. Everything just kind of runs better when you have a system that just works with Windows 11 really well. I dunno
Because it's actually not faster to do it with appliance?
SVB was offering higher returns by taking on more risk than was required. Those customers now lost nothing. The rest of us who went with safer banks offering market rate returns not only received less over that duration, but we have to pickup their tab.

Why should I or a bank ever do diligence again? I can just claim I misjudged the risk.
VC's and YC have burned a lot of credibility overnight with their tech employees during this mask-off moment. I wouldn't be surprised if this forum harbors long term resentment, lack of respect, and a more adversarial relationship going forward. I haven't ever seen such a large lack of respect for them as the past couple days. This industry has gone full Wall St. The next generation of individualist, regulation-disruption startup founders will be reconsidering the YC club a bit more...
The problem in this particular case is they already sold those treasury bonds, at a loss. But yeah, it would be ridiculous for a bank to go bankrupt because it bought it's own government bonds.
Peril Lisp