skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Aren't they telling their customers to cancel transfers into SVB?

(seems like the flow of funds is customer bank -> SVB -> [maybe more] -> payroll payees)

Seems likely enough that those transfers will fail to clear in a couple days, not bad to get ahead of that if possible.
Classically, it’s a liquidity issue if the market value of your bonds goes down because rates went up, causing the discounted present value of the future maturity payout to decrease. It’s a solvency issue if the market value of your bonds went down because your borrowers turned into smoldering craters and they will not ever pay you back 100 cents on the dollar.

Really it is not so obvious to discern between them at the moment that the crisis is at its worst.
My point precisely
Matt Levine reports that the reason they had to buy those low-yield investments that plummeted is because it’s tech-sector customers had too much money in the boom times. Too much deposits means they need to buy a lot of something, and in the boom times that was low-yield stuff.
> The campaign was driven by poor fear and just utter nonsense.

Our geopolitical rivals latched onto the green movement and actively spread this fear.

We can't characterize this as just fear and nonsense. It was a state sponsored campaign to turn us against our own best interests. And it worked.
The bank failed. It's worth $0 now.
Yeah, but have you read "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom"?
> in 55 failures since IndyMac of banks with total deposits over $1 billion, uninsured deposits were fully protected against any loss. The largest failure, Colonial Bank, had $20 billion of deposits, including an estimated $4.4 billion of uninsured deposits.

https://www.cato.org/commentary/fdic-invents-costly-solution...
> They corrupt everything.

More accurately, their own corruption exposed the corruption already present in others. It just needed the right opportunity to hatch. Live for money, die by money.

(Generally speaking, it's quite common for most of us to think highly of ourselves and our moral character ("I'm a good person. I'm not Hitler!"), but under the right circumstances, many (but not all) of us would discover the flaws in our own hearts. A routine examination of conscience, and refinement or correction of defects in the conscience, is enormously helpful and essential to leading a life of moral excellence and virtue.)
Show HN: Linktree, but It's a Receipt
Threw this together this afternoon after discovering the font. Probably been done before, but thought I'd share!
The main issue is no longer tech.

It’s whether or not they have HTM assets that will bring them under if they have a run on the bank. A lot of the depositors are rich Silicon Valley residents and they may get spooked and pull their money. That’s the issue in this phase of the contagion.
I have fixed this exact typo before. The visual similarity is annoying.

https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/commit/1f4835129630f12008d...
The ranches and farms would not disappear but would become owned by stronger managers. Yes, let them go bankrupt.
Thank god, a single source of good news is better than none. Does anyone have an aggregate view of the LCR / NSFR metrics across U.S. banks? I'd love to see the risk trend here at a wider scale than single bank disclosures like this one.

Why? Because I'm really nervous that SVB was in no unique situation -- after all VCs / Startups share a lot of low confidence and low cash traits in common with other investors.
True, but we also have the UN charter, which is also worth fuck all
Another async framework might give smaller binaries, important for Linux routers and things.
It matters because recent underperformance in the sector led to the initial deposit outflows in the first place. If you’re concentrated heavily in a single sector, you’re likely to see higher correlations in the behavior of your depositors.
Right, so they aren’t guaranteed to get the money back, but SVB had large assets (likely enough to cover all deposits).
https://portal.ct.gov/DOB/Consumer/Consumer-Education/ABCs-o...
They did a terrible job after the Euro sovereign debt crisis passed, so let's say after 2014, and they did a terrible job starting mid-2021, after vaccines and opening up. Always too slow to raise rates and stop financial froth that was obvious to everyone.

The first half of stopping a panic is always easy if you're the Fed with the exorbitant privilege to print money with virtually no immediate ill effects. The second half is the hard part and they've failed 11 times out of 10.
This is why I come here, thank you for the response.
(slow clap)
Maybe not 10%, but I don't think we will see deflation anytime soon so cash will always lose value. Sometimes faster sometimes slower.

Capital needs somewhere to go as long as money keeps being printed. If there is more capital than profitable investment opportunities, it will flow into housing.

As a thought experiment to illustrate the point, imagine a world where there are no investment opportunities and the only place to store value is cash or housing.
In this case, housing prices will continue to climb because money keeps being accumulated and there is no place to put it.

Of course this is a hyperbolic example, but I think our world is moving closer towards it as truly valuable Investments dry up. Certainly in the short term, and possibly in the longer term as well
MBS is a critical part of the american economy. You wouldn’t be able to buy a house without it.
Woah, keizo! Great to hear from you. Man that 20 years snuck up on me quick, I just might have to try to make it home.
>Grazing fields aren't really growing crops.

Right, they grow food for animals, which walk around the field and graze on it autonomously. Hey, I wonder if that's why they're called that... :)

I'm not really sure what the point is in making this observation. Just a "farmer vs rancher" thing, or something deeper?

>I can't see any good way to harvest a field with solar panels

See above.
Create content, bet on yourself and win a money from losers
Show HN: ReplGPT.jl, a ChatGPT shell mode for Julia
OK, cool. Thx for the all the inputs. If I get any where with it, it’ll hopefully pop up in HN. I know it may be a fools’ errand, but I’m always willing to step up to the plate… :)
There’s definitely going to be some major fallout from this. I don’t think SVB will be bought, and depositors certainly are not going to be made whole anytime soon. Why?

Well check out SVBs most recent 10-Q. Everyone knows they had $90B in MBS but most people haven’t commented on the fact that they also had $70B in loans as part of their assets. Normally loans are considered pretty safe assets, but as others have commented a good part of these loans are to the same depositors (startups) that SVB owes money to. Additionally SVB lent money to founders to buy homes, cars, etc. Hopefully you can see where this is going now… The real question is going to be how much if any of those loans SVB can recover to cover their deposits. This could mean calling in all kinds of credit instruments from startups that are ill prepared to suddenly pay them back.

Unless the loans are forgiven, in addition to making the depositors whole, SVB will still take a whole bunch of startups down with it. Those companies vendors will feel the hit too. It may take some time for the full repercussions to be felt but this is going to be a big deal.

Also, for those of you who didn’t live through 2008, there were plenty of people who assured everyone that everything was OK right until the music stopped.
More like a 10% haircut given some of the losses they took on recent security liquidations.
And here we go on the aphantasia / does everyone have an inner monologue / can you make your ears rumble / do you sit or stand when pooping train. :P
I'd also like to point out that VCs were telling all their portfolio companies "Pack it in and conserve cash as you're not getting another round." That caused a lot of companies that would otherwise have put their cash into an investment vehicle to instead hold it in their accounts.

It will also be interesting to see if someone is going to wind up in jail for initiating the bank run. Someone shared confidential info that started this whole thing.
The obvious consequence of defaulting in your debt is that it becomes difficult to go to the capital markets in the future if you need to.

Probably more politically disastrous is that if the debt is denominated in the domestic currency, it’s likely that a substantial portion of the bond holders are domestic and they will not be happy about having their wealth confiscated.
Does YC hire a lobbyist?
i'd say that's a high chance, and maybe finding a way to "maximize" on that chance is a good strategy
Read Matt Levine’s column from today. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-03-10/startu...

The tech sector isn’t an issue in itself, it’s that (1) all their deposits all came in at once because it’s one sector, so there was a huge demand surge for deposit interest, leading to a supply shortfall of loans they could issue and hence kinda desperately parking the money somewhere, which ended up putting their risk balance off kilter (bonds with interest rate risk); (2) all of their depositors (aka creditors) talk to each other and listen to the same people, so bank runs happen really fast. Compare this to First Republic bank: demand for deposit interest does not surge dramatically because there is finite liquid cash needing to be deposited and so one sector getting a cash infusion comes at the cost of another. It smoothes out. Plus their customers don’t all talk to each other and behave like worst-case bank runners.

All sectors are pretty highly correlated in the cash they have on hand and how they behave with it. It would be equally risky to be a bank that only deals with oil companies. Nevertheless it offers efficiencies for acquiring new customers and new business, so banks do it.
It'll be a haircut (my uninformed bet is ~10% loss), but definitely not zero.
> Unless, of course, this predicted white knight never appears because lots of other banks are secretly in similarly shaky positions where they are also holding lots of long-term Treasuries or MBS that are in some respects extremely safe but which also pay only 0-1% over 5-10 years, and those “assets” would need to be fire-sold at 65% of face value if the bank ever needed cash quickly…

Just by coincidence Wells Fargo is having "technical glitches" affecting account balances the exact same day this happens.
It’s completely rational behavior albeit immoral.
Right, that bit all makes sense. What was less clear to me (though sibling comments have since clarified) is why the depositor sector matters.
The tech sector has been withdrawing money in aggregate (because they continue paying payroll and rent but haven't been raising as much money recently) which increases liquidity pressure, and furthermore tech depositors are more skittish due to experience with FTX and thus prone to panic bank runs. They also have larger average account sizes, way beyond FDIC limits, which makes them more likely to need to withdraw money to protect their cash.

SVB did have some issues with losses but they likely were still solvent; the bigger issue was just a lack of liquidity and a sudden bank run - 45 billion (out of ~175 billion in deposits) was withdrawn in a single day before they ran out of liquidity.
(I hope this comment doesn’t age poorly.)

Lessons were learned following the 2008 financial crisis to sure up major banking risk exposure. Dodd Frank act was reversed a little but there are regulations and stress test simulations to improve banking system resilience if there is a cash or credit shortage. Who knows how valid some of the assumptions changes in these marginally higher interest rate times but we cannot be in pre-2008 credit swap nonsense.

SVB represents $200B assets and the customers are in large part revenue negative or growing startups. That doesn’t make it Ok but it cannot be representative of the greater economy. I’m sure fintech in personal banking, credit, and mortgages is far more popular than it was in the 2000’s but it by and large does not represent a majority or even large minority of retail banking.

My hope is there isn’t some sneaky financial engineering marvel in large corporate debt that this fringe instability snowballs and we find out we’re back in a state where the market is propped up by sketchy extrapolations of value estimates.

But I don’t think a bank run by a bunch of VCs or startups is a picture of the greater economic engine.
I would be curious if there are that many frontend people that don't use a debugger. You mostly have to open devtools in the browser anyway, and it has an unquestionably sophisticated set of debugging capabilities
> Any financial advisor who recommended to these startups that they should keep >250k in a regular bank account should be fired.

Looks like not just startups, e.g. Roku had ~500M in SVB

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/03/10/business/roku-svb-cash/in...
Tucker Carlson knew the NSA hacked his Signal messages after planning to Russia
Great comment. Since it sounds like your jam, do you have any suggestions for reading on logging best practices in this context?
> How do you find time for everything in life?

I don't. I have to prioritize what is most important, and let the other stuff drop.

Such is life.
okay... and something needs to be able to decode the text sent to it over the serial port. All the bugs pointed out in the article also happen if you use the serial port console
They worry about banks because they are a bank. If it weren't for government oversight they'd be a private bank.
Look up ssh -sk keys. OpenSSH has been supporting FIDO2 secured keys for quite a while now. You're specifically looking for "resident" keys.
The Tablet article you link to engages in a regrettably common misconception of what Marcuse was actually up to with his Repressive Tolerance. The point there was not to defend society against anything ideologically problematic, but merely to push the very notion and social norm of a "managed", fad-driven discourse to its breaking point. That's why it was proposed to favor the most strongly censored and unfashionable ideas at any given time and strive to platform them everywhere, even irrespective of their actual merits. It's quite simply a "chaos monkey" approach to the whole problem of what we now call communication 'filter bubbles' and 'echo chambers'-- or pretty much the trollish 4chan model under a different name. It's really sad that more people don't give Herbert Marcuse the credit he is due for that whole idea.

Anyway, the broader point is that Zubatov is not taking a very nuanced view of the historical Frankfurt School here, and critically he's missing their loosely socially-conservative leanings - something that scholars seem to broadly agree on, and a key reason to dismiss purported links between the School and what often passes today as "radical" or sometimes as "socially progressive" thought.
A simple point class looks like this:

class Point {
has [qw/x y/] => ( default => sub { 0 } );

sub clear ($self) {
$self->@{ 'x', 'y' } = ( 0, 0 );
}
}

What?
No it isn't? Not having access to enough quickly enough is a liquidity crisis; not having enough even when it is all liquidated is insolvency.
>Do you suggest that in order to support Widevine, a distro (Alpine) should also build Chromium, Firefox and co also with glibc instead of the default (musl), or provide two varaints?

Yes, absolutely.

I'm not suggesting that it's a good thing that this is needed.

But I do suggest that it needs to be done.

Will, in the sense that, otherwise, people running Alpine will have to say "OK, as it is, we can forget Widevine and Netflix/Spotify" and leave it at that.

That said, since this is something many Alpine users will want, I'd expect to be some known "semi-official" or "reputable third party" build for this, not just "some random Chromium found on the Internet".

If not, personally I'd skip Alpine.

>Even when they have a Chromium with musl as libc working perfectly fine, except no proprietary DRM support?

Well, even then, since this doesn't change the fact that Widevine and thus Spotify/Netflix wont work.
This is super useful, but the font betrays that usefulness. The "fun" font is reasonable for titles but for the content, I would stick with a readable sans-serif font, or a monospace for code snippets.

I don't mean to be negative, but that is an impediment to me using it
We used to keep all our operating capital in a different bank, but then we did a venture debt deal to bring some AR cash forward, and the terms placed on us by the venture debt lender required us to move all our money to SVB, where they already had systems & experience in being able to monitor the accounts.

The irony is, if this doesn’t resolve itself relatively soon, we won’t be able to pay down the loan precisely _and only_ because of the terms of the loan that they set in the first place.

I don’t know yet how it’s all going to shake out, but I’m pretty excited to have the experience of trying to navigate through all of it.
https://archive.is/MsGnj
And what do you think the relevance of that is, exactly?
The best parachute in the world won't help you if you open it when you're ten feet from smashing into the ground.
At Google scale, you don't just find edge cases, you find every edge case. I miss the days when Google actually bothered to support them, though.
Hopefully the panic will not spread. Multiple people were calling me to ask whether they should get their money out of their bank.

But keep in mind that people also went through a pandemic, where panic was the go-to option.
A lot of words in those tweets were reminiscent of 2008. To me, it sounds like SVB was possibly giving away sub prime adjustable rate loans to startups.
No, there is a substantial difference between the two.

GP says that Rippling did not delay payouts. In fact, the payouts went out in time - they were delayed in transit, outside of Rippling's control, and Rippling immediately made another payout through a different bank.

The headline suggests that there were issues at Rippling, which meant that the payouts did not go out in time. That is a completely different scenario, so the headline would indeed be inaccurate.
> Assuming the markets are rational ;)

I mean, they are on a long enough timeline, but they tend to be able to stay irrational longer than you can remain liquid.
Why are banks even allowed to buy assets?

Every asset is a risk. Banks should have right to do exactly two things. Keep their customers saving and issue loans. There's plenty of risks even in that activity. Every other thing bank does is just piling up risk to unreasonable levels.
How does that follow? The guy probably cashes out that amount every quarter. So when there is an event like this of course you will find he cashed out what to us little people is a huge amount of money.

If it's a one-off then yea it's suspicious.
This is cool. I am building https://quizgenai.com/ (under construction) which uses ChatGPT to generate Quiz. Exporting to Anki would be cool. Imagine just highlighting a piece of text on the web and sending a generated flashcard right into your Anki deck :)
> The investment portfolio is less than 15% of total bank assets. Of this, less than 2% of total bank assets is categorized as available for sale.

Is 2% good or bad?
Coding font would be helpful
I know 7 from list 1..10 and 2 from list 11..20
What a great judge.

They have crystallized all the issues with this bullshit in a really straightforward, yet persuasive and hilarious way.
> “Braun described GPT-4 as a game changer for the artificial intelligence sector, since the language model will take another step to get closer to the capacity of human interpretation. Obviously, he still has a long way to go to match it.”

He?

It?

(If this was generated with GPT-3, I assume it would have known the name of its main investor’s CEO, Saya Nadella.)
I have never been prouder to have become a Canadian citizen.
I'm sorry buddy, but this is no longer about tech or bonds. This is more about whether you can survive a withdrawal storm. This is more about whether someone will back you up with credibility.
Old news, I'm already on GPT-6.
The big concern is the contagion spreading. All banks are vulnerable to failure if deposits are taken out quickly, especially in this market where assets have taken a huge hit over the last 12 months.

FRB wants people to believe the contagion is limited to tech and that they have limited exposure to it, so that folks don’t take deposits out en masse. If people start to think that it’s unstable, then they’ll take money out and it’ll be a death spiral like SVB.
Any organization of that size will have inertia and the damage was already done by the time they got there.
There was a domino effect, but a number of banks had the same root problem -- MBS held on their books at higher than their true value. Bear Stearns just happened to have a whole lot of the worst MBS, so it went down first.

In this case, a number of banks are holding a lot of long-term debt as "hold til maturity", so they're not recognizing on their books that it has lost value due to rising interest rates.
I still disagree. It's just not that hard. I can explain by comparing it to art.

Artistry is hard and artistry is basically the same thing as design but harder.

Let's take something like say painting. Painting requires a lot of skill. Why? Two reasons. The sheer amount of ways to compose paint into a painting is astronomical. Much much much More then the amount of atoms in the universe. The amount of these paintings that would be considered "art" is also astronomical in number but the ratio of art to all possible paintings is minuscule in number and can basically be rounded to zero. This ratio and the actual huge numbers plugged into the ratio illustrate how hard artistry is.

How about building art or designs with legos? Suddenly it's easier. Why? Because the number of ways legos can be composed in a limited space is much smaller then the ways you can compose paint on a canvas. This is because lego Blocks have specific rules. Two lego blocks have a countable number of ways they can be composed, two brush strokes can be positioned with enough variation that composition is more or less infinite. This is why designing something in legos is EASIER than painting. In fact this is the part where the word "artistry" starts to transition to "design". In legos it can be said you are "designing" a structure. Basically when the skill involved with the creative endeavor becomes significantly easier we tend to transition from artistry to the word "design". It's not a hard rule but definitely a generality that exists.

I look at these constructs made by a "lego artist" and I know I can ALSO make those big constructs if I had the will and time to do it. It's a feat of enduring tedium and not much skill. But the mona lisa in oil paints? you need skill to render that.

Do you see where I'm going here? What's system design if not putting together lego like primitives? It's trivial. The only thing you need here is knowledge about how the primitives work and how they compose. That's really the only challenge.

Heck you can even write a program that has all possible "boxes" as primitives with the right composition rules and just brute force evolve a design through random compositions. Each design has what? at most 40 primitives in a typical design? Maybe 200 total primitives? Let's make it 10,000 total system design primitives just to be excessively generous. Even at that number, system design is easy enough that it's a candidate for genetic programming.

Do you think such a thing can be accomplished with pixels? Randomly generate a square of 1000x1000 color pixels until you get something that looks legit? Running it at 5000 generations per second you probably won't get anything legit before the sun goes super nova. You'll need to switch out of random walk to machine learning to get anything artistic.
https://archive.org/donate