skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exactly. I think given the choice of having a free experience with ads vs the subscription model, the majority of people would pick the former.

This model won because this model works best. The hardest part is getting users, and as you say, ad-model is low friction. Most people won't subscribe to thousands or random small sites.
>They'll avoid saying anything that could harm profits.

I'm on mobile so won't respond as well as I'd like to. But 1000000% this is why I'm vehemently against advertisements as a primary model of income.

Want money? Ask for donations or sell your content. Nobody pays you? You aren't worth being paid in the eyes of the public. It's your job to convince the public that you are worth paying!

All of my favorite websites and content creators are 100% funded by donations from supporters. It works because the value is high enough to be worth paying for. If the donations ever stop rolling in that speaks more about the quality - it stopped being worth financially supporting.
ABC: Always Be Closing
You’re missing the point. This isn’t a marketing piece. JPM doesn’t need to compare themselves to SVB for any reason, that’s like comparing David and Goliath. What’s purpose would that accomplish?
> it also turned out that quite a lot of employees (public sector might be very different than tech) got very lonely while working from home every day.

There’s your answer, demoralized employees are unproductive.
It wasn't risky as long as prime rate stayed super low.

But that rate has been creeping up for months now.

SVB was too small to qualify for risk assessment under the revised banking rules. So they could get away with money in volatile securities that were very interest rate sensitive.

That said, SVB seemed very solid until Thursday morning.
Usually referred to as ‘chicken head’ knobs.
It's also a bad idea imo.

This situation isn't a handful of big individuals losing some of their money and the majority being insured under FDIC, the bank's customers is mostly small and medium businesses which have lost all of their money.

I hate bailouts and think we should allow more failure but it would be a horrendously bad idea to let a bunch of businesses fail under no fault of their own.

They'd likely be looking at multiple tens of thousands of unemployed individuals near instantaneously along with accelerated layoffs at unaffected businesses as clients disappear overnight / businesses get spooked.
Does any one knows if VCs have contracts with startups where they have to deposit X amount weekly or monthly? Now if they can't because of the SVB debacle, can the startups sue them? This would put these VCs in even worse situation - not only they could be out of their money deposited at the bank but now they owe even more money to the startups.
if everyone exercised their right to not render ads, this problem wouldnt exist...
Wasn't the risk 'betting hard that interest rates wouldn't rise for a decade' in 2021?
Because their "knowledge" usually consists of a drop of actual knowledge in a barrel full of ego.
It’s not about “billionaires” (who don’t keep billions of cash sitting in one bank) but the company with a few million that needs to make payroll and pay vendors.

SVB is in receivership where depositors place very highly. Banking policy is not just about insurance. That’s just one tool.
This literally sounds like something out of a cyberpunk dystopia novel
To be honest, the analysis of recent days show that the public information was there from Q3 on. So Thiel could just have hired financials with a tad more professionalism than SVB. Even the plain reported story is plausible. Don’t use a bank ever again if they do not make their SLA. Pretty simple reasoning and risk management can save you a lot of hassle.
With the 4bit quantization they needed to make it is like a jpeg with only 16 pixels per "thought" parameter.

It's going to perform like a brilliant person with brain injury. 8 bit is far better and it would be interesting to see if they can get it working on any reasonable hardware.
Depending on the audience, I think the article is justified and gives a good overview. Just thinking of scientific papers, where sometimes you spend a full year carefully laying out the words. Being concise here helps improve legibility and is definitly worth the effort.
> I just don’t understand why folks on the internet are so passionate about the depositors being hit by this

The rest of America hates Silicon Valley like they hate Wall Street
Maybe a stupid question: if banks can collapse from a bank run, shouldn’t the entire model be questioned? A bank run is simply when a threshold number of customers decide to withdraw their cash, with every right to do so. With social media + frictionless mobile banking, the entire notion of teetering your model on mitigating the risk of a “bank run” seems anti-customer, regressive, and unsustainable.
Which sites are deceptive?
SVB had an unusually risky customer profile while taking (debatably) risky bets with deposits from said customers.
It's both, also it's a sign of how this industry is full of followers, once word got out Thiel fled the bank the run started and it was over within what 30 hours?
This sounds like a depressing solution.
If the document is free and isn’t legally mandated, it’s marketing.
The view strikes as hypocritical as Vivaldi itself is funded by advertising. You can not pay for Vivaldi browser.
> The Fed wants to enforce fractional reserve lending

Maybe the fraction should be made larger than 0%? Or maybe bailouts should come with more strings attached including actual penalties for executives and board members?
It’s called “moral hazard”.

Normally, depositors have to have confidence the bank they choosewill handle their money competently and responsibly.

With unlimited insurance, depositors will simply choose the bank that offers the best terms.

Banks need depositor, so they will respond to what depositors want. In the first case there is pressure to handle money competently and responsibility. In the second, there is pressure to take risks to be able to provide the best terms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard
the CTO of Starbucks stood on stage (pre-covid) in a small setting and told everyone "actually, we do not know how many people work at Starbucks right now" .. dramatic pause.. the explanation is that pending resignation, pending dismissal, no-show, hiring pipeline, even whole stores opening and closing.. means that the EXACT number is not known, but there is state.. and bounds to that state. It was a dramatic way to talk about the inherent difficulty of precise numbers in a very large and active enterprise.

So, relate that to the state of border control of an entire nation, and you get the idea..
I don’t think startups will have a harder time banking in the future.

This isn’t even the fault of startups. It’s a complete risk management mistake on the side of the bank. Buying 10 year low yield securities and not hedging them against rising rates.

Plenty of banks would love to have the deposits of startups and VCs.

I bet a bank like Mercury or some other ones will grow to take SVB’s place.
The whole reason we're having this discussion is that it appears to not be universal for anyone with more than the insured limit to split deposits over multiple accounts.

But there's also a big distinction between the working capital required for a business and the size of e.g. a personal savings account, which is kind of getting lost here.

If your payroll is $1M every month then it may not really be practical to split deposits across many accounts.
Given the massive outflows and impact on the bank, I wonder if there will be some clawback from the government here.
Then it sounds like both passwords and gdoc authorization links depend on security through obscurity, but people are less aware of that fact for the links.

There is a point here that the difference between access level grants is not clear enough and the urls should have a clearer demarcation of the level granted, (e.g. sheets.google.com/danger-allows-editing/{secureToken} or sheets.google.com/allows-viewing/{secureToken}.)
Apparently the offer from hedge funds gives them a substantial profit.
I was scootering through Venice CA and there was a small storefront. Very small. Less than 100 sq ft. I called and rent was $8500/mo.

I was watching a YouTube video on UpFlip about a guy with three coffee shops. Monthly revenues are around $80K for his main shop. His margin is less than 4%.
You think consumer banking is lightly regulated?

Or that VC should have their risk controls? Only conservative old school bankers should invest in startups? Or what exactly?
The point of it is to know way ahead of time who is coming to their shores, even at the cost of inconvenience. Quick online esta-style form, not too bad, you just have to remember to do it.
They’re doing what every bank has been doing: reassuring everyone that they’re not at risk.
Nothing different than what the US has at the moment and they’re ok
> When was the last time you went over their deposit base and asset allocation?

A few times but only for a short time and a small percentage of the capital. Was already a full grown adult in 2008, have good memory, and are still licking many old lion financial battle scars...
They were caught faking zoomed in photos of the moon on their phones with AI filling in details.
Which seems... Ridiculous. It provides "border security" in the way TSA provides airport security: By showing theater to make certain folks feel better. As far as the number of people: Flights have record of who is on them, and generally require a passport for international travel (even though there are open borders between EU countries). I've not taken a train internationally, but I'd imagine something similar exists there - or can exist, anyway.

It doesn't really cover folks driving (Which would make their numbers different), but I suppose there are less routes into the UK by car.
I can't speak for literally all businesses, but more or less everything a business publishes is marketing/PR. They fully control what they allow to be published, why wouldn't they make sure it paints them in a positive light wherever possible?
The images were generated by carbon and it's auto syntax selection must have defined the whole thing to be shell code. I'll fix it in next commit. Thanks pointing it out.
Same, and it was terrible. And I promise you it's not just a techie copping a "hurr hurr salepeople are awful amirite" attitude: most of the salespeople at this company were great folks and I enjoyed their company...in my free time, i.e. when I wasn't trying to concentrate on coding with them all talking at once.
This is not risk management failure by depositors.

Depositors can and should assume that regulations prevent banks from assuming outsize risk like this.

This is a policy failure of the regulators that oversee banks. Banks should not be allowed to have so little cash on hand, especially when we knew with high likelihood the fed would raise rates.
I do not think there is reasonable pushback on this. If a private company like JPM wants to do it, great!

The issue is with using government money to repay depositors beyond what they would otherwise get from the FDIC floor plus liquidation of SVB assets. I am not saying it should not be done (it probably should to avoid forcefully consolidating all banking at the big three), but that it should be a subject of hard questions and a serious discussion. My 2c.
For the record I like Thiel but I don't think it's controversial to say that he was a large catalyst in SVBs demise.

It was probably also a smart move to remove the funds, but I'm not sure it was sensible for someone with his level of influence to encourage a bank run. Even if you believe a bank run is likely telling people to withdrawal their funds doesn't solve the problem that some people will be too late. If you want to help you should try to ease nerves if anything.
Banks assume a lot of risk if they are overweight in any single sector. Having some startups is fine if it’s not a giant portion of your depositor base to the point that you have major sector risk.

I’m really glad ZeroTier used a boring old mainstream bank that didn’t specialize in any one sector. We looked at SVB. Bullet dodged.
Or did he have insider information that allowed him to act early?
> I don't care about endashes or emdashes. I've never seen them in business or personal writing, and I probably never will.

There’s an en dash in the first line of text on apple.com right now. There are en dashes, em dashes, and hyphens in the most recent press release on that site, all used correctly.
I like it. Confusionism. Like some sort of anti-confucianism.

There is no order, only confusion.
Speaking of being evil, even (especially?) Android is out of the question at this point :

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems#Schrems_I (2015)

> Under EU law, data-sharing with countries deemed to have lower privacy standards, including the US, are prohibited.

When Android still has a Play Store and non-AOSP versions of it require access to Google services, not to mention that it's all likely to be backdoored for the benefit of the US intelligence agencies (which is the assumption this decision starts from), then effectively the Android Privacy Sandbox is unlikely to make Android legal again in the EU ?
I highly doubt that JP Morgan will buy SVB's assets at above-market prices.
Agreed that these neobanks aren't a wise choice, but I still think the VCs made the right call in advising their portfolio companies - they had a literal vested interest in their success, they had to do something, this eventually was going to happen.
New Blog with Jekyll and Minima
Open to feedback on my new personal website.
> Anything beyond the $250K per account would be money that they are not entitled to per US banking regulation.

It's my understanding that FDIC considers $250k the minimum they'll cover and they can (and have) cover(ed) higher through raised premiums to other banks.
That's exactly what I was advocating for. Clever of you to read between the lines like that.
Most depositor's money is insured by the government, so there is no reason people would panic withdrawal their money
If you have imagined an argument that is absurd, maybe that's more about what you're imagining than what people are thinking.

You could say absolutely the same thing about buying stocks. By your logic, nobody should be allowed to buy stocks because it's just too darned complicated.
Movie theaters are pretty much ad supported aren't they. From what I hear the payment we make doesn't cover the cost of the film, which is why you get about half an hour of ads and trailers before the film starts.
I'm confused how they don't have the accurate numbers. To enter the UK you need to go through Border Patrol, either via a automated gate (where they can count you) or via a person at a booth (where they can count you).

If you can't get accurate numbers from that, how would an online form change that?
Why do we fantasize about the apocalypse?
In particular for those inter-Europe cruise ships that do EU and non-EU countries, like the UK. I can imagine you need to get 2, 3, or more of these authorizations each with a fee from $7-30.
Here's a 2.8km/sec dust cloud from DART for comparison:

https://www.virtualtelescope.eu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads...
Their SVB Private subsidiary, which is an ordinary consumer bank (people deposit money, bank buys bonds and writes mortgages) is still in good shape and will probably be snapped up by a bigger bank in the next few dya.

For the shareholders of SVB, Patio11 of course says it best: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1634925745515692034

> The sacred duty of equity is to take losses before depositors.
Legally very easy, technically not so much.

The EU requires you to attend a meeting to submit biometric data when you initially register.
> "This is a bailout”. It would be if shareholders were to get their money back, which doesn’t seem likely. The government will use the bank assets to make customers, not owners, whole.

From the broader public's perception, you're splitting hairs. The gov - at taxpayer's expense - *are* ______ing* depositors with deposits over $250k. Depositors who are well aware of the limits of what's covered. Depositors with more advisors than most taxpayers have bank accounts.

Capable and well educated people made poor decisions. Why is The Nanny State the solution? Again??

* call it what you want, but it's special treatment of the very well to do.
Arguably, it came true with the Pentium Pro more than 20 years ago. Ever since then x86 processors have interpreted x86 instructions by translating them into multi-step sequences of microinstructions under software control. The microcode is basically a just-in-time translator with specialized hardware assists. (And it is very much under software control -- that's why the microcode needs periodic microcode patches to fix bugs.) The internal architecture today looks much more like a RISC/VLIW machine than a classical x86 processor.
This is a Khan Academy video discussing full reserve banking in contrast with the fractional reserve banking system we have today.

Historically it came into existence before fractional reserve, and while it has some disadvantages, one prominent advantage is that bank runs are impossible.

Converting to full reserve banking was proposed during the Great Depression.

I thought it would be topical and interesting to look at and discuss given current happenings in banking.
Re: movie theatres. We’re already on that road. 20 years ago I’d go to a move and see a few trailers. Now I have to sit through a bunch of ads, then trailers, and then finally we get to the movie I paid for.
I would imagine that larger balances would be accepted for a fee.

If the fractional reserve requirements were raised, banks would need the deposits in order to lend and they likely would welcome some larger balances.
An important stand out quote to me here: “ It’s fair to ask about the underwriting discipline of VC firms that put most of their liquidity in a single bank with this kind of risk profile“.

I really don’t understand why these firms didn’t use at least two banks for their deposits. Surely these tech firms have heard of single points of failure being problematic?
Bad business decisions have consequences I guess
There's no moral hazard if we pay out depositors and let the bank fail. The big "problem" in 2008 was that the bailed out banks were made whole with equity injections and then continued to grow. (Although the government did quite well on those investments).

SVB is dead. Shareholders are getting zero. The losses are not being socialized. But because we don't want a bank run on every regional bank, let's make depositors whole.
You forgot rent for that store by the breach.

You can sustain if your rent is low (low revenue, and low expense) or your location gets you heavy traffic or you serve a community that really wants your product—like a bar near a university. You don’t need the most ideal real estate next to the university, just within the community—(high revenue, high expense). So, to make money you need something that lowers your cost or increases your revenue.

That’s where survivorship bias clouds the picture and you drink your coffee, and not realize they guy owns the building. Haha
I'd posit that a fake view of nature is superior to the real view of many windows (that look out on alley's full of dumpsters, etc.). One study showed that looking at pictures of nature could be beneficial: https://www.sciencealert.com/just-looking-at-photos-of-natur...
To reassure their creditors.
Without the pedantry, things can devolve to violence. Panda bears with machine guns. Horrible stuff.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_%26_Leaves#Title
The solution in the article of creating an inner "courtyard" seems to me to be absolutely horrendous, from a livability perspective.

Imagine your only windows being into a tunnel 300 feet from the open sky. That's not actually a source of natural light. Sure, it's a possible source of ventilation. But really, this sounds like dystopian housing as opposed to anything someone would actually want to live in.

That being said, it does have a convincing argument for converting older, smaller footprint buildings.
This is exactly right. This has nothing to do with the startups using the bank
The first Kanban Board with AI assistant
Many were restricted by covenant with their investors to only use SVB.
> Depositors can and should assume that regulations prevent banks from assuming outsize risk like this

Small depositors, yes. Institutional depositors, no.

Not all banks are equal. SVB was borderline investment grade before it collapsed. Treasury advice strikes me as low-hanging fruit VCs could have guided their companies on. Instead, most universally recommended SVB because the priority was reducing friction, not risk.
First of all, even if the company you work for goes bankrupt, you're very likely to still receive your salary, as debts to workers are the highest priority in any bankruptcy case. So the risk to workers' livelihoods is being way overblown. Of course, if a substantial amount of your compensation was company stock, you may lose a lot on that, but that is par for the course with stock.

Second of all, the purpose of having a limit to FDIC insured deposits is to limit the government's liability in case of bank failures to small-ish depositors. A company thag has millions of dollars to deposit also has more responsibility to evaluate the bank they are depositing in. Perhaps they shouldn't keep money in the bank in the first place, but find other uses for them.

Note that the true FDIC insurance limit is much larger than the 250k that usually gets cited - since there are various facilities for business accounts which can take that up to a million $ or more (multiple signers on the same account, multiple types of accounts). Should be plenty for most startups to pay their employees' salary outright, even without going bankrupt.
Seems that in order to secure insured funds from SVB tomorrow, each company will need to file a claim today.

We created a how-to #guidde for everyone to use
The probability of being hit by a pandemic originated on a different country is proportional to the number of travelers moving in and out of the country (each one with a small probability of carrying the virus). Put the same amount of people visiting Swedden without any mask and the result would had been very different so "our plan: good and the other's: bad" is just too simplistic.

The variable excess deaths in a country depends also of how much people lives there. To have 100000 people killed by Covid is a different situation if your population is 9 millions or 60 millions. If millions of people visit a touristic location you will unavoidably have an increase in the people that died there just by accident. And accidents happen more often when there is alcohol and party involved. If a German died by heart attack while sunbathing in Marseille or another English commit balconing after drinking booze for all day in Valencia; those will be computed in the list of France/Spain deaths or is a +1 in the Germany/UK excess death?. Is unclear here. There was a lot of creative management of the info by everybody in the Covid years.

And there are a lot of other factors that must be taken in mind, like healthcare, but the main problem still is a question of trust. We don't have tools to verify if this data is real or not.
You you noticed the duplicate word?
It is important for banks to always have a balanced portfolio and regulations to force them to have it.

Otherwise, it’s weakness will soon be recognized by some billionaires, Thiel in this case, and they will take advantage of this weakness to become even richer.
I mean their risk here wasn’t exposure to startups but too many MBS in an env where the fed’s “risk free money” is better investment than the MBSes.

It wasn’t because of “Startups”.