skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Murray McMurray officially started his chicken business in 1917. He had always been interested in poultry as a young man and particularly enjoyed showing birds at the local and state fairs. He was in the banking business at this time and sold baby chicks through the bank to area farmers and hobbyists. When incubators became available he was able to purchase several small Buckeye incubators to hatch and sell his own stock. In 1919 he sent out his first catalog and price list and continued to carry on both the banking and the hatchery business. During the early stages of the depression his bank went broke. It was then he decided to go into the hatchery and mail order baby chick business full time.

https://www.mcmurrayhatchery.com/history.html

I was joking, but I didn't realize the tie between bank failures and one of the biggest names in poultry.
Silver Lake set to take over software company Qualtrics in $12.5B deal
Sure, and karma doesn't require hurting yourself either. I meant in the specific case we were discussing, in which harming yourself was already baked into the situation. I admit I could have been clearer initially and am sorry I spoke clumsily.
> And they did collect pennies in front of a train. Bought 10yr treasuries at historical lows.

> worst case 100% loss, best case 1000%

See I don't understand how you can have 1000% return by buying treasuries, at any time. It was a stupid decision in hind sight, but the best case is order of magnitudes below 1000% return.

And you've put these two things right next to each other, what am I missing?
> moral hazard that bailouts create.

The moral hazard that the GFC bailouts created mostly pertained to bailing out shareholders and executives, not bailing out depositors. Let's be careful to make this distinction.

There is some marginal added moral hazard from guaranteeing deposits, you are correct, but I believe this should be counteracted by regulation, executive compensation clawback laws, etc. We have learned from the Great Depression, the GFC, Diamond-Dybvig, that the systemic risk of bank runs isn't worth the marginal reduction in moral hazard from not guaranteeing deposits. If you don't have trust and confidence among people (and businesses, not just the "rich" in the abstract) that their money is safe in a bank, then all you need is social media panic and you can cause a financial crisis for no reason. This is a risk especially now in the age of social media.

The $250k amount was implemented because they thought it was enough to stop these kind of bank runs. After what we saw with SVB, we need to update our model of reality. $250k was proven to not be enough.

Taxpayers won't pay for anything. If there are any losses, it'll be socialized amongst other banks. I don't see the issue. The alternative of risking more bank runs seems a lot worse.
Tell HN: Taipei Meetup
We have our 4th meetup on Monday, March 20th. 2 light talks on Zero Knowledge Proof (cryptography), in English.

A bit earlier (usually every 3 months) because the cryptographers happened to be in town, and we thought it could be a great topic for HNers.

RSVP here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/576753273567

Hope to see Taiwan's folks there!
Only if unemployment in the startup sector was a big problem and they were unionized.
A Spectator to Phase Change
"Perhaps some day soon I will feel moved to use of these tools as I write code of my own. For now, though, I am content to watch from the sidelines. You can learn a lot just by watching."
Just some context:
If the Iranian regime falls this is actually a good outcome, even if it has backing from western interests.

Having said that, up until now Western governments have largely ignored the plight of the Iranian people, leaving them to fend for themselves.

If this isn't fake news and the lithium deposit is real and then suddenly Western governments become interested in helping the Iranian people, it won't be because of some kind of altruism. It will be to get easier access to the resources.

It's still a good outcome, but if it happens I don't think it will have came from the good will of western governments.
It's not VCs or SMB owners obligation to keep propping up failing banks. Thiel here did his job properly by advising his companies to take care of their own fate.
Again - wrong. This is not a liquidity crisis. It's a solvency crisis. These banks have debts (i.e. deposits) that exceed their assets (the mbs and bonds that are now worth less than their hold to maturity value).
I am finding the number of people definitively defining terms with exceptionally high regional variance on this thread to be a little disturbing. Bike, scooter, e-scooter, moped, e-bike all mean different things in different contexts, different places, and different regions.
They'll probably get hit by the standard 90-day clawback in bankruptcy.
Yeah, but 10 year bills are way cheaper and you can apparently use their HTM value to shape your balance sheet. $80 spent for $100 on the paper (or whatever).

I’d suspect they were already marginal and this was their only way to keep the books sound until they could solve their deeper problems.
One of the other startup sounds I loved was that of Ubuntu 13.04+, I last used Ubuntu almost a decade ago but that sound is still stuck in my head
Sorry.. just saw this comment. It is not secretly as opposed to it might be planned at a director level.. but when it comes to actual engineers, it would not be necessarily efficient use of engineer's time. There is also lot of communication gap and trying to make build everything in 6 months what was scheduled for a year because of various release freezes.
Mine is generally the opposite. People retire and their work gets spread out among the next tier down. Bosses notice the work still gets done so the positions go unfilled.
Wishcasting
Taking an equity position in a failing company that needs a bailout is obviously dumb. You want equity in the ones that don't need bailouts, i.e. you want a social wealth fund.

We the people don't need equity to make money from companies growing, though; we have income taxes.
Thanks, that did fix it! (Controls working fine too!)
> tools that are actually meant to build rich GUIs (i.e. HTML/CSS/JS)

You had me until this part. If those 3 were meant to build rich GUIs we wouldn't have new JS frameworks and a load of bundling tools coming out every year. They were meant to give documents structure and style, that's it. We molded them into the monstrosity they are today.

The appeal is not that they're a pleasure making GUIs with, it's that you go through the nightmare once and it works everywhere, rather than going through 3 different nightmares.
And again, we as a society do not find destitution/poverty to be an acceptable outcome for the "crime" of simply banking.

You seem to not understand who would be effected by this the most. It's not the people with vacation homes, it's their employees.
Job of the risk team is to be skeptical, ask "but what if it's not?" and hedge against that possibility. If your job is to believe everything you hear without doing proper risk analysis, why should a bank pay you?
> It's not VCs or SMB owners obligation to keep propping up failing banks. Thiel here did his job properly by advising his companies to take care of their own fate.

He might've done his short term job properly, but there's a social contract he stepped on and the consequence of it is a lesser likelihood that ventures with his name on them (in any capacity. Advisor, investor, founder, whatever) will get favorable terms from lenders.

He and others who pushed for rapid exits are now a high risk for lenders, especially any lenders already evaluating their exposure to startups and VCs.
> a lot of time and money is spent

I guess on reflection my parent description is not quite right, but your comment brings up maybe the real distinction: if you were a true oligarch, you wouldn't have do that, you would just have government influence, or, at least have it 'quite easily' for some definition of easily.
This is exactly how crypto exchanges recover after hacks/losses. Interesting.
Huh? I just said people can’t see the future, right? If anything, you’re making the point for me.

In 2017, I was working on some stuff and traveling a bit. In 2023, I’m working on some stuff and traveling a bit. In 2028, we’ll see when we get there.
Yes, you have brought this up before.[0] And as I have said before[1] -- and will presumably say for the next 26 years as well -- I very much regret that quip. (The irony is that that was dredged up in part because people very strongly disagreed with my handling of the Noordhuis incident a decade ago.) But I will stand by my assertion that I have been outspoken about my disagreements with what I have found to be problematic in modern Silicon Valley, e.g. [2][3][4].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8958705

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9041086

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=px9OjW7GB0Q

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wtvQZijPzg

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzdVSMRu16g
Many investors like to have a board seat, which makes them an officer of the company
> leave our entire species behind

Leave us behind whom or what?

I agree with gp. It may not be LLMs, but we will certainly create a technology at some point that can't be openly shared due to existential danger, aka The Great Filter.

We can't just naively keep frolicking through the fields forever, can we?

We have to be able to at least agree on that, theoretically, right?
Investor Mark Suster says a “handful” of bad actors in VC destroyed SVB
Lower-middle-class thousandaires don't have $5,000 to donate to a single candidate, let alone hundreds of them. I am not sure how much money you need to be making to donate the maximum to a single politician, but I'm guessing it's in the low-to-mid-six figures before you can have a $5,000 donation as a reasonable budget item.
> [svb.com] 4.50% APY on deposits

Well, my accounts don't pay as much. Are you okay refunding the extra APY you get by having your bank takes more risks for the past years?
This is the part no one is explaining to me; what's the advantage of doing this over doing the right thing? So far it really looks like gross negligence rather than avarice.
Will changes to probably in the context that FDIC only has reserves of approximately ~1% of the total insured value.
As far as I can tell, the difference is in consumption/durability. They don't buy cars because they'd be hooked on the gas supply chain. But if you buy a solar panel, it's yours.

And the ship has sailed on lithium batteries -- cell phones are permitted in limited contexts.
Unless they have cameras at all the border roads between Northern Ireland and Ireland, there's no way to really know how many people are coming and going there.

Of course, if they're not sure exactly how many people are coming into the island of Great Britain, then that's plain incompetence.
Instead of creating a government policy based on "managing the decline" as they are doing, they should consider policies that will promote improvement.
>If those deposits are guaranteed by the government, and backstopped by the government, then there's absolutely no reason banks should be able to invest any of them.

>Revoke banks ability to invest deposits. They can't get to have the cake and eat it too. They could offer higher interest rates for non guaranteed accounts which bear risk, or zero risk for the already zero interest rates.

You are missing something crucial here - treasury bonds are a loan to the government - this is all by design.

Who will loan the government tens or hundreds of billions of dollars besides the banks? The [Fed/Treasury/FDIC] has no incentive to prevent banks from loaning customer deposits, because the Treasury needs banks to purchase government bonds
How many "lower-middle-class thosandaires" do you imagine donate the legal maximum to political campaigns? Even if it does happen it can't be with any significant percentage.
https://archive.is/9zBUq

See my comment here. They do the same "mistake".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35130119
It was $50bn, it was raised to $250bn in 2018.
Could've probably sold their low interest HTM for a far smaller hit but wound up holding the bag while feds absolutely spiked the rate.

The previous CRO probably saw the writing on the wall, I wonder if she* got shut down and decided to quit and watch the fireworks from outside.
Local Community Bank has free checking and few fees. Does Chase? That’s what they look at, not existential questions about the longevity of the bank.
This works in Nushell; it just needs parentheses:

ls | where modified > (date now) - 1hr
What is Temperature in NLP?
I'd think in an environment like that people would be using dodgy web-based file converters all the time because of the hassle required to install a converter locally.
If I thought the US government was going to fail I'd simply try to be the first to convert my dollars to a dense and valuable commodity, like gold, and then find another government to live under. It's not like people pulling out dollars have to keep their wealth in dollars.
You should look at Hisense Touch or Hisense hireader. It's a e-reader in smartphone form factor
4) Banks get their privileges revoked and they are no longer an oligopoly with privileges of being the only way to store dollars legally, and the only investment institutions who get to gamble their customers money while the government is insuring their loses but does nothing about their gains.

The Fed releases a digital dollar that you can bank without needing to be a part of this oligopoly. Banks are forced to give better terms to be attractive again, terms that will make up for the risk of the bank using your money. Deposits are no longer guaranteed because being in a bank is now a deliberate choice instead of something you're forced to do despite having money.

Banking is not competitive in any way. The small players are very risky to bank at. The big players get to be riskier because they are protected by the government.
> 1000% return by buying treasuries

by buying with leverage? What percentage returns do you think would maintain their business?
The most dangerous story that’s ever been told is happiness lies just beyond achievement. And you can spend your whole life following that story just to find that there really wasn’t a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Hmm...but the evidence suggests happiness increases with income, even above $500k/year for some people. Maybe not a pot of gold, but having more money can make life easier anyway.
I don’t see why you think that’s true - if infections are latent long enough to spread and it’s virulent enough, with a fatal outcome, it could rapidly wipe out most people. There’s no reason to believe a viral infection that mutates from an animal infection to human wouldn’t be both easily transmitted and highly lethal. It’s not a great evolutionary adaptation for the long term, but transitory effects can often be sub optimal and catastrophic.

COVID is a perfect example. It could easily have been significantly more lethal and it was very infectious in its first blush with humanity. What process other than luck prevented it from being both highly lethal and highly contagious rather than moderately lethal and highly contagious?

If you have a reference to a first semester immunology text that supports this supposition I’m very interested to read the justification. Otherwise this feels like a big of an appeal to authority.
Their point is that the value of equity is insignificant to the upper class, as compared to the value of the uninsured deposits.

IE the equity isn't enough to leverage political capital. The deposits are.
Interesting that so many people seem to want the bugs in these LLMs to be rebranded as features.
Memorization and plagiarism used to be undesired problems - to be worked on to get rid of them. Amazing job of PR here to try to reframe it as a benefit.
Bringing the Cotton Fragments to Life
Very cool! It sounds like you could have a career in software development if you wanted one.
An insolvent bank would eventually end up illiquid.

But an illiquid bank is not necessarily insolvent.

In this case, the bank is both illiquid and insolvent. In which case we should not blame the illiquid event because it is eventual as the bank was insolvent ever since the feds hiked rates.
The threshold was $50B until Trump and co raised it to $250B. I agree that lowering it back to $50B should be a priority.
Images are limited in required dimensions. You tweak some pixels and you’re done.

Language on the other hand… every word you say needs to be matched probabilistically with the next to make sense… imagine how many ways this reply alone could have been formulated :)
Well, Silvergate called the government and began unwinding. At some point, voluntarily starting the process makes sense instead of trying to hold on a little longer.
Nothing would ever happen if there wasn’t a deadline
> You think the depositors should be punished for...trusting SVB?

Yes.

> Do you expect every startup to run their own little hedge fund to manage their cash?

I expect them not to trust banks.
News broadcasts are filled with the "dumb and serious mistakes" of the common man. They're turned into pariah's.

Why a different standard for the rich?
these three are not widely used somehow,glib might be a better choice though.
How do you convert it to food?
> If this isn't fake news and the lithium deposit is real and then suddenly Western governments become interested in helping the Iranian people, it won't be because of some kind of altruism. It will be to get easier access to the resources.

s/ lithium / oil /

.. and now we're looking at the 1953 Iranian coup d'état in which the US and UK deposed a democratically elected government to prevent them poking into the details of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) and exposing the degree to which Western goverments were "helping" the Iranian people (err, sorry, themselves) with resource royalties.

That led to 25 years of despised western puppet government and an eventual overthrow that over compansated and lurched backwards into theocracy .. leading to today.
This is a significant simplification of the matter. I doubt it works in reality.

Replace the words "VC firm" with "Sequoia" in the previous statement and see if it rings true that Sequoia's reputation would be destroyed forever.
The comprehension thrown around in this thread is beautiful. Love the passion.
Coreboot and Libreboot are software projects that aim to replace proprietary firmware with a lightweight, open-source alternative. However, there are some differences between them:

Libreboot is a fork of Coreboot that does not allow non-free binaries or blobs. Coreboot gives you the option to include chunks or not when building.

Libreboot only supports a small number of devices, mostly older ones. Coreboot supports more devices, including some modern ones.

Libreboot does not keep track of Coreboot updates; its most recent release is from mid-2016. Coreboot is updated regularly.

Depending on your device and your preference for free software, you may choose either one. However, installing either one may be difficult for non-technical users.
>what's the advantage of doing this over doing the right thing? So far it really looks like gross negligence rather than avarice.

Yield chasing is equally gross negligence and avarice.

I'm not sure what you mean by "what's the advantage". What's the advantage of going 100% into Tesla stock call options, rather than an SP500 index fund? There is no advantage when Tesla is returning 4x the S&P. There's a rather large disadvantage when it drops 30% in a quarter.
Big, ongoing discussion of the original source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35127063
Your recitals are correct, yes. But this:

> the bank was insolvent long before that.

Well, not quite. Insolvency was achieved the moment of the bank run. Until then, the bank was fully solvent based on the value of its liquid assets, including stock, against whatever obligations they had at that point in time.

Once the bank run started, that's when withdrawals outpaced what they could fulfill through the sale of their liquid assets. Hence insolvency, and illiquidity very rapidly thereafter.

---

edit:

> as the bank was insolvent ever since the feds hiked rates.

This is less "not quite" and more "not at all" as it misunderstands what insolvency is - the inability to pay debts at maturity.
Agreed, though stopping excess is no easy feat
> The depositors didn't make the decision to turn deposits into low interest long term bonds, and hold it after interest rates have risen.

They lent their money to the bank. They are absolutely responsible.
The overall lack of editing made this blog post extremely hard to finish. Sorry, I realize it's an ESL poster. But feeling like I'm reading a lazy vomit-post on top of the fact that this is entirely a hustle-porn self-brag is too much narcissism at once.
Tell that to the nurses who have to work ungodly hours to keep the system going.
Of course they are...
The main reason "the cloud" exists is to log everything about it's users in every capacity possible. That's one reason they "provide it so cheap" (although now they have increased the cost so much it'sfar more expensive than self hosting. So you lose majorly in every way by not self hosting.
10 year bills are way cheaper because of the interest rate risk. You have to hold an unrealized/paper loss if rates move against you, but eventually you will realize the face value after 10 years.

This is why bond investors who aren't yield chasing would never overleverage into these.

At the _very_ least the fed announced interest rate rises in March of 2022 (with updates in June, Sept, Nov/Dec) and SVB could've worked out some kind of short-term credit deal with a JP Morgan type last year. Instead they did nothing but sat on assets which they knew would drop over 20% market value in a year while not ensuring short-term liquidity.
You want to get devastated ?

its finance is ruining and could be long, wait and watch a bit more carefully
The federal reserve purchasing securities at par is money printing/debasement, since those securities have lower fair market values.

The increased insurance on everyone else to cover actual losses to unsecured deposits is just a small tax on every other banking customer
I suppose the traditional 1950s-era simplistic high-school-textbook story is indeed that of scientific progress as originating with the Greeks who discovered mathematics, then stagnation until the European Renaissance applied mathematics to physics.

However, this has been pretty thoroughly debunked enough for many decades now. Almost anyone with any interest in the subject now knows about Indian and Arabic mathematicians of the European 'Dark Age' era, Mayan mathematics and astronomy, Chinese developments in math and science, even prehistoric technological developments which certainly depended on experiment and observation (copper ore smelting as likely discovered by potters, etc.).

It might be a little more interesting and informative to focus on a specific branch of science, such as plant breeding by farmers in the past up to scientists today. Another one of importance is the discovery of infectious disease and of the various approachs to treating infectious disease from ancient history (plant extracts etc.) up to the discovery of antibiotics and vaccines. Such specific examples offer better examples of history's quirks related to scientific progress (such as the effect of the rise of Lysenko to power in the Soviet Union with respect to plant breeding in the USSR, or that of the advocates of gain-of-function research in the United States and China with respect to the global Covid pandemic, and such other fun stories).