skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What one person considers optimal may not work for someone else. Optimal in the context of programmer productivity is a subjective measure or opinion, not a quality always improved for everyone by something like syntax highlighting.

I would venture that Russ Cox and Rob Pike (who dismissed syntax highlighting more strongly than Cox, calling it "juvenile") have demonstrated productivity far greater than the majority of programmers. I believe Linux Torvalds uses uemacs, which doesn't have syntax coloring. What other productive programmers use, or don't use, may not persuade anyone but I think such examples show that the relationship between syntax highlighting and actual programmer productivity may be weak, or more subjective than some people think.
I wonder why so many people are jumping in them. All making the same things. All making profile picture generators, or ai logo generators or whatever.

I wonder what the most common thing everyone is building with the open AI API?
> expect every startup to run

Yes

It is the most basic of business tenets to do risk assessment on strategic company decisions to reduce exposure to risk

I am sorry you are offended by the fact that I look down on you for your lack of business competence. I used to expect better of people managing hundreds of millions of usd in capital, but I guess not

It is due time for Silicon Valley to face some financial discipline
I would guess that these executives entered their sales months in advance as is relatively typical to avoid insider trading. You can look this up on the SEC website
What are you saying exactly? How much should spending have increased to account for inflation, population size, and population age distribution? Please give a specific number. Would that be a good use of limited resources?
Mark Cuban says he has $8-10M at SVB via his funded startups. Rich guy bailout to be paid by increased FDIC fees and reduced Fed 'earnings' paid to USA. Everyone is forced to pay so billionaire Mark Cuban gets his millions.
Are you just speaking from a position of not needing this chance when you were a teen?
They are using their media influence to "threaten" a bank run. Aka, if you don't bail us out, then we might as well take the whole system with us.
There’s so much victim blaming in this comments section. I’m amazed.
The UK's doctors and nurses are essentially slaves compared to their US counterparts. They make a quarter of the pay or less for equivalent work.

When your healthcare strategy is "just employ slaves so we can have free healthcare" of course people will die.
> when Britain's own young people were never going to do that work for the wages offered

Too true. I’m from Canada where we worry nurses will go south of the border, but was recently in London at an NHS hospital and was talking about this with a nurse. Pay for nurses in Canada is on par with a Jr Developer here. (Still low for the hours and effort required!) By comparison, nurses in the UK make about as much as an intern or admin assistant. After all, single payer means there isn’t much pressure to raise wages from other sectors, you’ve a monopoly on nursing so you can set the wages at whatever level keeps staffing adequate, which isn’t the same thing as paying a living wage…
Heh... they need to read Persian history and Chinese history to get a grip on how others perceive science and who came up with what. I know people of those extractions who often when in argument will argue which of their civilizations came up with what first and of course it's always "their own" that came up with something first.

I'm quite sure neither China nor Persia/Iran or India will care what anyone says, be they European or otherwise.
Wow, some people are really prescient: "And even if the company did run into trouble, there are good political reasons to think that depositors wouldn't be harmed: the people who donate the legal maximum to political campaigns are disproportionately likely to bank with Silicon Valley or work for companies that do."
The market cap of SVB on Friday was $6 B

The amount of uninsured deposits was $150 B

The value of all the stock is 4% of the amount of uninsured deposits
Google Reader shut down announced ten years ago today
"Putting your series A check into a fucking bank isn’t a risky financial strategy."

You still think that's true? Clearly it is a risk. And that risk can and should be managed. Even now!

There is no law that says the FDIC has to pay uninsured depositors of the next failed bank.

What if you banked with one of the last several failed banks that no one heard of or cared about?

You think no companies split their funds among several banks and short-term US treasury instruments?

Those companies didn't worry about closing this weekend.
Not true. Publicly talked about back in December and the author had a short position:

https://archive.is/dHmC4
Agreed, it's a thorny issue. My own subjective experience of lifting weights 3x per week vs. biking 5+ miles into work 5x a week is that the lifting was far more successful in helping me lose weight. Ideally, you do both. But I worry that many people, especially those in this industry, underestimate the weight loss gains from building muscle.
Even the “safe” parts of the US aren’t all that safe.

Ontario which includes Canada’s largest city and 38% of the population had a lower average murder rate between 2016 and 2020 than every single US state but New Hampshire. Quebec population 8.5 million is significantly lower.

These statistics aren’t completely equivalent due to various factors, but it’s close enough for reasonable comparisons.
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 are at best a innocent party with slightly less awareness.

If a drunk driver is doing 120 mph on a freeway and crashed into a normal motorist and sent him to the hospital. The right argument or response isn't that he should've seen it coming in the rare view mirror and moved a lane over.
When I worked at IBM circa ~2006 you'd get a written warning called a clean desk violation if you left your workstation unlocked.

I wrote a little daemon that'd l2ping my Nokia brick phone; if it didn't get a response for 30 seconds it'd invoke xscreensaver. Saved me a lot of paperwork.

I currently work at a Call of Duty studio. My favorite hacks ( not super high tech, but the ones that had the most impact for the least code, and the ones I feel I can talk about.. ):

* Put together a little box that polls varied knobs on a USB midi device to mangle the traffic going across its two interfaces. Allows for real time latency / jitter / packet loss testing https://twitter.com/ultrahax/status/1200902654882242562

* Studio LAN game browser didn't work across subnet boundaries ( studio is a couple of class B's ). Wrote a little daemon that'd take game discovery packets from one subnet, mangle the src addr, and send it on its merry way. Everyone can see everyone's games, happy producers.
Simpler answer: bail outs keep the stock afloat. Here the stock goes to $0.
Did you read the bit where he said his projects "aren't impressive" and that he has "no intrinsic talent" and that he's just "reflecting on what has and hasn't worked for me"?

Or click on "emotional management" and read "In keeping with the theme of the rest of this series, I don't claim to be very good at this or to have any deep or generalizable insight"?

Or where he says: "I've never had to maintain a codebase for more than 2 years. I've never been responsible for running a long-lived service. Any thing that I report having worked well for me has to be considered in that limited context."?
All countries that have gone through development started with bad conditions that got better, not just America. China is proof of that right now. You could just as easily condemn the people you would otherwise want to help to poverty instead.
How is a venture backed company with $40m in capital supposed to diversify? How are you supposed to manage a business with all your funds scattered across 100 bank accounts? How are you going to accept payments, manage user log ins, api credentials. There are significant practical operational and technical blockers that you are ignoring.
The next to last screenshot is a screenshot of Terminus! Right at the top left of the screenshot it's labeled, "Terminus".
There is a Mitch Hedberg joke about escalators that applies here.

Almost all e-bikes can, at the very least, be used without battery power. Some can even be essentially "de-electrified" if need be. The fail state for an e-bike is "slightly less convenient."
> now everyone will be scrutinizing every bank very heavily

Now no depositors should care to scrutinize anything because the Fed put is back in action. Chase the highest yield because the Fed is backstopping bank losses again.
> What would you think of a world where only one country has nukes (due to a monopoly on radioactive fuel, rather than a monopoly on knowledge)?

This is more like giving every individual on Earth the nuclear launch codes. It only takes one stupid or malicious person to press launch. Giving more people buttons is not how you avoid thermonuclear war.
Sure, but any given work could introduce such a use within the first few pages and the reader would be accustomed to it pretty quickly.
I'm not sold on ice baths, but maybe I'm wrong. Training certainly inflates that number. My own anecdata indicates that building muscle has been far more time-efficient for me than running or cycling. At least with respect to burning fat.
And also "people with bank accounts who don't make enough to pay taxes" like my grandma.
I'm really not sure why you think washing them with water is vital to make a solar installation worthwhile. Panels have been getting / are dirt cheap, efficiencies have been going up, and that trend will continue for a long time. If $ cost to wash is more than $ increase from cleaner panels, we won't wash them.
The NYTimes tweet also says federal officials closed a bank, when it was state officials who closed the bank. I don’t think the Biden administration is endorsing the NYTimes weekend social media person’s summary.

The article says the Treasury wanted to emphasize that this action is not a bailout.
why conflate "startups" with "VC"?
Warren* Mosler, one of yhe founders of Modern Monetary Theory. Lead author was Phil Armstrong, and he did a great discussiom of the paper on the MMT podcast.
What is the shortfall once all the assets of the bank are sold though? It's not like anyone is putting $150B into this to make sure those deposits are made whole.
matt levine article link https://archive.fo/cN3CD

that doesn't sound like anti-tech snark, it sounds like anti-vc snark, which you'll hear a lot of anywhere techy
Ok, that makes sense.

My question was more about mechanics of this. Do they plan to keep FDIC fund and grow it or maybe you wind it down and just assess “as needed”, since the other guy is now completely on the hook.
Once we’ve transitioned into the filling state, we can work as slowly as we want on moving dishes from the counter to the dishwasher, assured in the knowledge that the counter mountain is no longer growing, meaning it will eventually disappear with even the smallest amount of ongoing work.

Wouldn’t that depend on the difference between arrival rate and fill rate?
It looks like they may have done a little bit of lying. https://nongaap.substack.com/p/sivb-held-to-mortem-governanc...
My personal take - on the surface "cost cutting"; real answer "internal politics"

Dale (along with Rogers) opposed Jared Cohen and Sarah Robertson on their plan to repackage the MBS products, or maybe it was the specific method of repackaging, either way... After his exit interview and packing up his desk, he's talking to Emerson - he asks "who was it?... Robertson?" which clearly points to the internal politics.
Wait... So this bank failed because of a good old fashioned bank run? That's hilarious and awesome.
Except in this case the CEO sold a few million in stock weeks ago.
And yet finance is what has built the modern world and of human progress.
Most useful script I've ever written, and legitimately how I keep track of everything important in my life:

#! /bin/bash

function todo {
if [ $# -eq 0 ]
then
vim ~/Dropbox/todo/todo_list.txt
else
vim "$HOME/Dropbox/todo/todo_list_$1.txt"
fi
}

Sourcing this in my shell means I just have to type...

todo

To automatically get into my default todo list which is synced to dropbox (and thus accessible everywhere on mobile as well).

While, whenever I have a new project/etc come up, I can just

todo new_project_name

And get a new, nice clean file, with the same backups and multi-device accessibility.
> Why not use Plausible self hosted (it's open source and free)? "...but it's not actually free if you have to spend many hours setting it up and maintaining it"

Not really. For example I use Plausible self-hosted through Coolify (open source Heroku alternative) which has a one click add service feature, it has quite a few services including a full blown Nextcloud instance too I believe. It works well because it's all Docker.

I don't have to worry about it after the one click. It even auto updates.
> Maybe just because I'm used to shells/sed/awk/etc.

I suspect we’re both great at regexs. But scraping is brittle and trying to use it with object shells defeats the purposes.
technically she was only saying she wouldn't bail out investors tho
Making such laws would be a signal that the government sees bank deposits as something akin to tradable securities, where you are competing with your fellow depositors for some fixed value and must do so on a level playing field, and that's the exact opposite of what they want to convey. The illusion that every single customer can get their money out whenever they want regardless of anyone else's actions is the single thing keeping the entire system afloat.
My bad. I mixed up commenters on that last bit.

> Which I asked you to clarify as we never sought any financial advice. SVB was chosen because it was recommended to use for Startups.

Right. And what I'm saying is not that the bad advice was using SVB. Of course you can't predict which bank is going to fail. That's kinda my whole point.

When I said I thought you got some poor financial advice, I was assuming you had a financial person who put your money in this vulnerable position. Which I guess wasn't the product of poor advice but of getting no advice at all.
If we accept that the purpose of that FDIC insurance in the first place was to prevent bank runs. then, this "gift", is really the gift of stable, reliable banks. In general, this benefits us all.

What we see at these banks is that the large shareholders themselves have enough impact to cause a bank run, and they don't have the security of the FDIC to fall back on. So doesn't this show that the FDIC insurance was never enough to do what it was supposed to? What is being done here is breaking the game-theory payout structure that causes bank runs in the first place. It will prevent the same bank-run contagion individual investors are susceptible to from happening with larger investors. If we accept that the 250k insurance is worthwhile, then this seems good for the same reasons.

If your objection is that depositors were not paying to properly insure themselves, then you should be happy with what is happening--depositors will be forced to pay to insure themselves via the bank, and bank service prices will reflect the cost of being properly insured. Shouldn't we all have been paying the price of properly insured banks all along as consumers, anyway.

Isn't this a move in the right direction?
Bank deposits are outside the scope of the SEC which is where the usual rules against insider trading come from (selling shares, as mentioned in the article, would potentially be a crime). We (rightly) have laws against improperly profiting from inside information, but I'm not sure they would or should cover pulling your deposits, since deposits aren't meant to be investments that go up and down, they're meant to be reliably worth what they're worth.
Do you really think the owners and senior management of SVB ended up with nothing? What about the stock sales they made right before the FDIC took over, or the bonuses given out, or even their compensation during the years in which this high-risk interest rate scheme was going on?

They have orders of magnitude more money than most people, and will get away with no liability.
> The depositor didn't do anything wrong

They did if they deposited money above insured amounts.
As if that's why they got help? Come on. The risk of a domino effect of bank runs destroying the banking system, and thereby the economy, is why the government acted tonight. Remember that the Biden administration are not really big fans of the tech industry.
> Spite is hurting yourself to hurt someone else.

That is incorrect, spite is seeking the deliberate harm of another. It’s possible for spite to include hurting yourself to inflict it, but that’s not in any way necessary.
According to its official website, Textual lets you get a dynamic layout up and running in minutes and refine the UI by tweaking a few lines. It separates the application logic from the presentation layer, making it easier to maintain and test your code. Textual supports UI elements such as buttons, text boxes, and menus.
It's certainly a difference, but then it's like a mutual bank that's actually mutual. Given that there are 6,940 FDIC institutions and 6,815 U.S. credit unions (according to another poster), one should choose from the commodity that is banking institutions based on the services of the bank or credit union. I bank with two credit unions that are former aerospace employee credit unions; one of them gets most of my business because they offer a savings rate of 2.1%, the other one offers 3.0% on the first $500, and 0.5% on the rest. The second one has branches (or at least something that looks and smells like a branch, but doesn't touch cash), which was helpful during the pandemic when I couldn't get in for shared branching.

I really should move my savings to a commercial bank, where I can get 3.6%, but I haven't been inspired enough yet. Sure, the commercial bank may be making a profit, but they're giving their depositors more, and that's really what I'm looking for in a banking relationship.
What is cruel about wanting people to get paid a median wage via government benefits. How is this the new definition of cruel?
And in the case of company failure, perhaps the lookback period should be extended beyond several months. I don't have nearly the financial or legal knowledge to suggest viable policy, but from what we know of how SVB failed it would have likely been visible well in advance of the failure to someone with access to the requisite information.

Edit: Also, the CEO sold stock not even two weeks in advance
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-10/svb-chief...
This was news to me, but now I understand it (someone with more banking knowledge can correct me if I'm wrong): Securities held by a bank can be classified as either "Hold to Maturity" or "Available for Sale". HTM assets can not legally be hedged against interest rate risk. Reason for this is that if assets are actually held to maturity, there really isn't any interest rate risk.

https://viewpoint.pwc.com/dt/us/en/pwc/accounting_guides/der...

"The notion of hedging the interest rate risk in a security classified as held to maturity is inconsistent with the held-to-maturity classification under ASC 320, which requires the reporting entity to hold the security until maturity regardless of changes in market interest rates. For this reason, ASC 815-20-25-43(c)(2) indicates that interest rate risk may not be the hedged risk in a fair value hedge of held-to-maturity debt securities."
FWIW, bikes are built to be efficient means of moving. Biking 50 or 100 miles per week only burns 250-500 calories, so you wouldn’t expect much weight change.

That volume is good for keeping your body limber, but it’s not really exercise in terms of weight loss or cardio conditioning.
Insider trading laws should cover that, I expect jail.
that's custodial. it's different. cash/assets don't sit on the bank's balance sheet. they're in individual accounts, not usually lent out, and you pay a fee to keep there.
Reminds me of a similar hack I did recently. I wanted to book tickets for a show in Vegas, and for whatever reason the “ticket bundle” which included the show plus extras was about $20 cheaper than just the show on its own.

The only problem was selecting the bundle would automatically choose the seat (on the far side which weren’t good), skipping the seat selection modal.

I realized that if you had a seat in your cart, it would reserve it for 15 minutes and the bundle would pick the next available seat. Since I wanted central seats, I wrote a simple Puppeteer script which selected the bundle in multiple browser instances, reserving all the unwanted seats until mine was finally available.
Yeah, I can't imagine the headache to do THAT.

The ANA flights in these cases were Star Alliance operated long haul legs paired with shorter ANA operated legs, and we got to see both the older and newer business class for Delta (typical for most routes; we aren't where ANA runs their specific long haul). Newer is MUCH nicer.
SVB didnt lobby to relax the laws against unpaid overtime, faulty advertising etc. Not any banal evil like that. SVB lobbied against laws that protected both the bank and its depositors from the very thing that happened. And succeeded to get an exemption for itself.
Is calling it GTP a meme now?
Sure --- but to the average individual, what is iconic about them? People who probably never saw one in real life, maybe only ever saw the one in Back to the Future? What percentage of people even know about those other vehicles?

I think most of what we could say to that would be anecdotal on both sides. So I guess, this is just my anecdotal perspective?

Totally not trying to say that those other things are not interesting, btw.
You've got this backwards. The FDIC's actions are in part designed to limit its losses, since contagion risk will also be borne by the FDIC. By limiting the chance of runs they are limiting their liabilities.

The FDIC always had unlimited resources since it is backed by the US. It always sought to protect the entire banking system without limits. It's doing its job.

Lets just say the FDIC officially covers all losses at all banks. That means that the real danger, bank runs, are eliminated and so is the FDIC's risk in that regard. The risk is reduced to bank mismanagement which can be managed through examination and seizure of banks. That's essentially how too big to fail banks are handled.
> The problem is that now everyone will be scrutinizing every bank very heavily and will find similar bad investments like the ones SVB made.

Problem? I don't see the problem. People scrutinizing banks is probably the best thing that could possibly result from this dumpster fire. Banks should be scrutinized down to the smallest detail. No exceptions. If you don't like what you see, you should absolutely pull your money out. If that breaks the bank they only have themselves to blame. Should've kept reserves.
What losses are being socialized? This is a liquidity issue that is being reconciled with short term loans, not a solvency issue being bailed out with tax dollars.
Recently developed a small embedded device (using a nRF52840 microcontroller) that allows me to open my front gate remotely using my phone. I no longer have to carry around a gate remote. And my friends/guests can now open the gate from their phone as well. I couldn't find anything on the market for doing that so I'm glad I managed to do it (and it was a good opportunity to learn some embbedded programming and electronics).