skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not really. It's like a child repeatedly telling you they're going to pour some cranberry juice in a container. Then pouring some. Then telling you exactly how much more they're going to pour next time. Then they pour that. Then again. And being surprised when it overflows and stains your carpet.

SVB had plenty of warning to sell securities. They didn't even have to do it overnight. They had plenty of time to slowly roll-over their bonds and sell MBS. This wasn't a surprise "gotcha" by the fed.
I've used it. I know what it does. For a while, I've even run a linux with a slightly patched version of it for some quirky needs of my own.

seccomp-bpf is a more fragile version of pledge; you need to keep changing your sandbox whenever you upgrade glibc, because there's no mechanism to keep syscall usage in sync between the kernel and userspace.

It was fine for my case, because I was implemeting my own direct system calls, and froze any external dependencies, but it's typically very fragile across system and dependency upgrades.
People aren't waiting ten years for their money.
When did I ever say that you should do that? We know that the government will backstop BofA. They aren't going to backstop SVB. FDIC is only intended for regular people as you imply.
Teen nicotine use is still common, but tobacco is on its way out thankfully. While vape has its own problems, and may have others that emerge over time, they’re nothing compared to tobacco. And this is the point I was trying to make. Tobacco is a lot worse than social media.
And SVB means Silicon Valley Bank, which was shut down by a regulatory body some days ago: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/10/silicon-valley-investors-and...

(seriously HN, we non-US people have never heard of your terms)
To be fair I'm not sure why "good ideas" would be worth anything close to a business doing $3b in annual sales.
This is good for centralized finance.
Maybe I misunderstood your comment? Also I may have been unclear in my reply.

I understood your specific Greek dictionary example as being something that does not encode any meaning, because the words are not real Greek. However, completely hypothetically, if "Αβαρκαμαξας" was a word that a whole bunch of Greek people started repeatedly using in the same or similar contexts, it would quite literally become a real word.

That is what I mean when I say meaning is entirely statistical. Words and phrases emerge, disappear, and change meaning over time. These changes often happen differently within different segments of populations that speak the same language. What words mean depends entirely on enough people agreeing to use the words the same way. LLMs capture the commonly used modern meanings of words extremely accurately.

edit: That's also how ChatGPT was able to understand the commonly made typo in the question I asked it. Statistically, I probably meant to say "can you tell me what the word [...] means".
> The issue becomes when the fed suddenly raises rates faster than any time in their history

The Fed funds rate was 9% in July of 1980 and 19% in December of 1980.
Still shows what a police state the UK is, this lady is arrested and she was not causing any disturbance. Do we really want to live in a society where people who did not commit a crime are locked up?
Not even predicted trends... even when the fed said specifically they would raise rates they still didn't start selling their securities. Every. Single. Time. Nothing.
ianal but this is pretty well known in my experience. If you are the management of an employer and you mess around with wages owed (payroll for work done in the past) and taxes (including payroll tax withheld) then you are personally in deep shit. Here's an article on the subject in the context of California: https://www.melmedlaw.com/guide-on-unpaid-wages-in-californi...
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All lending is a gamble, but if they only lend 25% of what you have stored with SVB it's (approximately) a gamble that the FDIC will pay out more than 25c on the dollar. Which as lending goes is a pretty safe gamble.
it’s not as simple as is being suggested. The corporate veil can be pierced in cases of wage theft where the corporation has been used for nefarious means. There’s no evidence that being unable to make payroll because of a bank collapse comes close to qualifying as bad behaviour on behalf of those behind the corporate veil.

You could argue that an overly cautious founder might cut all their employees off immediately out of an abundance of caution, but that would be self-immolation.

As a non-lawyer with zero credibility, I’d be shocked if any founders of companies that can’t make payroll because of this are at risk of the corporate veil being pierced. SVB was based in California, subject itself to California law, it would require some extreme mental gymnastics from a judge to believe that a company that can’t make payroll because they used SVB behaved inappropriately in this situation.

Again, I have zero credibility, but I’d expect when the dust settles, the only companies we see get in any trouble will be the companies that do some insane illegal things in a panic because they get caught up in the tidal wave of fear. Founders withdrawing millions into their personal accounts and then losing it by buying crypto or going to vegas to do a fedex with their remaining cash or something equally insane feels much more likely an outcome.
> specifically for US dollars they're both liabilities of the Federal Reserve.

I don't think that's right. There are banks outside the US that hold US dollars that the Federal Reserve has no jurisdiction over. They create more currency through fractional reserve lending for their local currency as well as any dollar denominated loans they make. I don't see how those are liabilities of the Federal Reserve, but maybe I'm missing something?
where do you think Stripe Capital banks

They threw all their Atlas customers into SVB, according to Atlas customers
Still. The corporate tax rate is way lower than personal tax. In my country some workers pay over 50% tax on their income, while corporation they work for pay 10% or less if they have good accountants.
> We have essentially built a computer-based replica of our internal language engine.

How can we honestly say that’s the case when we cannot explain (or define) our “internal language engine”?
Stadia was built on GCP.
This is how financial crises start. IndyMac ($40 billion) went under in July 2008 which caused tension, and then Lehman fell apart two months later which led to 15 institutions failing in a matter of weeks.

There are other financial institutions that are suffering. We could definitely see cascades among some of the weaker banks
Off to the Department of Labour, they won't look kindly on late paychecks.
Yes, physical documents attesting to identity do face this dilemma too! The ways they handle it are in fact very illustrative.

Consider for example the Australian system for proving one’s identity: https://www.afp.gov.au/sites/default/files/PDF/NPC-100PointC...

To “log in” to a government service in person (i.e. for the person at the desk to accept that you are you for the duration of your appointment), you have to present at least 100 “points” worth of documents attesting to your identity. A passport is 70 points, a driver’s license is 40 points, and various other documents are 25 or 20 points. In practice the most common way by far is showing your passport and drivers license*.

Both your passport (federally issued) and your drivers license (state issued) have an individual biometric authentication process required for them to be valid: they have a photo on them, and the official checks to see that the photo matches your physical appearance.

So an equivalent digital version of this whole process might be: present a Yubikey (federal) security key (passport) with a successful thumbscan (picture matches), and then present another non-Yubikey (state) security key (drivers license) also with a successful thumbscan (picture matches as well). This logs you in for a single session that expires when you leave the page (valid for just the duration of appointment).

By digital standards this is an onerous authentication process, and it only gets you a short-lived session token at a single service/vendor. Clearly, physical identity documents are grappling with this exact same dilemma.

*: Second most common is showing your drivers license, Medicare card, credit card, and a recent utility bill/bank statement - four pieces of attestation!
I thought the follwoing was an interesting analysis: Aside from the fact that those assets don't seem to be valued at the current price (i.e. are marked at cost basis, not market,) much of it is already pledged as collateral.

https://twitter.com/FedGuy12/status/1634031134505066496
Sorry, that doesn't explain why companies use that specific bank or what/why they file a "8-K".
If businesses lose money on deposit, then every business in the country will move all cash above $250K into Treasuries and we’ll have a system-wide bank run at Twitter speed.

They’ll tell their banker, “the only counterparty I want is the US Treasury.”
They didn’t MEAN anything.
2.7% of SVB deposits were FDIC insured
I think the people in the frontline of this preservation deserve to have their portrait and bio etched in stainless steel for their effort.

The value this will have, both now and hundreds of years (assuming it'll still exists!) will be immeasurable, especially as we now seem to be entering the AI era of human history.
Yeah I think it was the French specifically around that time with the post structuralist influence, and the humanities in America that imported a lot of that thought and language. I'm not well versed in the school of thought by any means though.
> and did so for peaceful freedom of speech demonstrations by truckers recently

Ahh yes, the "speech" of 160dB ship horns for 22 hours a day for 3 weeks in residential neighborhoods.
How about you fuck off, wannabe(?) technocrat?
> I think this is only true because there isn't a production-ready dependently typed language [...]

Now this I definitely agree with. I want to see what's possible!
It's a gamble not only on what's recoverable but also future lifetime value of newly acquired customers from this effort (remember, there are a bunch of ventures looking for a new bank now that their banking provider is gone). Public service meets rapidly evolving growth marketing campaign. Can't fault Brex, there is no downside to anyone except them (correction: it appears a third party is taking the credit risk per gpm, even better for Brex as they're simply facilitating the lending ops and aren't exposing themselves to the credit risk). Kudos.
The internal mechanisms are quite different, yes, however, the inputs and outputs are for the sake of this discussion, identical. The people, regardless of the system, would probably be performing the same types of operations. I’m not sure you read my original point as I intended it to be understood. A worker making tires under authoritarian communism is still going to be making tires under democratic capitalism - the differences in this worker’s experience may not be the result of these political and economic systems but rather policy at the corporate, departmental or state level which are not unique or exclusive to a particular government or economy.
Any system will self propagate at the expense of other systems and individuals like workers.
I expect the losers in SVB will be the same as for WaMu: bondholders, shareholders, and investors. No reason yet to expect depositors will suffer anything more than inconvenience. And if, like WaMu, the FDIC can rapidly effect a sale to another bank that inconvenience could actually be quite short.
A $100 in 10 years is just not worth $100 today in the current interest rate environment.
I think most SVB depositors will be OK. I'm wondering about what's going to happen to similar banks.
Sometimes they're ordered to and it's not their call.

I'm not saying this is the case here, but here's a hilariously well documented instance: https://ymeskhout.substack.com/p/sorry-for-arresting-you

Yes, yes I know "just following orders" shouldn't be an excuse.
He has been selling blocks of shares since 2018 [1] like any other executive aware that you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket.

According to the most recent SEC insider sale filing, he still owns about 100,000 shares in the bank. If he was that cunny...why won't he have sold them? Doesn't absorb him of carelessness in running the bank, but this is clickbait for the ignorant and perpetually angry.

1- https://www.sec.gov/edgar/search/#/ciks=0001259867&entityNam...
"I'm a founder with $12m in Silicon Valley Bank. We are not going to be able to make payroll today and our entire business is in severe jeopardy.

Reporters feel free to DM for a full interview."

https://twitter.com/growing_daniel/status/163427193598208409...
I think the main point here is that while faulty intel is always a risk, the biggest problem is willful misinterpretation. For how things played out in Vietnam, Frank Snepp's book seems to be the most well known, perhaps because it came out early. A more forceful account and criticism by a CIA field analyst is Sam Adam's War of Numbers (1995). (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2471957.War_Of_Numbers)
For those who don’t know Montreal, Laval is a suburb of the city. It’s mostly white, French-speaking majority has been in decline for years relative to newcomers who speak other languages - including anglophone Canadian. The complainants in the case are definitely Québecois and emblematic of the resentment toward newcomers expressed by many.
In the limit of 100% confidence of prediction, does it not equate a model? Put another way, when all the probabilities get set to either 100% or 0%, do you not simply arrive back at classical True/False logic?
Bear Stearns was even earlier that same year.

It’s like that old quote about going bankrupt, first it happened slowly, then suddenly.
no it's never fair to ruin lives and torture people ("the hole" during months is torture [0][1])

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solitary_confinement_in_the_Un...
[1] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2020/02/united-state...
I can see Pied Piper AI replacing Richard as CEO
How does that work with payroll? 500k is not enough for a moderately sized startup to make payroll.
Your 8k screen is run purely off of the CPU drawing to a frame buffer?
I think the implication is that the board wouldn't want to continue not paying and would lay people off. As in, how long can the board continue to employ people who they can't pay?

(I have no idea what I'm talking about legally, I'm just trying to interpret what I'm reading).
I'd say they're unrelated. This situation could hit any US bank that placed the wrong bet. What's somewhat unusual, and might shelter other banks, is the bank run was viral among VC-backed firms. They also had a stronger incentive to withdraw a lot more because their funds weren't insured. A bank with lots of retail customers doesn't have this issue.
> some days ago

some hours ago
Atempa v. Pedrazzani is what you want to Google for.

"Rejecting Pedrazzani’s argument, the Court of Appeal relied on language of the applicable California statutes: Cal. Labor Code § 558 (West 2018) and Cal. Labor Code § 1197.1 (West 2018). Section 558(a) subjects “[a]ny employer or other person acting on behalf of an employer” to civil penalties for overtime violations. Similarly, section 1197.1(a) subjects “[a]ny employer or other person acting either individually or as an officer, agent, or employee of another person” to civil penalties for minimum wage violations. The Court of Appeal held that Pedrazzani was responsible as an “other person” who caused the overtime pay and minimum wage violations."
I just got an email from Mercury saying they’re well capitalized and all is well.

“
I want to assure you that Mercury is in a strong financial position (profitable and well-capitalized), and we have a number of ways that we keep deposits on Mercury safe:”

Uhoh.
I like this post but is it really only about "people skills"? Of course a manager would have more of an interpersonal focus because that's their job; ICs need to focus on their job as well (while being personable enough obviously). I'm all for interpersonal skills but think this post falls short a quite a bit for helping out engineers/ICs.

Edit: inter- not intra-
Judging by their user name they are from a german-speaking country like I am, and yesterday there was a mass shooting in a church in Germany. Which is not usual, and people care more about that than some bank over the pond.
Yes, this, thanks. The missing Chief Risk Officer is an issue. It's not necessarily nefarious, but the optics aren't great either.

Edited to not repeat what you said. :)
This guy is a NYC (self-described) entrepreneur, and if he has a serious background in law or even business, it's certainly not apparent. I take his flurry of tweets with a grain of salt. Obviously he's time-stamped his predictions (today or Monday, right?) but it's likely enough that he's an east coast elite with west coast envy, shouting at the "devil".
> Can't fault Brex, there is no downside to anyone except them.

Not actually clear who is taking the downside

> This credit line is funded by 3rd-party capital (and not Brex directly)
SVB failure doesn't threaten 'safety and soundness' of banking system
https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours

https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/

https://www.timesizing.com/history-of-the-american-workweek/
“Twitter was used to rig an election” is just another instances of Twitter users not realising that nobody outside of Twitter cares about it. Musk is very evidently far from immune to this.

Media outlets will share what some famous people say on Twitter. Let’s not conflate that with Twitter mattering. It’s just a press release website.

If we want to look at social networks that actually decide elections, let’s look at Facebook.
Silicon Valley Bank was a go-to bank for many big technology companies because it forged deep connections in the industry. The bank experienced a bank run and had to be taken over by the FDIC (U.S. government). Roku is letting investors know that they have a lot of cash stuck there and may not be able to access it for a while (as the FDIC tries to sort out the mess).
I think it is not a US-specific thing, I live in the US and had never heard of SVB until the recent volley of articles here.
I think he's doing a bit.
It is indeed shocking that this poor man was arrested, charged, and taken through a full prosecution despite the obviously flawed evidence. The crown prosecutor erred so greatly in taking this case on that it strains belief. In Canada, the crown turns down all sorts of cases if they aren’t highly confident they can win. This one? Prosecutors are appointed, not elected. They have nothing to gain from such legal tourism and whomever brought this case forward will have a black mark on their credentials for some time.
Ahh the memories
Farming and hot sunlight isn’t something that only exists in california.

High population density countries also do farming and using every inch of land is essential. Demand for things sensitive to harsh sunlight (herbs, berries, and so on) or in places with long dry seasons means growing under shaded areas has advantages, and doubly so if you can extract energy while doing so. That’s also not exclusive to california.
The VCs collectively orchestrated a bank run that destroyed a bank that serviced them for 40 years, when they should have instead cooperatively organized an LTCM-style consortium bailout for it, and helped them raise capital. The selfishness and short-sightedness of VCs never ceases to impress.
Yet , countries with the highest crime rates have the toughest punishments.
Looks like the Fair Labor Standards Act at the federal level and there are also state-by-state statutes which add variety.

With the disclaimer that I am not the expert we all hoped would show up to explain, I think the intent is to provide statutes to back up the social contract around wages. Any inkling of the possibility that an employer can wiggle out of paying wages it promised to pay is going to have an outsized effect on an employee’s trust. And businesses do not want (and in the case of a small business or startup cannot) to pay wages up front. Incentivizing a business to lay people off rather than promising them wages that may or may actually appear actually seems like an okay outcome in the degenerate case since the employee has various rights and protections that are triggered by a layoff while unpaid wages could pile up endlessly until the employee initiates action themselves.
Roku having 75% of their money elsewhere instead of going 100% into a single bank seems to be a significant thing here.

Given the much-discussed recently limits of depending on the FDIC, not putting all your eggs in one bank basket seems incredibly wise, guess now we just see how broadly exposed other businesses and other banks are.
Not to be confused with hyperreal numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreal_number
I call it debugger-driven-development and it is indeed great when you have to get quickly into huge, complex codebases.

It allows you to learn them very fast.

VS has great debugger for C# which allows you to do a lot of stuff when running the program, so sometimes I even develop the soft while having debugger and breakpoints attached
We both know that you haven’t actually done this.
"The yield they wanted to see on this capital" I imagine is some combination of money needed to run operations of the bank, interest paid on the deposits and profit.

They could have just stored the money in the proverbial vault. But if they do that, then they have to charge the depositors a fee to be a customer. And competition has pushed in the other direction.

And probably more importantly that whole "profit" goal.
>They did nothing wrong, they followed the rules, they thought they were being responsible using SVB, and here we are the small companies, founders, and potential employees pay the price.

The rules are FDIC insurance up to $250k. That's the world where the game is played. This is real life and life isn't fair.
James Baker worked for the DOJ and FBI directly before becoming high up counsel at Twitter. He was fired for selectively edited the documents and disclosures that became the Twitter Files.

Take his advice, go read the Twitter Files.
"Discovered" crime rate goes down. Many folks actually got better at covering their tracks. The ones that didn't? yeah...
Asking a populous to raise taxes on itself is not normally a winning strategy.
Brex could offer loans up to 25% of the borrower's funds stuck in SVB. As long as depositors receive at least 25 cents on the dollar, the loans would be paid back in full, and the borrower would have gotten significant working capital in the interim.

SVB's carcass still has significant assets, so Brex can set that % number based on what they know about SVB's state, to make the loans almost risk-free.

I'm not a banker and have no idea if this is actually what Brex is offering. That public page doesn't discuss terms at all, which makes sense given the chaos. But there's certainly ways to structure these loans without much risk.
From what I understand, the assets were allowed to be on the books at face value, under the assumption they would be held to maturity, but they're worth significantly less on the open market.
Sure seems it.

https://nypost.com/2022/12/19/fbi-reached-out-to-twitter-bef...
> You don't ever want a Ted Bundy back on the street, because rehabilitation is probably impossible, whatever is messed up in his brain to make him like that is there for life

And yet they put people in prison for life over basically nothing https://reason.com/2021/05/13/this-38-year-old-man-will-spen...