skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a small risk that they can't pay the promised $1.00 on Monday. (I don't expect problems, but I don't own USDC and I only skimmed the news.)
If SVB hedged its interest rate risks, it would be a going concern today.
The risk is low because of the assumed bailouts.
How do you prevent capitalism and dollars being free speech from turning into oligarchy?

Asking for a friend.

Actually, a few billion friends, come to think of it.
Having a front/back buffer design is interesting to me. I say that as someone that does like the idea of having multiple dishwashers. I don't see myself doing that sort of treatment, though.

Building on how I think I'd treat them is closer to a ringbuffer of workers. Would look a lot like the front/back idea in slow use, but I could easily see bursting through to where I have both running at once. And the destination of dishes out is still to the cabinets, for many other reasons.
> Insofar as the amatuer hour banks [...] will now be saved from going under [...]

That's the exact opposite of what's happening. Signature has, in fact, gone under.
> it is illegal to have work and home close to each other.

What do you mean by illegal?
All this stuff goes directly against the First Amendment which guarantees free speech. Australia of course has no constitutional right to free speech, but America does.
> The problem was that central planners reduced rates to near zero in the face of adversity, instead of using fiscal policy more aggressively as you suggest

The people who make decisions about interest rates have no authority over fiscal policy, and the people that control fiscal policy (who theoretically could cobtrol monetary policy as well) have segregated themselves from interest rate decisions in large part to avoid fears that they will monetize the debt undermining confidence im the currency.
Big banks are still offering sub-1% rates:

https://www.usbank.com/bank-accounts/savings-accounts/elite-...

Compare that to a money market fund from a stock broker at 4.5%:

https://www.schwab.com/money-market-funds

The question is, how quickly do simple folks figure out they're being slowly bled, and start moving their cash to some place where it's appreciated?
What? My position is that SpaceX are justified in the limits they've set. That hasn't changed at all.

I'm simply pointing out the most likely reasoning behind setting those limits in the first place, and clarifying that what you said about how Ukraine isn't going to care about those limits because they're in an existential war also is in conflict with what they're dealing with regarding all the other aid.
That lack of confidence is why I've moved all my money to crypto where no such mechanisms exist!
The creation and maintenance of moral hazard in our economy is a problem, but it is not a contributor to inflation, the causes of which are fairly clear of you just examine the components of recent increases in inflation.
I would be careful using the past tense on this one. Tomorrow morning will be very interesting in a bad sort of way. A war, a pandemic, a financial crisis. What's next?
> Pretty clear who this system serves.

A bailout is when they save the bank owners. The SVB owners lost the bank. There's no happy result for them.

If you had your deposit for the home in Silicon Valley Bank, it would be serving you. It would probably suck if you saved that up for retirement or a mortgage, and lost it. In that scenario would you be saying how great it is because it showed the government really served you?

Bank runs are a real thing that could ruin you wherever you're banking. If the large accounts realize that that smart move is to pull their money every time Peter Thiel yells fire, because they are unprotected, other banks can go under too--maybe yours, or maybe the bank where your company's payroll funds are!
Honestly the biggest blocker for me is just how slow emacs feels compared to (n)vim. Using both in a gpu accelerated terminal emulator, emacs just feels slower especially on larger files.

Granted, I have not tried to use emacs once the jit landed in 28 (or was it 29?). But it's something I really would really like to use since instead of having a different application for irc/mail/etc it could all just be emacs.
>Why isn't it. Pragmatically it's pretty silly to insure the first 250k and then expect people to go through the trouble of spreading their cash over a multitude of accounts

How is it silly? From the perspective of the FDIC, if you have two seperate accounts (at 2 seperate banks) that represents a drop in risk. It's unlikely 2 banks with fail and now FDIC only has to replenish 250K instead of 500k.
> SVB collapse had zero to do with crypto

Had Silvergate not collapsed, SVB's balance sheet weakness may not have prompted a run.
No the customers of the bank will also have to deal with the clown-world implications of continued bailouts for poor allocation of resources.

Banks will continue to be able to make horrendous decisions and not have any fractional reserve requirements. Executives will continue to get absurd performance benefits until losses are realized. Depositors won’t have to care that the institution where they dump millions of dollars is run by someone doing their best financial John Wayne Gacy impersonation. And we’ll all suffer because institutionally these horrendous investments are backstopped.

Please just let one of these banks fail. A few more will. Lots more should. And then maybe we’ll see them act with any sort of prudence.
That's reverse causation. Proper question is how much they were building the last three decades, and if it's outrunning new household formation* now.

There are places with cheap housing in the US, generally not in the good jobs areas but if you're retiring that's not so much a problem.

* that's when people move out of their parents' house or decide to not have roommates anymore
I’ll start out by making my position clear: I have a strong aversion to software engineers like you, and I consider software engineers like you to be toxic people who are a drain on organisations. Anyway…

If you approach work as a zero sum game that you’re participating in against your co-workers then you’ll be deeply unhappy wherever you go, and you’ll be a toxic force in the workplace. Work is collaborative, work has a purpose, work is about contributing to the greater good, work is more than the sum of its parts, work is about creating value.

There’s no shame in being someone who doesn’t work well with others, and you’re under no obligation to change, but it’s your responsibility to find an environment where you’re either a positive or at worst, a neutral force. Choosing to work in jobs that make you deeply unhappy is irresponsible and unfair on those around you. If you find working with product managers to be a miserable experience filled with frustration and resentment, then the responsible thing to do is to remove yourself from that situation. Find a job within a company that uses a structure that’s a better fit for you, don’t drag people down.

I won’t preach to you about how important collaboration is, or how much you’re missing out on by operating with this toxic attitude, but I will say that the problems you’re facing have nothing to do with software engineering or product management, they’re human problems.

Running your own software consultancy can be an amazing and rewarding experience that presents new opportunities for growth and new intellectually-stimulating challenges, it’s an experience you may love, but it’s absolutely crucial to understand that human interaction scales with responsibility, and running your own company (even with just yourself) has a lot of responsibility.

I think your final paragraph shows that deep down you know that you’re the cause of these challenges at work. Maybe the problem isn’t work related at all, maybe the frustration at work is a symptom of the real problem, like being unhappy in yourself, maybe the solution is actually therapy or maybe you’re burned out and need a break.

Ultimately, as software engineers, we are very privileged to earn great money and have far more respect / autonomy / trust than most others in the workplace, and so the ball is in your court. If you think your co-workers are the problem, quit. Don’t waste your life stewing in misery, you’re better than that.
I see comments like this and I wonder what do people actually learn in school. Adam Smith wrote extensively about this (surely people still learn about him). His premise were people are naturally greedy, and it is good to use a system that pits their greed against each other. A natural competition to provide goods and services to each other. And it has worked well for hundreds of years, pulling billions out of poverty in just the last few decades. But yeah, government corruption is a problem in any economic system and democracy was supposed to be the check against cronyism.
They expected (with 99.8% confidence) to be able to retrieve their deposits in full.

So the 0.2% scenario is turning out different.
I have to admit that I am not fully informed on these topic. BUT, even then, the SVB have an extremely weird feel to them. Far too many blatantly wrong, but good sounding comments. Something that I do not expect on this forum.
This is so aloof. People are engaging in a conversation about how to structure innovation. Many, many people don't want to see "startups solving hard technical problems." That's the nature of the guillotine images. They want a more equitable system and they want stricter vetting of what constitutes a problem worth working on.

The fact that you can't see that in the discourse -- that you instead just take personal offense despite the need in your message to claim you are sort of outlier -- is emblematic of our community's lack of self awareness, constant need for praise, and general ego. Much of the criticism being leveled right now is deserved. While you can complain about civility, you shouldn't expect that critics sentiments would not exceed your own critiques when you stand to gain by the continuation of the system.
And perhaps there's no other way? The Japanese did the same with their overpriced real estate provlem, Europe did the same with their almost defaulting countries.
Capitalism always was cronyism (so was feudalism, but with a different favored class.)

It hasn’t been replaced, some people are just realizing the things that have been pointed out since critics of capitalism coined the name “capitalism”, refelecting its favored-class orientation, for it.
No idea, how many? Up until now I would've thought keeping your money in a bank was the safest liquid asset class.

Is 250k the threshold where you need become a financial bank analyst and independently validate US Banks liquidity tolerance to withstand variable economic conditions? If that's the case everyone's just going to consolidate to using a top 3 bank when exceeding that limit.
The SVB failure has been massively covered on HN. It's not as if this story has been neglected in the slightest!

The post we're talking about, which users flagged, was a YC blog post asking people to sign a petition. Petitions aren't particularly on topic for HN to begin with. We occasionally override the community verdict if we feel like a story is particularly interesting and the override is a 'teachable moment' about the kind of culture we want on HN. That wasn't the case here, and if we had tried to override the community to favor a YC company post on a hot and controversial topic that many people were angry about, we would have been skinned alive.

Two moderation skills that help a lot are (1) not overusing power, and (2) not stepping in front of fast-moving trains. One learns these things the hard way and I don't want to revisit the lesson!
How exactly would we be buying other countries with the annual $T trade deficit? No, you have the actual numbers reversed.
The situation appears to be back on track.
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Good, they would’ve gone under otherwise. The Treasury et al. took the clearly responsible step of approving a systemic risk exception for SVB and Signature. This was truly existential crisis of confidence in the US banking system. A depression on par with the 1929s would have been underway had these decisive actions not taken. Thank the lord competent people still run the Fed, Treasury, and FDIC.
> One part of the bailout is depositors over $250k getting a new FDIC guarantee.

Not really. It's not like the FDIC would normally give everyone $250k and then light the bank's remaining money on fire. If there is money left over after depositors all get their $250k, the depositors have a claim on that money too.

Thought experiment: Consider a bank with only one customer. Let's say that customer had a million dollars in an account. The bank fails. That customer gets $250k. The FDIC finds out that another half a million is left over. The customer gets that too. The shareholders get shafted because they don't get anything because the depositors have precedence over the shareholders. Shareholders are the last ones to get paid, if there is anything left.

This is not a bailout. It's the way things normally work.
Three banks failed in the last week. But it's not good for depositors to take a haircut because of that. We can work it out without anyone having to pay for it except the banks' executives and shareholders.
Depositors are just shareholders with higher priority and an apparently unlimited (previously capped at 250k) insurance policy
Are you aware that SVB had exclusive banking clauses that preclude opening accounts with other banks?

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/12/silicon-valley-bank-signed-e...
You might want to reconsider this take by reading the news of the day: Iran and Saudi Arabia just had a rapprochement brokered by... the Chinese. Whoopsie daisy.
SVB was insolvent
> When some other part of the financial system endangers whatever mechanism we were using here, will you be back asking why we didn't just keep money in a bank somewhere?

No. The point is that a bank is better than a safe but that diverse assets are better than a bank.

> You're not an expert on managing "FDIC risk" even if you read about it this weekend.

Exactly. And this is why, if you have a critical business dependency you should hire an expert and not ask my advice which the parent poster did.
There are a lot of vicious and blood thirsty people on the internet. It isn't specific to you or this event. Hardly any big event goes by without calls for executions.
Right now I'm just using the PowerShell part to move the cursor up and to the left and delete it. You can still see the PK$#@($!!!1 for a nanosecond, but that just gives it character in my opinion.
In my opinion, rates near zero and no bank bailouts allow the market to price the actual rates depending on how well a bank is doing.

In fact I'd prefer everything to be on-chain rather than credit rating agencies being months behind. Especially if the Fed is raising rates so quickly!

In fact, I'd prefer UBI to be phased in as an alternative to the banking system, together with corresponding taxes on negative externalities. Like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fee_and_dividend

When Andrew Yang ran, I met with his campaign and made https://yang2020.app for them. I really asked them to be a TWO-issue campaign, tying the UBI to carbon taxes, but he never did that. So he didn't have a good answer to "how are we going to pay for it". And to this day, the Forward Party needs to make a good case for it.

I don't believe these kinds of things can be done at the national level, which is why I started Intercoin: https://community.intercoin.app/t/new-ubi-movement-mayors-ci...
We’re on the same page with all your points. Agree agree agree.
The premium is set for 250k. Not unlimited. I'd have no problem with unlimited insurance schemes for deposits so long as the premiums are priced to reflect that
> suddenly it's a CEOs fiduciary incompetence that a seed round isn't distributed amongst 16 banks?

That's not your only option and this is nothing new. Even I - arguably a very small business owner - spread my risk. Just in case...
Indeed. The government passed out money like candy and printed treasury’s to fund it at interests rates the Fed (who they hire) set at record lows. They then put into their own regulations that these are 0 risk assets and banks bought them to pay for depositors. Then the Fed decided to put rates at the highest level in 20 years.
The name of one of the scientists involved in mapping a fly's brain is MOSCA?

I had to double check if I didn't click on a Babylon bee or the onion article just to be sure.
So your saying somebody like SVB would never hire the person at the helm of the Lehman Brothers implosion?
Now I want to see hedge funds and bankers call the bluff and continue to run other smaller regional bank.
Was this not tried with little uptake? Or am I thinking of a Treasury Direct product?
"The systemic risk exception invoked here is an exception."

Yes but it's not a new exception.

The OP claims Yellen implicitly announced something new. She didn't. She's following the playbook from 2008+. The policy isn't new, it's not unexpected, it's kind of like ... a rule.

And whether a new rule is being created matters for moral hazard purposes and all.

Edit: My above quote could have been read as talking about all depositors in all banks but I meant all depositors in the SVB.
I haven't. Although I definitely know what 'getting baked' means.
This has been repeated ad nauseam but it does not pass the smell test. If SVB were solvent then it would not be in receivership.
Agreed.

I like CSS, but the article (while interesting and informative) give me PTSD thinking about a previous project with "typed" CSS. Maybe I'm an old fart, but I never saw the appeal in having such a thorough level of typing.

The downside is longer time to analyse your Typescript code, having to reference some ungodly type if you need to pull your value from a config file, while the upside is just... something that most IDE already did anyway?

In most case, I'm pretty sure it's less of an hassle to say it's a damn string and check that your code give some correct value there, instead of trying to rube-goldberg Typscript into auto-generating the correct code.

Typescript is powerful, but KISS is good too.
The US has over $9tn of deposits and the entire FDIC insurance fund is only $121bn, which is less than the total assets of SVB alone. FDIC insurance can cover a few bank failures, but not dozens.
The administrative state as we now know it didn't exist yet so there was nothing for the robber barons to capture to cement their place.

Oligarchs depend on the administrative state for their security.

The oligarch pays (bribes, political donations, what have you) the state $5 so that the state will spend $10 screwing the competition and then the oligarch's business will make $10. Of course I made these numbers up but the system by which these people hold power doesn't work if there isn't an administrative state with the power to fairly capriciously regulate the oligarch's business. The whole game is predicated on being able to buy unfair access state muscle. If the state is sitting on its ass there's no advantage to buying favor.
SVB was a relatively normal regional business bank that also had giant VC accounts.

So they also had some things people would think of as "regular" businesses, like local wineries, nonprofits, affordable housing developers etc. who were all in trouble.

(I think of all of those as rich people hobbies, but most people think farmers are salt of the earth working class types for some reason, so they have better images.)
It seems that the fundamental problem is actually humans. If we eliminate the humans, we can eliminate the problems. Maybe AI will accomplish this before long, after it reaches the same conclusion...
Think about who gets hurt if the banking system collapses. It ripples out into the rest of the economy, because in fact the economy runs on debt. It would be harder to maintain existing businesses and start new ones if there was a credit crunch -- we lived through a credit crunch after 2008 and it was very bad for everyone.

Even if you want certain people to get hurt by this (and there is definitely a baying mob that seems to want to cause as much suffering as possible because they just don't like certain classes of people), keep in mind that this could cause a 2008-style recession that hurts everyone.

Who do you think gets hurt more by an economic downturn? The billionaires who lose millions and end up still being rich, or the working people who lose their jobs and can't afford housing? This isn't a theoretical question, we know the answer because it happened before.
there is no contagion except that spread by these fucking criminal VCs on twitter.
Yeah, unless you're megarich, you as an individual you probably shouldn't have more than that in a bank.
To put things in perspective, the US government guaranteed $2.4 trillion in money market funds after the Reserve Primary Fund broke the buck in 2009 [1] and that guarantee came directly from the Treasury.

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/id/48578949
> FWIW I think it's a sign of intellectual dishonesty to complain vaguely about censorship of "widely held beliefs" without stating what those beliefs are.

I would hazard a guess that don't think those beliefs need to be stated because most people know that widely held beliefs are censored, and because it would make the discussion about something else. The Twitterfiles are available, as are all the discussions about censorship including by those running the social networks. They don't deny censorship, they attempt to justify it.

> "Free speech" is widely mocked as a supposed principle because it's a rallying call, not a specific thing.

Free speech is not a rallying call, and it most definitely is a principle, just as "democracy" is not a rallying call.

> Even people who'll proudly tell you "I may not agree with what you say but I'll defend your right to say it" will have limits if you keep pushing them on it.

And like democracy, different people will define it and (if they get the chance) implement it differently. However, they're all talking about democracy (maybe with the exception of North Korea's government).

> "Free speech" just means "I want to be able to say things I'm not allowed to say"

It most definitely does not mean that which means your following questions are moot. I would suggest that you find out what those supporting freedom of speech actually think.
By game theory, if you let sinners prosper, you will produce more sinners. In the most pure sense not punishing the sinful is wrong, always.

That misses the point that it is possible to both help everyone and punish the sinners.

Here is a game I recommend that you play: https://ncase.me/trust/

I think it gives a great explanation why what you are saying in good faith is not quite right. Not punishing the sinful both pushes the problem into the future and makes it bigger.
If a CEO of 100 person startup can't understand the concept of business continuity planning, what are they doing, exactly?
However, no more. Modern-day capitalism in America is to flatten the risk curve for people who already have money by borrowing from future generations with debt-fueled bailouts for companies. We have consciously decided to reduce the downside for the wealthy, thereby limiting the upside for future generations.

That's modern-day America (and western countries in general), but massive government taxation and borrowing, and spending on bloated, inefficient, and corrupt programs to buy votes and scratch backs won't get more love from "capitalists" than it will from anybody else.

It's not capitalism that is going bad, it is government.