skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People with money and a brain. Smart businesses have a treasury department, one job of which is to look at the risks of where their money is.
The problem with that naive viewpoint is that it assumes that greedy people that got successful playing the game won't use their power to mess with the rules.

Once the first set of greedy people gets powerful enough, they change the playing field and cement their lead.

75% of those billions pulled out of poverty were in China [0], which is explicitly not capitalist.

[0] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...
From the perspective of just the people working at SVB, I guess so? But from the perspective of people putting lots of money in one place, it's a reinforcing signal that the most important part of picking a bank is that it be big enough to get bailed out in case of poor planning.
And if the Fed had backstopped Silvergate rather than letting it fail, then SVB wouldn’t have needed the same thing (which did get the bailout). Turtles all the way down
Not 0%
I hope that we don't start demoting visibility to the point that it's nowhere to be found somewhere in the first 10 pages after hitting the front page even if it's bad. It don't feel it represents our users from the fringe.

If you're going to demote, don't take it off the main page index for casual browsers. Sometimes the fringe is very correct.
But the message in this announcement is pretty clear, the put is there and none of that turned out to be necessary and won’t be going forward. It will be financially worse for you to put your money into less liquid things.
No, they don’t know about the risks and they’re shouldn’t be any to the depositors. Banks are highly regulated institutions and the creation of the FDIC was intended to prevent a systemic bank run, with people shoving cash into their mattress. This is precisely what would’ve happened had SVBs depositors taken any form of haircut.
I'm not following your logic here. If there's 10 people each with a $2.5m deposit at a separate bank each and they all spread their accounts to $250k in each of the 10 banks, the FDIC still has a risk of $2.5m per bank right?
If they don't already exist, there's got to be a market for dishwashers with a built-in clean/dirty indicator. With smart appliances nowadays, it doesn't even have to be a physical display (in the home.)
> The bank doesn't exist anymore and its shareholders got nothing. The customers' reward is they can make payroll. What bailout?

Depositors knowingly took a risk by keeping more than $250K in an individual bank account. Rather than allow depositors to face the consequences of that decision, the government will now be making an exception to their own rule and covering depositors' losses. That's a bailout.

If a company would have been unable to make payroll because of this, it would have been a direct result of their failure to adequately assess and mitigate risk.
I guess maybe if all the small customers pull out of index funds to flee to bitcoin? Not sure.
The Fed is already decentralized, no? There are branches in different regions throughout the country with their own governance, and a central board of governors to oversee the whole thing. I guess what I am asking is, why not treat banking like the utility that it is. Their is a natural monopoly on currency issuance after all, no?
Language Design Meets Verifying Compilers (GPCE 2022 Keynote)
I have a 13 mini, and I would love to at least know there will still be a small
-screen upgrade path when I’m ready to retire this one in 2-3 years.
How does something like that even happen...? All I can consider is the relatively small size of the UK, and how one can drive from one side of the other in the UK in just 15 or so hours...
Secure boot in practice always become slave boot. The user loses control to even control the operating system running on his device. It is the final nail in the coffin for the already dying concept of general purpose computing.

What measures can the government implement to combat this? AI image modification is realistically possible even on consumer hardware running locally. There is no going back.
It’s almost certainly going to manifest as tax that will be passed on to customers in the form of lower interest rates on deposits.
Here's some Gists that show a simple example of each concept:

- Key chords: https://gist.github.com/CFiggers/ccb6bc911ee87f423f558368128...

- Right-click menus: https://gist.github.com/CFiggers/96bc37ca468909c9ec83252144c...

Let me know if you have questions. Enjoy!
Sure that works too, lots of younger bands where I live have records pressed, they’re quite popular merchandise.
If other banks fail, I expect it will not be for the same reason.

That's not based on any original thinking or analysis, but others have pointed out that most banks have more diverse depositors who don't have as much money individually and don't all talk to each other, making a bank run much less likely. The other banks also have an easier time putting deposits to work in a way that isn't so sensitive to interest rate increases. Allegedly, a normal well run bank should actually increase profits overall as rates rise.

There are a lot of lame attempts at anti-tech snark, but it does make sense that this bank was unusual.

Matthew Levine wrote:

"You are the Bank of Startups, and startups are a low-interest-rate phenomenon. When interest rates are low everywhere, a dollar in 20 years is about as good as a dollar today, so a startup whose business model is “we will lose money for a decade building artificial intelligence, and then rake in lots of money in the far future” sounds pretty good. When interest rates are higher, a dollar today is better than a dollar tomorrow, so investors want cash flows. When interest rates were low for a long time, and suddenly become high, all the money that was rushing to your customers is suddenly cut off. "

This does not apply to a random regional bank that, like, lends money to local people to buy houses outside of CA. Regular banks have a certain amount of assets with variable rates, like, say, my HELOC, that cushion rate increases.

Also, if you want anti-tech snark, Levine is the best:

"... I am sorry to be rude, but there is another reason that it is maybe not great to be the Bank of Startups, which is that nobody on Earth is more of a herd animal than Silicon Valley venture capitalists. What you want, as a bank, is a certain amount of diversity among your depositors. If some depositors get spooked and take their money out, and other depositors evaluate your balance sheet and decide things are fine and keep their money in, and lots more depositors keep their money in because they simply don’t pay attention to banking news, then you have a shot at muddling through your problems.

But if all of your depositors are startups with the same handful of venture capitalists on their boards, and all those venture capitalists are competing with each other to Add Value and Be Influencers and Do The Current Thing by calling all their portfolio companies to say “hey, did you hear, everyone’s taking money out of Silicon Valley Bank, you should too,” then all of your depositors will take their money out at the same time."

.
.
.

"Nah, man, you don’t get to be a successful venture capitalist by taking a long view or investing in relationships or being contrarian. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, this is unfair. Of course they were right — Silicon Valley Bank did collapse, and if you got your money out early that was good for you — but that is largely self-fulfilling; if all the VCs hadn’t decided all at once to pull their money, SVB probably would not have collapsed."
Mizuho Dangles Amazon Perks as Japan’s Banks Fight for Retail Deposits
iPhones are available on contract in most of the West. I don't know anyone around me that buys new devices outright. But considering how powerful are those devices compared to laptop, the price point of ~£1000 of top end isn't completely crazy.
I've pointed this out a few times in other threads but it's worth repeating.

SVB had just recently reported that they had no liquidity issues and did not foresee any need to sell any of their assets at a loss.

Then Thursday morning the announced that they had, in fact, liquidated some of their assets at a loss.

Your bank is supposed to be zero risk and essentially as good as cash. Any sign that your bank might have liquidity problems significantly raises that risk from 0. In that case it is beyond prudent to try to move out of that bank fast.

I love a good conspiracy theory as much as the next, and wouldn't be surprised if there were ill intentions behind some of those meetings. However this bank run was rational and does not need to be explained away by any conspiracy to organize a bank run.
> Government propping up special interests is pretty anti capitalistic, whether it's a corporation, an unemployed person, or a college student trying to default on their loans.

So I am assuming a purely capitalistic system would let the elderly and the disabled die on the street begging for charity? Are you advocating for such a system? Because no thank you, I am good.
There are some absolute turkeys out there, no question -- but there were/are also a lot of people who have taken pay cuts and betting it all on themselves to try to bring something innovative and important into the world. And when you say "they got into trouble", what you mean is: the bank in which they (we) are depositors was subjected to a bank run (something that no bank can survive). And yes, I believed and believe that depositors should be made whole: we -- as a group -- were not acting with avarice or recklessness. I am proud of my government and our hard-working regulators who were able to ignore the shrill caricature and see the very real lives that would been adversely affected by deposit loss.
Depends whether there are another million that have the natural ability/inclination to become these bioengineering/etc grads.

Absolutely agree on more teachers though.
That can be fine for personal banking. Regulators audit liquidity coverage ratio, tier 1 capital, etc. Investment products have bolded warning that FDIC insurance does not apply. For commercial banking it can be argued that counter-party risk assessment is on the business.
Is it though? I think there's a proportion of readers who might feel grifted by regulatory capture (eg: unable to get on the housing ladder due to draconian zoning policy) and reasonably feel that some of the moral hazard has to be addressed to stop what has been unstoppable growth to give them a chance to establish financial security. It's a fallacy to see it as zero sum, but a temporary crisis in confidence might produce the only opportunity in a lifetime to create the conditions needed for affordable housing to be available for purchase for folks who can keep their jobs during the crisis. Many feel economically abandoned.
I made a CLI tool for quickly starting new branches with draft PRs, asking for reviews, etc: https://github.com/dbalatero/work-cli

Made a bunch of Hammerspoon plugins for macOS:

- https://github.com/dbalatero/SkyRocket.spoon - mod+click to resize/drag windows

- https://github.com/dbalatero/VimMode.spoon - Vim mode everywhere

- https://github.com/dbalatero/HyperKey.spoon - pop-up menu for when you forget your keybinds (like neovim's which-key or spacemacs)
> If a lending facility, only available to banks, at par for assets that are under par is not a bailout…
> What would you call it?

Obviously I'd call it a loan.
I've never run a large company but I feel like it wouldn't be feasible when you have transactions routinely over 250k, like how I'd imagine most of these companies would be with their payroll.
Less than 10 days after I post this, and someone's got the small version of LLaMa running (slowly! but running) on a Pi.

https://twitter.com/miolini/status/1634982361757790209
https://whileydave.com/publications/pea22_gpce/
Points don’t usually get devalued from the credit card to the transfer partners. But most airlines and hotels use “dynamic pricing” and they devalue points all the time. So it’s the same thing
The run or the weakness at SVB?
That's called a laborer. Frequently they own their own tools.

"Capital", in this context, means the ownership of the means of production (classically factories, but in this century as much pointed to data, land, and regulatory capture). Specifically, the means of production that you do not operate.

If you must do labor for a living, you are not a capital owner. Stop identifying with the class of owners when you are a "working stiff" even if you're making mid six figures in tech or as the owner of a small business. In "Wall Street" Gordon Gekko was talking about "400k-a-year working wall street stiffs", and that's a million a year or better these days, after inflation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqjQxs9l5fg
I saw this happen in myself too. I think it has to do with experiencing things as a consumer first(the "ooh shinys") and then only later being able to work through how I'm actually using the tool towards a goal.

A lot of tasks that look like they need a computer in the loop, are actually a tiny layer of tech on top of a more traditional skillset. That is, you would actually be more capable of using the tech well by studying and planning it on paper and walking in the proverbial "recording studio" practiced and prepared, than by getting a device and expecting to be hands-on with it for hours and hours every day. This analogy works for music, for visual art, for writing, for programming, and many other tasks.

The cases where you can get a lot out of being hands-on tend to be artifacts of incidental incentive structures, because so much of computing is just an abstract UI to process and edit data you already have and publish the results, vs being an more intrinsic experience - it's supposed to speed you up, not make you dwell on every decision. Staying hands-on with the machine creates incentives to polish things mindlessly, because it will never say "no" to one more layer of processing, and it will always say "yes" to your requests to keep previous versions around.

Going traditional cuts out all the fluff - you have to put in ongoing effort to support a traditional workflow, so you automatically drop your level of polish to what the task calls for. It makes you think about handling information as a performance art, instead of an idealized production process. And when you bring the computer in on top of that, it focuses you around making basic adjustments and enhancements, instead of mitigating the need for a performative approach altogether.
Then they're orthogonal, and siting such projects on land that has become desert in the last century, say, will not harm these "healthy desert ecosystems" you speak of?
It has a beat, and you can dance to it.
How likely is it that all 10 banks fail at once?
They will not. They will pass the cost on to the end consumer. You seem to mosunderstand how finance works. When you're the middleman, you have no problems. Only the consumer does.
I am a customer of NDAX and they suspended trading for BTC/USDC. Guess they figured it out.
Again, I'd encourage you to do a deep dive into the laws of Canada. Like I said, it's clear you don't understand the rights you have - so not surprising you don't see the problem.

The banks can and will freeze accounts when the police or other agencies raise suspicions with them in most western nations

The police or a politician cannot arbitrarily order a bank account frozen without a court order (again due process). Sure, the police could say "hey that looks suspicious", but the bank is under no obligation to do anything.

You say there is no distinction there - I'd say it's a massive distinction.

I’m not upset because it’s not unreasonable to grant powers to perform an emergency breakup of a blockade, particularly when not all of those powers are going to be exercised (as they weren’t here), and when under the scrutiny of parliament and with democratic accountability.

What scrutiny of Parliament? The decision to enact the Emergencies Act was a decision by the Prime Minister, done with his cabinet, and those discussions were secret.

Sure, there was a inquiry after the fact, but hey, the horse is already out the barn by then.
When a building company, building my house goes bust. The government doesn't step in to get someone to finish building it. When I order goods from a company and it goes bust, the government doesn't step in to ensure I get my goods.

Engaging with any third party entails a level of risk.
The guy got off because he was legitimately acting in self-defense.
the message to depositors everywhere, of every size, is "don't worry about your bank's solvency, we'll protect you".
So market scrutiny is removed as a discipline on bank asset strategy.

Uhh.. isn’t that FDIC’s raison d’tere? (Aside from the ‘every size’ part)

Bank runs are caused by low confidence. FDIC makes depositors confident.

It’s also interesting that failure is socialized among banks- who are equipped to judge the risk their peers are taking.
It's the old saying, if you owe the bank a million dollars you have a problem, if you owe the bank $100m then the bank has a problem.
Number of banks failed is less useful info than total size of the banks that failed.

So far this year we are looking a lot closer to 2009 than 2020[0].

[0] https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/03/10/business/bank-fai...

Edit: wrong image linked
Yes, but only as a pressure cooker
As a fan of the TV show “Silicon Valley”, if I was the person that got to name these FDIC takeovers I’d just put the word “New” in front.

“New Silicon Valley Bank”

“New Signature Bank”
Sounds like running a multinational corporation has some overhead.

The idea that we shouldn't regulated because it's too hard, is the same rationale for suppressing wages, costs money.

For a corporation, too hard === costs money.

No corporation is entitled to exist.
Bank runs are a psychological phenomenon.

If you're looking at a bunch of companies you're invested in taking a 5, 10, whatever percent haircut on their deposits, it might be to your interest to take to the media and encourage everyone to panic, helping to create the very risk of contagion that you're talking about, to try to force the government's hand.
Where would you move, and for what? The “wealthy and powerful” enjoy similar if not better corporate and investment tax rates in most of Western Europe as on the west coast of the US.

The social services those countries have that we don’t are largely paid for by the middle and upper middle class, not the “wealthy and powerful.”
SVB had no Chief Risk Officer for much of 2022 at all, which they failed to disclose. The previous one left in a hurry after selling $4m worth of stock, along with the CEO.
This is really interesting. Nothing like it exists in the US as far as I know.

I am ignorant of current and previous Danish mortgage interest rates. Assuming a 2% mortgage from a few years back, and current interest rates at say 6%, I would expect to buy back at less than 85% value.
Haha, I just finished ordering 32GB of additional memory for my PC so I can run the 65B model, if that tells you anything. I'm upgrading from 32GB -> 64GB.

7B is fine, 13B is better. Both are fun toys and almost make sense most of the time, but even with a lot of parameter tuning they're often incoherent. You can tell that they have encoded fewer relationships between concepts than the higher-parameter models we've gotten used to--it's much closer to GPT-2 than GPT-3.

They're good enough to whet my appetite and give me a lot of ideas of what I want to do, they're just not quite good enough to make those applications reliably useful. Based on the reports I'm hearing here of just how much better the 65B model is than the 7B, I decided it was worth $80 for a few new sticks of RAM to be able to use the full model. Still way cheaper than buying a graphics card capable of handling it.
Isn't this the regular story of Google though?

"Let me give a half effort on X product. Oh, see, nobody likes it. Well, guess I'll go ahead and shutter it."

It's a shame that products with so much potential have all the resources put into them wasted with their behavior.
Something I've wondered about: why did (apparently) some large proportion of all valley tech businesses park their working capital at the same bank?

Is that something we'd expect to happen in a free market?
Yes, my comment was made a bit in jest. I think everyone will agree that after an arthroplasty, your quality of life is not as good as it was before.

But most of the reasons why artificial knees are not as good as the real deal have to do with the fact that they're made of inert (albeit fancy) materials. They don't have the ability to continually heal and do tissue remodelling, which is what real tissue does.

I feel very optimistic when I think about this: we're limited, but I think it's absolutely wonderful what we're able to do.
Exactly. The VCs were right, this saved a lot of regional banks and may just stave off a major recession
Given the amount of people planning on easy arbitrage with USDC tomorrow morning, do you know if Signature under the Fed will be able to handle this demand coming from Circle?
I did this for a while. It doesn't work as well as you imagine.

There will always be some items that are left in the 'clean' dishwasher - eg. that lemon squeezer you only use once a month.

Also, with two dishwashers, thats a lot of cutlery/crockery in one or other dishwasher. Sometimes the cupboard is empty. Now every time you want an item, you need to check the cupboard and the dishwasher.

You might say, why have a cupboard, simply only store your plates in the dishwasher. But sometimes I have stuff that needs washing but I haven't yet used up all the clean plates... So I need somewhere to empty them out to.
I know the basics of Emacs as an editor, and I understand that it is possible to use Lisp to extend it, but I have not come in contact with a good resource to teach me the fundamentals of how to do so. I know a bit of Lisp, I am more curious about how to expose the existing interfaces (API), where and what to look for. Does anybody have any suggestions? I like learning more by seeing somebody do it than by reading reference documentation if that helps.
One element is that the banking industry as a whole behaves pretty chaotically with 'unusual' customers.

Big wire in from a fundraising round? Account frozen. Big wire out for an acquisition? Account frozen. Bank learns your customers include cryptocurrency companies? Account frozen. Bank account balance huge relative to your business' cashflow? Account frozen. Random bank staff doesn't understand what you're doing? Account frozen.

In that kind of climate its almost inevitable that VC's would recommend a single bank known to not behave erratically for the activities that are usual for their investments.
I'd say it's bailout-y to value collateral above market value, but isn't totally free money and we haven't seen all the terms for it. At least the Fed is safer holding long term bonds than anyone else.
It's an incredible waste of time and energy for every business to do this.

Imagine if every company was responsible for making sure their catering services didn't poison their employees. Technically, every company could hire a food safety department to validate that every catered lunch wasn't toxic.

It would be a stupid waste of resources! Businesses should be able to just buy food that isn't toxic! Likewise, they should be able to simply put their money somewhere that isn't dangerous! So they can focus on the solving new problems that every isn't solving pointlessly in parallel.
The length and tenor of this non-response is precisely what OP is
disgruntled about.
The Amish are famous for shunning technology. But their secret love affair with the cell phone is causing an uproar.

-- https://www.wired.com/1999/01/amish/

Pimp my buggy (led lights):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ3Z_0aKWyY

Etsy swag:
https://www.etsy.com/market/amish_made

I am positively uproarious, Hochstetler!