skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Kinda insane that this entire debacle was potentially caused by @ByrneHobart
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No. If one blog post can take down your company the issue isn't the blogpost, it's the environment that enabled that blog post to do the damage. This is the equivalent of the "one gunshot caused WW I" logic. Stop blaming the last person to pull a piece out of the Jenga tower
You ignore the next sentence:

> The FDIC will pay uninsured depositors an advance dividend within the next week.

This will likely be a substantial fraction of the uninsured deposits. Take a look at the FDIC website.

https://closedbanks.fdic.gov/dividends/

Pick a bank, say, "IRWIN UNION BANK & TRUST CO". The first dividend was almost 47% of the uninsured amount, and anoth 25% or so over a decade.

The failure of SVB as reported is not nearly as bad.
So... online?
I've built a chrome extension that let's you access Linkedin without having to have Linkedin open all the time, saving you much needed memory on Chrome.

I've also added several Pro features, such as an AI assistant to automatically generate articles using ChatGPT and schedule them to grow your network, an ability to take note on profiles and much more.
I’ve grown to loathe React but your approach breaks down horribly once you start getting to a certain level of complexity. There is a reason frontend JS frameworks exist, I just wish the default wasn’t React.
yep and if US$250K in cash is not a lot to have in deposits, then certainly some basic risk management and due diligence shouldn't be too much to ask for either
Rippling has received the money, and it then disappeared while in Rippling's account.

If Rippling can get their customers to somehow get that money out and wire it again, Rippling may not be on the hook for replacing the missing money.
It took all of 10 minutes lol
How can you blame the fed for the bank not having funds to cover the deposits?
OpenChatKit: Base to create both specialized and general purpose chatbots
that limit was set in 2008. before that it was $100k
He doesn't seem to have signed it.
We, the undersigned, do not believe in free markets. If some of us said we did, it was a lie of convenience. If we preach their virtues in the future, we are hypocrites. We put our money, over FDIC limits, into a single bank. We accrued positive benefits by using a bank which was trying to make the profits elsewhere. How they were attempting to make these profits was public information, https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/SIVB?tab=financials . We indirectly put our cash into mortgage-backed securities, those investments declined, and we're asking the public to make up the difference for our bet gone bad. It is up to you each of you Americans, to wire us $600 so that we can eventually be billionaires.

Sincerely,
us
Can't wait for people to, like, test things before posting incorrect dismissals:

ChatGPT prompt: "A man says "I am a 30 year old looking to take out a mortgage loan on a house, employed to look after sick people and my wife is a cleaner, our ideal house is a Victorian city house and our pet hamsters 'Stanford University' and 'Quantitative Analyst' are looking forward to having more room".

What could the man's job be? If you cannot answer directly, speculate. Keep the answer brief."

Reply: "Based on the information given, the man's job could possibly be a nurse, caregiver, or healthcare worker."

Prompt: "Any other job titles he might have?"

Reply: "The man's job could also potentially be a physician, medical assistant, or home health aide, based on the fact that he is employed to look after sick people."

Prompt: "Has he graduated from anywhere specific?"

Reply: "There's no information given about the man's education or whether he has graduated from any specific institution."

Prompt: "What does the prompt mean where it says 'Quantitative Analyst'?"

Reply: "The prompt mentions "Quantitative Analyst" as the name of one of the man's pet hamsters. In the business world, a quantitative analyst typically refers to a professional who uses quantitative methods, such as statistics and mathematical modeling, to help businesses make informed decisions about financial investments, risk management, and other related areas. However, in this context, "Quantitative Analyst" is simply a creative and unusual name given to a pet hamster by its owner."
Is it still maintained?
> Everyone knows that amounts over $250K were not insured.

This is technically true, but I think there's a feeling that traditional banks are de-facto safe places to keep money. Depositors losing money in bank runs feels like a 1920's problem.
Per Wikipedia, he's the President of YC, he's essentially a politician (without the ostensible duty to the public)
Have you seen those pyramids made of human skulls in Cambodia?

I think the scale of the brutality matters a lot, and governments can get bigger scale.
I wasn't trying to say Fidelity was the only game in town that will automatically manage the FDIC insurance process for you. One bonus for Fidelity, their program has been around a while and they manage more money than the US Govt spends in a year, so they have definitely grown into the, to big to let fail category.

I agree with your perspective.
It’s not just Americans. For many non US-citizen founders, SVB was the only US bank that would serve them. It’s hitting Indian startups hard:

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/11/silicon-valley-bank-collap...
Totally absurd justification for a bailout coming from the people who will most benefit. When airlines go bankrupt they don't burn the planes. Someone else finances them at a discount. Same thing here: if you have a good idea, a good business model, good people, someone will fund you. Sure, the startup's legal entity may dissolve and the equity holder wiped out, but everything else survives.

The guys at the helm here are making every apocalyptic argument they can think of. No more innovation. China will win. Think of the workers' mortgages. It's all so that they, careless VCs, can get a taxpayer bailout.

If you really think some rank and file programmer is going to suffer for an extended period of time (he/she won't, but just for the sake of argument), then let the Federal Government cut them an unemployment check directly. But any investor, in anything, who loses due to this: suck it up, it's your job to hold the bag.
Because actions of fed made the bank unstable. By lowering value of things it hold

And then other people attacked it causing a bank run that put it over the edge.

Without the run, it likely could still be operating without too big issues.
> the concept of a "photo" has become increasingly blurry

nice.
There were lots of earthquakes before 2004, and 2012, etc.
I have flipped to four sections which looked interesting and found them all totally unconvincing. The author doesn't so much explore topics as expound on them, with an ideological bent that fails to question itself adequately.

E.g. the premise of the (bluntly opinionated) "Sell the Schools" - the post office is declining because it's a government monopoly? Are you sure sir?
> The moral hazard of trusting a licensed bank?

With deposits in excess of FDIC limits? Yes, absolutely. There are a number of options to manage cash more securely than just putting it all in a single bank.

Either one of 2 things must be true:

1. The FDIC 250k limit is real, and so deposits in excess of that limit must be subject to the risk of failure.

2. The FDIC 250k limit is fiction. If that's the case, then we should be honest and acknowledge that, and price any additional insurance accordingly.

Everyone clamoring for a bailout now wants to have their cake and eat it, too. They want the luxury of pretending like their deposits are insured without paying the premiums.
Or, just grab your soldering iron and some epoxy.

I think the point was that he did it as a bit of a hack. And looking at the condition of those notebooks, that's probably appropriate.
Things Unlearned After a Decade of Programming
Sure, it is a time period that causes people to stop and reflect. I'd wager more people reflect on their lives at 10/15/20/25 years after hs/college graduation than their 11/16/21/26 years after
It's only a bad thing if there are shorts on the side from the big whales who started pulling levers. I mean, would ANYTHING be done about it? No.

And if the bank could be propped despite what the evil soloblogger power-tweeted, would the gov't prop it up? Yeah. Oh wait, unless some powerful people influenced the govt not too...

I was just trying to retrace the "Global. Coordinated. Recession." Tweet from a few months back, which got walked back. Is a banking crisis an attempt to make another recession since inflation, rate hikes, etc aren't doing a very good job?
I got a dog recently, have been out on walks a lot and talking w other owners. Met a guy with an old dog a few weeks back, she was grey in the muzzle + stiff in the joints, but still moving around happy + unencumbered.

He said she was 20 years old, and his second 20+ y/o one. His said he went by:

- a balance of positive + negative reinforcement

- regular dog food, nothing fancy

and that

- if she was a seeing-eye dog she'd have been dead by 10

My takeaway is that mental stress is a killer. He was letting her have her "dog-nature". Roam around, sniff things, unburdened.

But the #1 has to be people. Everyone withers away alone + takes cues from our environment. The dream is having people around who make it feel natural to be healthy.
There's solo freelancers that run things through their LLC as well. It's not just all fat cats for sure.
I definitely side with the people who said that what you are describing is bad TDD

This is the result of people believing « unit test » means I should only test one « unit » (usually a function)

When you start testing a behaviour which can span multiple scopes, your tests don’t suffer from the same problems.

As for Clean Architecture, the overhead is quite minimal, and being able to hide complex stuff behind an interface means you will actually save a lot of time (like not having any database for several weeks, which helps iterating a lot quicker)

I have had the chance to see strong craft practitioner, it convinced me that they are indeed faster than the majority of developers (and ship more often)
Someone should start a petition for letting the market work and having its participants be accountable for their decisions.
I don't think the person you're responding to necessarily disagrees with anything you've written, which all seems quite right to me, too. But it's about the marketability of the app.
The Conversation (https://theconversation.com/) publishes news-style articles by working academics and graduate students, so the contributors typically have a technical background relevant to the subjects they are writing about (making the publication comparable to Quanta).

Nautilus magazine also publishes excellent science journalism (https://nautil.us) with high-quality writing comparable to Quanta. In contrast with The Conversation, the contributors are typically professional journalists and writers—the writing quality is therefore often much higher and more literary than The Conversation's, though Conversation contributors have relevant specialist knowledge more often than Nautilus contributors.

Also, Lapham's Quarterly (https://www.laphamsquarterly.org) is perhaps comparable to Noema, as the magazine publishes essays and analyses of modern issues, often via making comparisons between current affairs and important parts of history. This looks similar to Noema's approach of analyzing current events from an academic perspective, from noticing references to academic publications in several essays featured on Noema's front page.
> I don't know how much riskier.

Read the prospectus, they are required by law to list all of the known risk(s) in that document.

In general, MMF's are mostly identical to cash, but they do have some quirk(s) that might cause problems, and it should be noted that none of them are FDIC insured, and SIPC insurance(which they will qualify under) is drastically different than FDIC. https://www.sipc.org/for-investors/
The part where they participated in the bank run:

> $3.3bn of USDC’s cash reserves remain with SVB. As of Thursday, we had initiated transfers of these funds to other banking partners. Though these transfers had not yet been settled as of close of business Friday, we remain confident in the FDIC’s management of the SVB situation and stand ready to receive these funds.

The part where they said that because they participated in the bank run that they should keep it all, presumably even if others who didn't participate in the bank run lose some of theirs:

> We have reason to believe that under applicable FDIC policy, transfers initiated prior to a bank entering receivership would have otherwise been processed normally. In other words, the FDIC should allow transactions to settle in the ordinary course through the end of a bank’s standard daily processing cycle until the FDIC takes control of the failed institution.

"transfers initiated prior to a bank entering receivership" is doing a lot of work here.
No we have not established a moral hazard. It's always been $250k.
You are trying to make one up implying that we are "suddenly altering expectations". The narrative has always been, FDIC insured accounts are insured up to $250k.

I've known this since I opened my first bank account.
The only problem is that you’re locked into a centralized monopoly, and they can disconnect your business at any time
So let's get this straight. You want a bank who will take risks willy-nilly on start-ups. But you also want that bank to be subject to regulations to prevent banks from taking risks. But those regulations exist, and SVB begged for exemptions to them, so they could take risks. But your experience with more-regulated banks shows that they're too risk averse. What exactly are you asking for here?

You want your flock made whole. I get that. But are you also asking for regulators to kill the startup economy by shutting it out of banking?
On your profile page there is a setting called "Show dead", enable it if you want to see the skeleton threads.
> even then they are delayed, but not held.

If I understand it correctly:

1. Businesses processing payroll through Rippling wired money to Rippling's account as SVB

2. Rippling would now normally use that money to pay the businesses employees.

3. Before that could happen, SVB went upside-down. Some of the money may be lost, the rest is frozen.

4. The businesses owe their employees their pay, but may not have enough money to simply pay for payroll a second time.

5. Rippling owes the money to the businesses (respectively, has an obligation towards the businesses to pay their payroll), but may not have the money to do so after some amount of funds just disappeared and another larger amount just got frozen for an unknown amount of time.

6. Employees of these businesses won't be receiving their pay on time, and may not be able to receive it at all if the money they're supposed to be paid with is gone and neither their employer nor Rippling can afford to cover the loss and goes bankrupt.

Edit: based on a tweet linked elsewhere in this thread, Rippling is putting up its own money to make sure payroll goes through, so it should indeed just be one business day of delay + possibly additional small delays because some companies didn't make the necessary adjustments to keep future payroll runs working.
My risk threshold for cash is $0. So yeah, it would be split across however many banks.

Of course I don’t have all my positions in cash and I take into account the necessary risk/reward equation into account.

But then again, I would never work for a non public company where part of my compensation comes from “equity” and I sell/diversify all my after tax RSUs within 6 months after that vest. So I’m very risk averse about holding positions in any company I work for
Surely the situation isn't that bad for Large Language Models.
Which is exactly why I think "these poor bankers worked so hard they deserve it" as some kind of moral appeal falls flat with me.
Execution doesn't just encompass building software, in fact coding is typically the easiest, most enjoyable, least critical part of early stage tech companies founded by people already in tech.

Ideas are trivial. Follow a person around for 24 hours looking at them doing their job and you will have a dozen. Read a bunch of business books and analyse an old vertical you'll have a dozen. Hell ask chatGPT and you'll have a million.

As others have pointed out, whats seemingly missing from your mix is talking to people. If you talk to be people, they will give you problems, then you go about trying to solve them. Along the way you will have ideas on how to do this, most will not work, some will. The way you mitigate the failure risk is by understanding your users, the market better.
Not a stupid question. Good to ask what you don't know.

Yes, we're talking about startups with their operating capital frozen and struggling.

Many of the commenters here appear to be confusing bank depositors with bank investors. If you started a startup, it's very likely that your funds would be frozen.

> And how can a bank 'loose' money from checking accounts

As usual, it's complicated. Banks have always used the money in checking accounts to make investments. All of the service fees are just a tiny fraction of how a bank makes money.

The real question is how - and to what degree - a bank should be able to invest that money without creating untenable risk. Essentially, they are allowed to loan a significant multiple of their actual cash holdings.

Let's say that they can loan $5 for every $1 in trust. This works great so long as they don't have 21% of their customers show up and demand their holdings at the same time... which is a drastically simplified version of what happened late last week.

Unfortunately, they don't teach this stuff in high school. They 100% should.
No but maybe GPT-5 will be able to
Was more of me posting a meme in a thread about AI generated memes - I tried it out, great job
Man, that is a blast from the past. I had an engineering sample of one of these in 2008 and was trying to get it to work with ECC RAM pulled out of a Sun box. What a blast from the past.

https://techreport.com/review/16255/acards-ans-9010-serial-a...
Question from a foreigner: if this bank is so important for your ecosystem, why don’t y’all interested parties chip into some fund or something and buy it out yourself?
The FDIC should bailout the SVB
As long as you notice the ACH transfer and notify Fidelity, there is a very high likelihood they will be able to return your money. It's pretty easy to turn notifications on for those accounts and get notified as soon as Fidelity is notified about an ACH transfer.

This is one of the reasons ACH transfers take a few days to settle, to allow for fraud checking before settlement.
This is damning.
Why on earth would this be flagged? The SVB fiasco has been all over the front page for days, with an unprecedented number of stories allowed simultaneously. This particular link is especially relevant, since it's from YC itself.

The strangest part is there's no 'vouch' button, which is typically/always available on flagged submissions.
The Teva generic or the Teva brand name? They make both a generic and a brand-name. Everyone I've heard swears by the Teva non-generic as "the best" for just adderall.
I don't buy it, while it's true that startups are hundreds of thousands in the US, it's also true that VC funds are about 2000, the ones that invest on a recurrent basis must be less than 1000.

Every big bank surely has the receipts by now and they can check the sender as well as the cause for the wire (which should always be added) .

A 2.5M wire with sender being 'Founder Fund' and cause being 'Equity investment' will get the green flag even if the account is 3 months old or less.
not sure where did you get it, but they trained 65b llama too, which outperformed llama 7b on their benchmark.
I think the answer to this is that we don't anything that much better than GPUs to justify dedicated hardware - but I see it as inevitable. (Edit: I'm not counting TPUs, since they're not for sale).

My money is on something like processing-in-memory enabling inference on gigantic models with rock bottom energy consumption, and rolling out to the masses as a PCIe device. Lots of research on this direction, see https://mythic.ai for an example.
I imagine some people flagged it so it doesn't get more views. How pathetic of YCombinator itself begging for a bailout.
No, I don't have hard data, but so does Chomsky.
> Like I don’t want to defend the execs too much as they are the responsible people. But the gov and Fed did this. Erratic economic policy did this. It’s sad so many people think it’s a greedy bank. Being named Silicon Valley Bank doesn’t help.

Classic libertarian chant assigning the success to the private individual and blame to the government. Everyone is dealing with the same macroeconomic environment. SVB execs don't get a pass for poor risk management and not understanding their customer base.
Hey man, they own the place so it is their rules. Do you think the speech is free here? Newspeak only.
frontendmasters.com has a really great library of courses, and you can watch the introductory ones for free.
Because absolute greed.

Note the complete lack of ANY contrition, accountability, etc in their communications on this.
Every central bank is working in a digital currency (CBDC); the insurance and safety will be one of the value propositions pitched by the government. CBDCs will enable governments to control money at the individual level, also, if needed.

Then, when the next lab-virus leaks, those that don’t comply with government mandates will be programmatically forbidden from spending their digital coins.
It sucks at morse code.
I don't even understand why he would even make that comment in good faith in the first place. They are not asking for risks to be socialized, but they are asking for their "deposits" to be safe and the depositors to be "whole". Well, sounds like a lot like socializing the losses, unless there is a magical way to make the depositors whole without burdening the taxpayer.
When you join a startup, you don't really think about their traditional bank failing as a risk factor. It's a step away from "what if the office collapses in an earthquake" or some other p9999 off-chance risk.
Let's see how govt. handles this. I think if they just stand by, we can maybe assume that this kind of consequence is sort-of a deliberate part of the rate policy.
This seems like a rather exaggerated framing to absolve SVB of any responsibility for what happened, and is not accurate.

SVB overleveraged into long-term bonds in 2021 when interest rates were at an all time low. A financial institution/bank normally would hold a mix of maturities in their fixed-income holdings - 1 year, 3 year, 10 year - to maintain liquidity and reduce insolvency risk.

"If they were able to hold them to maturity there wouldn't have been a problem" does not make any sense - it's as if your company told you just wait an extra month for your paycheck, there won't be a problem. And then you told the mortgage lender to forget about this month's payment - if they just wait until next month, there won't be a problem.

Not to mention they had well over a year's advance notice to do _something_ because they knew exactly by how much their assets would decline in value. In March 2022 the Fed announced the decision to raise rates and continuing to do into 2023. By Sept they had announced the terminal rates would be over 4%, and have continued to openly increase that target since then.

Bond prices moving inversely to interest rates is Econ 101; anyone (at SVB) could've quite literally calculated their ~$25B 10-year 1.8% notes would drop by _at least_ $5B in 2023 before the terminal rate is even reached.

The run was the result of a clearly impending liquidity issue due to lack of near-maturation assets, not the other way around.