skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A bailout protects the equity and debt holders of a bank.

This has nothing to do with that--it's about making sure the depositors of a bank get the cash they were holding there.
Anyone who believes they can anonymize data automatically will be very disappointed...

There are so many ways in which data can point to individuals, you'd need to process every datapoint with a lot of care and investigation.

For example, rare medical conditions can be a good identification tool if the adversary knows the relation between such a condition and a person. How would an automatic tool know if a medical condition is rare enough? How will it know if such information is already available elsewhere?

Information may be transferred as images, or as audio. What if database simply stores these as blobs and only the application knows what format is used inside the blob?

Or, even if the format is known, in format s.a. DICOM where it's hard to tell if the information is significant or not. You can often recognize MRI machines due to various features of an image they take, eg. there might be some artifacts that would be found in every image. DICOMs usually have information s.a. date the image was taken, beside patient's name. But, connecting the date and a machine one may be able to infer which patient was pictured, if they also know that the patient paid for the cab ride around that time. Or, even simpler: sometimes there may be text in DICOM images identifying patients in some way.

Or, in a situation like my office: there's one woman and 30 men working there. Surprisingly, gender becomes a very precise tool at identifying people.
I agree. I put conscious effort into making sure my hobbies never make me money. I know that if they turned into a business they’d stop being fun and at my own pace.
Yup, I stand opposed to the slope mob. Quote me on that.
Silicon Valley Bank chief pressed Congress to weaken risk regulations

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11847295/amp/CEO-co...

I googled that for you.
This headline is atrocious. They are not asking for a bail out, they're asking for the rescue of a single bank.

If this bank failure touches off something similar to what happened in 2000 for the online economy the results will be colamatious. The average person doesn't realize how much bigger the Valley is in the entire American economy than it was back then.

FWIW I have no money in Silicon Valley Bank.
Every business holding uninsured deposits is responsible to do due diligence on their banking partners. There should be no bailout for negligence.
Ironically, I had to ask ChatGPT to translate this for me: “be sus if you’re not asking dumb questions.”

Some pearls in that list; but overall it left me feeling like I had downed a fistful of caffeine pills. Set a timer for this, for that, everything; hurry up (‘run, don’t walk. literally. “Slow is fake”’) But maybe I’m not in the target audience.
No bailout.

Where's the sense of responsibility here? YC told their funded companies to use Silicon Valley Bank. It's YC's responsibility to find a market for SVB's assets. It's YC's responsibility to create a secondary market for SVB's receivership certificates.
Well, the whole point is about "pay as well as Facebook and yet are a better corp for the world". So citing Roblox is pointless.
> We are advocating better regulation to prevent this from happening in the future. It's in the petition.

Details matter — let's wait to see what y'all actually advocate when it comes down to writing actual regulations.
The investors will try to claw back their money. Their first tactic will be a huge round of job losses.

The "Help us because jobs" line is just mendacious.
Disagree.

People who invested in SVB should be wiped out, probably.

People who deposited in SVB should not be wiped out.

Depositors in banks aren't expected to do due diligence on the financial statements of the bank they're depositing in. Have you read the 10-K filings of your bank in detail?
100k isn’t much money in Silicon Valley at this point, FWIW. You probably need multiple roommates if you’re going to save any of that salary level.
Startups have been anything but “socialized losses”. They’ve literally been the growth engine of the country for the past twenty years.

According to Brookings, “Annually, venture investment makes up only 0.2% of GDP, but delivers an astonishing 21% of U.S. GDP in the form of VC-backed business revenues.”

https://www.brookings.edu/research/as-the-venture-capital-ga...
I appreciate this fact-oriented comment.
Sorry, I'm not sure if you're confused, but these are simple bank accounts. There was no high interest yield. The average interest yield was a fraction of a percent.

No one was chasing any yield. No one was taking any risks. It's a bank account.

Are you suggesting tens of thousands of small business customers need to do due dilligence on the investment practices of their banks?

And what about all the other regional banks? Based on your comment, do you think the prudent thing would be for every single small business in America to transfer their funds out of regional banks into a large bank?
> Startups should live or die because they create good products and solve real problems in real markets, not because they made an arbitrary choice.

If you choose a bank because they were offering better products because they were taking more risks, why I should bare the cost?
What is the incentive for someone to buy SVB? Just to stop the spread of contagion or is there any scenario in which that was a profitable move?
Perversely, it’s in SVB depositor best interest to provoke more bank runs to cause systemic risk.
Anyone building anything useful or just the next version of the same thing that has been done before?
With all due respect, you have no idea what you are talking about.

A traditional hedge fund is the opposite of a VC. VC's want huge gains, which means huge volatility. Traditionally hedge funds minimize volatility rather than maximize returns. Traditional hedge funds are for those who care more about wealth retention during down times than increasing wealth during uptimes.

The maximum theoretical gain from shorting is 100%. A stock can only go to zero. If only 10% of your shorts are wildly correct and go to zero, you just made 10% on that one bet.

The maximum theoretical loss from shorting is infinite. Any one of the other shorts could blow up your fund if it went up 10x. Of course, this is a hedge fund, with risk management that would either hedge the risk or exit the position before it blew up the fund.

But shorting costs money. Especially if it's a popular short or if it pays a healthy dividend. Even if your stars align, and all the other 90% of short/long pairs just went sideways, neither generating a profit nor a loss, you are unbelievably lucky if you come anywhere close to the 8% a traditional index ETF returns over the long haul, with a 10% win rate on shorts.
Contagion, you say?

SVB had $20 billion in unrealized losses. There's estimated to be $600 billion more in the banking system.
Many startups chose SVB because they were the ones willing to open a bank account for them at all.

I remember going to a branch of Bank of America to open a bank account for Posterous and not being able to.
BOA should buy the bank, it'll be a big loss, but the clientele are some of the richest in America, or may someday become so, of course I'm not sure they could make everybody whole fast enough.
I can't speak for U.S based founders, but for many foreigners wanting to incorporate in the U.S SVB was the only banking option. Stripe Atlas made SVB their sole banking partner and thousands of foreign founders relied on them for all their fundraising needs.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/11/silicon-valley-bank-collap...
Let's compare Apples to Apples? I was citing Box stock since 2015. FB is more than double its 2015 price.
That's because what they're asking for is literally a bailout, and no amount of SV jargon is going to disguise that.
What equity are you talking about? It’s already wiped out, anyone can buy SVB for $1
…which is what many crypto companies have had to do for a very long time… bank redundancy is crucial in an environment where innovation has stalled, regulations stifle and monopolies abound.
FDIC resolution transactions division is doing it's job. They aren't fucking around.

Monday - $250k unfrozen

Wednesday or Thursday a huge amount of funds will be unfrozen from proceeds from FDIC big selloff of SVB assets yesterday.

Balance should be available in 2-3 months but will require a process.

This isn't going to be the big catastrophic event YC are pushing.

Although I do understand the fear.
Should developers really be paid $300k a year? Why is it so high compared to a career manager in a bank who will cap out at $120k, after wrecking his health with cocaine to sustain the incredible pace for 25 years?

This crisis may make deflation happen, if developer salaries deflate.
How long until someone puts out a docker image of this?

Ideally with a nice rest API, I can't imagine it's too hard to do.
It would be interesting to see how this mode handles foreground objects such as an aeroplane or clouds.

Does it just overdraw it (i.e. erase it), apply texture over the foreground element, or fail altogether?

This scenario is probably why other vendors don't go so far as to fake such images with texture overlays.
> Most startups only have one bank.

There's the problem: startups are doing an inadequate job of managing the risk around their treasury operations. That sucks, but that's on them.

I as a taxpayer do not care to bail out -- yes, that is what that is -- these startups, when they could have done a better job at risk management. I know some smaller startups that do have their cash at multiple banks (SVB one of them). While this is still a headache for them to deal with, it's not an existential threat. Perhaps more startups should be like that.

If you take a risk, you have to be prepared to accept the consequences of what might happen.

> Startups should live or die because they create good products and solve real problems in real markets, not because they made an arbitrary choice like which bank they started using.

False. Companies live or die because of every business-related decision they make. Choosing a particular bank, and choosing not to diversify where they keep their cash, is one of those decisions.
Not a giant incumbent?? They were literally on the board of the SF Fed...
> Would the taxpayer receive 10% equity in YC?

Make that 30–50 and we'd have a deal. Fucked up and want the state to rescue you? Fine, but your business is now mine, future profits and dividends (evabled by the bailout) will be distributed to all Americans, not just the handful of owners of "your" business.

It's how the 2008 bailouts should have been handled, instead we got the biggest transfer of wealth from poor to rich in history.
I have an idea. The startup depositors are made whole in exchange for the FDIC receiving shares in the company that dilute the VCs in an amount depending on company valuation and balance lost. This way you bail out the small business and make the VCs pay.
Very authentic! It even has a closed forum that's pending an upgrade. To complete the experience they could've linked to the forum but left in the PHP error messages.
Could we use CBDC for this? If the central bank has the money, there is no need to loan it out and the operational fees could be covered by tax payers. Then those who want their money lend for profit could use banks.
I know we’re not supposed to have positive opinions about MOC around here given those blog posts he wrote about venture capital but his recent take on the matter is worth reading.

It does seem like commercial art and literature are in for a tough ride, though high art and literary fiction may stay secure. The question and problem is that the two segments may be more interdependent than anyone wants to admit.
> not because they made an arbitrary choice.

It is not an arbitrary choice, svb was known for their risk taking behavior which is why so many risky small businesses landed on their lap

Rather than taking standard loans designed to reduce systemic risk, startups chose to use this bank because it allowed them to access capital more rapidly or in exchange for their own pennystocks, which ofc leads to increasing systemic risk and leads to the situation today

Sow winds and reap whirlwind
TARP did turn a profit, but there was no guarantee that the US treasury wasn’t going to take a loss on it.

Now, if these companies are willing to sign over warrants for 79.99% of the equity (like the banks did)… well, maybe there’s something to discuss. But otherwise reaping the rewards of capitalism while declining to take its risks - nah, I don’t think so.
Do you understand what you're saying though?

The consequence is, cash deposits for thousands of small businesses, are unavailable. The direct consequence is these businesses can't pay payroll, and can't pay vendors.

This isn't about socializing investor's losses. It's about making sure employees, contractors, and vendors get paid by fully backing cash deposits.
Yeah, no. Sorry folks, you have my sympathy, but bailouts are not - IMO - an appropriate role for government to play. Sometimes the breaks are just the breaks. But take heart, maybe this is a sign that it's time for a new business - insurance against bank failures.
The possibility of changing the rules of the game once it's started can create moral hazard. For example, if people believe that the govt will use taxpayers' money to reimburse funds that were not FDIC protected, then they won't be careful about picking their bank.

And it's a lot of money (e.g. 30% loss on $200bn is about $600 per US resident household).

But I'm conflicted, because:

- the federal administration doesn't seem to care about moral hazard or changing the rules of the game retroactively (e.g. handouts to people who borrowed lots of money whilst they were enrolled in college)

- banking is necessary for companies to operate, and it doesn't seem reasonable for every business to become expert in managing counterparty risk

- bank regulation seems to have failed, and that's a responsibility of govt

- it's almost impossible to be neutral about this; if you're a founder/CEO you aren't going to feel you did anything wrong by choosing SVB; if you're a random taxpayer you are going to feel any obligation to pay some west coast companies because their bank failed.
Hope should be reserved for good things. I hope the ones who truly had no idea what they were risking come out better and wiser.
What’s your take on SVB vs. First Republic?
They were often included in WW2 military rations. The name of the German variant was Pervertin. Based on the side effects encountered when using it.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/03/silicon-valley-bank-...

"Christopher Whaler, Chairman of Whalen Global Advisors in New York, said: ‘I think the Fed badly miscalculated the impact of rising interest rates and so these are self-inflicted wounds and if we see more banks fail then the Fed is faced with a very tough situation which may force them to drop interest rates.’"
My bonus also paid Friday. It’s almost like this is a typical time of the year for bonuses to go out. No expense spared on the headline here /s
Well, now you are. But the milk's been spilt.
I mean the 250-500k limits have been around for a long time now, that said they are rather low due to inflation. Most larger companies reduce this risk by spreading assets over a number of banks. Just banking with a large bank does nothing if they fail.
I'm convinced that anyone can make a living writing by having a stockpicking substack. Hear me out.

Picking stocks is simple. All you have to do is take a course on accounting, read up on valuation, and find a niche (endless variety here) to focus on. Research stocks carefully. Document your analysis and publish regularly. Syndicate on podcasts and fintwit. There are many people that will pay $100/mo for this sort of research if you do it well.

Spend the rest of your time writing your novel.
Rich fat cats all over Silicon Valley looking for society to socialize their losses. YC has an incredible amount of wealth as it is.
We are asking for new regulation that would prevent this from occurring.
The original llama uses google's tooling for that, written in C++ https://github.com/google/sentencepiece
So… Is this a list of financially unstable start ups ???
This is just brazen. These people play all kinds of financial games, run business right at the margin of what is legal, decry regulation or legislation that “hurts their competitiveness” (abusing 1099 employees anybody?) and then cry out immediately for a bail out as soon as they feel an ounce of pain. Maybe these CEOs and VCs can fund payroll for a few pay periods.

Edit: I fully expect the YC sycophants to flag this story to hell and get it off the front page, and the censors here will come along with their canned finger wagging and admonishments of anybody taking them to task.
It is financial negligence on your companies' part. And that too is a risk of doing business. Risk is not just on the product, but also the partners you get into bed with along the way.
> a bit of javascript when it's needed for a form.

Until you get told to implement more reactive features, then it's over. Using Pure JS/JQuery for reactiveness is outright horrible.
Hah, nope.
All I know is: I'd love to go to this casino. Win? It's mine. Lose? The house covers me.
No. Save yourself and the VC pyramid scheme that collapsed in front of you.
Everyone is aware of the Great Depression. This ain't it.
he's making a joke that I think is pretty clear, and jokes are only funny when they're stripped to their essentials.

if anybody holds the perspective that the govt should use public funds to save a set of companies because ma jobs, ma innovations, etc. in the venture capital sector it would seem that person does hold that perspective, at least enough to joke about it.

Unless you're making a more unlikely point that the government should be intervening all the time?
This is nonsense. These nets regurgitate the most average possible output given inputs. By definition. You’re conflating and hyping and mixing up so many weird things at once.

You literally couldn’t get GPT to come up with a single novelty if you tried. It’s all remixing existing content, and again, doing so in a way to fit the average of the dataset.

When you realize this you realize it has no intelligence as we most typically define it (novel solutions to novel problems).. its not AI. Call it what it is: a beautifully advanced way to regurgitate the exact most popular (mundane) reply you’d expect given a huge dataset.

It’s sort of good for studying what already exists. It won’t even really ever show you the edges though so it’s actually almost dangerously deceptive as evidenced by this absurd rounding up people are doing. If you want to learn the gist of anything, ask GPT. If you want to know anything in depth, GPT in fact will only mislead you towards genericity, platitudinous mediocrity.
So the punchline is that while most of it (~85%) was paid back, the program wrote off $66 Billion as a loss.
Stress test (financial) > Bank stress test , Payment and settlement systems stress test
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_test_(financial)#Bank_s...

List of bank stress tests > Americas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bank_stress_tests#Amer...

https://www.google.com/search?q=increased+capital+thresholds...

From "Transparency & Accountability - EGRRCPA (S. 2155) Rulemakings" https://www.fdic.gov/transparency/egrrcpa.html :

> The FDIC is responsible for a number of rulemakings under the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act (EGRRCPA). This page provides links to proposed and final rules and related documents.

"FDIC Releases Economic Scenarios for 2022 Stress Testing" (2022)
https://www.fdic.gov/news/press-releases/2022/pr22019.html

How can the scenarios and policies be improved?
I remember in Cambodia they stole water from female tourists. And if somebody confronted them you had to be very careful to not get bitten. In a sense they reminded me of humans. I bet we would also be very crafty and annoying if we were held as pets or another more intelligent species took over the world.
I make repairs to cables like these with a very simple method: glue the two pieces together with superglue and some overlap, a few mm will do. Then use conducting glue (with silver particles in it) to restore the connection. Use a tiny brush and a microscope to apply the glue. If the currents are low (as they usually are with cables like these) this will work just fine and give a quick and long lasting result.
One unlucky user paid $2,080,468.85 USDC to receive $0.05 of USDT
People keep saying 250k, but it's actually 500k for any account with two signatories, which a company should be trivially able to produce.
If a startup can't pay their employees at the end of the month, it's apocalyptic no matter whether or not they get access to their money again at some future date.
SVB has some ordinary people as depositors, with a regular commercial bank as their Boston Private subsidiary. It would be very disruptive and cruel if they lost all or much of their deposits.

SVB's stockholders, on the other hand . . .
Well then perhaps you should be more specific, because there are obvious counterexamples to the generalizations you're throwing around.

USDC is a bridge across which supply and demand signals flow between centralized and decentralized networks.

Mycorrhizal networks are a similar bridge. Both are complex social structures, but only one is falling apart.

If we're going to get this right, it's not going to be by writing off cases where this kind of problem has been elegantly solved, especially in the absence of alternatives to try.
Wells Fargo is the least corrupt large bank I can think of. They were nice and helped bail out one of the 2008 losers then those influx employees started doing mischievous things and gave WF a bad name for a while. I think they've got all that sorted now.
Typically, Coinbase has been able to absorb liquidity on weekends to give consumers the illusion that USDC is redeemable outside of banking hours, but the SVB crash caused their weekend reserves to run out.

If SVB didn't crash, there wouldn't have been a huge spike in USDC redemptions, and Coinbase would have been able to service redemptions using their weekend reserves like they always have.
I get the thrust of the comment, but it's not a particularly good analogy. The petition signers are asking for the FDIC to prioritize their debt (deposits at SVB) repayment. They aren't asking for debt forgiveness.
Ah yes. It’s the docs that are wrong.
I’m disappointed that so many YC companies had all their cash with one bank.

It’s boring stuff, but good governance includes things like risk management policies, and treasury policies.
Too late the lesson is re-learned - spread your banking risk, especially if holding large amounts of cash. Meanwhile it’s not too late to think about how to lower client, counterparty and supply risk through diversification, including into other locations and countries.
It's truly remarkable that most likely SVB lobbied congress to allow more risk taking because it will encourages innovation, while in reality what it did destroys innovation.
Are you saying if I deposit more than $250k (which is NOT a lot for a business) into a reputable and regulated US bank at negligible rates of interest I should just accept the impact of the bank shutting down due to events unrelated to my actions and choices?

Yes. That's the way this works. Or you can choose whatever risk mitigation strategy you're comfortable with: spread your deposits across multiple institutions, buy Krugerrands and bury them in the backyard, purchase 3rd party insurance whatever.