skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> But the cause of the run is the suspicious part to my mind.

I've heard multiple reports that one of their large investors got wind of their attempts to get a $2B loan so they wouldn't lose that money in their bond investments and thought it was a huge red flag and was the first to take out all of their money. The theory goes it was a large SV company, and news travelled on social media and the SV financial circles about they did and their belief that the bank was about to implode.

This created a long line forming on Friday morning of companies wanting to get their money out as well.

I agree, I'm not sure if the rumor was enough to spook people, or an orchestrated move by several companies, once one company found out what they were doing - but its very suspicious. Add in the founders were busy taking money at the same time they were liquidating their positions, which I'm sure the SEC will have something to say about as well.

Add in all the people who may have found out early and took out short positions as well who are now poised to possibly make a good chunk of money in all this chaos.
You offer customers CDs if they want higher interest rates. Isn't that how it's been done for decades?
> The rest of the world has heat pumps figured out

A single digit percentage of homes globally are using heat pumps, most of the world does not have it figured out. That's specifically why Electric Air exists, they're chasing what is going to be a gigantic market (if it were already such a figured out market they couldn't get funding without a revolutionary 10x approach, YC would have little interest).
“Everything that arises passes away.”
Rules of thumb typically are just first order approximations which by definition are not guaranteed to hold far from their point of interest (or point of tangency).
> Often, on his arrival in a new town in Alabama or Mississippi, he would head straight to the police headquarters to ask for advice on which areas he should avoid for his own safety. Wherever the local sheriff warned him not to go, he went. Did he encounter any animosity on his lone travels? “The only hostility I experienced was from white people,” he replies. “I had a number of run-ins that were not pleasant – guns pulled on me, a rifle aimed at my face. There is a lot at stake there for some people when they suddenly see an outsider, especially an outsider with a camera.”
lol I sorta figured as much. That level of dedication to a single project is completely beyond my comprehension, very impressive.
I'd be very interested in the specifics of how and why late stage investing is so different that the success of YC in early stages doesn't translate.
Sure, incurring additional detrimental reliance after notice of revocation is not compensable, but that doesn't mean that I couldn't recover — even under your hypo.

For example, if I was offered a long term grazing contract in 2021 at favorable rates, and I passed on it because I was able to graze with you, I could claim that the 2021 act was reasonable reliance and that if I have to pay more for a grazing contract now, I should be able to recover the difference.

Of course, the landowner would argue that it isn't reasonable to pass up on a deal on grazing without first checking with the landowner to make sure the deal was good for the foreseeable future. This would all come down to facts and circumstances (as all reasonableness determinations do), including the duration of the historical practice, whether anything material had changed since then, etc.

Is it better to have a contract? Absolutely. But as a seasoned lawyer will tell you, it's possible to kill a deal by papering it to death. A rancher might put it differently: don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
Right. If they needed NULLs, then imho full algebraic datatype tagged unions would be the natural extension of these. Now, obviously you can implement those in SQL using one column per type and one column as your discriminator tag, but that would be excruciating, especially considering how weak SQL generally is about standard libraries and reusability outside of the very fixed concepts like Views and Functions. Then you could properly define the semantics of your "missing value" as appropriate to the data.

Various SQL servers have accepted the need to support stuffing multiple data-types into a single column - MSSQL has SQL_VARIANT, Orcale has ANYDATA, SQLLITE has... well, everything in SQLLITE. So between that and the existence of NULL, the ship has already sailed. May as well make it formal and schema-defined behavior using tagged unions.

As the rest of the software industry has figured out, `Maybe<T>`s are better than NULLs.
High Definition CSS Color Guide
Posting the link to this recent Chrome Developers blog post because I've just updated my browser and was delighted to accidentally discover that Chrome now fully supports OKLAB/OKLCH colors. Including gradients!
hisense 9?
The Mattress Bank.
If I had a nickel for every time that restores from "simple SSH+rysnc script" backups failed, I would not need my job as an infra engineer. You can do that, but being sure they work is hard

My clients spend a lot more on AWS bills than they would on self-hosted infra; $1000ish compared to $200/mo from self-hosted or a pair of $1000 servers colo'd for about $100/mo. They get a lot more - Reliability and support channels. That's what they're paying for. Absolutely, I recommend that they when they scale, they move their most expensive parts in terms of AWS costs (bandwidth-intensive things like gameservers and media bouncers) from AWS to self-hosted, because those are the things that are too expensive on AWS and have reliability properties where "Throw a bunch at the wall, fail them fast" is a good guarantee. For your production backups, don't rely on simple scripts. Don't rely on complex scripts. Rely on commonly tested solutions of other people's amortized experience.
Ask HN: What role do data and analytics play in product management?
Hey all, I'd like to ask for your feedback on a topic. I'm curious to know your opinions on the role of data and analytics in product management, and how these tools can be leveraged to make better decisions about products.
I'm building Notion Standup (https://notionstandup.com/) and I believe that seeking out the perspectives of others is crucial for the growth of my product, and I'm eager to hear your thoughts on this subject. So, if you have any insights, tool recommendations or experiences that you'd like to share, I'd love to hear from you!
Conda is very nice for people who just want to write some python and not need to learn about the ecosystem or weird issues like some Visual Studio dependency not being installed to get scipy to compile on Windows or whatever. Like someone coming from R to Python. But aside from that situation I agree with you.
> Now, SVB, loaded with money, could have tried loaning it like crazy, but instead, decided to go the conservative way and buy bonds.

No, they bought MBS, yielding 1.6% at the time, which aren't conservative. What they should have done is bought 1 month - 1 year Treasuries, yielding 0.10%. Then they couldn't give out above-market interest returns, in excess of 0.5% compared to other banks, which SVB depositors pocketed during the upside, and then failed to realize the risk during the downside, being bailed out by the government.
> With plain venv it’s hard to maintain multiple different Python versions on the same machine

Ironically, given the usual software dev experience on Windows vs. Unixy systems, this is not a problem with the standard install on Windows with the py launcher.
How about Australia? Not the same population, but otherwise the criteria fits.
> On one hand, it aligns with my ethics to shut-down the operations of sanctioned companies to minimize their harm.

Only if the sanctions are warranted by ethics. Which they are not, in this case - there isn't anything online I can find which supports sanctioning this specific company.

This is a repeating pattern in this conflict: even without substantial or even circumstantial proof that a russian company benefits from or at least tolerates the war, in the event Ukraine tells us to sanction the respective company, we have to obey or else.

What do we expect? Should all russian companies shut down because of the war? Would this be what we expect from all western companies, like when we attacked Iraq because of Weapons of Mass Destruction?

This is slowly really getting ridiculous. Even more so if this opens up an attack vector from even more non-friendlies because of an orphaned github account.
What do Peter Thiel's political party and contribution activity have to do with Silicon Valley Bank's solvency?
Chris, I think there's a lot more here to uncover. Most of your competition has no sensitivity, and almost no openness, about these aspects. I think this could become a really important part of your go-to market, but also a differentiator vs other products.

I'm a VC since recently, but have been a tech guy for a long time. Feel free to ping me if you'd like to discuss it further. $HN_username at gmail.
what does it mean by "caching"? saving it into a global variable in the lambda function?
A language model cannot, by itself, figure that out, at least not to arbitrary complex inputs.

But it’s a fairly sweeping statement to say that AI cannot do it.
It uses LTE and any phone should work.
Yeah, HDMI is a notoriously failure prone connector I've found. I avoid it if I can, though I don't have any use for it on my laptop. My Thinkpad has one, could be dead I suppose since I never use it :P
Can you explain your thinking? as I find this so far from likely to be true that I can't understand how anyone could believe that.

Example of one calculation method, take the probable incidents, multiply the probability by the negative impact. Likelehood of kid injurying themselves in a physically dangerous area, very very high. Hospitals are full of kids every weekend that injured themselves in their own home, negative injury likely bad bruise or broken arm lasting days to weeks. Online probability of harm = low. Severity of harm most likely = name calling or mental bullying. Bullying impact likely low unless bullies also physically live nearby which then brings it back to in-person harm.
Banks are supposed to know how to deal with this problem… a couple didn’t.
That's a big problem if you're using a language model as a search engine. The trick is to learn how to use them for the things that they're good for outside of that.
> And Facebook knowingly and grubbily caused extra chaos as part of their effort to get their way

There is exceptionally little merit to this claim. They blocked links news outlets that would have subjected them to the link tax, and this block wasn't perfect. There was nothing to indicate that blocking sites that wouldn't have incurred the link tax was deliberate.
Been really enjoying trying out pdm in PEP 582 mode. I've just found it behaves when used across multiple devs, not necessarily that used to working with python.
Whenever a contradiction of capitalism arrises like this, the problem is always too much interference in the markets, and the solution is always more unfettered capitalism.
Seeing his photo from 1973 makes me feel weird. He looks like any young guy on Instagram a few years ago. But he's this old dude now
> Probably since Friday they have assessed that the depositors can be covered once the assets can be liquidated, and that they may even be able to make money doing it.

The same assets that are yielding <4% interest against a market rate of 5%+ or 7%+ or whatever it is? Seems like it's going to take a long while before those papers are trading at or above cost when you account for inflationary devaluation and their yield horizon.

There is certainly a cost here. The insolvency of the paper is the entire reason the bank failed in the first place.
In an already difficult economic climate, it's heartbreaking to hear that these individuals will be impacted by this change in strategy. I hope that YC will do their best to support these team members during this transition.
Central banks have been telegraphing rate increases for over a year. Your statement might have been true on the day of the purchase but SVB had an entire year to fix their mistake and failed to do so.
Ask HN: How do I make peace with being a dud?
In my mid-30s and I find myself yet at the bottom of another cycle of failure to make meaningful progress in the most basic parts of life. Traumatic childhood, blah blah, has almost cognitively neutered me. Therapy has helped little. Meds haven't done much. Life is crumbling.

I feel I have no choice but to accept that I am not wired to pursue my ambitions of being an entrepreneur, not with the executive dysfunction, social anxiety, and paralyzing fear that I have not been able to improve.

How do I accept that I will never amount to anything notable, let alone moderately respectable?
This seems simplistic and low drag. Do you have an example you can share?

Thanks!
They didn't buy treasury bonds, they bought mortgage-backed securities with average duration of ~10 years (risky), why are people still wrongly repeating this?
I read earlier today that Thiel and many other people actually took action after reading a reputable newsletter called The Diff.
I mean, aside from the fact that you misunderstood the whole point, nobody ever paid 20% extra for a heating system which didn't have cloud connectivity. In fact, the whole idea that there's something wrong with a heating system which doesn't require an internet connection is so incredibly bizarre that I can only wonder if you're someone who came out of a time machine.

Lastly, a partial refund does fuck all to compensate for the fact that you have a multi-tonne brick in your house that has perfectly functioning hardware but broken software (because the server it used to talk to is gone). It also doesn't compensate for the wasted resources.
Rivian wants out of Amazon exclusivity clause for electric vans
How I burnt out in FAANG, but it is not what you think
It isn't going to get you phone service. The satellite service is low bandwidth, I heard 9 Mbps shared with the entire cell. It will be limited to messaging and maybe voice call.

It will replace satellite messengers and satellite phones.
Would YC be willing to share more about the effectiveness of the Continuity Fund? A post mortem would be welcomed and valuable imho.
After watching this play out in Australia, it doesn't feel like there are many new arguments to be made. It's just sad to watch.

As a Canadian, it bothers me that our politicians are willing to jump through mental hoops to avoid considering the most obvious solutions.

If news companies don't want people accessing their content through the web, shouldn't they simply take down their web sites? If they aren't willing to do that (because, say, the benefits outweigh the costs), then perhaps this isn't an issue that warrants legislation...
> Where exactly, though? Ask any big tech worker; they will assure you it's not coming from there.

Like I said, non-profit research organizations, branches of government, traditional, sustainably-run companies. The fact that Silicon Valley is boxing all of these things out of the market doesn’t prove they won’t exist. They did before anticompetitive behavior became the business model du jour and they will again.
Are we really comparing treasury bonds to pokemon cards now?

Treasury bonds are guaranteed by the government with the worlds largest economy. US treasuries are pretty much the safest investment instrument in the history of mankind.

In 10 years, they WILL pay out at face value, unless the USA suffers complete collapse. In which case your dollars in the bank are worthless anyways.
A choice that I deliberately made years ago.
California cancels salmon fishing season
I would say it depends on where you live. The grid in CA has (in some parts) not been reliable for 5+ years. To Chris' point below though, it's not really relevant because gas furnaces need electricity to operate, too.
Wow, I am impressed, in particular by the human quality.

I discussed some literature I was very familiar with. It did feel like conversing with a professor, or at least a very informed and articulate layperson.

So in terms of discussing things I know, it's fantastic.

I still feel insecure about believing what it says about topics I don't know.

Edit: Wow. I am having an incredibly stimulating conversation about T.S. Eliot's poetry with Claude. It offers some interpretations which definitely feel like an AI might, but they are entirely plausible too, and when I share my take, it self corrects and demonstrates what appears to be a deep and thoughtful understanding. I am enriched.
I guess someone was intrigued by my talk of peppercorns in the banking thread

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35134552
The thing with interest rates is in high inflation you never know what high really is since high inflation itself is highly volatile.

I.e. don’t be SVB. Hire a risk officer.
YC does early stage well. Spreading out focus and capital over other stages takes energy away from this.

Other firms already have a good grasp of late stage and it'd be a battle for YC to improve over this.

Maybe YC can return to late stage later when the environment changes.
Okay so you are a professional and are getting paid to create, presumably, useful software.

In that case I would take some time, be loving and kind to yourself, enjoy life, and consider what you would really like to do. Learn about a bunch of different things.

Then, go gradually. Learn to take one small step at a time. Read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, which has a lot of wisdom about this subject. The Tao Te Ching is another great example of literature on wisdom and patience.

If you doubt yourself and don’t want to, then you need to accumulate small victories consistently over a long period of time. Write down in one place all of the things that you have accomplished and keep adding to it all the time. Call it a brag journal if you will. Eventually the evidence will accumulate that you are capable of what you want to do.

Finally, I recommend therapy and professional coaching to really break through any underlying psychological barriers that you have e.g. pathological belief systems. My email is open if you want to talk further.
Yes, USD.
> They were never, even MTM, under water.

This is completely false. If the SVB (or any other bank) had been adequately capitalized on a MTM basis, then they could have borrowed from the Fed to withstand any bank run. The SVB was not:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-10/the-balan...

The hold-to-maturity accounting allowed them to pretend otherwise, disregarding losses on long-term bonds when interest rates increased. They--and their regulators, since such accounting is perfectly legal--hoped this would let them ignore the problem until they could earn their way out of the hole. Instead interest rates increased further, the hole got deeper, and the SVB blew up.

It's not impossible that Thiel somehow benefitted from the collapse, though I'm not aware of any evidence for that yet. It's also possible that he simply didn't want his money in an insolvent bank.
That's great (from my sofa's PoV)! If your mission is to fund youngsters and we know the story about that bank from the Silicon valley so this is the best way to save some resources.
A handful of people can do immense damage to many things.
As an old business mentor once told me: if you've found a niche where there is no competition, the odds are very good that there's some huge problem around addressing it that you haven't thought of. If nobody else is fishing in the lake, it's probably because there are no fish, the fish are poisonous, or there's a crazy person around who will shoot you for fishing there.
Yes, the Fund which had had issues using the Bank recommended the Fund's Companies stop using the services of the struggling Bank.

Seems to me like this is how business would be conducted, I'm not sure where I would look deeper to understand how this is nefarious?
Open Circuits: The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components
I just got a copy of this book. It features pictures of the internals of electronic components in truly amazing photographs. We fail to appreciate the technology that goes into making some of these. For example, the whisper-thin bonding wires in a 3656HG Isolation Amplifier (pp 266-269) have a vapor-deposited conformal coating. Imagine trying to coat a wire you can barely see.

This "coffee-table" book of pictures is well worth the price, if only to see the absolute beauty of our amazing level of technology.

Eric Schlaepfer and Windell H. Oskay
"Open Circuits: The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components"
No Starch Press ISBN 978-1-7185-0234-5

(and, no, I am in no way related to the authors, the book, or publishers)
thanks for your comment. I will make sure to never comment on a thread again, unless I am a world expert on the subject.
Without a quote I'm not inclined to believe people characterizing his statement as "censorship". Even Boebert didn't use that word, and she's one of the most reactionary of the bunch.
Yes. I am an "engineer" in a field I definitely don't do despite never having a degree of any sort. What I really am is a programmer.
First Real-World Look at Apple Mixed-Reality Headset Parts Leaked Image
From what I understand: SVB offered below-market rates on loans and even personal financing for the founders of companies if you, in return, use them exclusively as your bank and put all your raised capital into an account with them.

You buy favorable rates on loans with the increased risk of putting more than the insured amount into the account.

When your house gets damaged in a flood and you've selected to insure it for $250k because that's cheaper, and you've knowingly built it in a floodplain, is the government still going to cover 100% of the cost of building it?
I am not VC but I think this is kinda apparent from the get go.

In early stage you are betting on and nurturing a small team with a full-of-hope business plan. They need relatively small bits of help that can go a along way. So both "who you are chosing among" and "how you are helping them" is very specific.

With bigger companies, the team and the business plan is more proven and they need help navigating size and scaling their offering - a very different set of people you are chosing from and what they need from you.

I am sure there's a lot of additional nuance.
Blaming somebody for saving his money?
For me, it's just peace of mind. I need to know that if cloud servers go down, or even my internet goes down, my house still works. My Nest thermostats are currently cloud-only (the only parts of my house left that are), and I had to write a script to never update them exactly on the hour. That's when their API is very likely to 500; I'm guessing because most people have automations trigger on the hour.

I guess I can sum it up like this: I only want to deal with my own problems in my free time in my own home.
> How so?

It have been pretty deviating in Nov. 2015 when HP lost ewlett- ackard.
There have been plenty of scaling problems (my batch, S12, has been publicly referred to a few times as "the batch that broke YC" for example).

Scaling is an iterative process :)
I’m so old I forget that old memories can be found again with Wikipedia and Google.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_D9060

https://www.commodore-info.com/brochure/item/commodore_d9060...
Literally none of the investors in SVB were bailed out, as you cannot bail out a failed bank.
yeah, that is kinda my point.
This ignores the voices crying in the wilderness for months about dangers at the bank.

"The risk for $SIVB is that deposit outflows accelerate at such a pace that it is forced to either raise equity capital and/or sell down its HTM securities portfolio, thus realizing substantial losses. You can bet that $SIVB is praying for a Fed pivot!"

https://twitter.com/RagingVentures/status/161582608803847373...
Far more likely will be grainy reposted jpeg screen grabs of the title and first paragraph of the article being shared.