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That’s not necessary though unless we are to believe that a meaningful amount of money has disappeared. The FDIC offers insurance with a limit for a reason, it’s a fantasy to believe that the FDIC are going to invent a brand new standard of deposit protection because some companies might be forced to take a small haircut on their money.

The bank will re-open, companies will get most of their money, and life will carry on. The FDIC aren’t going to guarantee 100% of deposits, and shouting from the rooftops that a million jobs will be lost if the FDIC don’t do it (which they won’t) is panic-inducing for no discernible reason.

Edit: I intentionally took one for the team by embarrassing myself with a claim disproven less than an hour later. You’re welcome.

“If you receive a late paycheck, California Labor Code 210 requires employers to pay a penalty of $100 for an initial violation.”

Severely is overselling it.

Maybe it’s not fair to compare Garry Tan to sama in this situation because Garry is the current president and sama is the former, but, it’s nice to see sama’s measured response compared to Garry’s.

Garry is shouting from the rooftops that more than a million jobs are going to be lost if the fed doesn’t immediately do something (that we all know it isn’t going to do). I wouldn’t want to be a YC startup right now, listening to Garry stoke panic.

Kudos to sama for being pragmatic and calm.

HelloFresh have outlived many others but they aren’t long for this world either. They’re still spending huge amounts of money on marketing which isn’t converting to long term customers.

There’s definitely a market for these type of food boxes but it’s a much smaller market than HelloFresh etc. require to sustain the size of company they’ve built.

https://ir.hellofreshgroup.com/websites/hellofresh/English/3...

I’m not sure I follow. Circle don’t hold tens of billions of USDC: USDC is minted when they receive USD at a one-to-one ratio. What coins are you proposing they burn? If there’s $10bn USD missing they’d need to burn $10bn USDC.

The laws exist to protect employees, not to discourage employers from employing. Setting the precedent that a shareholder in a company is at risk of losing everything because a bank that their company uses fails would have a very negative impact on California as a place to employ people, which doesn’t help employees.

I am presuming the employers operate in good faith, that is, they are open with the employees about the situation — it would be hard to keep this a secret given it’s major news.

If your employer said to you, “we are caught up in this, we are working to resolve the situation“ it would be pretty fair and reasonable of them. You can choose to quit if you want, you’re under no obligation to work.

it’s not as simple as is being suggested. The corporate veil can be pierced in cases of wage theft where the corporation has been used for nefarious means. There’s no evidence that being unable to make payroll because of a bank collapse comes close to qualifying as bad behaviour on behalf of those behind the corporate veil.

You could argue that an overly cautious founder might cut all their employees off immediately out of an abundance of caution, but that would be self-immolation.

As a non-lawyer with zero credibility, I’d be shocked if any founders of companies that can’t make payroll because of this are at risk of the corporate veil being pierced. SVB was based in California, subject itself to California law, it would require some extreme mental gymnastics from a judge to believe that a company that can’t make payroll because they used SVB behaved inappropriately in this situation.

Again, I have zero credibility, but I’d expect when the dust settles, the only companies we see get in any trouble will be the companies that do some insane illegal things in a panic because they get caught up in the tidal wave of fear. Founders withdrawing millions into their personal accounts and then losing it by buying crypto or going to vegas to do a fedex with their remaining cash or something equally insane feels much more likely an outcome.

8% represents, what, a month of runway for most startups? That’s not an extinction level event, it’s a stubbed toe.

A company spending millions of dollars per year on payroll will have the relationships necessary to weather a storm like this. SVB made some very poor investment decisions but they didn’t light the money on fire: it’s not going to take years to liquidate. There is huge upside opportunity for buyers of assets from a distressed bank: the assets are worth less than what SVB paid (hence the crisis) but are not worthless. We will have to wait and see, and perhaps my optimism is naive, but I struggle to see a situation in which these remaining assets can’t be liquidated in the coming weeks. Even pre-crisis, SVB held less than $200bn — that’s a small amount of money in the context of the US banking system. Apple alone has, what, $100bn?

You’re conflating the amount insured and the amount that will be recovered. SVB has failed as a bank, it hasn’t failed as a place to have money. The money still exists, and while there’s a hole created by recovering immediate access to that money, it represents a very small haircut — maybe a few percentage points for each customer.

Garry has an incentive to say the sky is falling because the sooner this is resolved the less pain it’ll cause, but to say this is an industry extinction event is a stretch.

Even if the extremely unlikely scenario plays out and companies are unable to make payroll, employees are very unlikely to walk out, it would make an inconvenient situation (no pay) much worse (terminated) in an already challenging economic climate. Anybody with the financial means to walk away because payroll has been missed is someone with the financial means to ride out a few weeks waiting to be paid.

We will see many startups fall in the next few weeks + months, and many will attribute it to the failure of SVB, but SVB’s failure is a symptom of the broader economic environment, not a cause, and the same factors that caused SVB to fail are already hurting startups — like the difficult fundraising environment at the moment. SVB will be an easy scapegoat, “we didn’t fail, it was SVB’s fault!”

Most any startup that attributes its failure to SVB’s collapse would have been dead in a few months anyway.

Sounds like you have a ready-made customer base for a bank in crisis.

Sure, and everyone knows that their favourite person in the world could just run them over in a car and kill them in seconds, but if your best friend says to you, “you know, I could drive my car into you and you would die… your life could be snuffed out with a moments notice” you may start to question your friendship.

Perhaps a dumb question but container breakouts are a problem for all sorts of services which have been addressed in different ways. Since your goal is not to prevent container breakouts but rather securely run third-party code, why did you choose to use EC2 over something like ECS or Lambda or Google Cloud Run which is already dealing with the security aspect on your behalf? Virtual machines seem less secure and less convenient.

Security is layered. A backup code is only useful with the password, and your password is only useful with a second factor. You can be fairly liberal with storing your backup codes: make a couple of copies, keep them in secure places (one at home, one in your office). I agree that backup codes aren’t perfect but they’re pretty robust.

The site has been pretty unstable recently. The headcount cost reduction is worth much less than the additional cost of lost ad revenue + interest payments. Twitter was break even pre-Elon and is now down billions per year.

That’s a paper with very carefully selected examples. The point I’m making is not that this will never be possible (it will) but rather it is not happening right now and this article is just victims and journalists doing exactly what all scam victims do: look for a reason they fell for the scam that softens the blow. AI in the news? Must be AI!

Scams don’t need sophisticated technology to work, suggesting that scammers have access to some state-of-the-art technology that has only been demonstrated in a paper doesn’t match up with the reality of what scamming is.

Getting scammed is embarrassing and our natural response is to look for reasons beyond the obvious. These scammers don’t need state of the art voice technology, because this exact scam has been working for the best part of a decade across many different mediums. There’s a reason if you walk into a shop and try to buy $1000 in gift cards, or walk into a bank and try to withdraw $3000 in cash, that the teller will assume you’re the victim of a scam!

Protecting ourselves and our families from being scammed requires a sensible, realistic understanding of how they work: getting caught up in some AI fantasy misses the forest for the trees.

Go back to the month before ChatGPT was unveiled and you’ll find this exact same news article written weekly for the last 5 years, except it won’t mention AI, because it wasn’t hot then.

https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/scammers-use-fake-emergenc...

https://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/info-07-2010/scam_ale...

https://theguardian.com/money/2013/nov/13/stranded-traveller...

https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-tra...

I doubt this story is true. That’s not to say this specific scam doesn’t happen, it does, this exact scam — stuck in jail, stuck in a foreign country — is rife across all mediums, but the sophistication required to introduce artificial is not necessary.

Scams evolve out of necessity, the widespread nature and success of this scam without the use of artificial voices demonstrates that the scam does not need artificial voices.

The article mentions that in one of these cases, there’s very little audio available online of one of the victims and so it posits that even just a few sentences are enough to generate a real sounding voice… but doesn’t consider that maybe the voice was a generic man’s voice that, in a panic, their parents let their guard down and assumed that based on what the voice said that it must be their son.

There’s absolutely the technology out there to generate a real sounding mimic of someone’s voice given enough material, but we are not yet at the point where a voice can be mimicked accurately from a voicemail or a clip on social media.

The article is an example of overfitting: the last few months have been awash with news about technologies like Chat GPT but these voice mimicking technologies have been around for years now!

A far more likely explanation is that the scammers in these cases just happened to sound like the victims — after all, if you know someone’s gender, age and location, and set up a contrived situation in which audio quality is bad, you can guess what they sound like and explain away any discrepancy quite easily.

I guess my point is not that this isn’t going to happen in future, but that these scams don’t need something so sophisticated. People will fall for this scam without the need for AI (as they have been, for years).

I don't know if they've evolved their approach, if my local store is an outlier, or if yours was an outlier, but I live near an Amazon store and go in a few times per week: the experience you describe doesn't match my experience. Over maybe 100 visits: there's usually a few people in there at minimum, the food is pretty good (as far as convenience food store goes) and prices are the same as similar stores. I sometimes have to dance through a crowd of people struggling to get in.

I wouldn't say the concept is a huge success because... it's a convenience store, and location is far more important than anything else, so there's a pretty low ceiling on what a convenience store can achieve beyond being in a good location, but it is certainly convenient.

(As far as business goes, they seem like a cute experiment that has escaped the pointless novelty stage but hasn't reached the industry disruption stage ('cause there isn't one) and so is floating aimlessly in the middle space where they probably can just about justify keeping them around.)

Muscle memory. Thank you, fixed.

You don't go in cold, you go in warm. Building a product in an industry you aren't familiar with is very difficult and even if you can get companies to talk to you, you're not going to be well positioned to truly understand what they're saying. You need to start with the relationships (either by developing them, or hiring people who already have these relationships). Pick any startup in your target industry and look at who they've hired: they'll be filled with industry stalwarts who provide the domain knowledge and relationships required to understand what's needed. If you want to sell into life sciences, time to hire some experienced VPs from your competitors.

Airbyte isn't a great example for you because businesses using ELT tools are radically different to pharmaceutical companies: pharmaceutical companies are working in a very slow moving industry that requires a great deal of careful consideration. As people in technology, we get caught up in the belief that because we can build incredible masterpieces that we're owed the time and expertise of others that we need to realise these incredible masterpieces... We're not. You have to approach this from a much more humble position, you're going cap in hand, you're not a hero, you're begging for scraps.

> [...] just being normally capable of speaking [...]

I think you may be confusing a medium (speaking) with communication itself. Successful communication is as much about the choice of medium as it is what you're communicating. Communication is the method through which we extract thoughts from our own brain and share them. Code is a form of communication! You can be a fantastic speaker and a terrible communicator, likewise you can be a terrible speaker and a fantastic communicator. The right environment for you is an environment in which you're able to choose to communicate in the medium that has the best outcomes.

For example, spoken communication is my weakest form of communication and yet it has not hindered me at all, in fact, I am considered an excellent communicator by the people I work with. Sometimes, you have[1] to use a method of communication that you're not confident with, so you can develop strategies to help you communicate more effectively in that situation. When I'm speaking, I take notes in advance to flesh out my thoughts, and if I find myself struggling during a conversation, I'm honest about it and recommend next steps -- e.g: "I'm not sure about that off the top of my head, so after this call I will put together some thoughts and get back to you by the end of the day".

The people you work with benefit most when you succeed :) You're clearly a very capable communicator based on your comments here, you don't need to argue against the fundamental importance of communication, rather, you need to find an environment where you're encourage and rewarded for embracing the communication methods that work best for you.

I couldn't have spoken this comment out loud and that has zero impact on my communication ability.

[1] Dyslexia is a common example of this that I've encountered. If a colleague prefers listening to reading due to dyslexia, I will choose to speak with them because even though I'm bad at it that is the most effective means of communicating with them.

An ability to communicate is the bare minimum to be effective in almost all jobs. A team of mediocre anythings who communicate effectively will achieve more than a team of exceptional anythings who communicate poorly.

The way you’re characterising communication shows that you’ve been unfortunate enough to work in environments where volume of communication has been mistaken for a measure of quality. Good communication is characterised by the ability to share in the understanding of others, effective communication makes a group of people more than the sum of their parts. Effective communication leads to less communication.

I hope someday you’re fortunate enough to find yourself in a positive environment that is able to demonstrate all of this to you, because effective communication will improve your output more than any programming experience ever could.

I’ve been around rich people, I’ve been around poor people. I am fortunate enough to be well off today but that’s not where I come from, I grew up around people in poverty.

There are rich people who are bad with money, there are poor people who are bad with money. The only difference is that rich people have a much greater ability to tolerate financial mistakes. I can burn $10k and absorb the consequences, a person in poverty cannot.

Poor people are no less equipped to make use of money than rich people: credit card debt is a huge problem _amongst the middle-class_. For every poor person who can’t afford to feed their family, there’s a middle-class person who can only afford to feed their family because they make so much more money and would be even worse off if they didn’t have such a high income.

There’s no evidence that poor people are any more “bad with money” than rich people.

The lesson there should be that projects get funding when they have advocates. The importance of a project to the world means nothing: it’s the importance of the project to people willing to fund it. Your co-workers should feel empowered by this: if some inconsequential software can make money, your co-worker’s advocacy can surely help a piece of business-important software make money :)

I’ve recently started working on 2 legacy codebases, one with tailwind and one with scss. The #1 problem — that has cost me multiple hours! — is inheritance, because how developers write CSS and how business people think about design are very different. I constantly find myself causing side effects when making any change to the css, it’s a headache.

I don’t think tailwind is perfect but coming into a well-established codebase I am so much happier to see tailwind. I can’t think of a single issue I’ve encountered with tailwind in this context.

You can certainly write good, maintainable CSS and I’m sure tools like Vanilla Extract make it easier but to say tailwind is worse is just wrong (in my experience, anyway).

You’re about to get Dropbox’d: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

The "all lottery winners end up broke" meme is just that, a meme. Likewise, the idea that the lottery is a tax on those who are stupid or in poverty is a meme. There's lots of people who participate in (and win) lotteries who are living very comfortable lives, certainly not in poverty. Yes, many people who end up with money will go on to lose it (whether inherited or from a lottery or a lawsuit or some other means) but that's not unique to those in poverty. As I said, generational wealth is the perfect example of this: many rich and successful families will lose their wealth within a few generations. Losing money is an activity enjoyed by rich and poor alike.

it's not a policy suggestion, it's a rhetorical device. If you pick a person in poverty, and give them a million dollars, they'll probably escape poverty and probably go on to live a prosperous life because poverty is caused by money, not education. Education helps people escape poverty because education can be used to earn money, not because knowing how to open a bank account is the path to salvation. There are lots of smart and well educated and successful people who are terrible with money but never end up in poverty because they have enough money to absorb the mistakes.