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17 years here (wow). I don’t post much but I get a lot out of this site and it’s one of my few daily reads. Grateful for the site, its mods, and the contributors.

Happy Thanksgiving!


If it’s something involving property damage or another issue requiring reimbursement, I’d recommend seeking legal advice and the lawyers can send whatever correspondence is needful.


ELI40YO Engineer


Still need it dumbed down a bit /s


Great way to trigger more bank runs. I don’t think this will help.


There are political forces on both the left and the right against bailing out depositors because the startup industry is hated. We need to protect our industry from further damage, including by being ahead of bank runs on other banks. If that results in triggering those bank runs, so be it.


Startup industry is bad, why should we protect it? There's very few things awful enough to attract bipartisan hate.


Drives economic growth, creates jobs, and increases labor market competition amongst employers which leads to higher wages.

The latter function is particularly salient for tech people (which many of us who follow HN are).


A heap of parroted buzzwords is not very convincing.


Neither is evidence-less overly-general assertions like “startup industry bad”.


Here's (admittedly weak) evidence: calling for actions that lead to bank runs.

It's hard to take defense of startups seriously where startups are blatantly going to screw others over for their own sake. Do I get it? Yes. But it's more than me vs them; they made it an "us" vs them.


The "them" in this case are those who gleefully point out that only 250k is insured by the FDIC and any startup that deposited more than that was engaging in risky behavior and deserves to lose their money.

In such a situation, you can't cry foul on those seeking to move their money into safer banks, even if doing so precipitates a bank run.


...I mean, I learned about the FDIC caps in like 7th grade... And my parents also made sure I was aware of it.

Where are all these people who don't know how the system works coming from? Who is advising them?


But I'm not trying to be convinced of that; that fact is self-evident.


No it isn't.


I literally just said it is.

>that fact is self-evident.

What part of this very simple sentence was unclear?


Just because you said it is doesn’t make it so. It’s not self-evident that the startup industry is bad.


It's self-evident because it's self-evident. Please don't say incorrect statements like the ones you just made. The fact that startup culture is bad isn't in dispute.


Mmm... like strong encryption? Plenty of good things get bipartisan hate.


Nor would it ever be public. If it was the banks at the top would be under FDIC tomorrow or being pressured to not be within the next month.

The 2008 crisis showed FDIC at their most effective but the vast majority of the ~100/per yr banks taken over were known well before any customer found out. The difference between them and SVB was that w/ SVB served plenty of well connected VCs who dedicated their lives to being connected to the latest market information before other VC/angel/wall st players found out. Mom and pop shops even with larger banking businesses never faced the same sort of bank run risk.

Their financial state could be kept hidden without it turning into a bank run 100x easier than a bank serving VC-connected types. So as long as the FDIC learned of problems all they had to do was move before the regular consumer bank client found out their small town bank branch was at risk, which was a much easier ask. Then once FDIC finds a larger buyer to stabilize it the customer didn't worry too much and the business is saved, although typically owned by some mega bank.

SVB was the last sort of business to survive such an information risk almost by design of their clientele.


Public companies file public records, so yes, it is public.

And First Republic Bank looks like it could be the next to fail, likely within days, barring intervention. Without a systemic backstop the runs will almost certainly continue


First Republic Bank stock has already tumbled. If you want a DB of bank's with obvious issues that are already public just track their stocks.


The stock price has nothing to do with whether the bank is solvent. It's about the balance sheet and if they can service a large amount of withdrawals within a short timespan.

Stock price can only be treated as an indicator of what the market thinks.


So make the database then with your foresight. I'm sure it would be extremely valuable. Prove me wrong if it is indeed public.


There are hundreds of threads on twitter already analyzing the balance sheets of the public banks and ranking them based on risk levels.

First Republic has been singled out as one of the more vulnerable, and thus, likely to experience a bank run over the coming days.

Many pics of people withdrawing their money en masse from the bank earlier today: https://twitter.com/Dr_PhillipB/status/1634632068058722304?s...


Or, a good way to force the bank owners to face reality.

Not so easy for BSDs, REITs, ponzi schemes, etc., but should be dreadfully easy for banks


Indeed. Which is what has diluted this conversation so heavily. Everyone wants to point at the tech Startups using SVB for boring banking as the why (and the "I told you VC was a bubble") instead of the 2008 style wall St gambling the bankers engaged in using tech startup money. The VCs might be responsible for the bank run but they aren't why the bank made stupid mortgage investments and ultimately failed.


Not really. What SVB invested in was NOT the same kind of thing that tanked 2008 — in 2008, it was (basically) lies about the creditworthiness of MBS and default rates going through the roof.

SVB held a lot of MBS but it was a safe tranch — the risk was not of default, but rather of a market value decrease if interest rates rose.

Which they did.

Which would not have been a problem, because the full value would eventually be paid back in full, as long as the bank didn’t need to sell them.

Which they did, because more depositors were withdrawing funds than expected, because the investment market tanked and startups were drawing down funds.

Which resulted in selling a loss.

Which spooked VCs.

Which caused a run on the bank.

This was not a 2008-style “Wall St. gambling” problem — if anything it was a misunderstanding of risk, but not in the “wow, 50% annual returns, who cares how safe it is” sense.


You think banks putting money in bonds is gambling?

If so, how do you suggest banks make money?


Buying long-term bonds with short-term debt is risky, yes.


They betted that interest rates would stay low long term. They were damn wrong and paid for it.


You should still be able to use alt="" to indicate that it is "decorative" and not meaningful imagery for a visually-impaired user.


Instead use the ARIA tag role="presentation": https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A... to indicate when an element has no semantic meaning and is purely visual.


Which of these tags you should use and what they should contain is entirely context dependant.

That said, the use of empty alt tags is generally discouraged and not even allowed together with the ARIA presentation role in most cases.

This decision of theirs will steer developers towards non-compliant/asemantic code. It's really stupid.

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/images.html#alt

https://w3c.github.io/aria/#presentation

https://w3c.github.io/aria-practices/#presentation_role


That second link from W3C gives this very example:

https://w3c.github.io/aria/#example-13

"In the following code sample, the containing img and is appropriately labeled by the caption paragraph. In this example the img element can be marked as presentation because the role and the text alternatives are provided by the containing element."

<img src="example.png" role="presentation" alt="">

So empty alt tags are not discouraged.


Hence the generally discouraged - as in not recommended in the majority of situations but exceptions exist (such as the one you provided).


As I read that page, role="presentation" is intended to remove the natural semantics of a tag (e.g. have an <h2> be treated as a <div>), rather than to tell the user that there is nothing relevant to them in the given tag?


"presentation" is the default role for an <img> element when the "alt" attribute is an empty string.


That's like the difference between null and undefined.


If you have no alt attribute, then screen readers read the URL!

Empty strings are the way to go for decorative images


Alt is a required attribute of the <img> tag, so requiring it is just basic validation. C code won't compile if you omit the semicolon after statements, either.


What if I have an app that no screen reader will ever read?


Then write your own component that extends and removes the requirement. Until then, web tooling is better off explicitly acknowledging that accessibility is an explicit goal.


Look up Techless or The Light Phone, those may be more aligned with your desires


It’s a feature that Deno has and that works on the web (ESM imports from URLs). People have use cases for it and they want it. That’s not to say it’s secure by default of course but the demand is there.


There's always demand for completely insecure features. That doesn't mean you should add them.


The constitution protects all American people and businesses. People should absolutely study it, understand it, and use it as part of their reasoning when it comes to responses to government or other legal requests.


And before that the Soviets, British, and others for centuries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasions_of_Afghanistan


The CTO and security teams and devs will care. The language decision has a broad impact on how to secure the application, engineering community (who can you hire), etc. It’s a big decision.


So PHP should be the obvious choice then, considering what a bloated mess and security nightmare Node.js is.

As someone who ran a company for 5+ years on a Node.js stack, never again.

Before when I managed 5k+ servers running PHP, I actually slept at night knowing nothing was suddenly going to go wrong because of some stupid memory consumption bug or exploit in a popular and critical package.


Laravel and modern PHP are as secure as Rails or Django and arguably more secure than plain Node.js. Your point is at least 10 years out of date.


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