skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
However, I think the "mistakes" of the financial institutions are things that have been already built over the decades throughout the neoliberal era (over-reliance on credit and the reserve currency status of the US dollar), and things are *really* past the point of no return now. You can't deny this populist event has no political consequences whatsoever and can be simply solved in the context of "finance" alone. Quite a lot of Americans already have near zero trust towards financial institutions (well, more after they were bailed out in 2008 and nothing has changed out of their risky financial practices), and it's going to be harder for finance to get a get-out-of-jail-free card this time. The era of neo-classical economics becoming the "rational", "objective" basis of governance of society is nearing to an end, since governance is ultimately not a matter of scientific truth, but a matter of the desires of the people.
Right, any desktop app where you have to wait for a non-stupid operation (like a Gaussian blur on a 50mpix image) makes me want to throw my computer through the window. It's 100% unacceptable, every interaction should have its result in the very next frame, and we have all the tools for that.
Occam's razor does not actually mean the simplest explanation is correct. If that was the case you could explain anything with "a wizard did it." Occam's razor says that if you have 2 possible explanations, but one adds unnecessary clauses, the one with only the necessary clauses is more likely right.

For example, two explanations:
1. There was an avalanche and birds ate the soft tissue
2. There was an avalanche, birds ate the soft tissue, and Mars was in retrograde

Occam's razor tells you the first explanation is more likely to be correct. It does not tell you 4 or 5 natural events occurring can't be the best explanation if there isn't a more parsimonious alternative explanation.
If you acknowledge the threats, you should acknowledge the opportunities as well. Expressing "horror" every time data is mentioned in connection with health data is a very one-sided reflex. Surely, there are challenges, but why not solve them?
We need a better term than "dark pattern." Dark pattern sounds like a colorscheme. It really minimises what is going on.

I like your use of "malicious" there. "Malicious design" It really captures the sense of what dark pattern was supposed to mean.

But can we make it catch on?
This page doesn't exist
Occam's razor prefers the hypothesis with less asumptions that still agrees with all the observations.

H0 assumes that:

- there's intelligent life out there

- that life is close enough to visit Earth

- it's interested in us enough to secretly do weird things to us

- but for some reason hides from our governments/scientists

- and manages to avoid them

- but for some reason regular people can sometimes catch it

- but never on a cellphone

- it came to that particular place and did these particular things

H1 only assumes a lot of things we already know exist and can happen (like hypothermia and scavengers) - happened at once.
From what I gather in WSB (I lurk there a lot) it seems more that a lot of people are very aware that money will change hands, might go into other rich people's pockets but they simply don't care, if they fuck up one or more rich folks while enriching others, they don't care. If some normal people make a lot of money out of this they are happy enough.

It's fascinating to see how many people really just want to fuck with the rich and how many care about normal people getting life-changing money. It's much more altruistic than I imagined.
What are you talking about? You’re suggesting things like diabetes isn’t covered by health insurance? That’s just not true. In fact, making sure “pre-existing conditions” are covered is a signature act by Obama to keep most people insured.

You’re using a very narrow definition of insurance that doesn’t cover health insurance in the US.
I believe a critical part of this is false: Citadel does not front run on order flow (front running is illegal).

They buy order flow from robinhood because retail traders don't know what they're doing, and that goes doubly for Robinhood, making their order flow generally random noise.

Institutional order flow is not random, and is often right; processing winning trades is less profitable than random ones, and so Citadel pays more for RH order flow.
That's exactly the point that the article makes.
yeah they lied about revenue sources and why they were able to offer low prices. would have been better if they just shut up and didn't try that hook.
But international PEOs have such crazy high fees that finding a local tax accountant suddenly becomes much less of a bad idea.
> I think we actually agree about the cornering part don't we? I say the shares are cornered, you say the hedge funds but it amounts to the same thing. I definitely agree the hedge funds are looking fucked and deservedly so.

I think we agree on this.

> an agreement of two or more people to commit a crime, or to accomplish a legal end through illegal actions.

Are you saying, though, that publishing advice or suggestions on a forum to buy a certain stock is a crime, or is illegal? That kind of stuff happens all the time in newspapers and television shows. Wall Street insiders have coordinated buying and selling for generations.

So did giving the advice become a crime by virtue of the fact that so many people decided to act on it?
Same story in a lot of iOS design. There used to be a button where you could see all the options: now there’s some magic gesture for everything. Wtf, just show me a list, show me options I don’t yet know that I need or would know what to call, show me what you can do.
Robin Hood is the real life Pied Piper - people think they are changing the world but really they're leading people around in circles.
Part #4: Install Laravel Valet on Ubuntu System – Web Dev Environment Ubuntu
Yes, very much so - long, gradual built-up of momentum by interested parties is typical to grassroots movements. It happens slowly - and then all at once.
I think a lot of arguments against "new" things end up like this. I really like my Model Y and don't really have any complaints but it annoys me when people that haven't owned or even driven a Tesla come out of the woodwork saying "That is a terrible design! Why would anyone do that!?".

These critics end up sounding like someone just introduced flush toilets and they can't possibly see how that's better: "You mean you have to flush?". Or perhaps Doctors washing their hands between patients: "Who has time for that!? I have people to cure!"

I'm not saying that everything Tesla does or is doing is perfect, or even better. But to dismiss it out of hand, without even trying it, is mind-boggling. Case in point, the most recent Tesla 3/Y update changed the on-screen GUI quite a bit and a lot of people got upset over it. Sure there are things that I didn't like about it, at first, but I reasoned that there are a lot of pretty smart people behind it and they probably had a reason for the change. Give it a chance.

Tesla has a lot of smart people and there is probably a reason behind this new steering wheel. I'm willing to give it a chance. If it turns out that, in practice, this new design is terrible or dangerous I'll join the chorus of naysayers shouting it down. We'll see.
I guess the theory from some people is that if they could have kept buying then the stock would go up (and trigger the squeeze).

Not sure I buy it (esp with the amount of call options that are just going to magnify the move up but also the move down).
> With most of the original Meteor Development Group team having moved on to Apollo GraphQL, it’s time to pass the torch to a new corporate sponsor that will make the promotion and growth of Meteor their full-time business.

https://blog.meteor.com/a-new-chapter-for-meteor-7b684320be4...

Meteor got sold to Canadian company TinyCapital (Dribbble, WeWorkRemotely), so it's under new leadership/management.
> We’ve printed trillions of dollars and Congress is en route to print trillions more. The price for that has yet to be paid.

The majority of dollars in existence do not come from the printing presses of the Fed.

The majority of dollars in existence appear from thin air on the balance sheets of fractional reserve banks, when they lend money, for business loans, personal loans, and mortgages.

During a recession, people borrow less money, and businesses tighten their belts. In order to prevent the monetary supply from shrinking (thus causing deflation[1]), the fed generally needs to start printing money.

Now, we may say that they printed too much money, or that the money did not go to the best possible places for it, but from 30,000 feet, turning on the printing presses was a sound move.

[1] Deflation is utterly horrible, and should be avoided at all costs.
They’re bleeding because others are holding, no? There are premiums at play.
That is normally what happens if the broker goes bankrupt the stocks should still be yours.
You don’t need $10bn of capital to trade $10bn worth of a stock. For example, if you repeatedly buy and then sell a single share then you could, in theory, add billions of dollars of volume with only as much capital as the price of a single share.
A Story of Short Squeezes and Market Corners(2020)
I don't know whether he orchestrated this or it grew out organically, but he's essentially the Jesus of WSB now. Most of what he seems to be doing is holding lots of GME and posting day-by-day updates (he lost some 14 million USD on GME yesterday, but is still millions in the positive) - but that galvanizes the community.
Win-vind: Advanced Vim emulation layer for Windows
It will scare people off triggering a sell
Yes, but it can be a messy process:

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/050515/what-...
Shameless plug: for adhoc reporting by non-technical users our https://www.seektable.com also can be considered (esp. if your users heavily use pivot tables), it is closed-source but has a fully functional free accounts & self-hosted version.
The Big Squeeze
what's with the matplotlib hate on this post? it's an extremely mature piece of technology, but maturity itself isn't the only reason why libraries like ggplot and altair aren't the default choice for python plots. as per many topics, most plots are just quick drawings and plt.scatter(x, y) is not just quicker, but, by far, much more intuitive to me than anything involving the word "geom" (ggplot2) or "encode" (altair).

some here say "i haven't gone back to mpl". oh i have. every single time i tried any of these alternatives.
> Ceteris paribus, creating more money reduces its value.

That is correct. What you're missing is that a large fraction of created money used to come from banks lending money. During a recession, or a pandemic, that lending tightens, which slows the rate at which money is created, and speeds the rate at which money starts getting destroyed.

It's why the fed prints money during recessions, and destroys money during economic booms.
It's a short comment. Or do you mean TFA? The only reference to Robbinhood therein is a link to a perfectly cromulent Bloomberg report of their by-now-well-known selective stock purchase limitations. There is no scandalous reference to Citadel. NYT's breathless 1 AM transcription of press releases doesn't seem to add much to the discussion either.

Of course, that's not what I was talking about. I'm just giggling at the idea that alone among USA journalists, Matt Taibbi has had his mind addled by the Twitter, as discussed upthread. How is that "Russia-gate" investigation going now?

[EDIT:] As I've observed before [0], I still don't get economics advice from Taibbi.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17244242
They've lost the trust of people YOLOing on meme stonks. I'm sure it's a noisy part of their userbase, but still only a part.

It would be interesting to see stats on how many people use RH for long-term investments (buy and hold, DCA, etc), and how many use it as a form of gambling (day trading, leveraged options etc).
I believe some margin positions got called and closed, which might not have been if more people continued to pump the stock by buying more.
An evidence review of face masks against Covid-19
@dang, I appreciate all your work moderating here, I'm sure it's pretty thankless at the best of times, but you do keep this place one of the best places on the internet for technical discussion. So thank you for that.

That being said, I disagree with the assessment of my comment. Those of us (and there were many) who warned about this escalating when Trump was censored and deplatformed were downvoted and flagged at the time, amidst lots of crowing and victory clapping from people who fully believed the censorship only applied to one individual and was acceptable.

We've seen in the past 2 weeks a huge escalation - the British Socialist pages on FB, other left-leaning sites, and now of course watering holes related to WallStreetBets. We're fortunate to see this history happen in real time, so hopefully we can course-correct, as our forebears did, but without the longer timeline and through much more horrible circumstances.

Facebook used its power unilaterally to shut down yet another group of people. Whether we agree with the opinions of that group or not is not the point - the fact that this can happen, is happening, and is being supported by large swathes of people who should be more aware of where this path leads us, is very worrying.

Reminding people that just a few weeks ago, when concern about the Trump censorship was resoundingly dismissed, that that was the same as the censorship of other groups today, is important.

I'll continue to do that, because we need to deviate from this path we as a collective seem to be walking down.

Respectfully,
Previous relevant comment

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25951475
Stocks don't belong to you, unless you have the actual physical stock. Everybody borrow them from 3rd party who borrow them from 3rd party who borrow them from 3rd party, who actually lended them multiple time to short the stock, who borrow them from a 3rd party, who actually have the physical piece of paper in a vault somewhere.

I am not even joking.

And it's the same for transactions or your bank balance. The bank doesn't keep your money and give it back to you. At least, for banks, they are backed by the government and IMF. For stocks and gift card balance, I am not so sure.
I just thought of a way to improve the privacy of the DNS lookup. Instead of asking for the domain name, ask for a prefix of the hash of the domain name chosen so you get maybe 20 domains back.

The point is - I got all of the above by thinking about the problem for maybe ten minutes. This is far from unsolvable. We as a community are just terminally lazy.
I'm no admin but wanted to ask for you to refrain commenting like this, it's probably against the site's guidelines and brings nothing to the discussion.

Per the guidelines: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
When talking about centralization you can always of course zoom in the different levels. Decentralized systems are made up of systems that viewed individually can be said to be centralized.

BBSes viewed as an archipelago are decentralized.
This feels so likely when only retail investors were banned from buying. Who exactly is buying up all these shares then? Fingers only seem to point in one direction.
I'm having a hard time following any of this, but the NYT did actual reporting that refuted a story that has been circulating all day about hedge fund interests halting trading in GME, and Matt Taibbi really did just write a story that said Delta is functionally worthless because nobody is ever going to fly on an airliner again.
I doubt users will lose the stocks. This will be really weird. Worst case, you will be given some time to transfer your stocks to another brokerage and perhaps RH will make that process a lot faster than the nominal 2-3 days it takes now.
I would love to know who this programmer was and if possible,get access to some of the intresting source code that Donald Knuth ascribes to him.
Good. Beginning of end for FB.

I see real opportunity for big platform here who doesn't do such PC kind of thing. I hope someone build truly neutral platform that supports both right wing and left wing politics , retail traders and wallstreet big players ... plus and minus.
What scavengers would that be? No small animal capable of doing that is known to be able to survive at that height. small number of birds can fly that high, that's about it.
Sure, but as far as frauds go it is fairly victimless. Their users were likely winners in the aggregate for using RH
It's using a different method of loading the kernel:

https://github.com/containers/libkrunfw

Firecracker is using rust-vmm:

https://github.com/rust-vmm
An inability to buy means an inability to squeeze the short harder, and depending on how hard you have squeezed that can affect the overall success of the squeeze.

Also they apparently forced sale on some accounts, which combined with an inability to buy more, definitely affected stock prices.
I disagree, it was always as common as it is and never broke past the barrier of getting people to understand it's value, beyond designers themselves. This was true before UX was called UX (before 2014 maybe and as far back as designers of any kind have been around) and it's true now.
I didn't actually get that vibe from a comment about being run by bots. Not like the parents said "its all the bots fault".

But, for what its worth - I think "if you don't like it - lump it" still holds. There are other systems with zero commissions beside RobinHood. For instance, I didn't notice Fidelity stopping any trades the couple of times I spot checked today.
When I want to really convey my point in a discussion, I call it "manipulative pattern". People feel more implicated when you point them their behviour or actions have been manipulated actively.
Darn, that name is already taken. :(

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115680/
The people who probably would have lost their money anyways (because they were waiting for more suckers to push the price higher) now have an excuse (other retail buyers couldn't open new positions). People who realized those were the suckers stomached selling while it wasn't as high as yesterday but still astronomical.

The anger at Robinhood reminds me of when the government in Nigeria cracked down on MMM ponzi scheme. People were furious because they all assumrd they wouldn't be the bag holders at the end. But here there's been a full day to close positions so I'm fairly sure the people who aren't doing it now wouldn't have done it whenever the stock starting going down in other circumstances
The upcoming COVID story is more likely to be about the other 99% who are living and simply listed as "positive case" or "recovered", and the estimated 800% more that are thought to have not been tested.

Encephalitis lethargica killed 500,000 people and overlapped with the influenza of 1918, as it preceeded and continued afterwards and disappeared as quickly as it came. Subsequently many of the Encephalitis Lethargica patients developed coma-like states in the decades to come, and stayed that way for the rest of the century until they died.

We already know COVID is a neurological disease too, which is why taste and smell get disrupted. So we'll see as time goes on.
> As a brokerage firm, we have many financial requirements, including SEC net capital obligations and clearinghouse deposits. Some of these requirements fluctuate based on volatility in the markets and can be substantial in the current environment. These requirements exist to protect investors and the markets and we take our responsibilities to comply with them seriously, including through the measures we have taken today.
Are brokerage deposits / holdings protected by insurance? I'm genuinely fearful of losing my holdings in Robinhood at this point.
I fully agree that the tweet is not proof. I fear that nothing will come forward in any case. My point is: It could be true and we'd never see proof. That doesn't mean we should assume it to be true. Neither does lack of proof imply that it has to be untrue. In other words, we will probably never know for sure. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
What I meant was that speculation and challenging the existing narrative plays a role in seeking the truth. So it has value and can be healthy. But it has to be treated for what it is - speculation. In this case, the actions of brokers should be investigated, and regulatory requirements should be scrutinized. But taking speculation as a foregone conclusion and resorting to an extreme reaction as such, is not healthy.
I apologise for replying to my own message.

The programmer that Knuth referred to seems to be "Jim Dunlap of Digitek, who made some of the best early compilers".

Early editions of TAOCP referecce James R Dunlap

and

"Jim invented (at least refined and proved economically viable) a
programming paradigm for compiler writing: POPs, Program Operations.
Jim designed a computer on paper, an instruction was a POP, e.g., RCA,
Require Character and Advance; it was "easy" to write compilers on
this paper computer that would eventually be emulated on the
customer's hardware. The principal features of this paper computer:
LIFO variable length tables, recursion, a stack, translation to, and
manipulation of Polish encryption of the program being compiled,
character-scanning and code-generation POPs."

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/digitek/digitek_history.txt
I don't know much about the structured product particulars or the details of the hedging. I'm not sure if the actuarial derivatives are mostly options or futures. I think they're mostly over-the-counter products, and rather large contract sizes. So, I think trading actuarial derivatives involves passing some certifications, getting a few million dollars, and cold-calling a bunch of large financial institutions to see what they currently have on offer, and convincing them that you're not going to go bankrupt in the next 30 years.

But, I don't really know. I know a bit about making the computers go fast, and I talked with the structurers enough to know very generally what was going on.

Funny story poking around exotic financial models: a big part of the collateral a shipping company can offer is its ships. I saw "cape size" show up in a model for the value of a ship, and imagined ships dressed up like Superman or the Green Lantern. It turns out that for the same carrying capacity, ships that are dimensioned to fit through the Panama and Suez canals are worth significantly more than those that are forced to round the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn ("cape size").

Don't misconstrue this as investment advice, but be careful about taking the short side. If you happen to randomly be short Hungarian lives, and genocide breaks out, and you make 3 billion dollars out of pure happenstance, there will be double-digit percentages of the population believing in conspiracy theories about you for hundreds of years. Very few people will want to live in the same city or even sell a hamburger to the alleged architect of the Hungarian Genocide. This isn't investment advice; it's life advice. It's possible to be 100% right, for the wrong reason, and lose 1000%.
Ww2 death was much more spread out due to disease, famine, genocides in Asia and total war perpetrated by Stalin and Hitler. Most WWII deaths were not soldiers. Only the US and lessor UK proper concentrated in young men.

Now WW1 with Spanish flu killed high percentage of prime of age people.
Thank you! Would correct if I could still edit.
Google Play store just removed 10k 1 star review from Robinhood