skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There have been many attempted short squeezes, notoriously the attempt by the founder of Piggly Wiggly to squeeze shorts 100 years ago. He ended up broke, of course, because cornering the market on shares that you pumped to a ridiculous price is never a great idea. More recently there was a cartel that tried to squeeze Volkswagen shorts in 2008.
The cool thing is that while it's not easy, there's probably never been an easier time to make good stuff. There's a lot of opportunity out there to make better experiences.
Fine, it's not on the same level, but it sure does fuck with the crypto markets.
Email is an open protocol. If I send an email that's illegal, say death threats or child porn, the government can put me in jail. There doesn't need to be a single controlling entity for that to work.

The process of doing that involves investigation, subpoenas, and warrants, and is subject to laws created in a more or less democratic process. No part of it requires anyone to prevent me from sending illegal emails, just an apparatus to punish me if I do.
Read Steven Pinker's works. Things have been improving according to any meaningful definition of that word.
> How can this be legal?

I guess the same way that a bank under a run refusing withdrawals is legal.
tldr; even if Robinhood does it's own clearing (which I'm not suggesting they don't) it's reasonable to not risk their business to support the current market. Does "the market can remain irrational longer than Robinhood can remain solvent" apply here?

Any valid argument that would cause another clearing house to not be able to afford to handle these orders would seemingly-equally apply to Robinhood's own clearing house; no matter who owns it, the clearing house can't afford to go broke.

If someone is arguing that Robinhood should have the risk tolerance and reserves of a larger financial institution in order to service high volatility trades.... then maybe that person should use a larger financial institution to place these high volatility trades.
Ding ding ding.

These "here's why it's OK" legitimations are sounding just as cynical as the high profile insiders' rage against WSB that we have been hearing.

This is fast becoming a symbol of brazenly rigging of financial systems to ensure the house wins.

Hypocritical appeals to responsibility are half of what's causing all this rage. Sure, a responsible broker might reserve a right to liquidate your position in order to limit their risk. This isn't a responsible broker. They might also liquidate your position to limit their losses at your expense... or because the cabal said to.

We are not starting from the assumption that they (RH, Citadel, NASDAQ,etc... even the SEC) are acting responsibly, or in the interest of "mom & pop." They are playing heads I win, tails your lose... again.

The hedge funds got caught holding $10m puts with $1bn (so far) long tail risk. RH are in some sort of similar position. They make high, steady returns from such positions. Typical insider deal. When that long tail risk materializes, all bets are off... and this is not even a figure of speech!

The asymmetry is dumbfounding. Responsible actors! Market Fundamentals! The hypocrisy of it.
If bought on margin, it’s legal and reasonable depending on how fast risk management is responding. If those were cash purchases they liquidated, Robinhood is in a world of hurt.
If the core problem is volatility, then freezing trades would be the natural response.

They froze only the 'buy' option on their app. Selling would still go through and they'd still have to process those trades. There would still be movement, it would just be solely in the direction of selling.
I see it as 4* right now. Could it be to do with region? (I'm looking at it from the uk.)
I don't think all Trump supporters (or all Brexit voters) feel disenfranchised. My point is there are a large number of people who do feel discarded by the "system", and when given the opportunity to metaphorically throw a brick through the window of the establishment (or even the appearance of such opportunity), they will do so.
This is mostly covered in, or is a rehash of, the blog post (well, PR spiel) released earlier today:

https://blog.robinhood.com/news/2021/1/28/an-update-on-marke...

They also released one a few hours before that [1], re the restrictions imposed on trading in certain stocks. The post didn't seem to prevent the backlash.

[1] https://blog.robinhood.com/news/2021/1/28/keeping-customers-...
Your position of “TOS are too long and complicated therefore I should be held to them” is completely ridiculous.

There is eventually a point where if you want to make independent financial decisions as adult, you need to be responsible for understanding what you’re getting into.

Do t read the TOS for your Facebook account? Low risk. Don’t read the agreement for your RH margin account? That’s just dumb.
What about folks with old low karma real accounts. Lame.
I've also noticed in the job post data that remote-mature companies prefer employees with remote work experience. I'm guessing it's partially due to this problem of difficulty of getting juniors up to speed remotely.
You can’t pause the game for the player who is winning and not both players.
Companies cannot issue more shares than they are authorized to issue. They have to do Formal Corporate Things to issue new shares.
If the opinion is “don’t support wildly insecure things” I’m happy that somebody out there has that opinion. OpenBSD, its quality/security opinions, and the consequences aren’t for everyone, but they certainly don’t have to be.

And it’s a laptop, lots of people almost never use bluetooth on a laptop. You might, I do sometimes, but it’s hardly essential.
Oh my. Oh my.

Please tell me there's some dead code elimination step in your pipeline too.
I'd actually argue otherwise - UX has gotten tremendously better in the last decade. Online products have been moulded perfectly towards improving the use case for their customers.

The main issue though is that you aren't the customer anymore.

Look at Facebook - they've done an absolutely incredible job becoming a dream experience for advertisers. Youtube has catered to these advertisers as well and blocked controversial content that wouldn't look good next to their brand. It's a golden age to be at the head of a marketing team with a large ad budget. These companies have made golden escalators for getting sponsored content in front of the productized consumers.

If you want UX to succeed and become something that benefits you as a user, then you should focus on platforms where you truly are the customer. Look at Square or Patreon - in both platforms you are truly the customer, and their UX is incredible.
For those that don’t like videos, here is the Wiki.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster
It’s not a wild clause for brokerages to be able to close out positions to cover margin trades. It’s bog standard.

People may not realize they have a margin account with Robinhood, which is another matter.
The best ggplot2-like option in Python, by far. I use it constantly.
> some of their positions

Do you know which ones? Are the positions of the sort you've mentioned susceptible to this? Because it likely refers to those trading on margin, who aren't entitled to expose their broker to risk that they can't reasonably expect to recover from the customer.
This makes sense to me in terms of restricting buying on margin. But plenty of people put their own money into RH accounts and were buying stock. I don't see how that's relevant to RH paying a clearing house?

I suppose they had a huge influx of new accounts and RH gives you an advance up to like $1000 before the money is actually moved from your bank account and into your brokerage account but I'm still skeptical that this reasonably leads to "not supporting" stocks.
It combines my 2 favorite things! Deep learning and shadertoy implicit surfaces!
https://twitter.com/Wealthsimple/status/1354860658723086338

WealthSimple is not restricting trades, but displays warning banners about GME:

"GME is considered risky. Traders should expect high volatility. If you do choose to place an order, use a limit order with a set price."
Er, what is this project exactly?

The README says “Multi-machine network music performance over the Internet is achieved” but then later describes how to create multi-person video chat sessions. Comments mention music.

What does this have to do with music? Is it just that remote live music collaboration and multi-machine audio playback are use cases for low-latency codec implementations?

Because it seems like this is an audio codec implemented in the browser that comes with a video chat demo. Am I missing something?
I do not believe there are currently any dencentralized onramps for exchanging fiat for any crypto directly. Though I would wager this is an issue with banks not supporting smart contracts in a way that would allow automated withdrawals and deposits from/to the crypto networks.
For micro interactions Stimulus covers that part, which is a small client-side JS framework.
I don't think your take stands up to very much scrutiny at all.

If this is about people trading on RH on margin, then just... stop allowing people to use margin to trade GME etc. "If you wanna buy GME you gotta have the cash in your account to cover it".

Problem solved and you don't need to prevent people from buying a stock they want to buy.

RH users are the product, not the customer. Why in the world would you expect RH to act in the interest of their users over the people that actually pay them, e.g. market makers like Citadel?
Dynamic import for React apps and speed up development with code splitting
As an aside I don't understand why COMEFROM has that bad reputation. It's just another name for aspects.
In this case though, Coinbase is doing a direct listing, not an IPO. I think there is usually no lockup associated with a direct listing.
That is true, and you are right on this front.

That being said, I do have a business accepting card payments and the 2-3% for me is closer to 0.1% past bank fees.

But you're right that from the merchant's perspective, depending on country (e.g. the US) things can be worst.

Then again, from the merchant's perspective cryptos seem to have much larger downsides, after all there's a reason why they aren't widely used, and lack of good supplied for crypto is larger than lack of people willing to use them.
'Systemic risk' and 'Capital obligations' are crafted by the wealthy specifically to prevent small players from having as easy a time gaming the market as they do. No one is shouting conspiracy because they don't need to; everything everyone is mad about is happening in broad daylight.
Disabling buying on margin would be one thing, but disabling all together is another
The case of GME is more complicated than only being highly shorted. A short squeeze doesn't emerge solely from being highly shorted. Please be very careful with any single-stock gamble.
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I see. Thank you for the follow-up. Honestly I think your money would go further contributing to a politician that would try to advance reform, but I acknowledge that's not a universal strategy.
> Robinhood just didn’t have the capital to clear trades of super volatile stocks.

This was not their stated reason for shutting down the trades. What is your source for this claim?
And they can declare bankruptcy if they failed to prevent the system risks. But they instead chose to harm their customers.

Robinhood deserves all the hell that it raised
Indeed.

I'd also mention a small experiment I often do.

If you have the opportunity of visiting a company still using COBOL, Clipper or some other text mode software, ask their users for an opinion on those old systems compared to the current ones.

Most of them prefer the acient ones. When asked why, they simply say "I don't know. It works, it feels right".

Even the younger users (who already had experience with web applications, big tech's stuff etc when they joined the company) prefer the text based ones.

I'm not at all implying that every software should be text based. But I think there are some very important lessons to be learned here. Things we developers used to know, intuitively.

I think UX designers should listen more to those users and less to theories and to Google and its MDC trying to make the internet look like their own products
DeleteUber was entirely different thing. A boycott attempt driven by social justice issues. This is something that negatively impacted over half of Robinhood's customers in a very direct manner. Not at all comparable.

Sure, let's check back in a year.
'Rational' investors try to make money off each other. That operating in pursuit of a class interest is considered irrational suggests there might be some shortcomings in mainstream economic theory.
this aged poorly
What would the implications have been if they prevented people who got in at the top from selling?
PineCone BL602 Talks to I2C Sensors
Amazon Alexa – Blurring the Boundaries Between Assistive Tech and Companionship
Doesn't Robinhood work with Citadel, an investor of Melvin Capital Management?
People in the EU aren't citizens if the EU but if their country.

As always, they are threatened by the EU government. Leave the EU, lessen the problem!
This is why I don't get in a of this. Is there any precedence of only allowing selling before? It couldn't even accomplish their goals of protecting investors since that forces a crash of their investments
I don't know about the others, but TD Ameritrade did restrict trading (maybe just buying as well) but only if you were buying on margin. RH is getting ire because they restricted buying for everyone.
Who controls your money after you withdraw it from a traditional bank?
It’s not all sunshine and rainbows on the paid side of the house. All the disconnected out of touch decision making still happens but the metrics are ARR and churn. The game is making it as easy as possible for people to pay us and inconvenient as possible for people to stop.
It’s not impossible to afford. You can a lawyer to review a employment contract for a few hundred dollars. Many, many Americans can afford that.
There may be reasonable criteria being used such as reviews made by those who downloaded the app for the first time ever today and immediately posted a review vs a review made today by someone who first started using the app months ago and has opened it multiple times (going to guess Google has telemetry on such things). There's a lot of area between these two cases and where Google decides to draw the line is important.
Calling work done in off-hours "$0" is magical thinking. That teacher costs a lot to maintain. Those of us who are employed full-time don't really have "off-hours", and regardless of the intensity with which we focus in a given 60-minute period.

Sometimes, while at work, I am thinking of leisure.
Sometimes, while at leisure, I am thinking of work.

At the end of the day, the school pays their employee. And the rest of society pays them during "off-hours", e.g. in depreciation of common resources if, say, they drive on the road.

My point is that people cost society to keep alive, but some of those people are better equipped for certain tasks than others. The question is only where do those costs come from, and to what particular efforts are the particularly-equipped assigned.
I'm not unsympathetic to the liabilities of the brokerages and the difficult position. But this situation exists because in the US you have to be a rich person to directly interact with the stock market.

[edit] Don't pay attention to me below. I'm wrong. See responses.

Then the absurd requirements to be an accredited investor that require nearly everyone to use a broker should be lowered. It's only a very small segment of the US population that has a net worth of over 1 million dollars or an income of more than $200k/year. Most accredited investors are not human people at all but instead corporate people. If brokerages are going to act this way then people need to have the rights to bypass them.
But doesn't disabling buying cause less money to flow towards them?
Whenever I encounter the word "user" in the context of software products, I think of "Bubbles" from The Wire.
That makes sense. Any position someone bought on margin is subject to being closed out or facing a margin call. Cash purchased positions should be safe.

That's just a normal thing we expect for margin accounts though. Is this extra notice being given as a reminder of the terms for margin accounts or are they taking extraordinary action? Hard to say.
Some organisations (e.g. pharmaceutical companies, medical researchers) mandate that all employees have physically encrypted portable drives. The presumption is that "bad but enough encryption" is better than "non technical user can't work out how to use an encrypted filesystem". The really sensitive stuff is walked around on both…
Sometimes you need to tune down innovation and just finish your project
> they have the requisite number of emojis to be perceived as relevant
By this logic though, if you're already in a short squeeze, then the retail buyers (the ones who are doing the squeeze) not buying any more should not cause the price to drop: the person getting squoze (did I use that word right?) will have to buy whether or not Robinhood traders are. The price would still be shooting up. In a short squeeze all that WSB had to do was hold.

If your "short squeeze" is dependent on people buying more in order to create a short squeeze, then you are just coordinating to create a short squeeze, not dealing with a "natural occurring" one.
I don't own a cell phone. I ordered a Librem 5 a couple years ago, it'll be my first one. I just don't like the idea of hauling around a GovCorp tracking pod with me.
Now there are reports they (robinhood, not webull) are force-selling positions:
https://redstate.com/scotthounsell/2021/01/28/robinhood-app-...

If that's true (never assume something coming from Twitter is true without verifying, so it's still a rumor by now) then I don't see how "it's too risky" explanation holds. And of course selling somebody's property against their will is a fraud, at least on the face of it (IANAL).

Edit: screenshot from reddit: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Es1pb5KWMAE19CD?format=jpg&name=...
Well let's see: they lost $250 million on revenue of only $61 million, their most recent quarter had their largest loss ever, their most recent year had their largest loss ever, there's no prospect that this business will ever turn a profit again. On paper it appears to be among the worst businesses of all time.
>deadly insurrection

Although true this is hyperbole. We're not talking about the "deadly protests" for BLM so why did the capitol protest become a "deadly insurrection"?

A lot of people are calling for Donald Trump to go to prison/etc; does that mean (if he was still president) he should stop talking to anyone saying so?
The stock went down 40% after the retail brokers stopped letting GME be bought. It also happened to AMC. Is that not evidence?
This is definitely bigger than 12 years ago considering the proliferation of phones and easy access to the markets with apps.
Stocks are frozen when they raise or lower too quickly commonly.
Robinhood Play Store listing went from 329K reviews to 180K in few hours
Try calling up your local Charles Schwab office to ask them if they'll stop you from making bad trades. While you're there, also see if they'll help you get your money back if you lose money on bad trades.
No, come on, "no regulations"?

--

Matt Levine: "Every day people email me to say “I don’t understand how more than 100% of a company’s shares can be shorted, isn’t that illegal?” No, it is fine. I wrote about it on Monday"

My previous comment quoting his previous footnote on the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25935959
Robin Hood makes it pretty clear when you open a margin account. Not so much when trading in it.
One of the ISPs in my home town runs a nntp server and it is very popular among locals, not even tech-savvy ones. It’s been around for at least 16 years and last time I checked it was still very active. I think the point is - nntp is still acceptable if the community is large enough.
Bluetooth has unfixable security risks baked into the protocol, it's ideal for OpenBSD to ignore it.
“Just didn’t have the capital to ...” so they screwed millions of investors?

How on earth is this legal?
1974: Super Star Trek
Take a look at the underlying Vega-Lite library (https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/) and the paper that introduces the grammar of interactions (https://idl.cs.washington.edu/papers/vega-lite/) for some insights into the design.

What specifically do you find unergonomic about the design of Altair?
> LOL Isn't the whole point of cryptocurrency to produce an alternative to the current financial system?

Coinbase is basically a bridge between traditional and decentralized finance.

> Coinbase entering the traditional stock-market is a flat-out rejection of that; They're just another bank, except they trade in ponzi schemes rather than government-backed currency. Awful

My guess is they debated internally whether to do an IEO but ultimately decided it was not worth the regulatory risk.
Thank you for your comments on this thread and others today. They have been very helpful in understanding what is actually going on.
Bold claim.

There is a relationship between Citadel and RH and a relationship between Melvin and Citadel.

I want an investigation.
Melvin capital
Exactly this, If you have the cash they are likely happy to let you risk it. Margin is a broker problem and they have right to manage their level of risk.
>The idea that this just boils down to some good old boy phoning up RH and asking them to pump GME doesn't stand up to very much scrunity at all.

It's entirely possible, but do you really think that a conspiracy couldn't be possible in the financial world with all that's happened for the past 20 years?
Doge Coin?