skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What are they even alleging RH did wrong? Any broker is free to decide what the let their customers trade. They could restrict buying AAPL if they wanted to. This is like trying to sue a bar for having stopped serving your favourite beer. There is absolutely no case here.
I don't have a position related to the question at hand, but I've certainly been observing closely over the last few days and for me personally it's pretty hard to shake the perception that a subreddit mostly specializing in financial market memes beat "the man" at his own game and now "the man" is changing the rules.

Meanwhile you're jumping on internet message boards to try and explain how "the man" is actually totally right in this situation and everyone should really go back to dutifully enriching him without questions.
In theory... in practice? So much illegal shit goes down in finance all of the time. rarely if ever it gets caught.

And when they have literal billions on the line a slap on the wrist fine is preferable.
I wonder whether Citadel was the / a major lender for the shares in the first place. That would explain a lot. But even then, I doubt that there was foul play.
this increasingly looks like an episode of "billions"
This points to a need for code to be deletable way faster than it needs to be thought about.

I really don't see how this follows, or how it makes "reasoning about code" a scam.

How does deleting code that works, rather than thinking about it, solve anything?
I thought RH used Citadel
How many Dexes for company shares are being built right now? Which company will be the first one to get listed in one of those? When will it happen?
Such a great place, I try to tell, particularly young people how important picking the right city is. If you pick a bad City, you're going to end up not being able to afford to live your life will be needlessly stressful, you won't be able to find a partner. But if you pick a good city live can be pretty good
Is the algorithm that does or doesn't promote apps on the app store able to differentiate between "protest votes" and "real" votes?
The Reddit Revolution, GameStop and Melvin Capital – Glenn Greenwald
I second your observations on JPEG. It turns out that you can use the same code to skim through jpeg, lossless jpeg, Jpeg2000 and jpeg-ls headers. Impressive in it’s simplicity.
Various trading halts occur fairly regularly. If it's possible to win a suit against an exchange halting trades, institutional investors would be suing exchanges on a regular basis.

Also the creation of the SEC was essentially to protect retail investors from speculative investments (that typically cleaned them out). It would be less likely to see a trade halt as going "against the people" but as a consumer protection practice, so it's doubtful it will be wagging too many fingers at RH.
The MIT OpenCourseWare talk How to Speak by Patrick Winston is a great lecture on this subject: https://youtu.be/Unzc731iCUY
The idea is sound. Silver has been shorted and held low for a long time by institutional shorts. I am on another metals trading forum and they've been waiting for a silver breakout for years, which never comes. Why are you afraid if Silver goes higher?
Yeah I think my point is more that the outrage is not proportional. Other brokers did the same thing and aren't in the spotlight at all.
Even outside of the trade clearing argument (even if Robinhood clears it's own trades, it could still lose huge sums if the stock gapped), a short squeeze is illegal. Allowing it's platform to be used for illegal activity could make them liable to the SEC and investor lawsuits.
It was a company announcement material to the fund's prospects, if they lied it would be grounds for a securities fraud suit from their investors.
A short squeeze by itself is not illegal. It is illegal to make trades whose sole purpose is to manipulate the price of a stock, though.
> is Citadel a big enough player as to influence the regulatory system, like on the level of JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs

No. They barely avoided going out of business the last time around.
Yeah, no.

If you come to me asking to work together and I tell you no because I don't work with people that are trying to get me killed, it's pretty obvious what I mean.
Cory Doctorows position is built on a flawed understanding of what payment for order flow is all about.

Internalizers do not go out and buy the things they’ve peaked at during the internalization process.
Wait, this is a pretty gigantic claim that needs some backing. There are examples of the SEC instituting temporary bans on short-selling, but this is the closest thing I can find to your claim.
Everyone uses slippery slope reasoning in their personal lives, because it's a completely valid form of reasoning in the real world.

Otherwise we'd be fine with the concept of e.g. trying methamphetamine just a few times and then planning to stop.
Yes this is very bad for RH
Never thought I'd see him around these parts
The system looks very fragile when something like that happens, and by being fragile it makes the stock going down which in return lot of people are loosing money.

They should have stop trading completely on those stock instead they stopped some people / service to purchase it but you can still sell, it's insane.
if they are so profitable, why not keep hosting a site for enthusiasts ?
Short squeeze is legal. What are you talking about?
It's funny that lawmakers so mad about Robinhood putting the brakes on this[1], when all I had been reading prior to this year how Robinhood was recklessly gamifying investing[2]. Some people are absolutely going to lose their homes / retirement savings at the end of all this. I have no doubt they would have faced lawsuits and calls for regulation had they done nothing.

[1]https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/28/gamestop-cruz-ocasio-cortez-...
[2]https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/16/massachusetts-sec-o-commonwe...
I can understand how risk management might be necessary for margin trading, but is it really necessary for non-margin trading?

And if it's a scaling issue, shouldn't all stocks be equally affected, rather than cherry-picking just a few?
It's a quirk I've often noticed in writing by a certain personality type: people they disagree with are never just wrong; they're scammers, liars, gas-lighters, or in some other way deliberately attempting to deceive.

I suppose the implication is that they're so obviously wrong that they can't possibly be sincere, so they must be lying for some ulterior motive. A reverse Hanlon's Razor. A position that's quite odd from a writer who says: "Let’s start with the fact that people don’t think—sorry, reason—about things the same way"
Interactive Brokers chairman: Worried about integrity of the market
You're right, but I'd not make that argument here. I made a similar argument when this recalcitrant doctor was pulled of a United plane a few years back, justified in my view, and in line with the conditions of carriage. But, yeah, HN crowd wasn't pleased.

(Many said they'd never fly United again, and most people wouldn't... United share price dropped a bit, then went straight back up to where it was and beyond. Well, until COVID-19.)

Edit to add: BTW, the point is not that you should always read the TOS. The point is that you should read the TOS before complaining if something unexpected happens.
found the "should just build their own exchange with their rules!" comment
LLDB FreeBSD CPU target support and userland debugging improvements
Robinhood didn't pull the plug. Tastyworks did the same and they said they were more or less forced by Apex Clearing. Here is CEO of interactive brokers also admitting to the reasons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RH4XKP55fM
"halting trades" is not the same as "halting buys only while allowing people to sell in an attempt to crash the price so our biggest customer doesn't lose money"
I'm sorry to hear it was so difficult for you. I agree that it seems like every step along the way is there just to add more money (to what they can charge you or, for the insurance, what they can get you to pay instead of them). The long hours on the phone I mentioned are another expression of that (maybe if we keep giving him the runaround, he'll just go away). The fact that you're dealing with said issues just makes you more likely to give up, and they know that.

The next time something like this comes up, if you're feeling up to it, try pushing back. If you have the time to throw at it, the worst outcome of trying is usually just staying where you started.

At the end of my many hours on multiple phone calls getting everyone to agree to pay for treatment I need... the company in charge of making it called to let me know they've been retasked to making COVID vaccine and won't be making the drug I need for at least 3 months. So no treatment for at least that long. So that's fun.
> if hedge funds were long, it would have happened?

Yes. DTCC changes collateral requirements on securities all the time [1]. The collateral requirements they put on GME aren't even that egregious. Robinhood just didn't want to pay up.

[1] Literally, every day. But the haircuts they apply to the last day's market prices are also quite variable.
Are you familiar with the work of Michael Hudson? I just learned of "...and forgive them their debts" [0], and looking forward to reading it.

While I'm generally in favor of debt forgiveness for 2021 America, in his talks he's primarily described jubilees in the context of regime change: a new conquering emperor, or an aspiring revolutionary leader, cancels the debts to secure the loyalty of workers and soldiers, and the nobility has to acquiesce at the point of a sword.

What I can't figure out is how this could be done on a predictable timetable (as per the Biblical jubilee concept: every 7 or 50 years). In a conquest scenario, a lender might only withhold lending if the current power structure looked weak; but if debt forgiveness was institutionalized, why wouldn't they just cease all lending on Year 6 or Year 49? (Or, more likely: fold the probability of forgiveness into a usurious interest rate, so they collect the same income on average.)

As it stands, I think debt forgiveness can only be done as a one-time solution to gross inequality and/or social instability; and that institutional reform (to not need jubilees) has to be done upstream (such as public banking, Georgist land trusts, etc). But I'm very open to being convinced otherwise.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42515482-and-forgive-the...
That is a correct observation. The mainstay feature of WSB is making 'yolo' margin trades, so it's weighted towards companies that are in sink or swim mode and who will soon have an earnings call or some other major event.
To be honest, the more I'm watching this, the more it seems like the same behaviour we saw from the Trump supporters in the build up to 6th Jan. Baseless accusations, incredible emotive language, fact-free discourse and massive ramp up in rhetoric. Progressively wilder accusations with no proof. They don't seem to understand that mass hysteria actually is a reason for a trading platform to bring in limits - especially when there's margin around, and its actually not that big a deal for a hedge fund to go bankrupt. The idea that the entirity of Wallstreet is co-ordinating to back up some hedge fund is... laughable. It's all very high tension, low information at the moment and that seems dangerous. What was the result of this ever going to be? A narrative of being screwed by wall street start to end.
I'm sorry I still don't understand and I hope you will clarify.

You bought at $400 and expect that to be a good investment?

How will the longs that bought above arbitrary number $20 benefit in the long term?
Even better - having savings in a crypto hardware wallet :)
When do people get it.. These companies are scammers only?
I have never used GNOME and I've never experienced any of these issues.
I read a bunch of articles today and yesterday. Robinhood outsources their order execution to Citadel, which handles more than just Robinhood trades.

Or actually, "outsources" is a misnomer because Citadel pays them for the orders, so they can make money front-running them. That's why Robinhood trades are "free" for their retail users. You don't pay a fee but you get a slightly worse price.

Citadel also, fwiw, just loaned $2.5B to a fund with a lot of short exposure to GME.
So what? I know it's a highly speculative move. I know it's absurd to buy this stock at this price. But we should be allowed to. (Obviously not on margin).

I don't really think the market should allow for this sort of thing. I agree with you there. But that's how the rules are written, and now when the little guy figures out the rules they shut it down.
They write about it in their FAQs: https://robinhood.com/us/en/support/articles/whats-clearing-...
Equating speculative stock trading with opening a Facebook account is a very weird thing to do.
Citadel and gang operate this casino. If they think they're losing, they change the rules so they aren't.

Best investment money can buy is after-dinner speakers fees to people who then show up at the regulators.
Amazing! Great job! I'm so curious about your process

What programming language did you use?

What was the harder part?

Which format was the hardest?

How long did it take you?
They have already paused trading during periods of high turmoil. When bcash was announced, for instance. I think that actually set their standard for "open the market in 'post only' mode for a period before actually starting trading".
Indeed.

You are raising an important point. When you do not have a hypothesis, the first thing you want to do is get one :). It's like in research: the greatest problem you can have is not having a problem.

Now, how do you get a hypothesis?

You can start from some generic visualizations. The goal here is not to gain understanding, but to poke at finding interesting initial questions.

But, you actually always know something. You likely know the domain. Or you know the last tickets that are in the work. Even listening in the casual conversations is a good starting point.

When we train people, we literally start from the very issue they work on. Within 15 minutes, we typically find an interesting hypothesis to check for. For example, a dialog could go like this:

A: What do you work on?

B: A UI refreshing bug.

A: What do you think happens?

B: I do not know.

A: Why are you looking at this specific screen? (this is a key question. people often do not know why this screen and not another. If you have a 250000LOC system, you likely have some 5000 other screens you could potentially look at. Not knowing why this one is potentially interesting is not a good thing)

B: Because I think maybe it's related to how we subscribe to events.

A: How do you expect the event subscription to be like?

B: It should always happen in a method called xyz that is provided by the framework.

A: In all classes?

B: A, no. Just in components.

A: Ok, so you want to know the event handling that are not defined in xyz in subclasses of the component superclass.

B: A, right.

It's actually remarkably straightforward. Just try it.
Covid-19: Novavax vaccine shows 89% efficacy in UK trials
Ally has been terrible for me. From my end it was down all morning. Some days its extremely slow. I'm currently looking for another.
Anyone is able to have opposite reaction to an audacious economic transaction, it just takes a lot of retail traders to have an opposite reaction to one hedge fund. So even if the hedge fund's audacious bet is horribly wrong, the smart money reacts and profits before the crowd can coordinate their pile on. Hedge funds bet against other hedge funds too.

The asymmetry is who loses, and unlike the hedge funds with dreadful risk management, most of the retail traders piling in this week won't have mansions and yachts to go back to after their bad bet turns sour.
This sounds very plausible, but: I don't remember any cases when I've ever heard of specific platform stopping trade for specific stock just for volatility. I've heard about the cases of trade stopping when something clearly going wrong - like market crash, or bot-driven feedback loop, or such. And this usually then comes for the whole exchange or all exchanges the stock is listed on, not just a handful of platforms. That of course doesn't mean it didn't happen - just that I haven't heard of it. So is such thing common and does anybody have examples of such things happening in the past - I understand it may not gather as much press as this one but somebody should have mentioned it somewhere? Is it indeed a routine thing that got overhyped, or is it an exceptional thing trying to hide behind a routine procedure?
Hedge funds already game crypto.

At the root it’s nation state currency being manipulated.

Like in 2008. Privatize the gains and socialize the losses.

The entire ledger needs a wipe. It’s pure emotional bias to suggest the future is obliged to carry the debt of the past. There’s nothing in science suggesting such a truth exists.
This is nothing like the relatively common trading halts imposed by the exchanges under various circumstances—-which halt all trading, not just buying.

This is a specific broker—-one with direct financial ties to this trade, by the way—-totally shutting down the ability to enter an opening order for a specific ticker. Pretty unprecedented artificial suppression of demand.
> There is absolutely no case here.

There isn't, but I think one can make the case that there should be. At the very least, communication from Robinhood, from the exchanges and from regulators was piss poor. As a result, we have half the internet wrapped up in some Ken Griffin as Gordon Gecko Batman conspiracy theory.

Robinhood was criticized for marketing day trading to people who, to a large degree, didn't know better. The counterargument was people knew what they were getting into and were free to do it. Fair enough.

This adds a new wrinkle. It wasn't ever a day trading platform! A day trading platform should be able to handle high volumes. It should be able to handle increased collateral requirements. It should be able to handle some market makers going offline. What Robinhood did is contractually allowed. But it flies in the face of what they held themselves out to be.

Robinhood sold a turd doughnut, folks said "it's fine, I want a turd doughnut," and then the turd turned out to be uranium.
There is no “end of day” only requirement on margin calls. A brokerage firm could margin call you 2min after the market opened, as an example. The trigger is when your account is out of balance with the established risks the brokerage is willing to extend to you, which they can change the criteria at will.

More details on margin calls here:

https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-margin-call-358106
Robinhood could shut their doors tonight and it would have little impact on Wall St. or the American stock market. Robinhood isn't even in the top 5 for online brokers in terms of assets under management (AUM). Vanguard, Schwab, BAML, Fidelity, and Ameritrade are literally handling trillions of dollars (that's trillions with a T) [0], while Robinhood is estimated to be managing ~$20 Billion. [1] Sure, you could argue that's not all "retail investment", but they are not even in the same ballpark.

[0]: https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/research/online-brokerage-st...

[1]: https://www.brokerage-review.com/investing-firm/assets-under...

EDIT: Added concession in last line that not all in the top 5's AUM is retail, but the point still stands.
GameStop Shares: Dark Pools Owned by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, et al.
Looking at the first video link, that guy is using a telephoto/macro with a canon camera in ambient lighting conditions. Nathan has a scientific scope using a high power microscope objective, an XY stage, and lighting. The results are different. Focus stacking improves depth of field. But if you're aligning the flakes perpindicular to the optical axis, flat, then it makes more sense to just select the appropriate objective and lighting for the DOF you want, and scan the XY with a very high resolution objective to get the 2D details of flat flakes.

Big difference (I do both, but not on snowflakes).

Agree he's good at PR.
People who provide good entertainment and valuable insight already collect money through subscriptions.
Considering that ToS are intentionally opaque / full of legalese the average person doesn't understand, and that companies can change their ToS pretty much without warning and with minimal notification to the end user ("here's an email resembling spam saying our terms of service have changed in some way"), I don't consider this to be a legitimate defense. With Schwab you sign a contract that can't trivially be changed. I don't remember doing any such thing with Robinhood.
You keep saying this here but AFAIK they are not illegal. What are you basing this on?
> Short squeezes are illegal.

Nope.
Source on the illegality of short squeezes? To my knowledge the term just describes the phenomenon of prices rising as a result of shorts being forced to buy shares to settle their positions. It's a natural consequence of market forces, I don't understand how it could be illegal.
How convenient to let out a public statement that they exited the short… Gives them plausible deniability on claims of collusion with Robinhood by way of Citadel!
Anarchists as a political group usually don't like it when anarchy is compared to chaos, as this is usually a comparison that was formed by their ideological opponents.
Does citadel clear their own trades?

I could be off here, but what I'm asking is getting at like if they are on all the sides of the transaction as market maker, participating or allow others to participate in 'betting', and clearing the trades themselves? Does a trade even need to clear if it's just moving internally changing col A owner ID from 1234 to 9999?
I'm not saying they aren't shorted, I'm just saying it isn't Melvin. There are lots of people shorting GME when it's priced a large multiple of it's long term value. How this gets resolved given the giant short squeeze is another question. Certainly I wouldn't be brave enough to be on either side of the trade.
I tend to agree. I think the big issue is that when we use a site, we are being tracked by that site and most of the third party providers they use. Be it Analytics, Livechat or something else.
Kind of weird that in the chapter about mercurial pendulum they switch to metric system.
Yes, some of what you describe could be done with Bitcoin, but Please do not confuse Bitcoin with “the overall crypto market” where all of what you described actually took place.

KYC and government regulations are a pain, but the core decentralized, limited supply, secure nature of Bitcoin will remain fully intact.

Rich and powerful people have already tried to take it over, they ended up with their own forks and you can judge how those have done.
That doesn't quite work.

I'm not a stamp collector. Does that mean I lack a stamp collection, or do I have a collection of a lack of stamps?

If I am asymptomatic, is there a lack of symptoms, or is my symptom the lack thereof?
This is exactly where I will agree 100% with you, and why my original comment is more cautionary than optimistic.
https://www.sec.gov/investor/pubs/regsho.htm
You might want to put some text on the page.
Open Source Mission Control Software from NASA
Complicit isn't quite accurate though, is it?
Virus variant from South Africa detected in US for first time
Ask HN: What to Ask a VC in a Pitch?
We are having advanced talks with a few VCs to raise our first round.
What are things we should ask them?
Technically, anyone can do whatever they want but go to jail later
The SEC published guidance here https://www.sec.gov/investor/pubs/regsho.htm
Can you point to the legislation that indicates this? (Curiosity)
Mate, you can't just walk in here with detailed knowledge and settlement mechanics and all. It's a revolution against the conspiracy!