skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I liken it to film grain.

Very light film grain makes videos easier to watch, one of the early complaints of all digital cinemas was that they were too "crisp".

None of the CRT presets are what I particularly like, but I've got it customized to an extent that IMHO it is super easy on the eyes.
> Can anyone legitimately make the claim that the massive drop in value that cut off the price rise at the knees and allowed the worst short positions to cover their losses sub-$200 didn't materially harm the users?

Very probably. The general principle of Article III jurisprudence is that you have to demonstrate concrete, particularized harm to bring a case, not generalized, theoretical harm.

If your allegation is that your harm arises from "I could have made a killing if I bought and sold the stock at appropriate times," well that is theoretical harm (especially when you undercut buy alleging that you could have done so on other platforms). You'd probably have to allege that you attempted to buy (alternatively, sell) the stock and Robinhood prevented you from doing so, but the fact that you signed a contract saying that you acknowledge that Robinhood can prevent you from being certain stocks is going to be a challenging hurdle to overcome.
Maybe Citadel knew about RH's difficulties and timed their moves accordingly. For smart person who knows how RH's model works (I am neither, btw), which I'm sure Citadel employs many of, it wouldn't have been hard to predict.
"Sorry", "Unknown or expired link, pls what does it mean and how do I solve it?
The efficient market hypothesis - that over the long term prices will reflect what something is actually worth - is the core underpinning assumption of pretty much all finance.
Why? Surely them blocking buys for any individual (or even small group of them) is within their rights per their customer agreement. But blocking them en masse is market manipulation, and their tos isn’t going to protect them from that.
Another nest trick, what if instead of waiting to accrue the franchise, there was a way to retroactively remove the franchise of those that leave. Why should the past rule over the future?
Sure, your coins are where the government can's touch them. But if you do not comply with the IRS reporting rules and your body is where the government can touch you, watch out.

But you're right. If USG does go down this path of crypto suppression (and this is pure speculation at this point) US based exchanges are vulnerable first.

I imagine nothing like this would unfold without coordination with the EU and five eyes.
>“I was at a social gathering when I noticed two men started giggling after Myntra’s advertisement was played on television. When I asked them about it, they refused to tell me why.

So he is slow AND easily offended...
> The UK needed France

If the war started early, perhaps. But later on, not really. Britain and the dominion had one hell of a lot of resources.

There is a good book on this topic by David Edgerton titled ‘Britain’s War Machine’. It’s largely debunking the idea of the plucky underdog and shows the great strength of Britain relatively to Germany. It was more a question of how long it would take Germany to fall, rather than anything else. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13647996
I'm not for a laissez-faire society, don't get me wrong.

But a blanket restriction on risk taking as you're hinting at here to 'protect the vulnerable' is a red flag because who decides how wide this net is and the terms of the net. Concretely, what are we allowed to say and not say (the Reddit forum question at stake here), how much are we allowed to have and not have as demonstrable assets to qualify for a trade (Accredited Investor and Qualified Purchaser already exist in the private equity world), etc.

If you take a step back and put a magnifying glass on the principle, protect vulnerable people, you have to ask, what about: smoking, drugs, unhealthy foods in an obesity epidemic, extreme sports, combat sports, driving under the age of 18, and many other questions. What about poor people buying lottery tickets? If I go to a local bodega, I'll stand in line behind people buying lottery tickets, and you can see they are not upper income people.

The world is dangerous and we're all vulnerable, and yes, some more than others. Various societies have to decide on the scale of 0 to 100, how much we allow individual to hurt themselves. The answer will be different in China, Sweden, the United States, and so forth, owing to the values of the societies.

How about protecting vulnerable investors by regulating entities like short selling hedge funds?
I can't shake the feeling that Apple would trade their ethical standards for Facebook's in a minute if it made sense to them financially.

I'd love to see them enforce privacy in an area where it costs them something.
Cory nails it. Or at least part of it.

I've long had a nagging feeling that there was a deep connection between the current state of our "post truth" society and the continuously widening scope of "IP" (digital monopoly) protections. Cory disentangles some of those connections and shows some of the ways IP has become a tool for restricting freedoms. But there's more: I think that those same mechanics are narrowing the overton window and putting all thinking that's outside on the same level... and we end up in a world where the ordinary person can't distinguish between the credibility of un-approved ideas.
SEC regulations will override any user agreement where Robinhood is required to provide fair trade execution services
If I read Robinhood's ToS correctly, you agree to not arbitrate any claim you bring up in a class action lawsuit.
> that often needs to be removed item by item.

In general you just need to change it for each shipment - if multiple items are grouped together [because they're all at the same warehouse) then changing one shipment will change the shipping speed of all items within it. They probably should be defaulting to free shipping when it's available, though.
> Despite Google meddling with the standards

Please let that misconception die. I’m not at all fond of Google, but HTTP/3 is not a Google thing: Google is just one (admittedly significant) party involved in making a thing that lots of parties want and have worked together to make. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25286488 is a relevant comment I wrote a couple of months ago.
Reflection allows you to put the interfaces to Account and Customer into a shared module and the business logic implementations into their own mutually independent modules, thus removing the cyclic compile time dependency.

You "wire up" the implementations at runtime, using reflection.
Ok sure, but I still don't really see what's so bad about being margin called. Like even given that unlikely occurrence where RH might margin call you, what you get out of RH doing this still seems all around great for the user.
That gives me a good intuitive picture. I'd really love a basic online simulator where I can plug in portfolio characteristics (eg percent of calls Vs puts, ATM Vs OTM) and simulate an equity curve over the last ten years. I could build my own of course but I think a tool like this would be generally useful for investors.
Awesome story, especially that blind typing.

In Germany later (for the C64) we had a computer magazine that listed programs in hex code. There was a special hex editor to input these programs and each line had a check sum, so we could easily see if there was a typo in our program. But at one time there was a typo in the printed hex code, oh dear...
Whoa, please don't cross into personal attack, and omit swipes from your comments here.

TeMPOraL didn't downvote you. He couldn't. No one can downvote replies to their own posts (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25969116 was probably downvoted because it broke these guidelines:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Only a bit. I still use my OnePlus One daily. I find it odd as well how quickly people replace their phones.
> Can anyone legitimately make the claim that the massive drop in value that cut off the price rise at the knees and allowed the worst short positions to cover their losses sub-$200 didn't materially harm the users?

Yes, because you'd have to prove that Robinhood volume alone caused that drop in price. Robinhood isn't that big, and GME volume was crazy on Thursday.

It's equally likely (and equally impossible to prove) that Robinhood saved their users money by preventing them from investing in a stock that was already up 500% and clearly overvalued relative to its fundamentals.

This is the part that gets me about this: even now, after the mania has passed, everyone still thinks that GME was somehow a "sure thing" investment driven by a clearly incorrect understanding of how short trading works. And even now, after the magical short call rapture that was supposed to have come on Friday never materialized, people still want to believe that it would have kept going up and up and up.

Guys, it wouldn't. It's a bubble. They pop. Everyone trying to buy at the peak was making a terrible investment decision.
And do you think that kicking Poland out of EU will make the life of the LGBT community and the abortion rights better there? The only way to help the communities there is to have the border open between both countries and offer assistance in Germany (as we do already, just not now, because of COVID-19). Sorry, your cancel culture won't fix any problem in the World.
The collateral required by Robinhood’s clearing house to trade these stocks was raised to 100%, and it takes 2 days for trades to clear. Required collateral for other equities was not raised so there was no reason any other equities needed to be limited.
The Senate is intentionally designed to give more power to smaller states. Otherwise, the 10-15 biggest states could routinely gang up and pass federal legislation. Not a really nice outlook for a federal government.
Maybe. San Francisco has been where dreamers go to make their fortune since the mid 1800s. It’s clear that the pandemic will reduce tech employment there, but it’s far from clear that it’ll end the boom mentality that created Silicon Valley in the first place.
In his language he conflates the diagnostic code with the etiology. He tries to avoid this, but is missing the concept for etiology, so he winds up in a situation where he can't talk about the relationship between the diagnosis and what is really going on, because there is only the question of whether the diagnosis is "real." The answer is that yes, the diagnosis is always real, but it is not what we care about if we want to understand what is really going on. This is why I said he is on the right track. In his ADHD example he has nearly all the parts, diagnosis and symptoms, but is missing the free variable for the etiology. You can see this because if he had this concept then it would be clear that there is no cure for ADHD, it isn't even clear that it is a "problem" except in the context of modern civilization, and the etiology is a fundamental difference in the structure of the brain, not something you can "cure."
How come it works from all the way over here in Scandinavia? No problems with GME while RH was shutting it down.

Also, Robin Hood - the irony. They are clearly for the rich against the poor. More like the sheriff of nottingham!
"It has become extremely common for app makers to embed code called software development kits (SDKs) in apps that sends your data to other companies."

Heh. Ok.
Another way to reduce tail risk when selling options is to simply hedge with a protective call/put at a higher or lower strike respectively. Sufficiently far off strikes will have minimal impacts on returns while reducing tail risk.
Why can't non-Robinhood holders of GME sue Robinhood, though? If you can prove that RH's actions drove the stock down, then aren't they the victims (and also not bound by the user agreement)?
A huge contingent of the population, especially internationally and among US boomers will keep their cable bundle.

Not just Boomers. I've seen numbers showing that Gen X is getting tired of jumping through hoops to watch TV, so they're going back to cable, or going * gasp * OTA.

The numbers also show that Gen Z seems to embrace "owned" physical media a lot more than Millennials, and that they're also more likely to go full OTA just because they see little value in paying for multiple streams or a cable subscription.

It seems that Millennials love streams and subscriptions, and everyone else is rethinking whether that's a good idea.
It is a problem. Those that are capable and drop out of the insane career filter that is academia get good jobs elsewhere. Others end up in the University. And there, they don't even teach.
Reddit Rebellion Has Clogged Entire Financial System's Plumbing
“IP is any law that I can invoke that allows me to control the conduct of my competitors, critics, and customers.”

Doctorow never uses this word, but the dynamic he describes — where tech companies, rather than try to keep customers by offering good products, prefer to keep customers by making it impossible for them to leave — is fundamentally abusive.

The entire essay is a detailed explanation of the ways that tech companies exploit and abuse their customers and society as a whole, but he never uses those words.

I’m in agreement — they are abusive; they are exploitive; they are preying upon society and need to be regulated — but it’s odd that he doesn’t use the words.
I have the same problem: I tried in 2020 to play the games of my childhood (Super Mario Bros 3 being a favourite) on an emulator, and I keep dying in the early, easy, levels. I'm 30 years older than when I first played the game, am I that much worse? Maybe.

NES platformers rely on precise timing, and the controls just _feel_ sluggish and laggy. I can absolutely believe that some combination of delays introduced by the bluetooth stack for the controller, the OS' input event queue, the emulator itself, and the whole modern video pipeline add up to a few frames worth of delay compared to the original game drawing itself on a CRT.
RH charges $75 to transfer holdings to a different broker. If you have a big account that's probably worthwhile but I get the impression a lot of RH customers are small-time people who are just dabbling in the stock market for fun. If your account only holds $500-1000 of securities a $75 fee is pretty steep.
RH is the cost leader by a wide margin and its very unique to its business model via data arrangement with Citadel

It’s free right up until the point they decide to charge you 100% of your money.
Excess capacity doesn't have to be 100% operational at all times.
I think a global, decentralized pyramid scheme is fairly harmful - at least to the later adopters left holding the bag, and then the growing "army of HODLers" who are aligned financially to further adoption to realize gains or try to break even again; including the danger of regulatory capture.
I'm just saying that it's all the same magical thinking. I'm not saying it's the same people, though given the demographics I suspect the overlap is bigger than we think.
In 1980 newspapers were where >50% of advertising dollars were spent, now it's going to nothing - and - they have to fight for every little click using click bait.

You can see the natural progression towards hyper bifurcated viewpoints.
To the contrary. It might shock you to hear that it's still free.
Maybe it's stupid, but I could forgive the outages, maybe because I wasn't doing any time critical trades when they happened. But deliberately limiting trades on dozens of stocks is so far past the line for me that I'm leaving Robinhood as soon as I find another brokerage I like.
> Its data also showed that estimated losses from shorting GameStop at $1.03 billion year-to-date

That’s not $60 billion.
That trading stocks on it and all of its features are free, no fees and no commission.
You are dangerously close to empathizing with terrorists, citizen. How dare you try and understand them. We have always been at war with terrorism. This incidence of extremism has been added to your social credit report.

/s
As a side project I do a lot of dark sky and deep space photography [ IG: https://instagram.com/dheeranet ].

Seeing the Milky Way at night is incredible, but what a lot of people don't realize is that there is a whole lot more than the Milky Way up there in "plain sight" and huge, just too dim to see with the naked eye. Many people don't realize for example that the Andromeda galaxy is visually about 6 times the size of the full moon, but just too dim to see. Some of the nebulae I photograph are actually barely visible with the naked eye if you go to a truly dark enough place (e.g. Death Valley).

A big part of what I'm trying to do through photography is to inspire more people to be interested in space, STEM, and also protect the beautiful views that have been bestowed to us by the universe. It's something that I'm quite privileged to have easy access to in California but did not when I was growing up in Asia and later on the east coast of the US.

By the way, although although a lot of people have been pointing fingers at StarLink, including a huge swath of the amateur astronomy community, it's not actually a huge problem for most photography and observations. StarLink satellites are easily filtered out using even the most basic outlier rejection techniques (e.g. sigma clipping) and their tracks are presumably predictable and known in advance. They are much less of a problem in my experience than planes and assholes with car headlights who deliberately stop by your observing site for extended periods of time. I can't comment if there are any research projects affected by them but I imagine that at most they are an annoyance to data filtering and not dealbreaker.
If I can figure out how to aim a camera at my keyboard I'll try to do so later today.
Just because their decision favored another party doesn't mean it was malicious and they would be liable. If at&t had to shut down their network for 2 hours because of a botched firmware update, that would heavily favor the hedge funds (who probably have redundant connections), but that doesn't mean you can go after them for not being able to sell your GME stocks.
Their messaging around this has been a total self-own. I don't know whether they're trying to protect their relationship with the DTCC or something else, but Vlad's lack of clarity understandably makes most people blame RobinHood.
> Together, they very frequently necessitate a reboot after 2-3 days.

None of the 3 Windows machines in my house reboot other than for monthly updates.

Actually, if you count my Xbox as "running Windows"， I do have to reboot that slightly more often than once a month!

But seriously, now days a PC is a front end for a web browser, steam games, Adobe suite, and Office.

My current Win10 install started off as a Windows 8 install many years back.
Just looking at UCLA employees sorted by gross pay is interesting; Tao ends up around #192 on the list. Mostly due to the medical school, plus some people with titles like "INTERCOL ATH HEAD COACH EX" and "INTERCOL ATH COACH AST EX".

The top 3 (and #5) are all "HEAD COACH".
Not on options
The Volt is boring, ugly, and slow. I don’t know what they were thinking. It looks like it was designed by soccer moms in a focus group session.
I don't understand how you're too lazy to click through a 100-slide slideshow—and yet have the energy write a full paragraph complaining about it here.
During the other times, was their the perception that they were screwing their users over due to pressure by large financial institutions? That's a pretty salient difference for their brand.
On our devices with Windows, we use the built-in tools, 7-zip and WinRAR (on a single workstation).

Mentioning WinRAR was a bit of a joke.
Oh, I wouldn’t even call my idle layman thoughts a theory, more of a hunch really.

Have retail investors generally benefitted from doing an amount of trading that would incur significant transaction costs?

Do you think my general sentiment is off base, and the market (as is) is unequivocally a good thing for society as a whole? Even with regular worldwide crises caused by wild speculation, greed, and incompetence?

I would be very interested to read a thorough defense of how the increasingly complex market machinations and instruments are good for “the people” and some indication that their value isn’t entirely captured by the small cohort that dreamed them up. I admit that I understand this very poorly.
To provide some counter-anecdata, if you are in the lucky position to have screens that work at exactly 200% (4K at 24", 5K at 27"), then Ubuntu and its derivatives will Just Work out of the box. At least that was my experience around 2017-2019. Fractional scaling factors like 150% are tricky, but macOS does not properly support them either.

The only app that didn't pick up my DPI settings on Linux was Spotify, but all web-ish apps support ctrl +/-...which honestly strikes me as a big usability win over native toolkits.

I actually found my 5K screen more enjoyable under Linux than macOS, because the performance of JetBrains IDEs on Retina Macs seems to flip-flop between okay and abysmal every year.

Mixed-DPI setups are where macOS is truly superior.
6T, LineageOS works without issues!
The fact that they’ve not only limited trading in GME but low volatility name like Starbucks to 1 share is ridiculous. If the only outcome out of this is collective realization about issues with Section 230 or forced arbitration that is a positive whether this class action becomes anything or not.
Isn't UPRO just a leveraged SPY. Seems different to the above option selling strategy
Do you actually know of a specific firm that kept its short position open through to Thursday? They would have had to survive through Tuesday and Wednesday, which seems unlikely if they were one of the original sub-$10 shorts.
Sometimes it's used by the state itself for cost savings, as in California under then-attorney general Kamala Harris (now Vice President):

> “Extending 2-for-1 credits to all minimum custody inmates at this time would severely impact fire camp participation — a dangerous outcome while California is in the middle of a difficult fire season and severe drought,” lawyers from Harris’s office wrote in a filing.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/kamala-harris-of...
Logic a fundamentally different process of intellectual productivity, which is why mathematicians don’t see proving and reasoning as the same thing. Formal methods weren't even widespread until late in mathematical history, yet somehow we had mathematical productivity.

Mathematicians can scarcely describe their own thinking process, and proving is often the last step to mathematical reasoning.

Talking about logical fallacy in ordinary conversation is backward.
And for the love of God, people should stop calling Signal secure as long as it is tied to a phone number. You cannot get a SIM card in my country without not having it tied to your ID card number, address, and so forth. You are not anonymous on Signal.
"Some redditors believe that a short squeeze was part of the reason that GameStop's stock rose so rapidly over the last week."

No, the active thesis on WSB is that while a few shorts closed their positions, active shorts are still >100% of float. The short squeeze has yet to happen. Thus the reason they're all holding - shorts are paying huge amounts of interest every day, so the point is to hold until they're forced to give up on their positions, which will lead to the short squeeze.

The squeeze hasn't been squoze yet.