skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There isn't something "magical" about > 100% short interest. It should be stated a ratio to be less confusing, rather than a percentage. It just means that if there were, say 100 shares of a company, and 120 shares sold short, it would be "120%" short. But all this means is that there are 220 shares "owned" by others. And thus, to cover, the "shorts" need only buy back 120 of those 220 shares, so there will certainly be bag holders at the end of this since the shorts don't actually need to buy up "all the shares", only 54% of them in this case.

Now, of course, some of those shares are locked up by funds tracking, say the Russell 2000 index, which cannot liquidate their holdings (and may even be required to buy more as GME climbs) in order to maintain it's percentage in the fund. Other shares are held by other funds or institutions, and so on. So the reality is it is difficult for the shorts to cover quickly.

This isn't a problem during "normal times" because the volatility of the stock is relatively low and thus the short margin interest that you have to pay to keep borrowing the stock is a small percentage. But as the price runs up, that interest and collateral requirements grow dramatically since the broker needs to be sure you can pay up if you have to buy the shares at the current market price.
Irrational, but understandable.
Hey, it's not market manipulation when you're an academic or part of the oligarchy of experts with invested positions. These people are to be cherished and flaunted on news media to state their "unbiased" opinion of market movements. It's manipulation when you're an average joe telling other average joes to stick it to a firm that's trying to bankrupt another company that's struggling through the pandemic.
Safe, effective vaccines are being developed because they know if they don't they won't get past the FDA.
Thank you thank you thank you!

I was looking at PyO3 a few months ago, after discovering the orjson python (with rust inside) library and radically speeding up an auto-ML app for work.

I really enjoyed starting to learn Rust, but found the process to embed in Python to be rather intimidating. Looking forward to using your repo as a reference, and love the dtparse work you've done.
> If your company takes money from investors, their wishes are always going to take precedent over everything else.

i think this is a big part of where the "capital" in "capitalism" comes from. ownership and return on said capital ownership is the primary concern

> And they want money.

not just money, they want money as capital for further investments....

i am not an economist, but this seems to me where over financialization starts to loose the plot and go off the rails imo... eveything becomes about finanicial tools and "ownership" control to accumulate more capital, for capitals sake... this wrecks companies and economies alike
The strand conjecture is falsified if supersymmetry is found, because it predicts that supersymmetry does not exist.

The strand conjecture can also be falsified with a few hundred other experiments. A partial list is here: www.motionmountain.net/bet

In a few words, the strand conjecture predicts the lack of additions or modifications to the standard model of particle physics and to general relativity. It might be the only conjecture doing so. So far, this summary prediction agrees with all experiments.
> Most people probably don't use watch expressions, conditional breakpoints etc.

That's an indictment of the available debugger interfaces that they wouldn't.
> We will revert back to the internet that was 15 years ago.

How? What will make people—not people like us, who have eschewed Facebook for years, but those who still rely on it not just for connection to their friends and family, but for news and information—abandon Facebook, start questioning its neutrality as a platform, or generally change anything about how they have been behaving?

What you suggest will only happen if we force Facebook to change. And honestly, I'm not sure if there's a way to make Facebook change that would not leave it still massively prone to manipulation, echo chambers, and bubbles, even if the people in charge genuinely want to eliminate those things.
Yup. There's a lot of distrust in doctors and the medical community and some of that has been earned by past lapses in ethics or rigor.

The only way to earn it back is by heightened scrutiny. That's the role the FDA finds itself in. It doesn't just approve things because approving something that later causes issues will ultimately result lost confidence.

Getting people to take these vaccines will be a challenge in and of itself. Can you imagine how much harder it will be if we give antivaxxers more "they rushed this" ammunition?
> you think they shouldve gone public during a high-volume, high-volatility feeding frenzy with tens of billions flying around and said "we're insolvent, but its ok we're taking action to recover our position"?

Sure, why not? Everyone knows the situation is extremely unusual and not indicative of RH's ordinary performance. This way, they'd stay on the friendly side of everyone.

> its like saying theres no technical problem, but people think there is, so the company has to not only continue providing their free services but also make their users feel good while doing so.

I'm not saying they should've allowed people to continue buying GME and other meme stocks. I'm saying they should've honestly communicated the actual reasons behind their decision.
Yep - and there's SPDK for direct NVMe storage access without going through the Linux block layer: https://spdk.io

(it's in my TODO list too)
Polanyi's Revenge and AI's New Romance with Tacit Knowledge
You could stipulate whatever you wanted, but there is nothing special about that threshold in particular.

I fully agree that derivatives can create all sort of problems in many cases, including when the nominal amount of the positions is much higher than the actual amount of the underlying.
That's a very charitable reading of what they wrote.

craft/place buildings implies a very discrete action and does not encapsulate the sum of the parts, the interaction between all these systems.
>Where's the pump and dump?

Whether this specific instance counts as a pump and dump is irrelevant. The point is that it's illegal and "free speech" isn't a valid defense. Furthermore, comments elsewhere in this thread have mentioned that intentionally causing a short squeeze is also illegal.

>Look it up under market manipulation. A oversized hedge fund overselling a stock will certainly be able to set the price where they want and then profit.

And the same isn't true of the people in WSB gobbling up GME?
An expert is an expert whatever their title claims.
Depends on how long you need the server, and the ownership model you've chosen to pursue for it.

If you purchase a server and stick it in a co-lo somewhere, and your business plans to exist for 10+ years — well, is that server still going to be powering your business 10 years from now? Or will you have moved its workloads to something newer? If so, you'll probably want to decommission and sell the server at some point. The time required to deal with that might not be worth the labor costs of your highly-paid engineers. Which means you might not actually end up re-capturing the depreciated value of the server, but instead will just let it rot on the shelf, or dispose of it as e-waste.

Hardware leasing is a lot simpler. Whether you lease servers from an OEM like Dell, there's a quick, well-known path to getting the EOLed hardware shipped back to Dell and the depreciated value paid back out to you.

And, of course, hardware renting is simpler still. Renting the hardware of the co-lo (i.e. "bare-metal unmanaged server" hosting plans) means never having to worry about the CapEx of the hardware in the first place. You just walk away at the end of your term. But, of course, that's when you start paying premiums on top of the hardware.

Renting VMs, then, is like renting hardware on a micro-scale; you never have to think about what you're running on, as — presuming your workload isn't welded to particular machine features like GPUs or local SSDs — you'll tend to automatically get migrated to newer hypervisor hardware generations as they become available.

When you work it out in terms of "ten years of ops-staff labor costs of dealing with generational migrations and sell-offs" vs. "ten years of premiums charged by hosting rentiers", the pricing is surprisingly comparable. (In fact, this is basically the math hosting providers use to figure out what they can charge without scaring away their large enterprise customers, who are fully capable of taking a better deal if there is one.)
So, the HN "Genius" is just like most other people on the internet? I think the problem isn't with the HN "Genius", it's you expecting people on HN to not behave like people.

Stop putting STEM workers on a pedestal. We're still just people. Like everyone else.
At least Doge has a small transaction fee. 2¢ For Doge vs like $7 for Bitcoin. Might actually be useful as a currency like Satoshi intended in his paper (lower transaction cost than credit cards). But of course those low fees are because it’s not popular.
I glad there are people willing to participate because I wouldn't be able to sleep knowing there's worms in me. Never mind the itching.
Linked fron the article is another one saying Apple and Google are mass deleting negative reviews of the Robinhood app in their stores:

https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/28/22255245/google-deleting-...

It's sort of crazy how all of these different things are eroding trust in all of these systems simultaneously. Some can trade, but not others, happy customer reviews are legitimate, angry customer reviews are not.

This is a weird time.

I'm glad that this sort of normally-invisible manipulation is being brought to light, however. People shouldn't be trusting these rigged systems.
Live long enough and there'll be plenty more. I'll have more regret over that girl I never spoke to.
There was no bailout here of the clearinghouses, and in fact your line of argumentation supports them. If you want institutions to be able to avoid getting liquidated for cents on the dollar or bailed out by the government, you need to also allow them to defend themselves in times of trouble. The clearinghouses are doing just that by forcing brokerages to get higher reserves.
The non experts who do this are almost always people who have spent significant amounts of time familiarizing themselves with the literature.

It is fairly obvious that this is not the case for most people in threads about GME.
I absolutely agree with the main thrust of your comment, but I want to point out that in unprecedented times specifically, the odds that a smart non-expert is more correct than an expert are substantially higher than in normal times.
DNB: Check Financial Reports for Businesses
Here's what oh-so-many people are missing: the gigantic volume in these stocks is no longer coming from the WSB YOLO bros who know they'll lose money but think that's worth it to stick it to hedge funds. That may well be who was getting into the stock on Monday and Tuesday. But now it is people who saw the story on Good Morning America, having never previously heard of WSB or Robinhood, who don't care about hedge funds or any of that, but just got the impression from the news that hey this stock is going way up and that must mean it is a way to make a quick buck. And those are the people who are actually going to get screwed, not the hedge fund managers, who will be just fine.
Have an autoimmune condition. Medication works well but side effects are brutal.

This is huge gross factor, but if it would give me a normal life I could tolerate it.
Preventing purchase orders would cause the stock price to go down.

The funds short the stock gain wealth from the stock price declining.

Holders of the stock lose wealth. Clients who want to buy "lose" the opportunity to gain wealth.

The suspension of the ability to buy into the hype absolutely hurt the long folks (mostly retail WSB types) and helped the short folks (the big hedge funds which are short GME).
Severe means severe symptoms but doesn’t imply hospitalization.
It's not a tech problem, it's a production problem. There are only a few companies on earth that are capable of producing the precursor chemicals for these mRNA vaccines, and until now they were geared towards producing small batch research drugs. They are expanding rapidly but production capacity is at 100%.
First Erlang/Elixir, then Ruby 3, now Python. It's great that people are picking up the good idea once again.

Most of the time the Promise/Future or async/await add mental overhead to code just for the sake of performance (because the monadic operations are only for sequential operations, it only make sense for applicative/parallel operations to use async/await if we don't care about performance). And with the Actor model, you don't need to use Promise or async 9 out of 10 times as you would in most languages without sacrifice performance.
You are aware everyone else except retail was allowed to buy right?

You are aware hedge funds did just that after doing wash sales to trigger stop losses.

It was funny at one point bid ask spread was 120-5000
We are going to find out what will happen soon. As looking at the trade volumes people seem to have stopped selling or buying looking at the stock prices and the trades it looks like hf traders rather than retail
The last year has illustrated a new kind of "platform risk," where I think we always tried to diversify exposure to them in architecture, security, and supply chains, but it's as though it has finally trickled down to individuals.
> short (hedge fund) side.

The claim that "the hedge funds" operate in unison and/or are all short is probably the largest misconception about this whole situation. Very "us vs. them" and also very wrong.
Personally, I’d rather take the J&J which uses old, proven tech. In 5 years we will know a lot more about nRNA vaccine long-term safety, and I’ll be much more comfortable taking an nRNA vaccine at that point.

When I’m eligible, I still may take the nRNA, but my preference is on older tech at this point.

I fully acknowledge that the nRNA is extremely likely to be safe, but it’s just my preference
The problem with experts is that they often accept things and normal that the general public finds unacceptable. The SEC experts probably see a lot of "Normal" level of manipulation and improper activity that folks outside the industry would find wholly unacceptable and would like reformed. This happens to a lot industries where bad behavior is normalized and ignored by both players and regulators.
I'd say you might be wrong on both counts:

1. preventing people from buying GME at, whatever, $300 might not have been disadvantaging them, and

2. it might not have been unduly inhibiting their ability to trade, but duly so.
Thanks for well written article, makes me think about inefficiencies in our over-hyped cloud environment.
I have some friends in this mob, I'm legitimately thinking about cutting them out of my life, at least temporarily, because I told them this, and they think I'm a shill for some hedge fund I've never heard of.

Someone is laughing all the way to the bank about stirring up an internet mob, and I hate it.
This post is fantastic. I wish there was more workstation porn like this for those of us who are not into the RGB light show ripjaw hacksaw aorus elite novelty stuff that gamers are so into. Benchmarks in the community are almost universally focused on gaming performance and FPS.

I want to build an epic rig that will last a long time with professional grade hardware (with ECC memory for instance) and would love to get a lot of the bleeding-edge stuff without compromising on durability. Where do these people hang out online?
Every site uses Cloudflare, and there’s only one ISP in the entire world? That’s CrAzY!

Seriously. The lack of imagination here is embarrassing. Cargo cult engineering.

I suggest you read up on what a real persecuted site does.
https://www.businessinsider.com/the-ingenious-way-the-pirate...
Don't use the LGPL for Go code
LBOs are the very visible face of private equity. It doesn't help that they are over-represented in painful bankruptcies, like Toys "R" Us, or that many local government pension funds have an over-exposure to PE funds.

Next, you are correct that LBOs buy lots of distressed companies as well as healthy ones. But if you look at the distressed companies that they buy, a large portion started off as healthy companies before they were first bought. And if they do proceed to bankruptcy, very frequently their only real problem is the crushing debt that the buyout left them stuck with. See, for example, Toys "R" Us.

Moving on, why do people loan money to them? There are a number of reasons. But one of the biggest ones is that banks are lending money created by the Fed to prop up the economy, on the bet that the Fed will create more money later to enable them to close out their position. This is a cycle that has been happening since QE started post-2008. Certainly that is a prime explanation for the eye-watering trillion dollars in loans to zombie companies since COVID started.

And finally, the "hard decisions" that you're talking about very often take the form of finding things that can be cut. Like maintenance. If you stop that, your costs go down, your revenue is untouched for a long time, your financials look healthy. The reason why the original management didn't decide that is because they were looking at what happens 20 years down the road, and recognized that failing to pay these costs would be a net loss. Or that failing to keep a hospital up to date will cost actual lives. But PE has a much shorter planning horizon, and figure that the next owner won't figure it out until after the PE company has their profit locked in.

Now none of this is to say that the other things that you recommend aren't good ideas. However when I go to a local hospital, my odds of dying are increased because it likely has been taken over by PE and they prioritized profits over lives in the cuts that they made to maintenance. I'm not OK with this, and would like to see the people running those PE companies have to face personal liability for the effects of their actions.
People would get the disease but it won't kill them. They get a milder version of the disease that they otherwise would have.

It is like having some sort of immunity to type A,B, Spanish, etc of flu and getting them still but not dying like in early 1900s.
> The pig whipworm eggs used previously for this purpose can hatch in the human body but they cannot survive

If this became a routine treatment, it seems pretty likely that they'd start being able to survive.
Believe it or not there is strong evidence that more shorts are being added.

Consider a potential attitude that Citadel is going to get away with this blocking. I mean, maybe ... just maybe ... they'll get an SEC fine of a few hundred million (while protecting many hedge funds from billions in losses). In a worst case scenario a sacrificial scapegoat or two goes to a minimum security country club or house arrest for 6 months/1 year. But that will take a few months/years to come to pass and public sentiment will be much less hot. So they're probably gonna force the price down to unwind existing shorts.

So, since there is a potential that the price will be pushed down due to the above ... doesn't it make sense to open a new short position?
From what I experienced (could be misrepresentative), larger banks don't tend to put that kind of pressure when they provide investment capital.

Could be that it's not that they don't care, just that they don't take that level of involvement with growth companies.

VCs tend to take a <5 y perspective, where banks and other investors can play more long-term games
Not if the greatest danger to the rhinos are poachers.
I suspect it's a little of column A, a little of column B. :) While a theoretically great thing about Substack is that you have no editor, a serious pitfall with Substack is that you have no editor -- and, depending on publication, no research staff or fact-checking department. So there's no one to push back even with relatively gentle comments like "I see what you're going for here, but you need to support [thing] better" or "your snark here is magnificent but it's undercutting your larger point."
I truly hope the ones benefiting are really the little guys and not "other" wallstreet, manipulating desperate people by giving them a narrative is so easy.
I'll take it you've never gotten a bad diagnosis from a doctor. Those too are disastrous, gets put in your medical record, and local doctors will agree for the sole sake of not refuting another local doctor.

But jumping to crystals? Seriously?
I really like Crystal's website [0]. It lets the code to the talking and has nice big buttons for "Install", "Learn", and "Try Online".

0: https://crystal-lang.org/
> Builds a fantasy World of Wall Street from first principles around that definition

Haven't politicians and regulators been doing the same thing for ever?

Can't a normal person challenge that?

Why should we blindly follow the narrative of the politicians and regulators?
The 737 Max would like a word
My mistake! I didn’t check, but knew the value was in the range of “too long to assume our galactic neighborhood is static or even repeating but too short to not have had potential repetitions show up in Earth geology”.
I bought the game late last year and have almost 700 hours already. This is a great game and the 1.1 update is awesome. Logistics, move queue, and follow for Spidertrons are game changing.
And yet those stricter lockdowns in Australia (stricter than in the US) paid off. There are very few cases at this point and little if any community spread.
That would be useful if they were actually sticking it to the man. But that isn't what's happening here. What's happening is a big bubble where most of these regular people are gonna lose lots of money while the hedge funds end up closing out their position for a manageable loss and come out just fine.
I don’t know how you could possibly reason about options without understanding delta, and gamma makes sense to me too since it’s just the derivative of delta as the underlying value changes.
Contract between European Commission and AstraZeneca [pdf]
One of the more significant finding when dealing with conflicts between groups is the out-group homogeneity effect. The in-group is perceived as individuals with a diverse range of opinions and believes, while out-groups is generalized and seen as with no/minimal amount of diversity in opinions.

A result of this is that people who incite violence in the in-group is seen as a small minority of extreme voices, while same actions will define the entirety of the out-group. Non-violent behavior, say views about small government and lower taxes, can also be discarded since it does not fit the generalization.
Agreed fully. The 2x long, -1 short limit is just a neat, natural limit that one could discuss, and might be easier to enforce than other (similarly arbitrary) limits.
mass deletion of negative reviews is automatic and has been done before if it looks like spam / brigading (which this probably looks like). i think it's a reasonable explanation.

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2018/12/in-reviews...

https://9to5google.com/2018/12/17/play-store-anti-spam-revie...
Falling into the Pit of Success
So if RH would just make you wait 4 days before you could trade again, then there wouldn't be any problem? But then it would be a lot less attractive / addictive app.
This is well known the be common practice and very much not punished.
"We have no liquidity issues. We just need more liquidity." Reminds me of "depends on what your definition of 'is' is".