skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Should this ability for arbitrary censorship apply to ISPs, text messages, email, and phone companies too, according to you?

I have a feeling if phone companies censored text messages of conservatives the liberals would cheer it on. Liberals are unable to see Tyranny unless it's biting them in the face. As long as it's someone else getting mauled they're there to watch with pop corn and a coke.
Excellent response. This line in particular

> side-effect of going mainstream: it becomes political, and politics is perception.

This is absolutely true. Before, when this was between a few reporters and Wallstreet / WSB, it was possible to handle.

Now it has crossed the tipping point into mass politics, and the size of the audience involved is massive. Nuance is dead.
No, but RH knows, and could make that distinction if they wanted to. RH is punishing margin and non-margin users alike until it has enough cash again to resume making orders.

To be clear, the RH T&C very broadly protect them in case of any arbitrary service interruption, so on paper they're probably entitled to do whatever they want. But at the end of the day, it was them who got caught with their pants down because they went too far in their UX/risk tradeoff, and now users are paying the price and are understandably pissed.
There are a decent number of people who eschew free products support by advertising. Such providers are daemonized for "selling your data" (or even "stealing your data"). You'll hear some quips as "if the product costs nothing, you are the product".

What I find fascinating is these same people think nothing of the downside of Robinhood being commission-free. It's no secret that one way Robinhood makes money is by selling their order flow and choosing the exchange to fill your order that makes them the most money. Oh and that order flow goes to Capital. This enables frontrunning of retail orders.

How can you have issues with privacy and user data and be OK with being monetized by Robinhood, which literally costs you money through poorer trade prices and reporting on customer trades to a party who seeks to profit off that information?

So it's not a bad idea to transfer your shares out but the reasons for that predate GME.

Oh and if you look at the likes of Schwab as a replacement, which is also commission free. They also sell order flow.

Sometimes it's just better to pay for a service. At least then your interests are largely aligned (although with brokerage the provider has an incentive to encourage churn).
The accuracy is also often questionable. I have tested cheap smart watches that have heart rate info about as accurate as rolling a dice.
But if Robinhood has some preexisting deal where they have to loan out X% of long shares to shorters, why should they have to take on the risk of defunct shorters if it is within their rights to just stop allowing trades in the symbol, without any goal of overall price manipulation?
It was a lie.
>Facebook is trivial to leave

Your experience (and mine fwiw) does not generalise. It is significantly harder for many people to do so while keeping up with familial and social obligations. Not to mention some business obligations for many. Facebrick is trying ever harder to make being a citizen impossible without a Facebook account. Government departments have Facebook accounts and use it for communication. WhatsApp is used for payments on much of the world. Don't kid yourself it's as easy for everyone as it is for you and I.

That said. Delete your Facebook account. Plan it. Do it. It feels so, so very good pushing the button and your quality of life improves significantly. Facebrick is as vile as any serious addiction tends to be once it has hold of you.
The thing with me is, WSB is a group of what? A few million at least? I saw that they were up to 1.2 million maybe yesterday. And they're having a hard time on most if not all platforms. If not technically, then in terms of some form of censorship (as is the case here). There was the Discord issue, this Facebook issue. I've heard Reddit devs has been helpful with scaling r/wallstreetbets, but even still, the number of users and the (crazy yet benign) content is proving too much for a single subreddit to handle. This is a real-life use case for a possibly open-source, scalable message board. I feel like people are suddenly seeing the downsides of these backdoor-dealing, self-interested walled gardens.

The era of the walled garden will end. #RemindMe
I have High Blood Pressure. 140/100 when non-medicated during the office day. 110/85-90, medicated and relaxed. Having this since 25 (37 now), my genetics sadly puts a cap on my life expectancy (all other vitals normal, HBP runs in family).

All this to say, I hate measuring my BP and follow this space closely. It's a chore that takes minimum 10 minutes twice a day and I have to largely stop what I'm doing.

I would give so much to a device that could measure my BP as easily as O2, but this device is not it. That picture does not inspire confidence.

All the current "continuous" measurement devices are bulky and inaccurate compared to their larger non-"continuous" counterparts. One day I hope the apple watch can do it, but given the physics of BP doesn't seem realistic.
My understanding is that GameStop was the perfect storm.

- huge amounts of short positions at like $5 (months and months ago)

- some people disagreed and went long

- good luck #1 for game stop: some big investors (also months ago)

- good luck #2: activist investor joins board, overhaul seems likely (this month)

- shorts refuse to close position, stock at $15-20 (early this month)

- at this point, short squeeze is apparently likely and the momentum begins.

- 2 weeks later, the escalation catches attention outside wallstreetbets

A lot of long term background that seems key to how things have unfolded in that case.
This is really nice. I've been hand-curating Remote jobs from Hackernews for a while. It's carefully curated by hard and tagged properly, everything listed on the page is 100% remote jobs. I was also planned on writing a report to see how remote jobs % is increased over the period of time and what tech trend is growing. But not finding time. This is an interesting report. If would like the data, I'm happy to share the last 12 months of data. Feel free to ping me on Twitter(@abinaya_rl)
"Melvin’s most recent filing showed that it held 5.4 million puts on GameStop, valued at more than $55 million — an increase of 58 percent during the third quarter."

If it were just puts, then their exposure to a run-up would have been 55 million, not billions. Puts can only go to zero. The filing merely hinted that they were shorting the stock because they also had some puts on it.

Think about it, if you buy a $9 put for $10, the most you could lose is $10 when the stock goes way above $9. The unlimited loss scenario with options is writing (selling) a naked call, where you receive a premium but if the stock price rises above the strike price your loss rises.

Melvin's position must have been mostly short equity. Perhaps only a few million shares of a $3 stock.
Did TD halt trading in it? I thought they only raised margin requirements, which is reasonable. You can still buy if you have the cash.
I think saying "We do not have the option of 'ban views that are actually bad'" is like saying "We do not have the option of saving lives" because everybody dies.

I also think it's inconsistent to declare morals are all relative while arguing for your free speech ideals. In a forum with moderation, voting, and frequent banning of people.
What? You mean it's not been maintained and there is no latest version? I've been using this on many of my sites, which I'm sure now is full of security holes and will break in modern (or ancient) browsers. Please someone suggest an alternative.
We’ve got billions of people who need to feel sufficient confidence in the media and authorities to take vaccines nobody has used before at a time when every media outlet has some agenda to monkey around with what we know to be true. Not cool.
I wish I could remember the name of the book by Safdie that I read about 15 years ago which tells the story of the design and construction of Habitat, it's quite good from what I recall. There are several possibilities on WorldCat but I'm drawing a blank.
I think they like it for a reason that Banks himself would have disapproved of, and that the author misses completely.

I'm pretty sure one of the reasons Banks didn't describe the origins and how-to of creating Culture is that he believed that to be impossible (the article touches on that a bit in the end). That actually reminds me of Noon universe, by Strugatsky brothers (that was published much earlier, although not in English ;), that is also an explicitly communist utopia mostly described thru interactions with non-utopian civilizations, although in this case the former is much less in focus and the focus is on the latter. Unlike Culture, I understand it was born incrementally as various novels shared characters and parts of the theme; also unlike Culture, the authors incrementally arrived at sort of a conclusion of the narrative that they mentioned in the interviews but didn't finish before their deaths.

The idea, for the unfinished White Queen novel, was going to be that a character from the complete utopia encounters a society that built a small partial utopia, and a member of the latter eventually tells him that the complete utopia he's describing cannot exist, he must be living in a sci-fi novel :)

The reason Bezos and Musk might like the Culture universe because they are technological optimists - they believe technology can in fact build something like that. Thomas Sowell said "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.". The first lesson of technology for Bezos and Musk is probably that it can gradually abolish the first lesson of economics :)
Unless the big guys are convinced that they are right and have the money to not worry about a margin call. In that case they should be shorting more. If GameStop is really worthless then they win when the company finally files bankruptcy.
If they wished a quick way to bankruptcy, that would certainly be it.

Make enemies and robbing both your customers and your investors in 1 single move. I don't think there has been anything as foul in history, has there?
No, I argue that opposing the unjust application of the monopoly on force is not the same as opposing the monopoly itself, both the pro and anti-gun camps believe in the monopoly on force as a principle.
Literally settled with SEC a month ago for exactly that. https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2020-321
I hate that this site is getting posted around, when it does not show the update time. These short interest numbers can be 2-4 weeks old depending on NYSE and NASDAQ.
First they came for conservatives, everybody sheered here. So, how does it feel to be unwanted?

Karma...
This was heavily, heavily, heavily shorted. WSBers trigger a small squeeze at which point blood was in the water and the sharks came to feast...

...along with the entire internet. This triggers triggers more margin calls, more gains, and more attention.

It's a vicious cycle and given the liquidity conditions in the market there was enough jet fuel for take off. Now add more media attention, more people finding out about WSB, and you have the mother of all short squeezes.

This only became truly coordinated once the media got involved and was exacerbated more by the brokerage firms shutdown buying.
Sometimes. But the volume of after hours trading of the stocks in question is extremely high. It is a pretty good indicator this this case.
I hate going "works on my machine" but I have >100 tabs open at all times and switching tabs is instant for me, and your CPU beats mine.
Beyond the Basic Stuff with Python
It's your "Instant" account. That's where all the float has to live and all newly opened accounts are Instant.

It's a great marketing tool and definitely had a hand in getting RH to where it is today. Personally, I like the instant settling.

Ideally RH would have just turned off trading to specific securities that required float. i.e. "Cash" accounts can still trade everything, but maybe they can't make that separation... simply on for all or not at all.
Maybe the best way to cancel service is to spam them with a bunch of DMCA complaints about yourself?
The two situations are apples and oranges. Trump violated many rules in his years on Twitter. Twitter let him go on for things that would have resulted in a banhammer for anyone else. Same goes for the alt-right. They were allowed to go on for a very long time. Despite the hate and harassment they generated. Are you arguing Trump should have received special treatment forever? That sites can't moderate as they see fit?

On the other hand, these WSB bans seem to be related to external pressure from some very wealthy people. Not really the same situation. And not something that's new to the Internet. Digg's blocking of the HD-DVD key comes to mind. Or sites that removed content under threat of a lawsuit.
Corruption is a tricky subject. Pawns of a dictatorship, a mafia or any hierarchical corrupt structure... They might not be aware of what's actually going on but that doesn't change the fact that the structure is corrupt. Whatever caused this, Google's guidelines, its business practices, its investor relations, is corrupt.
TFW you complain about a player being dominate, and then immediately refuse to use any smaller rival because they aren’t dominate.

WTF? Get over yourself.
>likely tricked by someone with a financial interest (and that was probably a rich person)

Do we know Melvin got rid of their short position? They might be in a position to get an article published saying they did, while being able to say later it was fake news, and covering it as the stock plummeted today.

The article I saw I think had weaselly language about not being able to confirm the losses.
This has been the best piece on the WSB event I’ve read so far. It gives historical comparison to the 2008 crash, and enough basic explanation so I can better understand the finer points.
Of all the companies to level this accusation at... Facebook has more money than these funds. The biggest bank in the country, JPMorgan, is worth $400B (remember that total assets is not the same thing as net worth); Facebook is worth >$500B. Nobody outsmarted Facebook here. The scale that these funds are operating at is peanuts compared to Facebook's operations.
That's what they've been doing for quite a while, but no one cared.
I don’t believe it was enforced across the board. I have yet to see a list but TastyWorks is an APEX customer and there were no restrictions put in place that I’m aware of. Surely there will be a compiled list of offenders and they will likely include the most heavily used retail “app brokers”.
> So the real question is, why aren’t these platforms helping WSB mods instead of banning the community.

This. At the end of the day, Facebook/Discord has the power to ban individual users. There is no good reason to nuke an entire community if the the mods running said community are being cooperative. This isn't about "hate speech" or "adult sexual exploitation" or whatever the excuse dice end up rolling next time. This is a knee-jerk reaction from a platform with a ton of power and no incentive to wield it responsibly.
My point was that your data is safer with a doctor's office then with a "platform":

> And while you might assume that this information is legally protected the same way your hospital and medical records are, that’s not necessarily the case.

https://www.consumerreports.org/health-privacy/are-health-ap...
If you would like to see this, check youtube for the 'clickspring' channel at https://www.youtube.com/c/Clickspring . He machines a much desktop mechanical clock from scratch over many episodes.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with short sellers. People who attack short sellers only do it when they are protecting their rich friends who are CEOs.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with redditors fucking with short sellers. People who are clutching their pearls about this are only trying to protect rich friends who are hedge fund managers.

There is nothing wrong, illegal, or immoral about trying to "manipulate" the stock market unless you are committing fraud or have insider information. CEOs of companies, activist investors, and analysts do this for a living every day. They are not more qualified than us to have and share opinions and history tells us they are perhaps much less.

There is absolutely zero reason for anyone - SEC, The Government, robinhood, the exchanges, Facebook - to intervene and anyone who is considering intervention right now is only doing it to protect their rich hedge-fund friends.
If a Robinhood trade is being matched with a better price after it routes then Robinhood didn't offer them the best price. It's how Robinhood makes money. This is the heart of their deal with Citadel Securities. And, yes, the SEC is indeed on their case about this. It's how we know about it.

"How Robinhood makes money on customer trades despite making it free" https://www-cnbc-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.cnbc.com/amp...
Should I pay $1997 for this course?
Yep you read that right.
Foundr has a course from the co-founder of BigCommerce, Mitchell Harper. The guy's worth around $127 million, very successful and obviously knows his stuff.
The course is called '60 day startup' and promises to get you your first 100 customers in 2 months, $1 million revenue in a year, etc. It covers every stage of a tech startup's journey, the mistakes Mitchell Harper made and how I can avoid them, etc.
Now this isn't a scam because if you look on glassdoor & trustpilot, and see the people Foundr has interviewed, they are obviously very trustworthy and highly respected.
But $2000 is all my savings. Im 18 and I don't have much in savings obviously. However, if the information I get is really as good as they make it seem... I think I'd be willing to pay for it.
There's also a 4 month incremental payment, smth like $579 a month for 4 months.
Do you guys think I should buy this course? I know there are existing books/free courses on startups e.g. 'The Startup Owner's Manual'... but they're all really general & their info isn't all relevant to what I'm trying to do. The Foundr course is specific to TECH STARTUPS - which is exactly the type of startup I'm trying to start. Literally all the information, I think, will be relevant and useful for me - and also from someone who's very credible.
Furthermore, I think that it would be extremely time-efficient to have someone like Mitchell Harper condense all of his learnings & strategies into a single course, and not have to sift through dozens of books, trying to determine what info is relevant to creating a tech startup and what is not.
What do you guys think?
EDIT: There is a 365 day moneyback guarantee. But they say that you need to show them proof that you've completed all the assignments, tried the strategies they've suggested, etc. and only if the course fails to get results, will they refund you.
After he is gone, it's going to get much worse on social media, this just the start
but with this high a stock price, they could issue new shares can't they? They can survive by diluting existing shares at this price, and work out a new business model with plenty of runway.
My sister/brother if you have a nice high quality hand tagged consistent data set, do a show HN and get every data scientist a chance at your data. That is 99% of the struggle.
Do you feel this is a common thing for a medium sized company to use? Would you pay much money for something like that?

Years ago now, I developed a platform that allowed users to add "blocks" of data points pulled from any API to a dashboard to achieve the same goal. I never went the whole distance because I didn't get any users, but the dream was themed dashboards of graphs, tickers, event triggers and so on.
Retail started the fire but institutions poured on the lighter fuel
https://finance.yahoo.com/video/heres-why-robinhood-restrict...

It sounds like FINCEN requirements require a 2-day settlement period. This period allows fractional trading to work (they pool orders and execute on day 2). Those same restrictions also appear to restrict a broker/dealer from using customer funds to cover this float. From there it's pretty easy to interpret the end results - risk rises, fees rise, and suddenly RH has to pony up massive amounts of liquidity to cover the DTC float.

Fuckery is certainly possible. This explanation still begs the question; at what point can a business decide not to cover the 'cost of doing business' and instead, create explicit downward pricing pressure.
You call this a political event but I don’t think of it as a political event unless you mean in the sense of polis, but even then it seems a financial event to me. I’m curious why you call it a political event
The island Habitat 67 is built on was constructed from the rubble excavated from the Metro then dumped in the St. Lawrence River. Current environmental policy would not permit this sort of development.
Ha! That’s incredible. I can’t believe anyone would keep their account there after something so brazen comes to light.
Probably an automated system, detecting reviews by people who haven't actually used the app. Google is basically an AI-run company at this point.
I think this was meant to have read as "provably always pure", not "probably always pure."
The oldest trick in the book for governments and large organizations. Large peaceful protest happening? Send some goons to blend in and cause trouble, and arrest everyone.
That would be the state. It's a loose alliance between the corporations, media, government, and religion. They are generally content to try and gain control of the power structure under the guise of weakening one branch or the other, but they never actually attempt to weaken the whole system.
FT: Robinhood taps banks in rush to restore GameStop trading

https://on.ft.com/3t6smeN

link is good for 3 paywall bypasses, comment if you really want to read it and you get paywalled

>Citadel Securities said it had “not instructed or otherwise caused any brokerage firm to stop, suspend, or limit trading or otherwise refuse to do business”.

>Citadel, a hedge fund also owned by Mr Griffin, said it was “not involved in, or responsible for, any retail brokers’ decision to stop trading in any way”. Earlier this week, Citadel provided rescue financing to Melvin Capital, a hedge fund targeted by retail traders on Reddit.

I, for one, believe that Citadel Securities the market maker stands to gain more than Citadel the hedge fund ever stood to lose. And I would note that Citadel (the hedge fund) invested in Melvin; presumably to close out their shorts, not double down. Melvin claims to be out of GME, per FT reporting. FT is generally quite reputable, and it is not clear to me whether Melvin lying on this matter would be a crime?
As the saying goes, "if it's free, you're the product". And all of these de-platforming moves are in response to 'defective product'. The community they sell to advertisers is acting defective and becomes unsellable, thus that community is tossed out/shut down. Enough other communities remain manageable & sellable, so business continues on.
Isn't that the irony though? You can continue to use American infrastructure, be it for communication, finance, etc, unless you irritate the wrong people. There are no lack of "Putins" in Anglo countries as well.
We proudly call it "free market" in the USA, what a joke. Same goes for 'free speech' which was proven not to be true by big tech. USA is run by monopolies and powerful people.
Seems like you just get it wrong on purpose. I said I was uninterested in opinions of karma-protectors.
Gains from a hypothetical buy and subsequent sell that never happens? That’s way too big a stretch, and makes no sense.