skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The CEO of Robinhood went onto CNBC and lied about why they restricted trading.

I'm sorry, but it is a fact of banking that you can never, ever, admit to having liquidity issues. If it triggers a bank run, then the firm is dead, and, notably, not only the employees and managers of the firm suffer, but also the clients; and they suffer more than if the run had not happened. So, what you portray as a huge nefarious plot here is just a CEO of a startup trying to keep things going until they calm down again (which, incidentally, seems to have worked).

Next, the other issue with the $65m fine. As it happens, this has been discussed in depth by Matt Levine in his excellent "Money Stuff" column [1], and it's not quite as nefarious as you portray it either.

Brokerages make money from a couple of sources: 1) interest on customers' cash balance (which they might pass on or not), 2) borrow fees from lending out stock to short sellers, 3) commissions, and 4) payments from market makers for order flow [2], which basically constitute a discount on the bid-ask-spread.

Most brokers used to charge commission (3), but passed on most of the discount (4), giving clients a very good bid-ask-spread. What Robinhood did is charge less commission (3) (namely zero), but keep more of the discount (4), giving clients a worse bid-ask-spread.

If you have small orders, you're better of with the Robinhood model of smaller fixed cost, and a somewhat higher (and hidden) proportional cost, namely a higher bid-ask-spread (ie slightly worse price). But for customers with big orders, a different broker with a small fixed fee, but a better discount = smaller bid-ask-spread = better price might have been better.

(Note, btw, that everyone got prices equal to or better than the national best bid offer! It's just that you got more or less further discount on top of that.)

I agree with Matt Levine that Robinhood had a compelling offer, and should have just positioned it a bit better.

But again, that $65m fine was basically for not telling big clients that btw, with your size you might be better off at the competition where you pay a fixed fee but might get a better price. Yeah, not exactly Mother Theresa, but hardly egregious.

There really really is enough disgusting rent seeking going around in the financial sector (student loans, payday loans, credit cards & merchant fees, HFT, ...) that you should save your ire for that.

[1] section Robinhood(1) https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-07/the-ip...

[2] market makers pay for retail order flow (aka "dumb money") because it tends to be small and uncorrelated and "uninformed", ie not specially predictive on price direction; so they like it better than institutional "informed" flow which might leave them with positions that lose money subsequently (adverse selection). However! As this episode showed, retail money might not be small and uncorrelated and uninformed anymore, so we'll have to see how that shakes out - I as a market maker wouldn't want to pay brokers more for sending the WSB hordes my way instead of hedge funds.
Ask HN: How do I develop depth in any technology
Hello all,

am new here, i am certified in cloud and databases, have worked extensively on the same, but more like Jack of all and master of none :( which explains the title! i feel like i always lack in the depth of anything while i can talk 10 mins on any topic under cloud. How do i develop this? i cant do this in my work, because they do use exceptional tech like k8s or docker, but every Cloud interview i attend ask these in one way or other, like k8s or EKS . I can theoretically speak about how this works or try to convince that am a great learner and they should give a chance believing that.

how do you handle such situations be it in interview or anywhere, how did you develop your depth in your field.
The full article (not just page 1 of 6) is available on the same euromoney.com domain today, but with a different URL:

https://www.euromoney.com/article/b1320xkhl0443w/naked-short...

Perhaps posting an archive.org URL adds a certain mystique, though?
Show HN: Nyan – Python game library inspired by Scratch
They are just another discount broker, except they attract unsophisticated newcomers with growth hacker bullshit, accomplished by offering margin trading their customers don’t understand.
“WhatsApp’s existing users were held captive by the fact that leaving WhatsApp meant losing the ability to communicate with WhatsApp users.”

I'm confused. I thought everyone was identified by their phone number, which can be used to receive texts from anyone.
Painful ear infections is one hypothetical source of disruption to the nervous system, it's possible, probably, that other extremely painful experiences during childhood - when there's rapid nervous system development - could also impact/block development - cause development delays or reduction in capability or hyper/hypo-sensitivities. But yes, it can be comforting to know there are more options out there to explore.
The reason why centralized app stores (and autocratic dictatorships) suck is because once you delegate enough power to a single entity, they will ALWAYS have an incentive to start using this power to protect their own interest and not yours.

The arguments like "unlike Google, they actually listen to their users" sound similar to "this guy is a complete tyrant, but look, his interests are aligned with ours, for now". History has shown where this road goes.

I think, the only way to have a fair "app store" is to somehow model the recommendation mechanics of the pre-monopoly era. 50 years ago you would learn about a new product from your friends (i.e. people you trust) or a newspaper you would buy (i.e. the "influencer" you trust). Each person had their own circle of friends and trusted "influencers", and made their decisions based on them. There wasn't any central authority that could apply the same ranking algorithm to what 100 million different people get to see.

This could be modeled fairly well with decentralized mechanisms. Where the weight/rating of an app is different for each user, and it strictly comes from the approval of that app by the people they trust. If you get too much spam this way, just track down the source in your trust network and untrust them.
Thank you, this clarifies things. If I understand correctly, then, the requirement is that the average of a set of goods sold within a contract must be at least the quality specified by the contract. So it's not really talking about the average overall in a market of that good, it's talking specifically about the average quality of, say, a shipment of goods.
Reading the justification for WebHID I get the feeling I’m missing something:

> There is a long tail of human interface devices (HIDs) that are too new, too old, or too uncommon to be accessible by systems' device drivers. The WebHID API solves this by providing a way to implement device-specific logic in JavaScript.

> (...)

> The inability to access uncommon or unusual HID devices is particularly painful, for example, when it comes to gamepad support. Gamepad inputs and outputs are not well standardized and web browsers often require custom logic for specific devices. This is unsustainable and results in poor support for the long tail of older and uncommon devices.

So instead of only having to implement support for these devices once (in the browser), they now expect every website that would need support for these kind of devices to write their own code to handle all these ‘long tail’ input devices ?

How does that not make the problem infinitely worse ?

Instead of convincing one party to implement and support the code to handle your obscure HID, now you beee to convince potentially millions of websites. All running different implementations with their own unique bugs and issues.

This sounds less like an effort from the Chrome team to add support for these devices and more like a way to make it someone else’s problem.
Only a small amount. Most of the substantial trades I've seen go through are much larger than the average person would do. When you see a 10K block pushed out at market, that's not Joe average.
The obvious discontinuity is "never have to work". People talk about this all the time when they talk about this stuff.
Ethereum doesn't have a known inflation schedule. It has an arbitrary inflation schedule that is decided by the Ethereum developers.

The idea of cryptocurrency is to replace fiat currencies, with an engineered system instead of a political system. There's no benefit in a cryptocurrency that's backed by a fiat currency. It's like building a stone house on a swamp.
Alan Kay reckons they aren't OS:es enough
https://www.quora.com/Should-web-browsers-have-stuck-to-bein...
Kai'sa builds don't seem to take evolve thresholds into account.
Gold has been in use for hundreds of years and yet it's still very volatile. If Bitcoin is digital gold that doesn't really solve the volatility problem.
That's not really the same thing. A chargeback is mediated by a trusted third party, and the merchant knows that if they are reputable and do what they're supposed to, they'll get (usually) paid.

Future (possibly reversible) payments don't really give the merchant the same risk cap that a credit card authorization does.
Gold is also almost never used as a currency. BTC's product market fit is store of value, not medium of exchange
It's more hassle but would be nice to not use native dropdowns and instead custom ones so that they could keep the same styling.
You also might want to check out Blockpad (http://www.blockpad.net)
Wow, never thought of an app's predatory behaviour akin to 'domestication' - but it is true, i find it incredibly hard to leave.

the other interesting point the author makes is that the domestication can be inadvertently done by the app.

So, what is a well meaning app creator to do? Is'nt that just a symptom of success? He mentions what Signal could have done ( move towards decentralization) but not clear what Mozilla could have done?
The issue is apparently way worse with silver
It boils down to the fact that there are large potential (if improbable) downsides to messing with DNA, and people have a strong cognitive bias against actively inflicting harm vis a vis just allowing harm to happen on its own.

I personally don't think it's possible to prevent this kind of thing in the long term, so everything ranging from edited children born with horrible disabilities to deleting some potentially beneficial mutation paths in the human genome from existence is going to happen anyway.
About the volatility of cryptocurrency.

Shouldn't this even out when mining becomes too expensive and enough people adopted a cryptocurrency?

Like, aren't we simply too early for making sense of it all?
The problem with WhatsApp is not that users are locked in. You can install as many chat apps as you want. WhatsApp has no exclusivity over its users.

The problem with WhatsApp is that it only has one alternative. In terms of chat apps that use the signal protocol there's two: WhatsApp and Signal. And Signal is not quite as good as WhatsApp. It's certainly much improved but it's not there yet.
They are stapling $2500 to every $50,000 car they sell -- $2,500 they are only getting through a government subsidy (regulatory requirement rather than direct payment in this case).

This is why the GM announcement is significant: Tesla will have to learn to up the quality and reduce cost so they can survive without the subsidy.
This approach does work, but be mindful that each patch changes things a lot, and there's a lot of maintenance required to keep it working.

In StarCraft II, the 7 roach rush was developed using genetic algorithms. http://lbrandy.com/blog/2010/11/using-genetic-algorithms-to-...
4 javascript devs disagree, apparently.
> Humanity has done selective breeding for centuries, and nobody ever complained.

Nobody has ever complained about eugenics? About master races vs. inferior breeds of human, or about hereditary caste systems? I think you need to brush up on your history before making such claims.
This must go on. I know people who want to keep funding and get the latest model.

By the way, IMHO it could be cool to add a Raspberry-style GPIO. Perhaps also some other conveniences to interconnect a Speccy with Raspberries, Arduinos etc and peripherals meant for them.
indieweb.org/POSSE for the masses?
We have met the enemy and he is us is the real issue. It isn't easy to accept it but by all remotely reasonable standards a large chunk of the population are horrible people. Just look at the approval towards the National Guard's actions at Kent State. Strip away the status and "supports using the military to shoot unarmed and non-violentn students on campus" is not something a non-horrible person supports.

But people find scapegoats so much easier. Facebook is vapid trash because vapid trash is highly popular.
You can find the author's responses at this link:
https://github.com/nostalgic-css/NES.css/issues/432
What is the common sense definition of “naked short selling”?

I’d be shocked if the median American can even define short selling let alone naked short selling?
They're not really app stores, but community-managed free software repositories (e.g. Debian) work astoundingly well next to the shit-show that is every commercial app store I've ever seen.
Is there a c64 one?
>Sorry, I meant too much credit for trying to lead by moral example with egalitarian approach to vaccine allocation between countries.

Ah on this side I think that EU has not imposed any "supply first" clause or executive order to limit supply only to EU until all EU orders are met - which UK and USA did, all production in USA and UK are for internal use until their orders are met.

Basically EU is supplying countries that aren't supplying any country any time soon.
Cool. Although, I think the difference between the "before" and "after" is interesting in terms of showing what's going on.

https://imgur.com/a/YOEDQVj
Everything in context. This was written by a journalist who writes specifically about internet culture.[1] The job of a cultural writer or critic is to provide alternate ideas to help broaden and shape your view of the world.

This wasn't written by Woodward and Bernstein, or some hard-hitting give-me-the-facts-only political or business reporter. It's written by someone who specifically writes about culture. She writes the following:

> "Unless your story ties into some larger cultural trend, or holds some type of important wider significance, I am not interested in covering it. And frankly, it’s not newsworthy."

If the story being pitched doesn't tie into a larger cultural trend, it's not worth covering by a culture reporter.

Someone's success can be newsworthy, but it has to impact the larger culture to be relevant to a reporter who specifically writes about culture.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/by/taylor-lorenz
Don't rule covid out. While you may be experiencing burnout. Right now I'd chalk it up to after affects if covid. I had fairly mild covid and took an experimental treatment (which I may or may not have gotten) and it still took me over a month to feel myself as far as programming goes.
You say you have no pryob for work, what are you doing? If it isn't much, you could just still be recovering
Which ones are fast, with low transaction fees?
Were you able to access the entire article? I can only see page 1 of 6
In Google’s case it’s perhaps EELIE, embrace, extend, lose interest, extinguish.
Despite the fact that Tim Cook's attack on Facebook and its business model is really just another round in the ongoing fight between Apple and Facebook, he hits on an important point.

Facebook, et al are engaged in an effort to co-opt the freedom and privacy of people the world over and make our entire lives data points to increase their profitability.

By depriving us of privacy and choice around our information spheres, these practices derail and stultify our liberty and ability to knowledgeably practice self-determination.

This has been done with the tacit support (with a few notable exceptions) of frightened government officials who don't want to be blamed for another 9/11-like occurrence.

As Shoshanna Zhuboff put it in her recent OpEd Piece[0]:

"The epistemic coup proceeds in four stages.

The first is the appropriation of epistemic rights, which lays the foundation for all that follows. Surveillance capitalism originates in the discovery that companies can stake a claim to people’s lives as free raw material for the extraction of behavioral data, which they then declare their private property.

The second stage is marked by a sharp rise in epistemic inequality, defined as the difference between what I can know and what can be known about me. The third stage, which we are living through now, introduces epistemic chaos caused by the profit-driven algorithmic amplification, dissemination and microtargeting of corrupt information, much of it produced by coordinated schemes of disinformation. Its effects are felt in the real world, where they splinter shared reality, poison social discourse, paralyze democratic politics and sometimes instigate violence and death.

In the fourth stage, epistemic dominance is institutionalized, overriding democratic governance with computational governance by private surveillance capital. The machines know, and the systems decide, directed and sustained by the illegitimate authority and anti-democratic power of private surveillance capital. Each stage builds on the last."

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/opinion/sunday/facebook-s...
Yeah, I'm sure people would be happy to transact in a crypto with 1000% inflation \s
They can't afford to get the talent on the GS schedule.
There is in my view quite a big difference in journalism culture around the world. I personally dislike the US style of every piece having to be a narrative before it gets to the meat of the story. Give me the news up front, then I can dive down deeper if I am interested.
I missed both kickstarters, but their "shop" still had both models until early January 2021. I ordered one in October, but won't get it until August. I do enjoy these old retro computers and some games.

I find most of the original games to be unbearable (I didn't play games during that era so there isn't even nostalgia for me), but the new games people are building for the Spectrum and Commodore 64 are fun and a bit more modern in some respects. Ex: I recently bought Attack of the Petscii Robots and the graphics/music/gameplay/manual... everything is great. They're also more amenable to the very limited time I have in adulthood. I doubt I'll play another MMO until I retire.
It's possible to provide customer protection as a third-party service. Chargebacks shouldn't exist on the base layer of money.
1) It's been around for 12 years Bitcoin and cryptocurrency is old technology at this point.

2) what does the phrase mining becomes too expensive mean? Satoshi always envisioned that mining would be taken up by big firms and specialty miners not individuals.

3) price volatility has nothing to do with the size of adoption every single person on Earth could be using Bitcoin and it wouldn't make it any less volatile. Maybe if major retailers decided to price things in terms of Bitcoin that could help but that will probably never happen.
This article makes no goddamned sense. Android is the one with the majority and killer apps attract people to platforms. I don't like Facebook but it is far more likely that a full block would harm Apple way more.
Bitcoin mining is good for the environment https://pomp.substack.com/p/bitcoin-mining-is-good-for-the-e...
I don't have to be on Facebook to see that it's damaging our society, polarizing and radicalizing many of my fellow citizens.
Comments on the article from other journalists position it as, "and we all feel this way." Whether or not it was intended as a representation of journalistic attitudes in general, it has been upheld as one by other journalists.
Monopoly Run Healthcare in America
Thank goodness, tape loading is supported. There would be no point without that sound otherwise. (I'm the ZXPlectrum guy)
It's not like every device will or could be supported reasonably by a browser. This allows support to be done by those who care about it.
There's this: http://pixelambacht.nl/2013/css3-c64/
Very interesting, thanks for posting!

Edit: I removed some stuff I first wrote.

> It’s both surprisingly and dismayingly difficult to get people — especially computerists — to criticize the web and the web browsers — even more so perhaps today.

Definitely agree with this. People tend to view it as something handed down to them by Gods. It's not.

Edit 2: This needs a larger discussion. I just posted it as a new submission.
> This is a confusing example, because in a REPL steps of compilation and evaluation are interleaved.

The CLISP REPL does not compile, thus it can't be interleaved.

> then runs

It will still be interpreted and the macro will still be expanded at runtime.
Perhaps the part that you're missing is that in addition to margin accounts, Robinhood also has accounts that are able to trade up to 1k before they are funded (that is to say, before the deposits clear). So Robinhood has to lay out its own money to clear those trades, as well as traditional margin trades where the customer has settled equity but the brokerage also carries risk.

BTW, I don't know what that parable is but your invocation of it seems like a rather complex way of telling me that you think I'm being disingenuous.
and each book just re-iterates the same things. Gets old fast.
I got paywalled, what's the TLDR on it?
I didn't want blockchain. I didn't want anonymity. I just wanted a way to instantly move money (the same money anyone might use to buy bread with) between myself and another person, without banking fees or delays or even legislative limitations.

And instead I got cryptocurrency.
Visa doesn’t administer rewards programs - or loan origination for that matter - that’s handled by issuing banks. They are simply the payment rails. They also only collect a very small amount of the transaction, like the 0.1-0.2% range.
Most of the time it's just not worth pissing off your customers because they're using, "the wrong card".
So far we have not been to find a way to automate this sort of triage unfortunately. Also, most developers I know are quite happy that there is someone between them and the customers.
Record Level Margin Debt
In addition to the shorts, when people buy call options - doesn't that mean someone else is on the hook to provide shares at a later date, and they might not hold them at the time of selling the option?
I don't think people are arguing bitcoin will be less volatile than gold, but BTC is currently still an order of magnitude more volatile than gold.

Point being that even with gold's volatility it is still seen by pretty much everyone as a viable store of value, and I think BTC will be similar.
There are good sources on this, like Matt Levine's column "Money Stuff" at Bloomberg.

[I just imagine a finance guy after Heartbleed or Stuxnet complaining "woe betide me, the IT coverage on CNN and Foxnews is so bad... I wish there were trusted channels to discuss these, you know, hacker news!"...]

Yes, a meta system that would have the best channels available per topic (HN, Money Stuff, The Aviation Herald/PPRUNE, etc.) would be great, but I imagine it would pretty soon be exploited and overrun... Maybe it has advantages that they are generally somewhat out of the limelight?
But but but that's not market manipulation, that's just one company doing a normal thing in the normal course of business…

I'm sure it had nothing to do with GME.
Fire that destroyed part of the set happened a year after the show was cancelled. Fire was reported in August 2007, cancellation was announced in July 2006.
No, I mean the N9 :)

https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile/Nokia_N9

I loved the N900 to, of course, but as a phone the N9 running MeeGo v1.2 Harmattan was superior day to day (for me anyway).