skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Can you point to specific evidence of i happening?

Specific evidence of what exactly? You mean an example of data stored on signal's servers after you opt out of setting a pin? That's something that takes place in the background without notice to the user. We also don't have access to the data stored on Signal's sever. What we do have is the source code and we can see it still uploads data. When asked about this directly a lead developer at signal confirmed that this was happening by design here: https://community.signalusers.org/t/beta-feedback-for-the-up...

> The change was to never upload the encrypted master key to SVR. We still create a master key locally and derive a storage key from the master key. That storage key is still used to encrypt data that is uploaded to storage service. Storage service is still necessary for future features involving linked devices. That data is encrypted with a 256-bit key that remains only on your devices.

So when opting out a setting a pin, Signal still encrypts and uploads your data, but doesn't use the key for their secure value recovery service. As far as "internet rumors" go, the fact that signal is collecting this data is highly verifiable. They just aren't being clear about this data collection to users. In fact they've been highly misleading when asked
(see https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/htmzrr/psa_disablin...)

> Every communication app 'collects' info

Not true (see Jami), but even if it were, what matters most is that it's always 100% clear to people what data is being collected under what circumstances and Signal has failed in that. Signal markets their app to people like whistle blowers and human rights activists who have a critical need for privacy, but doesn't give them the information they need to make an assessment of their risk.

> Signal is designed to make that data unavailable to Signal itself.

that's extremely questionable. You can read over some of the security concerns here: https://community.signalusers.org/t/proper-secure-value-secu...

It's not clear how secure this data actually is from Signal, or from the type of agencies that have already requested this data from Signal in the past. Back in 2006 they were very proud to say they don't collect the kinds of data being requested (https://signal.org/bigbrother/eastern-virginia-grand-jury/)

> Notably, things we don’t have stored include anything about a user’s contacts (such as the contacts themselves, a hash of the contacts, any other derivative contact information), anything about a user’s groups (such as how many groups a user is in, which groups a user is in, the membership lists of a user’s groups), or any records of who a user has been communicating with.

Note that this website hasn't been updated to say so, but they are in fact now storing a list of your contacts and who you've been communicating with and there is no way to opt out of this data collection. It might take an exploit to get at that data, but even after facing months of backlash on their own forums from users about this, they still insist on collecting that data and are being less than transparent about that fact.
The article is about Google wiping reviews, and I’ve worked for a company that asked employees to leave good reviews on Glassdoor
What fiduciary duty? They disclose right up front that they are paid for order flow, and I assumed, correctly, that this meant they were allowing Citadel, et al. to front-run the retail orders and skim risk-free cream from the rubes. As a former trader, if you're fine making a donation to Ken Griffin with every trade, I suppose there's little more to say there, but Robinhood markets their service to unsophisticated investors that may not realize that is what they are effectively doing.
“Papa Elon” isn’t exactly praising the working class. WSB has less of a problem with Billionaires than they do Wall Street.
To play the Devil's advocate here, my personal intuition is that App reviews should be for how the apps perform, and shouldn't be used as proxy for reviewing those businesses. If the app is buggy or broken or whatever, it makes sense to give a low rating. I am not sure it makes equal sense if people suddenly realize they don't like the company who has made the app.
I agree, I'm glad to see some bipartisan support for holding big-finance to some accountability.

I'm not so glad with AOC's response to Ted Cruz which was literally: "Your help is not wanted on this. If you want to help you can resign."

So maybe not that bipartisan. I'm not a RH user either and have no standing in this. But I'm watching with interest and hope there's some action on this.
Reddit is not exactly known for preventing spam account creation...
This is all true, I just wish that commits to my forks of dead/strict projects showed up on my activity graph. I’m strangely proud of that thing and half my work doesn’t end up on it because things are no longer maintained upstream. :/
There’s a way to make that point without being insulting
This thing is bigger than Robinhood. Watch for the misdirection.
Why? The yellow/striped fields mean it's still supported (as long as you add it to th instead of thead/tr):
High ratings for apps in the store might help convince users that the store is worth using.

Or, even better, high ratings for apps from large corporations encourage them to support the continuation of your store's monopoly power.
If reviews don’t drive customer behavior why have them?
This reminds me of the Trump 2016 campaign and the Bitcoin 2017 bubble. It's the same avalanche of bullshit social media strike tactics.
I think it's a tough decision to make. In general I understand that Google would prevent review bombing, since it can very easily be abused by social media mobs or competitors. The point of reviews is to give a genuine idea of how people on average like a given app. Reviem bombing completely distorts that, whether it be 1-star or 5-star reviews.

But here it's a pretty huge app, and the bombing is motivated by a real issue the users are having, so I think I agree with you that it was not necessarily the right decision.

As always the real problem is that tech giants are opaque in their behaviour. If we had clear guidelines for what constitutes "review bombing" there wouldn't really be an issue I think.
Theranos HR posted one good review for every negative one to even out the score.
How does anyone even see the PR template? If you fork, push a branch with your fix to your fork, go to your fork in the browser and click the "Compare & Pull Request" button to make a PR from your branch [1], you don't see the template at all. The UI is auto-filled with the text from your commit message.

I thought everyone filed PRs this way; is there another workflow I haven't heard of?

[1]: It takes you to https://github.com/$upstream/$repo/compare/master...$you:$br...
> I can’t imagine some retail bank even employing people who could competently assess individual debt/income ratios.

They would have terrible sales numbers and get fired in the first month. Wells Fargo's training was that the more financial instruments a customer had with the bank the better.
Accredited investors still use brokers to trade on the stock market. Even for them stock ownership isn't transferred magically.
I can tell you I saw it at ~300k reviews and a 1* rating today.
You need them to keep money flowing in your system. Like blood vessels. It's a network to keep capital flowing from those with money to loan to those who need to borrow. You don't want to put that responsibility on a single entity, that's a recipe for failure. It's better to spread risk by allowing some to succeed and others fail. There is added complexity and that's a feature, not a bug.
Even if they lost their job, they are still incredibly wealthy. That's not any sort of repercussion, at all. Its nothing.

These people who are gambling with peoples lives and livelihoods just to get richer need to start going to jail.

Nothing will change until proper punishments are handed out that makes people reconsider being a greedy, selfish, morally reprehensible piece of shit.
There were stories here on HN (might dig them up) about how Glassdoor blackmails companies with "it would be a shame if your good reputation was ruined by some random bad reviews, eh?" and removes bad reviews for companies that hand over the dough :)
To add to this, he owns the Washington Post, THE paper for DC
> Robinhood is only a clearing broker that works with executing brokers to complete transactions. Citadel is an example of an executing broker.

What? No.

With respect to clearing, transferring stock from the seller to the buyer, there are clearing brokers and introducing brokers. Clearing brokers have a direct line to the clearinghouse. Robinhood is one of these. Introducing brokers use a clearing broker to clear.

With respect to execution, matching buyers and sellers, you have brokers (who represent clients) and market makers (who bet their own capital). Robinhood is a broker. It sells its order flow to market makers, of which Citadel Securities is a major one.
Your bitterness robs your post of legitimacy.
Valve did that for games that had fake reviews though. Getting your margin calls discarded out of hand and preventing buys on cash accounts is not the same as a game getting poor reviews because they had a policatally charged character.
If this is true Robinhood should be explaining this to their customers. The silence for me is deafening and indicative that something more sinister is happening.
but cash accounts were all affected
It's a big club.

And you ain't in it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5dBZDSSky0
> I honestly don't see how if this trend continues how things will end well.

It will likely end with ordinary people being really cynical about the motives of big tech, the financial services industry, the media, and the ruling class generally.

It is likely that what these entities say will be generally disbelieved, even when they are telling the truth.

Sooner or later another populist will come along who wants to shake up the system. The media industry have learnt from their promotion of Trump in 2016, and will not allow this. If necessary the ruling class will rig the election. Anyone who points out that the election was rigged will of course be deplatformed, on the pretext that they are "white supremacists" engaging in "hate speech".
So this is conflating some very different circumstances.
Maybe. Motherboard is saying that 50% of RH users owned some GME stock.
The first hardware device I always disable on my new ThinkPad. The second is camera. The third is bluetooth.
Allows the trades to settle and the funds to move and RH can pay back their credit lines.
The concept of "accredited investors", itself, is a great data point for why our implementation of capitalism isn't really capitalism. When opportunities are given explicitly to the rich, you don't have a free market.

I know that's not 100% relevant but it was therapeutic to write it.
They are clearly not afraid of regulators anymore
Well, Reagan became president back in 1981, which wasn't much different. If anything he was just an actor (before getting into politics, which is even less qualification that a salesman/real estate guy.

And, aside from spending on BS like "Star Wars" and escalating things with USSR, Reagan also established the neoliberal greedy nightmare we live in since.
Interactive Brokers blocked buying GME stock in non margin accounts. What I hear from twitter the same was for RH.
In all of these cases ‘They’ were within their rights.
Being condescending is not constructive. Can you substantiate your claim?

I'm sure that there are many tweaks to the way apps are ranked, but I would expect that the rating itself would, indeed, mostly be a star average.
This user is repeatedly posting misinformation and hiding behind links that don't support his position. I have repeatedly called them a shill and wish to spread the awareness

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25950680
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25950493
> Opportunity cost and time value of money. In general, if person A puts $5K a year into a 401k between ages 25-35 and then stops, while person B puts in $5K a year between ages 35-65, at age 65 person A will have a larger retirement balance despite having put in only 1/3 as much principal. This generalizes to the rest of your net worth (salary+stock) as well.

I'm with you on the opportunity cost of money but I don't see how it has anything to do with what we are discussing.

> The economics of software are simply different. Someone good enough to start a business that brings in $10-20K MRR and barely survive is almost certainly good enough to get hired and paid $200K+ by any number of companies. If you're not going big or going home, it doesn't make sense to do a software startup these days.

This is not true at all. There are tons of FAANG engineers plotting their exit to start their own business for the reasons of freedom and impact. It's not just about the money. Also, if you can reach $10-20k MRR—that's a lot more scalable than your salary at a company ever would be.

Don't confound entrepreneurship solely as a vehicle for getting rich.
Same reason why the 10,000 BTC pizza was necessary. If no one ever bought anything with Bitcoin, Bitcoin would remain worthless.
Tracking “Cancel Culture” in Higher Education
I left a one star this morning. I deleted it and added a new one with different text string
Few more cases of this, and finally people will understand that this argument is bullshit for platforms this size. Quantity has its own quality, as the saying goes.
Someone could become US president riding this public sentiment. Let's see if it decays in 4 years...
The adult in this article said his allergies went away.
>Bankruptcy is legal and investors understand such risks.

The type of retail investor that is using RH doesn't understand the bankruptcy process and certainly wouldn't be happy to be stuck in SIPC limbo while the value of their stock plummets. When it comes to what is best for RH users, this seems like it was one of the least bad options among a collection of horrible options that are due to the way RH is managed.
Indeed. What separates fascism from authoritarianism is the merger of state and corporation. If you mix the convergence of state and government along with the effective dissolution of the rights to privacy and the rights to free speech, along with the post-truth nature of so much of today's media (remember WMDs? It's not just Fox News), the argument that we're approaching some kind of fascism isn't completely devoid of merit.
For anyone like me who needs an ELI5, the best comment I found that explains what this story is all about is this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25949669

Hacker News needs a way to mark the best comments when there are 1600 comments to read. Years ago, HN used to publicly show karma score of every comment. They eliminated that (and probably for good reasons), but it was useful to find the best comments. Some other way to find the most incisive comments woud be great.
Cuffless device delivers clinically accurate blood pressure measurements
They could use a catchy slogan like "drain the swamp"...
Care to share what’s the value prop?
Robin Hood gives users margin accounts by default, so lots of users are unaware that they're actually trading on margin.
> Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

From 2014: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
The articles of incorporation dictate what a company needs to do to issue shares. GameStop, for example, requires a vote of the majority of voting shares (of which there are 50 billion votes among the preferred shareholders and 300 million votes among the common shareholders).

That said GameStop is authorized for 300 million common shares and there are only 70 million outstanding according to this table so if their corporate treasury has been at all competent they might be sitting on a huge pile of cash right now.
> On an unrelated note, start preparing yourself for a neo-feudal society now

What would it mean to prep for this? What would a neo-feudal society actually look like?
I put it poorly in my first comment.

I think it would be correct to say that receiving an education should teach you about ethics. Whether that should be strategic from the top down (you take specific classes about ethics) or embedded in each class is a question I don’t know the answer to.

In an individual class the amount of ethics varies. When I took d.school classes there certainly wasn’t a “market mover” mentality. We were genuinely interested in understanding people better so we could improve lives. But ethics certainly wasn’t explicitly on the agenda. We just didn’t have any assholes taking the course at that time.

This is part of the argument within the university for loosening credit requirements. When I was there, I took the HCI track. That track had the smallest credit requirement and also let you take a broader base of classes that counted towards the major, such as philosophy. That was a more rounded experience than some of my peers who took harder cs tracks like networking and systems.
This is definitely a thing. The startup I used to work for did this a ton before they were acquired.

They would even request it during all-staff meetings.
The code could be copied from elsewhere, owned by the contributor’s employer, found to be an asset not eligible to be unilaterally signed away in a divorce proceeding, or any number of circumstances in which the contributor is not legally entitled to agree to the CLA. And now you can be sued for damages.
Stock brokers are not fiduciaries.
If you believe stamp collectors are the source of all evil in the world, and congregate with other anti-stamp collectors to share your common struggle, maybe.

It's one thing to not believe in unicorns, it's another to define yourself in opposition to unicorn believers, which many atheists do.
They had over 300k rates and 1 star for solid reasons
That's a fair point, and I agree with you – I hate it when reviews don't give me (the reader) an accurate picture of the experience I'll have with this app. Two problems though:

1. That's not how people treat reviews (people will leave a positive review if they love the business but the app is crap), so it's misleading to only enforce such an ideal here, with negative reviews.

2. In this case, the business effectively is the app, at least from the user's perspective. The app wouldn't let me even look at GME/AMC today, much less buy it. That's not what I want from a stock trading app, because it's an annoying experience that leaves a sour taste in my mouth, so 1-star it is.
These are very convenient excuses.

How come this is the first time these actions had to happen?

How convenient that these actions just happen to help out their partners recover $Billions of dollars and cost millions of users $Billions in gains?

How convenient that these actions always help out the billionaire vulture short sellers, always?

Robinhood didn't just stop trading, which would make sense for these kind of trading issues. They stopped normal users from buying these stocke, while letting them liquidate and sell these stocks. Thereby pushing down price and helping out their billionaire vulture short sellers.
Robinhood was set to go IPO in Q1. In the age of every tech IPO going to the moon, they're certainly going to regret not having a decent PR dept. They could have just halted everything, or just allowed trading for non-margin accounts and they could have come out looking like the good guys.

I'm not sure if they did anything wrong or by the book, but the current sentiment of them among the millenial/zoomer demographic that was going to buy there stock isn't exactly favorable.

Ironically, their stock (when it IPOs) might end up being a great candidate to short into the ground.
(Disclaimer : This is not financial advice, just musing about the current Keynisian state of the stock market)
Wow, they don't even try to hide anymore.
When all the tech companies merge, they will in turn be bought by Taco Bell.
They have. There is no silence. They made a blog post saying pretty much exactly this: https://blog.robinhood.com/news/2021/1/28/an-update-on-marke... - they had capital and deposit obligations which they couldn't meet due to volatility, but having sorted this out they can resume trding.
It's likely both are true and that's the point: RH definitely will have some actual contractual and legal concerns... But how they react to that is almost certainly bring governed by whatever would help Citadel's other investments the most.

Any good lie is based on some truth. That veneer of plausibility makes everyone else carry your water for free.
The price dropped because it is in an insane bubble at the moment. Whether that drop would have happened today or some other day without RH's actions is unknowable. But if a lesser drop still did happen today and people couldn't sell their positions, that would have been even worse for users.
Reasons Google would not want the financial status quo:

1. It tends to retard technical progress.

2. They have to make deals with entrenched incumbents to do finance.

3. There's nothing stopping a hedge fund manipulating Alphabet's stock.
Aren't they always need to route orders to the exchange in order to obtain the best price on behalf of the customers?
You can barely see the needed information and forms because of all the whitespace of new websites these days.
I guess everyone will have to resubmit their 1-stars :/
I've no idea if any proof can be found in this case. I just know that if someone has won big off this they're likely to continue doing it until caught.
gaming reviews to extract money is insulting
Does anyone have an impression of how it compares to Alex Evan's SDF engine[0] used in Dreams? Is it primarily a space compression? I've been looking out for anything outside of media molecule that can come close to it's detail-representation and performance

A big part of the secret sauce there seems to be what he called a Compute Shader of Doom used to optimize the brush strokes into the SDF - I'd love to know that shader works!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9KNtnCZDMI&ab_channel=Media...
And sometime these most vocal participants are all talk and no code.
If I am willing to buy 100 shares at $100, I may be willing to buy 300 shares at $60. So just because my bid got filled doesn't mean I won't be buying more.
Last year Elizabeth Warren called for Facebook to be split up. Facebook censored it.

So things may change suddenly, but in one of two directions:

1. big tech being split up

2. big tech exercising the control they have over politics, by controlling speech, to prevent being split up

The second option would of course be the final end of democracy in America.
Silicon Valley is awesome but it’s a puppet factory
The WSB debacle gained momentum because everyone thought they were going to get rich in the process.

I think people are going to become very disillusioned when they realize how much of the information posted to WSB was misinformation. WSB removes posts and comments that don't toe the line that everyone needs to buy and hold GME. Meanwhile, the only way to profit from this trade is to sell at exactly the right time, before everyone else does.

There will also be a lot of frustration and disappointment when various hedge funds announce how they made record profits on the Gamestop frenzy. Some will suffer, of course, but others will make billions.

Finally, living in a world where frenzied crowds conspire to take out services based on shared misunderstandings will not make for great outcomes.
If you through Trump was bad, just wait until a competent version shows up
"users don't know what they want" is one factor. Nevermind that Macs lacked more than one mouse button, or iPhones more than one physical button for many years.
Study Delivers Real-Time SDF Rendering and SOTA Complex Geometry Reconstruction