skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do you read the ToS for every service that you use?
DFW made his fundamentals case months ago and had a real (if possibly mistaken) case at that point.

In the last week though, after the massive increase in GME's stock price, the arguments on WSB have all been about the planned short squeeze and gamma squeeze to convince people to hold on or buy more.
Surely its a response to market manipulation? Which, almost by definition is going to require some level of intervention.

My understanding is the forum members were colluding to drive up the price of particular securities? How is that not manipulation?

Although I guess I would have preferred the relevent stock markets to step in with a complete trading halt on those securities if intervention was required.
So, I am really an outsider to all this, but it's amazing to me that a market maker is a thing. Like, why is that guy not replaced by a computer? They never get tired, and they don't screw up. (usually)
A trivia snippet I like is that aluminum used to be more valuable than gold for a period of time in the 1800s.

https://www.npr.org/2019/12/05/785099705/aluminums-strange-j...
Just downloaded it. It solves every single problem I had. Thanks!
Are there still Facebook users in 2021? Let alone people naive enough to install their shady app?
Very simple. In a lawsuit they will claim market manipulation and SEC rules violations that are not covered by the binding arbitration. I hope we are not in the situation when a mafia guy shakes you down and makes you sign a contract to settle any grievances that you have with their mafia boss.
that's a problem with the specific compositor (DE/WM) you're using. If it's GNOME you're referring to, then that should be fixed in the next release. If it's something else, you'll have to check with them.
> For example, picture a retail investor with a Robinhood account had sold call options in the amount of $100,000 and their account was worth $200,000. If the price gapped from 300 to 5000 and those options were exercised, that trader could have a loss of $10,000,000. He would lose the value of his account, $200,000… but the brokerage would have to make up the rest of the settlement and take a loss of $9,800,000. Now multiply that by thousands of accounts…. no brokerage wants to take the risk of being bankrupted, so they shut it down.

That's why every brokerage has a risk department. If you're a brokerage and you let thousands of customers write uncovered GME calls, you deserve to lose all your money and go out of business. Simple as that.
If they go through arbitration they'll end up like DoorDash [1].

[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-02-11/doordash-a...
Where else are you supposed to put your money? Bonds? Real estate? A bank savings account? Good luck. People will not be able to live with their own failures. And where will that bring them? Back to stocks.
Only way to know for sure is to bring it up with your manager.
We were paying ~200k a year which while not FAANG is almost double the national average for software engineers.

> It's easier to grade multiple choice exams as compared to essays. But the former mostly measures how well someone can rote memorize.

It seems obvious to me if you have two equally useful attributes, and two measures. You should rely on the measure that more accurately reflects the actual attribute. Finding and hiring great problem solvers is a notoriously hard problem.

> Get a better hiring pipeline. If you start dealing with too many clueless candidates it's time to look out where they are coming from (which recruiter, school, whatever) and switching source.

What pipelines would you suggest? We used recruiters, indeed, monster, hiring, hacker news, stack overflow, etc... None of them were a silver bullet. They all had drawbacks.
* they claim they did
The end goal is to make sure "ILLEGAL" speech can not be suppressed. If you can block "illegal" speech you can block legal speech any protocol designed to be immune to censorship will have to make that sacrifice; I am very much willing too.
Microsoft is forming Rust team
> Currently the two sustainable answers for that are

No, there aren't two, there are three; the third one is the one you slid by:

> rewriting all the software you depend on

If sudo bugs don't get fixed by the existing developer(s), companies that depend on sudo will just end up writing their own. I suspect that in most cases companies will see that as cheaper than having to pay an open source library developer, who is not an employee, to maintain an open source library that is not under the company's control. So if the open source developer isn't donating their work for free, the companies probably won't end up using it at all.
As an aside, this page is great, I was able to watch the videos and see all the images without needing to enable javascript for half a dozen 3rd party URLs!
Yeah, kinda tired of freeloading financial institutions crying foul when their risk realizes.

/snark

Wait.
This entire GME WSB thing is a bunch of people wanting to feel important. That's why there's so much high-and-mighty talk even though the facts of the matter are..pretty boring.
You don't understand how trade settlement works under the hood. When trades occur, the money doesn't change hands immediately, only on the trade settlement date a couple days later. Before the trades settle the clearing house needs to be reassured that the brokerages actually have the money to settle the trades (brokerages have gone bankrupt before), so they make the brokerages post collateral. When volatility goes up the clearing houses demand more collateral to deal with the increased risk, and if Robinhood doesn't want to pay it then the clearing houses won't let them trade.

In other words, even if the end user isn't using margin, there is "margin" happening in the background between the clearing house and the brokerage.
You left out the exchange. Why can't the small brokerages go directly to the exchange?
I wouldn't be hugely surprised to find out there's a Gartner points requirement for such features.

Underneath that magic quadrant graph that Gartner publish each year is a scoring system, x and y features are worth 1 point, w and z features are worth 3 points, etc. etc. Typically that's based on what other clouds are already doing, but in some places they attempt to push features that way based on what their market research indicates customers want.

Clouds know what they'll be evaluated on about a year before they're evaluated, so they know what features they need to build during the year. Evaluation time is coming up for clouds, so you should expect to see a bunch of features announced over the next few months :)
It says a lot about trust in US big tech when people happily switch to a Russian platform.
Hezbollah's cyber unit hacked into telecoms and ISPs
Robinhood does clearing by itself. Webull uses a partner company for clearing.

But still, I think that there are legitimate factors for why Robinhood stopped taking buy orders for those stocks, like ensuring liquidity through clearinghouse deposits while trades are underway.
f-string
What about all the other retail brokerages that did the same thing?
> Citadel (the fund) and Citadel Securities are both owned by Citadel LLC, but supposedly operate completely independently with no collusion.

ROFL
They will have to sell their long bets to cover loses on shorts. The financial system is incredibly interconnected, no one knows what happens when 12b fund goes out of business and how that escalates up. Just like during the housing crash- bad mortgage- bad tranche - bad MBS - bad synthetics- bad insurance. I wouldn’t be too worried about one year take home pay and social status.
From EquitZen's knowledge center:

"Shares that are the subject of investment through EquityZen are generally subject to a lock-up period of up to 180 days after the effectiveness of a company's IPO filing, during which time shareholders are restricted from selling their shares."[1]

The 180day lock-up period could EquityZen poorly suited for investors with a short time horizon.
So I generally agree with you and feel like there's some amount of market manipulation and wall street types taking advantage of normal retail investor folks going on here. That said, I'd like to challenge some of my axioms and strengthen my own beliefs so raising one question I don't have a good answer for.

If Robinhood is doing what they claim, ie: is having issues fulfilling orders and/or is legitimately trying to protect retail investors by limiting purchases of a volatile asset, wouldn't it be worse if they prevented people from selling as well as buying? Is there some detail I'm missing that makes only limiting buy orders "blatant" proof of market manipulation and not the best possible option they had if they were acting in good faith?

Note: even if my counter argument here is correct, I don't think that necessarily means nothing fishy going on since there are a lot of other questionable factors at play and even if they were acting in good faith within the "stock market game" that doesn't mean the game as a whole isn't rigged.
Trading212 was also halting trading.
Facial recognition: Don't use it to snoop on how staff are feeling says watchdog
Logic says they are lying or trying to leave an impression as if they cut their losses, since if they truly already cut their losses why were they so adamant about telling their story and trying to get people out of the market. If they cut their losses they would have no incentive to tell people about it, they would just not comment and go on to new ventures.
> they're willing to brazenly manipulate the market like this

Evidence? The interview below (with CEO of broker Webull) claims that the clearing firms cannot (or don't want to) cover the increased cost when clearing these trades, and told many brokers that they won't open positions anymore, due to the two day settlement delay.

In other words, an entirely innocuous explanation.
Selling back and forth at a lower and lower price while WSB couldn’t buy to keep the price up
Interesting, all I see is comments about them liking the stock. The negative comments I’ve seen relate to the assumed market manipulation tactics.
Getting started with ROS 2 and Webots
This pretty much nails it.

I also do appreciate MP3's simplicity, in the sense that it's just a series of concatenated frames. It makes it really easy to just fling them over the network and get streaming audio working on a client. And there's also somewhat of an elegance (a very ugly and hacky elegance, mind you) to being able to exploit decoders ignoring malformed frames.

For example if you open an MP3 IceCast stream via HTTP in a media player like VLC, the server (if it realizes, via the HTTP request headers, that you're Icecast-aware) will occasionally barf the name of the current and following song into the MP3 stream. Meaning you don't need any higher-level streaming protocol to deal with, and can just send raw frames over the wire, where the MP3 decoder will ignore the song title as a malformed MP3 frame, but VLC will pick-up on the song title and display it for you as the server cycles from one song to the next. Kinda handy, because VLC will make use of this metadata, but at the same time, the MP3 stream's URL will also work in a web browser too, since the browser won't need to know how to deal with a higher-level protocol before being able to start receiving those frames.

Actually, nevermind all that. MP3 bad.
That makes sense as an explanation - but this interview is with the CEO of another brokerage, Webull.

It seems that Robinhood does its own clearing (maybe not for everything?), cf. https://robinhood.com/us/en/support/articles/whats-clearing-..., so the story is probably a bit more complicated there. Could still be a similar dynamic, of course.
Yes, and in order to have efficient capital allocation, you need price discovery.
Some of the complaints from Robinhood users ring of entitlement. They didn't know what they were doing or what rights they actually had. And certainly they must not have read the ToS where Robinhood is granted various terrible powers over their money and trading access.

On the one hand it's great that anyone who wants it has access to the financial markets. But I mean, you should probably know what you're doing before you start speculating. Are people really going to make a moral issue out of not being able to sell their bad bets to a greater fool?

It's like everyone wants access to swim with a dangerous group of man-eating sharks and then complains when they get bitten.
Ready for some more Zersetzung?
> these businesses have contracts specifying that they can increase prices absurdly high from one day to the other?

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation settles most listed securities transactions in America; in 2011, it did $1.7 quadrillion [1]. You've never heard of it unless you're a professional trader, but it's actually quite fascinating to read up on.

Trading looks instantaneous. But settlement takes a few days. In between are a series of credit agreements. From your broker to you. From the clearinghouse to the brokers. DTCC is the clearinghouse. Robinhood is the broker.

There are clear rules and contracts between DTCC and its members, including Robinhood [2]. Those contracts ensure that when you buy shares through your broker from a Robinhood customer, if Robinhood falls down two days later, there is collateral sufficient to make you whole. Those collateral requirements change in reference to, amongst other things, the volatility of the security. (If something goes up and down more, ceteris paribus, small mistakes are more likely to become firm-ending ones.)

Again, these are well-known formulas. Unusually, however, Robinhood didn't build this into their fee model. Given market makers, their revenue source, stopped making markets in GME on account of how volatility effects their risk profile, executing GME trades would leave Robinhood sending orders to an exchange, which may cost money, and ponying up collateral, which also costs money.

In my opinion, that's what they should have done. Most brokers have policies for these situations. Higher brokerage fees for securities on a schedule. Not making shares and cash from trades available until the trade settles, sort of like what banks do for large cheques. But I don't know if Robinhood is able to do that quickly. So instead they pulled the plug.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depository_Trust_%26_Clearing_...

[2] https://www.dtcclearning.com/products-and-services/settlemen...
Sani Abacha – the hunt for the billions stolen by Nigeria's ex-leader
Using focus stacking and strobes to take high-res photos of snowflakes is nothing new. Here's a YouTube video of how to do it yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKA8Boa9hBA

Gallery of incredible snowflake photos by the same guy https://skycrystals.ca/snowflake-gallery/ (adblock stops the gallery from working for some reason)

Myhrvold is just really good at PR.
> if Citadel is the prime broker for all of these shorts _significant_ exposure on that end, as well as the exposure that Citadel hedge fund has on the short position through Melvin.

Isn't this meant to be the reason for the "Chinese Wall"? In theory, Citadel as a brokerage is meant to have no insight into the operations or needs or desires of Citadel Hedge Fund. The technically correct answer here seems to be "not my problem", however... not so much.
We can’t know that for sure, as it wasn’t an official announcement.
Right. I was able to buy/sell Nokia (NOK) and Build A Bear (BBW) today with no trouble. However, a colleague showed me they blocked BBW sales later (screenshot).
I think I'm the only guy on the internet who's rooting for the short-sellers.
I have seen some information floating around stating that RH is not responsible for the trade clearing in the RH platform.

Robinhood has in effect cleared all its trades since 2018 as you can see based on their own page.

https://robinhood.com/us/en/support/articles/common-tax-ques...
Doesn't have to be an official order
I've heard this trope for the past 10 years. And just like different sr. devs are better or worse jr. devs can be better or worse. Ideally you always want to hire better.
> And when you don't understand the dense legalese how did you get clarification?

By asking people knowledgeable in the field I trust, if it's big and relevant enough I might even invest in a lawyer, but at the very least I will put effort into trying to understand it.

If that doesn't work then I will be way more skeptical of whatever I'm supposed to agree to because anything written to be purposefully vague, and difficult to understand, does not entail a lot of trust nor confidence in me.

But not understanding, and making no efforts on your end to understand, is a very poor defense for entering anything legally binding: Making sure you understand is ultimately up to you and only you because at the end of the day it will be your ass and your assets on the line.

Which is a mindset even shared by WSB: That submission is full of regulars reiterating how people have been told not to buy GME on margin exactly because of what ended up happening.
Please keep in mind that by continuing to allow trades, Robinhood was taking on major legal risks.

People have been attempting a short squeeze all week. Short squeezes are illegal. By allowing a short squeeze to continue with no action, Robinhood would have been taking on massive legal liability for aiding and abetting illegal activity.
A largely empty rant that contradicts its own premise by pointing out that reasoning about code is the same as thinking about code, and that different people think about code differently. Not exactly an epiphany. If "reasoning about code" was actually a "scam", high level languages would never have emerged. Everyone would still be using assembly for everything, because "[w]e know, for example, that you can basically use any programming language for basically any purpose..."
And even if it is new shorts, then it becomes a race between shorts and longs, which longs would have a huge advantage barring direct manipulation.
> My hope is that this will drive a reformist movement around digital rights (speech, commerce, etc.) As well as a movement from platforms to protocols.

I hope so too and I hope that movement will develop and adopt technological solutions and not advocate for government force. This is an opportunity for people to control their means of communication and create a more robust internet that can better withstand censorship attempts in the future. I fear it will instead be taken advantage of by people who want to increase government control perhaps to prevent competition with the currently dominant actors on the market. Any further normalization of government control of communication or the internet must be resisted if we are to have any chance to keep the truly wonderful thing that the internet is today, despite all its imperfections.
The nuclear disaster hidden by the Soviets
Ask HN: What will happen if Robinhood tries to go public now?
Something tells me the internet won't treat them favorably.
Failed Car Shows Why Tesla Shouldn’t Reinvent the Steering Wheel
Crypto enters the chat
It's one thing to be excessively against china it's another thing to be excessively pro china. You are the former.

What has a occurred in China is an economic miracle that has never been seen in the history of human civilization. This does not mean china is perfect. Far from it.

It is very very inaccurate to label it as "nothing unique or spectacular."
if hedge funds were long, it would have happened?

it is short-sellers who need to pay up the margin calls etc.
the way short selling works, it can create crazy leverage

it is definitely a lie
Interactive Brokers also stopped trading, Chairman goes on TV to say "will resume when market goes back to normal and GME is again at $17."

"Why? Honestly, to protect ourselves."

The foxes are guarding the henhouse. They always were, at least now is getting easier and easier for people to see it. But please, continue bashing crypto and those working on it...
I am torn.

On the one hand, the phrase is definitely overused. It's like "reason about" is the functional world's version of OOPs "modularity". It gets used so much it ceases to hold meaning beyond "thing that makes our way good".

On the other hand, it is clear to me that some promises do hold up. In cases where the phrase is used correctly, it means there are some questions you can answer about the code without having to execute it line-by-line in your head. That is objectively valuable, even if your only reason for reading the code in the first place is to determine which parts of it you can safely trash and replace from scratch.
Yeah, I've seen Ben's video but used a different controller and didn't get very good results with my (very cursory) tweaks to the various tables that controlled the refresh.
> simple as a "Birthday" field to the user profile pages

Nothing simple about this, considering that Omega Star doesn't support ISO timestamps.
They absolutely are not illegal.

Shorts got greedy and got caught out. Should short sellers not have any downside to their trades?
Presumably their customers are free to sue them.
Chart: Robinhood Apple ratings stayed the same, Google Play ratings tanked
> We were paying ~200k a year which while not FAANG is almost double the national average for software engineers.

I read two things: Not FAANG and national average.

If you are competing for FANNG talent that's where you should aim. Whatever average, that includes all bodyshops and bootcamp grads is a useless measure. Average Football player in the US and NFL football players have very different compensations.

> What pipelines would you suggest? We used recruiters, indeed, monster, hiring, hacker news, stack overflow, etc... None of them were a silver bullet. They all had drawbacks.

For college hires go directly at the source. At which university do you recruit?
Exactly, but if RH loses the product, it loses the customer as well, so it was a lose-lose situation that was created by the business model.
Short squeezes are illegal. Any brokerage that knowingly allowed a short squeeze to continue without taking action, could have potentially massive legal liabilities.

That is another explanation beyond the 2 day settlement window that Webull published.
A better way would be to update the definition of a public square to take into account the exponential scaling offered by digital services. Communication and commerce infrastructure should not be allowed to censor the moment they cross a critical point in scale.
Since when do you have to prove your innocence? It is AOC who should prove that.

There's a huge difference between trying to get someone killed and calling for an election audit or objecting against the election results.

Are the Democrats guilty for all the BLM/Antifa murders? I don't think so and they supported and fuelled the protests/riots.
And reread it every time it was changed?
DoorDash had an arbitration clause that said they would pay the filing fee. Robinhood doesn't have that in their arbitration clause. As far as I can tell, they don't specify who pays but it's possible the arbitration agency (FINRA) has some law governing that I guess.

If not, it's probably safe to assume the consumer has to pay the fee.
This. Alternatives exist and will be created as faith in America keeps falling. The world hasn't run out of smart people.
Maybe stating the obvious - doesn't this torpedo Robinhood's plans to IPO sometime this year?

The backlash seems so severe that I'm very curious about the rationale behind backroom decisions made that led to all this.
Citadel securities is an MM in this business, they are certainly delta neutral and not short.
>Citadel and gang operate this casino. If they think they're losing, they change the rules so they aren't.

Wait, is Citadel a big enough player as to influence the regulatory system, like on the level of JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs?