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Comment by jamesmehaffey | Hacker News Reader

It is a shame that these types of tech companies are always churning up such bad publicity... they literally cannot afford to be making these sorts of unforced errors. It just makes it that much more difficult for all the innovative and honest startups who are trying to bring about positive disruption. cutting corners and misleading your customers is not innovation.

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It isn't just finance startups. With one exception, every startup I've worked for has done something I considered at least sketchy. The difference is most of them didn't have a federal agency with teeth paying attention.

It is, honestly, something I struggle with a bit. I don't like it, but it seems like the state of play is that "a little bit" of cheating is expected, and those who don't are at least operating at a handicap. Exactly how wide that gray area is depends on who is advising you, and sometimes results in shops like early-Uber.

One of my least-favorite aspects of SV.

Bryan Cantrill has a talk on YT on ethics in software [1]. And as I remember it the take away is that the way we think about problems isn't very conducive to obeying the law, or being good to people in general. And I've got to say the amount of people I see thinking of regulations, social norms or morals as « cruft » is pretty alarming.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wtvQZijPzg

It's not just startups and/or SV. People generally don't like me bringing this up, but there is a good rule of thumb for everything in life:

The only people who play fair are those who don't know how to cheat well enough.

After reading about companies like Robinhood and Uber I basically take "disruption" to mean "breaking the law in order to attempt to gain a competitive advantage and hoping to get away with it".

How is a discount brokerage a tech company? They’re .. a brokerage, just like Schwab or E*Trade.

Yeah, that’s not really the point. People are going to avoid using these types of services, whether it’s Robinhood or some other startup, if they think they are going to get scammed. It is bad form, and the thing is that they knew that people have been skeptical about their sources of revenue for some time now.

Every other discount broker sells order flow too, and they’ll approve you for options trading if you say you have enough experience. I’m not sure why you think Robinhood is any different than TD or Schwab.

The tech's in the app and the marketing. Bring debilitating gambling to a larger audience type of thing.

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