sjc33

Leap year bug. Almost guarantee it was looking for March 3rd data and couldn't find any and threw up.

Leap year is a more likely snag here.

My theory is that this was a leap year bug.

I just got an email from Robinhood support on the outage, half an hour before markets close.

I don't actively use RH as my main brokerage so not a big deal to me, but obviously this is unacceptable. Don't recall any other online brokerage suffering an outage like this.

Suffice to say this throws cold water on any mystic around Robinhood having better tech that any incumbent.

I wish people talked more about how Robinhood really enabled this sort of reckless speculation.

Day trading on your smartphone was not really a "thing" pre-Robinhood, and then they came along with commission free trades on both stocks and options.

So not only did they make it easier to day trade given no explicit fees for doing so, they also mainstreamed options trading, which is actually what most people in WSB do almost exclusively, and really the only way you can 10x-100x your money in a few months (or in less time).

It's not a loss leader. Yes, they pay the bureaus for access, but you're giving them rich data about you (I'd argue credit data is even richer than what FB has on you) to use to target financial products to you.

I was surprised that the FTC actually blocked the Harry's shaving acquisition because it would be anti-competitive, and the Fitbit acquisition is still on the block as well. Not clear yet that this will be approved, though I wouldn't say TurboTax + Credit Karma have a monopoly on tax filing...

Nothing is "free" - you give Credit Karma perpetual access to your credit report and in exchange it gives them rich data to target loan products to you for which they make big referral fees from.

Ok, but why is that a bad thing for engineers that are interviewing?

If the interview process is largely memorizing 200 or so commonly asked algorithm questions and that is the gateway to a $200k+ job then it's a good thing for applicants, not "dystopian" at all.

Again, it would be much, much more painful and time consuming for the interviewee if they were asked to code up some fullstack project for every interview. That is far more time consuming, and in my opinion more "dystopian" to expect those interviewing to do dozens of hours of work specific to one interview for free.

It's pretty standardized. 99% of the questions you could possibly be asked are on leetcode for most large companies.

So what? It's a logic test. And you're still proving that you have enough experience to code well in general language e.g. java, python, javascript, ruby, etc.

It would be way more time intensive for the interviewee to be asked to code up some fullstack project for every interview.

Having to memorize some basic algorithm questions that are maybe 20 lines of code each is way better.

Honestly having an interview process that is highly standardized and teachable + learnable is a good thing, so I'm not sure why people complain. You know exactly what sort of questions you will be asked from company to company, and can spend nights and weekends over a couple weeks studying for it.

Most jobs are not like that, and then you get extreme variance in expectation with little communication on how to prepare, which is a waste of time for both the interviewer and interviewee if the interviewee has no clue what will be asked or expected ahead of time.

Yep, exactly. This is Kaplan 2.0.

Lambda School didn't invent the ISA.

I found his constant Twitter boasting distasteful and cringeworthy. It always came off like an infomercial.

Coding bootcamps are not all bad, though, it's just that I think if you are going to do one then 1) you really need a solid financial cushion (either parental or own savings) and 2) you should really do a top rated in person one. I can't imagine doing this through a Zoom for 9 months in my apartment alone. The value of having social support you get from instructors and being around other students in the same boat as you can't be understated.