I see a lot of recommendations for kagi, but no mention of brave search - specifically the (beta) feature called “goggles”. Afaiu it’s a blend of kagi’s “lenses” and the site ranking in search results.
Tbh, I can’t really compare brave search to kagi, since I never used kagi (though I’m using Orion - webkit based browser from the same dev and love it). Afaik, brave search is using its own index, thus making the results somehow limited and inferior to kagis.
Just wanted to throw some (free) alternative here that works for me. :)
* Note that Brave search, despite privacy oriented, is still ad funded and there was few controversies about brave’s (browser) privacy in the past. (if that’s relevant for you)
Kagi. You have to pay - but it prioritises based on content, not ads, and it lets you pin / emphasise / deemphasise / block sites according to your needs.
(No connection with kagi.com except being a very satisfied user)
Google has been inundated with SEO spam, and sometimes I want current things so LLMs don't work that well. One example is I was buying a ... wait, actually I was putting together some examples for you to compare Kagi (I am an unlimited subscriber) to Google directly, and none of them work now. My Google results for things like "best running shoes 2024" or things like that returned basically the same results as Kagi, pushing sites like Reddit and Wirecutter and REI blog and other known-good blogs to the top. Tried this in Private Browsing as well.
This is definitely a departure because when I subscribed to Kagi a couple months ago, all of my Google results for similar searches were SEO spam blogs filled with Amazon affiliate links that look like they had just sucked some Amazon reviews automatically into some poor facade to generate affiliate revenue.
These results were a surprise to me. Not sure what changed.
I imagine what changed is that Kagi started getting traction on site like here and some managers at google actually did something about it.
My own test "voynich illuminated manuscript" which used to give nothing but pintrest spam on google. Now there is just one result from pintrest in google and pretty much every result in Kagi is from pintrest.
There is an academic tab which seems interesting. I will give it a try later.
If you want a high-performance engine that meets modern emissions requirements, you're probably going to be looking at EFI and turbochargers. Changing the fuel injection maps on a modern car requires something akin to rooting/flashing an Android.
> If you want a high-performance engine that meets modern emissions requirements, you're probably going to be looking at EFI and turbochargers. Changing the fuel injection maps on a modern car requires something akin to rooting/flashing an Android.
It's also federallyillegal, I don't know why you've veered this thread into ease of performing illegal modifications.
Not everyone lives in your jurisdiction. I don’t know why you would be quick to police the discussion, as talking about how something works is done does not mean you intend to do it (and is well within the scope of “Hacker” News).
The closest analog with smartphones to federal emissions laws is more like the FCC prohibiting hacking the baseband ostensibly to protect the cellular network.
Correct, but in this case, it sounds like you didn't need to use the ISP router as your VPN gateway.
If I understand the DNS rebinding attack reference correctly, you could be running the VPN software on your desktop/laptop and still have your IP revealed by your ISP router.
Arguably, a setup using a VPN for anonymity purposes is badly flawed if it allows traffic to anything but the VPN gateway. This includes the local network.
Mediocre home appliances or (as in this case) ISP CPEs can easily deanonymize you.
Yes, but that's a deliberate security–convenience trade off then.
One solution is to use proxy servers or per-app VPNs (without local network access) instead of a system-wide VPN, and effectively partition applications into trusted and untrusted ones.
I've done that partitioning with virtual machines. I don't see how it's a "tradeoff". Yes, every additional service you expose can have its own security flaws, but you have to get data in/out of a VPN'd VM somehow. Even if I allocated more local storage to the VM and only ssh'd in to send/receive files, the ssh client could have a hole in it. nfsd, samba, sshd, and ssh are designed to do singular jobs. The issue in this case is the exposing of a consumer router that was never designed for security from the local network.
Given HTTP pipelining and fetch() promise semantics, I'm not sure there's a practical benefit to pushing results instead of "blocking" the original request.
If you want to run something in the background whether the user page is still active or not. Once the computation is complete, it pushes a notification to the user or trigger other workers.
DBus actually uses unix sockets (though I believe it can make use of other transports as well). If you're going to use a raw unix socket, you have to design your own RPC mechanism over it. For some things, that may not be a big deal, and may be preferable to pulling in a dependency like DBus. But for other things, not having to do that work might be a win.
DBus also allows for fine-grained permissions that you can't get with unix sockets without designing and building that mechanism yourself.
This kind of effort (presumably the verifications will be constant - one location being verified will trigger re-verification on all other locations) will just make people realize that piracy isn't that difficult to set up either and might make them reconsider using streaming services entirely.
> On Wednesday Melvin said it had exited its bet against GameStop and repositioned its portfolio. The firm moved to reduce risk in its investments following a turbulent start to January when it lost 30 percent in the first three weeks. Melvin’s leverage ratio is at the lowest it has been since the firm’s founding in 2014, said a source familiar with the firm. The news of Melvin’s January performance was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Which begs the questions: who are the remaining short-sellers and what do their positions look like? Are they other hedge funds with soon-to-expire positions or are they retail investors betting that GME will be back down to $100 or less by next month?
The general assumption on WSB is that Melvin Capital is lying and that they haven't closed their positions.
I haven't seen any evidence to suggest they've closed it, and have seen circumstantial evidence suggesting they have not. You don't spend money on ads saying "we no longer have a financial stake in this stock" unless you, you know, have a financial stake in this stock.
Considering this is a hedge fund, I just assume they're lying because, you know, it's a fucking hedge fund.
The way that WSB has latched onto Melvin as their enemy is to their detriment. It was never about killing Melvin capital, or at least, it shouldn't have been. It ought to have been about the ridiculous short interest on the stock, regardless of who was funding it. Whether or not Melvin specifically has covered their shorts is irrelevant to how the short interest as a percentage of float has changed in the past week.
https://twitter.com/ihors3 is the source to pay attention to, and he's saying (within the past hour) that collectively, the shorts have been largely covered. It's going to be bloody tomorrow.
... Either that, or magical meme energy is going to defy reason once again. Who knows.
They latched onto Citron first. They're focusing on punishing the "enemy" instead of an abstract trade idea. Motivates holding longer instead of jumping ship to cash out.
At this point though, many original buyers have probably sold some/all and most current holders are in it to make a quick buck, not to stick it to the suits. They'll be happy to jump off with a 2x or 3x return if they think the house of cards is about to collapse. Hedge funds sell first and retail traders left holding the bags, complaining the system's all rigged when they should never have entered in the first place. We don't know the exact timing, but we know it will be bloody at some point.
> They're focusing on punishing the "enemy" instead of an abstract trade idea.
Afaik that's only a somewhat recent change in narrative.
One doesn't get that many people, and that much money, on-board solely on the idea of "Burn your money to punish an enemy that has much more money than you", you get them on-board by promising massive gains and how getting in on this will yield such great returns that people can buy houses and pay off debt.
Which was the original narrative that started all of this and is still the most peddled one.
There are a handful of people who are quite open about the fact that they are willing to burn money to hurt the hedge-funds, but those get mostly drowned out by the flood of comments along the lines of "Look at all the money we made!" pushing people to further buy in even when GME is at $200+ because "We go to the moon!" or some other memefied slogan.
I think you’re wrong. Having an enemy always helps rally people to a cause. In the case of this GME saga, WSB’s juvenile hatred towards funds they perceive as their opponents actually ended up being their biggest rhetorical win. The media picked up the story of “Reddit vs hedge funds” and ran with it because it’s much more interesting than “amateur investors want to get rich quick”. That generated the huge public interest, and was helped by a large array of pundits and politicians(like AOC) who wanted to get their nose in the publicity trough when they saw the media feeding frenzy. If the message had only been about some Reddit get rich quick scheme, nobody would have cared, and it would not have gone far.
If the stock continues going up this week, it's that the "magical meme" energy is actually the momentum traders and various celebrities who want to keep the story going by putting more money into it. Of course, they are then likely to flip their positions for a profit before they tell their followers they've sold, leaving the fans holding the bag. Just at a more extended timeframe than you'd predict.
The driving force behind the movement is a David and Goliath story. Take away Goliath, or turn the enemy into some abstract concept, and you weaken the story. I'm not sure it would have worked as well.
Organized pump and dumps aren't anything new, but this is the first I've seen that used a story with mass appeal to energize its base.
Huge volumes trade off exchange in “upstairs” markets (blocks and dark pools). In a super volatile and absurdly illiquid at times market like GME recently, this is where the institutionals would do most of their trading.
If I needed to buy 1m shares of GME I wouldn’t do it in the open market. I would call my favorite sell side shop, let’s say Goldman and have them call Fidelity or similar to arrange a block trade.
I think that post is representative of how only the market and time will actually flesh out this story. The GME holding party entrenches further because the graph is bad (Y Axis distortion) and the GME short party says the pressure has been alleviated.
> You don't spend money on ads saying "we no longer have a financial stake in this stock"
I don't think they did. The source of this meme seems to be a Twitter ad from CNBC that was teasing an interview with a quote to that effect. That's a CNBC ad selling their show, they don't take paid ads from their guests.
This is not what happened, I don't know why people keep perpetuating it. The entire source of the "Melvin Capital has closed their positions" thing is an anchor on Squawk Box on Wednesday morning saying that he just got a call from Melvin's fund manager who said that Melvin closed. There hasn't been any other comment besides that one, which is why people think it may have been less than honest.
The more compelling reason to believe they didn't lie about it is because we haven't heard they went bankrupt yet. We probably would have heard that it happened by now, and they certainly would have been bankrupt if they didn't get out of GME in the $100s.
Also, it seems like "close my position" could mean anything. Does that phrase have any specific legal meaning? For example, if I own 1 share of GME, then that is my "position". If I buy another share of GME, then I have a new position: 2 shares of GME. I "closed" my first position, and opened a new one.
They sell journalism under the NBC brand. Is this a serious question? If CNBC was issuing paid advertisement like that it would be a much, much bigger story than a spike in a small cap retail stock.
Only a small segment during the 247 news station day is actually designated as news. Everything else is news entertainment which has different regulations.
I still don't see what this has to do with the point above, which is that a promoted tweet from CNBC for one of their segments is clearly not a paid advertisement by the guest in the segment.
You don't think it is relevant in a discussion about deceptive paid primetime television marketing, that the company in question has the highest documented rate of deceptive paid primetime marketing?
OK, you're just misunderstanding. "Primetime Television" is a marketing term that refers to the traditional TV network programming scheduled between 8-10pm. This is where they put the sitcoms and dramas and reality shows. And "Product Placement" refers not to advertising per se, but paid placement of retail products (e.g. cars, sodas, whatever) into the scenes in the fiction, or to appear as prizes, etc...
It doesn't refer to news programming or other journalism, you just got confused. And I'll say it again: if NBC News, or any other major news media organization, ever got caught teasing a segment because of third party payment, it would be a much, much (seriously: much) bigger story than this minor nonsense about GameStop. They simply do not do what you are alleging, period.
Does a free ticket to the exclusive event count as payment? You know like an apple event where new products are presented and then published in every paper around the world.
> Considering this is a hedge fund, I just assume they're lying because, you know, it's a fucking hedge fund.
If this is your prior for approaching evidence, you're always going to catch big finance lying. But not because you're actually calibrated on evidence. And you won't be able to distinguish between actual fraud and baseless conspiracy.
> Says Cramer: What's important when you're in that hedgefund mode, is to not do anything remotely truthful, because the truth is so against your view, so its important to CREATE A NEW TRUTH to develop a fiction...the great thing about the market is it has absolutely nothing to do with the actual stocks
it was mainly to satisfy pedantic financial professionals passing by but I can see how that is not reconcilable for pedantic software engineers at the same time
You should consider at least editing this post given that it has a massive inaccuracy in it, i.e. that Melvin Capital bought ads to communicate not having a position in GME. That was CNBC.
With respect, you haven't thought this through. Given there is "so much riding on this", why do you think a hedge fund would concoct a nefarious, extremely uncertain scheme to get people to think they closed instead of actually closing?
You agree they're motivated by money, right? They would have lost literally all their money, even with the additional investment, if they were still in when GME soared to $400. They would also be aware of that fact.
Because closing their position is not what any sane shorter wants to do. The bottom line of GameStop sucks baddly. Anyone who can add to their shorts stands to make a fortune in a few months after this all calms down.
Though they might have seen what was happening and exited at 50 to reenter at 300. That would be incredible foresight.
Why do you think short squeezes happen? It’s not because shorts are being insane and covering. They are literally forced to. You have buying for reasons that aren’t commercial and that’s why short squeezes are so bloody.
They are forced to because the lender of the stocks is afraid that they don't have enough money to buy back if things go even higher. If you can prove you have enough money at current prices then you are not forced to sell. GME is not a big company, even at current prices there are several funds that could afford to have a significant short interest from the bottom without getting a call.
edit: originially I said they could carry 200% short, but that is not true. The biggest funds I can find could alone have shorted 30% of a GME at $3 and be okay at $300, but going much above that price or percentage of GME shorted would be a problem.
That is not what naked means. Naked short sales are short sales without an executed or agreed upon borrow between the borrower and broker. You are referring to short interest higher than 100% of the float (total shares in circulation), which is mundane because it happens organically when a lot of people want to short the same thing and start borrowing shares which were already sold short.
It seems entirely unsurprising to me that a brick and mortar retailer selling digital goods in the middle of a pandemic would be a hot short target for many different funds, thereby organically pushing short interest over 100%.
>why do you think a hedge fund would concoct a nefarious, extremely uncertain scheme to get people to think they closed instead of actually closing?
Because they haven't closed their positions, and that information would tip shareholders into thinking they might release some profit before the price levels out.
>They would have lost literally all their money, even with the additional investment, if they were still in when GME soared to $400
No. Not if their positions haven't closed.
If you really think this through, why would they actually announce they have covered the shorts instead of simply reclaiming a short position?
> If you really think this through, why would they actually announce they have covered the shorts instead of simply reclaiming a short position?
This is paper thin logic. If they hadn’t said anything publicly, you and others would be commenting, “See! Melvin Capital hasn’t said anything, so they’re still shorting GME.” It is incredibly common for investors involved in public battles over a stock to announce they’ve closed a position, see Bill Ackman and Herbalife (https://www.investopedia.com/news/billionaire-bill-ackman-du...)
I mean, the obvious play is to short the stock now. Advertising that they're out helps cool the temperature of the storm so they're hoping to capture some value on the way down is my guess.
If you've watched the big short, you'll understand that the challenge with a short is the timing. You have to get the timing right.
For Melvin Capital, they were right, until they were not - when WSB showed up. They have eaten a loss on this.
But that doesn't mean to say that someone else was not willing to buy their shorts, for a hefty discount, with a significantly longer term time frame strategy (because they don't have to borrow on margin), believing that once it becomes clear that Melvin are out, that Redditors will want out of GME, and GME will likely crash back to something close to its prior levels.
I am more interested to know if they closed a lot the day many brokers blocked buying shares? ... so all the buys could have gone to Melvin at a price under 200 rather than over 300.
The stock is currently around $300, up by a factor of five from last week and much more than that over its historical base. The question should be who isn't shorting GME, not leading questions about a conspiracy theory as to whether or not Melvin actually closed its shorts or not.
I mean, I haven't shorted GME personally. But I've absolutely joked with friends that it's an obvious play. Maybe I should.
I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that this isn't like a tug-of-war where if there are more people betting short than long then the shorts win. It's asymmetrical. There are a finite number of shares and if enough people are willing to hold them at a certain price, then that will be its price. Someone with infinite money can't force the price to drop. (At least not through normal "market" means that don't involve fraud, theft, coercion, changing the rules, or violence.)
Imagine there's an auction for a one-of-a-kind Stradivarius violin, and it's bid up to a million dollars. Maybe you're a violin expert and know that it's only worth a hundred thousand dollars. But if at least two people are willing to bid it up to a million dollars, then there isn't a bidding strategy to cause the violin to sell for less than a million dollars.
Theoretically you could maybe claim to own an identical violin and be willing to sell it for two hundred thousand dollars, but if you don't actually have one it's a lie, and if people take you up on the offer but the price doesn't go down, you're on the hook for it. Which means you'll have to buy the violin at whatever price the person who wins the auction thinks it's worth, or default on your commitment.
That's actually not how it works. "Holding" a share doesn't, by definition, do anything to its price. The price is determined by trades. That's what a trade is. You can be sitting on 99% of a company, but as long as that 1% of shares is active in a market it will determine what gets reported as the share price.
And yes, someone with infinite resources can absolutely push a share price down. Borrow every share you can and sell it at $1, for example. Obviously no one does this because it's a terrible investment decision, but it's certainly possible.
I suppose that's true, but kind of beside the point. The "official" price isn't really the price if any random person can't actually buy shares at that price. (Kind of like the Raspberry pi zero that can buy for $10 or so but you can't actually buy in volume at that price.) And supposing that you're sitting on 101% of the stock and people are still buying and selling, then what in the world is going on?
(I don't know if that's really what's happening with Gamestop.)
Anyways, even if the price is artificially low because of some artificial trades driving it down, that doesn't really matter in the sense of the shorts being able to unwind their positions. If the people who hold most of the stock aren't willing to sell for less than a certain amount, then that's what the shorts will have to pay if there aren't any other available shares. That requires the people with the stock to hold out for a good price (even if some infinitely wealthy person is borrowing real or imaginary shares and selling them for $1), but if they do they "win". At least, that's my (possibly inaccurate) understanding of the situation.
One aspect of this whole thing I don't understand is what happens in a "failure to deliver" situation? If the shorts just can't or don't want to pay the market price for a share, what's the penalty? Do they get sued? Declare bankruptcy? Is the exchange or brokerage liable for their debts?
> If the people who hold most of the stock aren't willing to sell for less than a certain amount, then that's what the shorts will have to pay
But that presupposes not that WSB was big enough to trigger a short squeeze (something that everyone accepts), but that they are big enough to hold the bulk of the capitalization of (at this moment) a $18B company. Needless to say they aren't remotely that big. This isn't happening.
Sure, there's more going on than just some WSB people holding stock. Probably a lot of other people have gotten onto the bandwagon, and maybe even some hedge funds or bored billionaires. And some of the high prices lately may have more to do with short sellers covering their positions than retail investors buying at those prices.
At the same time, it's worth noting that a lot of the WSB people got in early, and were able to buy a lot more shares at a lower price. That WSB could scrape together 1.8 billion when the stock was worth one tenth what it is now is still a bit far-fetched, but closer to the realm of possibility than 18 billion.
You can avoid the borrowing fee and margin call risk by purchasing PUT options. The $320 PUT expiring in 1 year costs $240. I purchased 2 contracts on Wednesday bc I don't see a scenario where the price doesn't crash back down below $60 within a year. Expected ROI of 10-20%. Not a large return, but also a pretty safe bet imo considering their ATH prior to this squeeze was $60, and that was back in 2007.
The put options im seeing for 1 year out at $320 currently cost $24,000. (1 contract at 100 shares) what are you looking at that I am not? Am I looking at the wrong thing?
Sounds like you're looking at the right contract. Option contracts are written to give the buyer the right to buy/sell 100 shares. So, the minimum investment for the $320 PUT is ~$24K. Contracts with lower exercise prices will be less expensive, but carry more downside risk.
No idea how time value will trend, but I’m comfortable holding these contracts til expiration at which point I think the price will be sub 60. Could definitely be wrong - I just don’t see how! Investing isn’t my profession.
It seems less risky to buy puts, not short directly. I wouldn’t want to be short if this goes up another 10x, even briefly. It will go back down but you might get wiped out first.
The problem with puts is they can expire before this calms down. If you can get a short in and not get a margin call this is the opportunity of a lifetime. Only the biggest players dare risk it though.
This is true, but you can also go broke if you mess up your entry point. What if it happens to triple before it falls back down? Will you have the ability to sustain those losses, psychologically and financially?
I knew a guy that wound up going short on a stock that was going to the moon. He was down almost a years salary at one point. I'd rather go with a longer-term put option to keep the risk under control. It just lets me sleep at night. Everyone is different.
As I said, only the biggest players dare risk a short at this point. I'm not sure even the likes of Bill Gates are big enough, but there are many institutions that are bigger than him.
Not exactly a 1-3 year timescale, but Elon Musk tweeted something about Signal earlier this month, causing SIGL (completely unrelated to the messaging service to which he was referring) to spike from ~$0.50 to $40 per share. Three weeks later, and SIGL seems to have settled down at around $5 per share - 10x the original price. In other words, the price after the shock is not correlated with the price prior to the shock.
Or, maybe they're lying to discourage more calls? In any case, their best strategy is to claim they're out of the short position so really them saying so is useless information.
What's not useless information is that they simply didn't have the AUM to survive GME going from $100 to $300. They either got out when they said they did, or they're gone.
> Or, maybe they're lying to discourage more calls?
Is this something they are legally allowed to lie about?
If it is not, is this the sort of thing they can lie about anyway because unless an insider blabs no one would know, or is it one of those things that someone would be able to figure out from required SEC filing or other public records?
They could, but it's common (and not suspicious) for an investor involved in a public fracas to publicly reveal they've exited their position. Bill Ackman did something similar with Herbalife: https://www.investopedia.com/news/billionaire-bill-ackman-du...
My theory is that Melvin sold their short positions to other hedge funds that have enough liquidity to weather the memestorm. Melvin itself is likely just trying to keep their other assets, so they can't afford the shorts. Now that the stock is obviously overvalued, the borrowing fee for GME is insanely high. Buying the shorts from Melvin would be an arbitrage opportunity.
Likely just new shorts from a variety of places. I've seen plenty of people opening shorts with the expectations that WSB's play will blow in their face eventually.
Yeah - I mean, why wouldn't it attract a bunch more shorts that open their positions at the current highs?
Wouldn't surprise me if Melvin hasn't really closed their position - but it wouldn't be irrational to think that /r/wallstreetbets will at SOME point in the future move on from gamestop to something else.
The problem is that hedgefunds call retail traders stupid and if they are really that stupid then they will hold the bags, which is exactly what the shorts don't want.
I think that most people over a certain age are quite aware of their own mortality, and are looking to bring meaning to the time that they have.