Robinhood launches 3% checking account - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/13/robinhood-free-checking-and-savings-accounts/ <comment><USER3> For folks trying to understand this, some context which may be useful:

Checking accounts are loss leaders virtually everywhere, the exception being smaller community banks. Their primary revenue stream was, once upon a time, net interest income, but these days due to the extremely low interest environment and alternate sources of funding the revenue stream is more weighted towards fees (primarily NSFs, although that was hit a few years ago) and debit card interchange.

Robinhood also likely expects to not become the park-your-money account of choice for older dentists but rather to become the spend-your-money account for their millennial userbase. With high velocity of money and low balances the interest expense is minimal and, to the extent they use debit cards, the interchange revenue can be material. (In a stylized example where someone makes $2k a month and spends $200 on debit card purchases and $1.8k on rent/etc the interest cost for the year is ~$30 and the debit card interchange for the year is ~$60, even ignoring potential interest revenue.)

This is roughly in the same line as their core strategy, which is spending what would otherwise be a marketing budget on keeping commissions at zero, making money on the other ways brokerages make money. If you do not understand how a brokerage makes money, I encourage you to peruse the annual reports of e.g. eTrade or TD Ameritrade, which will happily explain their revenue sources and why commissions are a surprisingly small portion.

Metacomment: geeks who believe they have outmathed a financial firm should ask themselves "Are financial firms likely to be bad at math?" and "Are financial firms incapable of hiring their own geeks?"

<comment><USER4> Why would they expect this account to be used as a high-velocity, low-balance account rather than a park-your-savings account, given the rate?

I agree that the high rate is reasonable in that scenario, but the high rate is also actively fighting to ensure that scenario doesn't happen.

I don't see people here thinking that Robinhood is bad at math. They're all asking, "what's the catch?" Because it sure seems like there must be one.

<comment><USER5> here the catch, I believe: 1\. it's ensured by SIPC, not FDIC, so it's not as safe. 2\. They're going to lower that 3% rate down whatever all the other banks are at (2%) in a couple of years, unless the interest rates catch up to their higher rate, which they are expected to do in about 2 to 3 years: at that time, 3% will be roughly the norm for the highest interest savings accounts.

I remember the days when Citibank would give out 4% interest about a decade ago. now of course, it's about 0%. It's just classic bait and switch.

<comment> brown9-2 > It's just classic bait and switch.

Are you unaware that interest rates today are drastically different than a decade ago?

<comment><USER6> The Federal funds rate is currently 2.00-2.25%.

A decade ago, the rate was 1.00%. (And three days later, it was 0.00-0.25%.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I just spent 3 months in London, and it's crazy how Monzo seems to have taken the market. Almost everybody seems to be paying with a Monzo card, regardless of age.

Asking around, I consistently heard that Monzo's competitors like Revolut are going to be a future case study in scaling before great product/market fit. I don't know how many people have Revolut accounts, but nobody seems to be using their cards in public.

Little details really add up. For instance, Revolut didn't have contactless support for a while, which meant people could not use it on the Tube. Monzo made their cards pink, which creates a physical network effect.

The US seems to have a wave of startups trying to reinvent checking accounts right now. I wonder which, if any, will take the market:

\- Varo ([https://varomoney.com](https://varomoney.com)) - Product and brand don't look very polished and they haven't launched Android support, but they are doing the "hard thing" of getting a bank charter (rather than having a partner bank, like all of the others).

\- Robinhood ([https://robinhood.com](https://robinhood.com)) - Already offers investment products, so they can get a lot of users quickly. Unclear how good the product will be. (For example - can they support contactless payments with a clear card?)

\- Chime ([https://chimebank.com](https://chimebank.com)) - Seems to have the most mature and polished product. The killer feature they advertise is "get direct deposits faster", which doesn't seem world-changing to me.

My benchmark is Charles Schwab Bank, which offers no fees on any ATM, anywhere. It's what many millennials that I know use. But, it's a bad product and not very user-friendly. Simple tried to reinvent banking, but they never seemed to go beyond polishing the UI. I'm curious to see what the future holds, particularly as some foreign banks expand to the USA!

<comment><USER8> > My benchmark is Charles Schwab Bank, which offers free ATM fees on any ATM, > anywhere. It's what many millennials that I know use. But, it's a bad > product and not very user-friendly.

Why do you say it's a bad product? I use Schwab as my main account and it works great for me.

<comment><USER7> I love Schwab's checking account product because it's highly functional. But, I don't think that it has mass-market appeal. It appeals to a rational buyer, not an emotional one.

The opportunity here for a startup bank is to replace credit card spending in the USA. The potential earnings are huge if you can get consumers to spend on a debit card instead of a credit card (because the rake is higher).

To make a checking account capture the spending market in the USA, it needs to feel premium and focused - like the Amex app. The spending analysis needs to be great, the card needs easy control in the mobile app, and it needs to inspire confidence. It also needs to feel like a trusted, approachable brand.

Schwab makes most of their money on investments. I don't foresee them trying to give mass-market appeal to their checking account, separate from the investment account.

A case study in this field is Marcus, a savings app from Goldman Sachs. If Schwab spun out their checking account into a separate sub-brand with branding that appeals to millennials and had a spending-focused mobile app, I could see them doing really well: [https://www.marcus.com/us/en/savings](https://www.marcus.com/us/en/savings)

<comment><USER8> > I love Schwab's checking account product because it's highly functional. > But, I don't think that it has mass-market appeal. It appeals to a rational > buyer, not an emotional one.

Isn't that the wrong perspective on a financial product? I agree that good design is important, to a degree. Once a certain level is hit, you're not going to gain/lose very many customers based upon the UI.

I don't think anyone should favor one bank over another for emotional reasons Also, I'm not sure design differences qualifies as "emotional"; I think a better word would be "design" or "aesthetic".

If Bank A offers you a 4% interest rate on a loan and Bank B offers you a 4.1% interest rate on a loan, I think most people would pick Bank A over Bank B (assuming fee structures and customer service is more or less equal). Even if Bank B has a beautiful UI as opposed to Bank A's equally functional but okay looking UI.

<comment><USER9> A coworker looked over my shoulder as I was signing up for Robinhood checking today, saw the American flag debit card and literally yelled, "I NEED THAT CARD!". He signed up using my referral code, you have to learn that you're not the normal consumer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think folks are overthinking this.

The math itself doesn't matter. Have you seen recent Robinhood commercials popping up on TV? Their whole business is to encourage folks that should not be day trading to day trade.

Having your money parked there just facilitates knee-jerk-reaction and follow- the-crowd trading.

<comment><USER11> " Their whole business is to encourage folks that should not be day trading to day trade"

Also using the ridiculously upside down moral convention that they are somehow 'the good guys defeating the system' i.e. 'Robin Hood'.

"We wanted to do something after occupy Wall Street, you know. Something real. So, how about, get all the young people to, you know, put their money into Wall Street" is basically their 'storyboard motivation'. Which the CNN interviewer accepted without a hint of skepticism.

<comment><USER12> It's amazing how many times I've seen people post losses in excess of $20,000 on r/wallstreetbets.

<comment><USER13> The people in r/wallstreetbets usually understand that they're making stupid bets. OTOH, r/Robinhood is full of completely irresponsible traders -- trading in illiquid securities, dumping tons of money in penny stocks, triggering PDT restrictions and getting stuck with unwanted positions, not understanding bid/ask/mark (usually blaming RH or the "market maker" boogeyman for changing the price on them), buying OTM weekly options (known informally on wallstreetbets as "FD"s...), complaining about tons of "glitches" that are actually just them losing money through ignorance, and (one that has always confused me) blaming all losses on some mysterious "market maker" boogeyman who kills all of their trades.

If it was 1996, these people would be speculating on Beanie Baby portfolios hedged with Charizard cards.

<comment><USER14> To be fair, RH does sometimes have problems. They blew up the other morning and screwed over a number of people by closing their accounts for the day while they tried to figure out how their system credited them with options sales at 10-100x actual value. RH has definitely got bugs, and if I were serious about playing the market I'd go with IB or TW, or just about anyone else.

<comment><USER15> That number of people is quite large. Between FB groups, reddit and Twitter comments it definitely exceeds the hundreds.

I was locked out for 29 hours with expiring strangles that would have had significant upside if closed at the right time, lost everything put into them by the time I could get back in.

Never received communication about the lock out or being allowed back in.

They have no phone support and during that whole period not a single email was responded to.

To imagine this company as a bank is one of the most ridiculous concepts ive heard of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> They are offering this as a brokerage and not a bank so the accounts are not FDIC insured but SIPC insured instead [https://support.robinhood.com/hc/en- us/articles/360001469903](https://support.robinhood.com/hc/en- us/articles/360001469903)

<comment><USER17> It looks like both FDIC and SIPC have a 250K protection, are there any other differences between the two that would matter to an average consumer?

<comment><USER18> Maybe:

> SIPC insurance provides protection for your cash balance and securities > holdings if Robinhood fails financially, but _does not cover investment > losses due to declines in the value of securities themselves_.

Emphasis mine.

If you put $250,000 into an FDIC-protected checking account, that account holds cash and FDIC protects the full amount of that cash.

If you put $250,000 in an SIPC-protected brokerage account, that account holds both cash and securities, and SIPC does not protect you from a decline in the market value of those securities. So imagine the stock market drops and you go to your "checking account" and that has dropped too! To me, the concept of such a "checking account" violates my basic assumptions of how I think about my cash holdings vs. my security holdings.

I don't know how that percentage of cash/securities breaks down at Robinhood, but it's not going to be 100% cash and 0% securities. There is a reason big banks don't offer checking accounts with 3% interest rates. When the return is higher, the risk must have gone up too, somehow.

It also seems like there could be weird tax implications if your "checking account" has to liquidate securities to cover a big check you wrote.

<comment><USER19> What are securities in this context? Is that not something that you personally choose to invest in?

Because if it is, then this is basically the same. Your cash is fully insured, but obviously your investments run investment risk.

If Robinhood automatically converts your money into securities, then it's a different matter. It sounds unlikely to me that any bank account would work that way, but I don't know how Robinhood works.

<comment><USER20> Not an expert in this domain but I'll cover the basics: ecurities are a euphemism for stocks and similar. Banks have been loaning out the money you deposit since the beginning of time; it's how they make money. They don't keep all the cash that people have deposited on hand, which is why a "run on the bank" was problematic in the past. They basically keep enough cash around ("reserves") so that the average withdrawals don't get them into trouble. And yes, you are certainly not choosing the investments that the bank makes with your money. And they're not "your" investments: the bank pays you a small fee (3% in this case) and then takes risks with your money to make a higher return and keep the difference.

I'd recommend reading up on the Federal Reserve ( _The Creature from Jekyll Island_ ), the modern financial system (any of Michael Lewis's books, especially _Boomerang_ and _The Big Short_ ), and maybe the first global banking families ( _The Medicis: Power, Money, and Ambition in the Italian Renaissance_ ). We're talking about the power structure of the world here and it's good to be informed on the main points.

<comment><USER19> So what does that mean here? Are you saying that the part of your money that the bank uses to invest, is not insured? If so, then what does the insurance for the remainder even mean? Money that the bank doesn't touch doesn't need to be insured, because it's always there. The whole point of such an insurance is to reimburse you in case the bank loses your money due to their bad investment. If that's not covered but only the part that they never touch, then the whole insurance becomes meaningless.

I still suspect that the securities mentioned are your own securities rather than the bank's, which makes it totally sensible that they're not covered by the insurance.

<comment><USER20> My understanding is that yes, you're not covered if the bank suffers losses and passes them on to you. The entire industry is one giant moral hazard due to complete lack of skin in the game on the part of the banks. They don't own the money and aren't responsible for catastrophic losses (see the '08 and previous bailouts), but they control it and keep the upside. You're right, that insurance sounds like garbage, but I haven't bothered to dig into the details. Caveat emptor!

"Own nothing, but control everything." -John D. Rockefeller

edit: good note from /u/snowwrestler below:

> > It's not the cash/securities that Robinhood holds as part of their > business, it's the one they hold for you. You may well choose to hold 100% > cash or 100% securities.

> If I'm holding 100% securities, a) SIPC offers me no protection from losses, > b) I better be making more than 3% return, and c) I would not call that > situation "a checking account."

<comment><USER21> I think the loss case they're protecting you for is more

"I bought 100 shares of Acmecorp, then Robinhood shuttered their doors and said they sold the shares to fund their yacht."

The SIPC's job there is to reimburse you for 100 shares of Acmecorp as of now; they're not going to let investors cherry-pick and say "but they mishandled the account during the one day it was at its peak and I want that price!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> For those not aware of it: ton of people lost money yesterday because RH options trading system shat itself. I wouldn't trust them with my beer money

[https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/a5iwgh/robi...](https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/a5iwgh/robinhood_options_fat_finger_glitchbug_thread/)

<comment><USER23> Robinhood definitely had down time yesterday, but I'd like to make a note that /r/Robinhood overreacts to things like crazy. I'm pretty sure 95% of the people in there are under 20 and daytrading options with less than $5000.

I'm bringing this up because, while some people did lose money yesterday because of Robinhood's downtime, there we also a lot of people claiming to have lost money, but were blatantly lying.

I'm not trying to let RH off the hook, but /r/robinhood makes it sound like RH was robbing them at gun point.

<comment><USER22> >down time

Look at the comments I linked to. That's not downtime. People's transaction history is being rolled back. Some people still have fake positions showing. Another had all his positions sold. Another got bonus buying power.

The inconsistencies in the comments are striking. Looks like a complete lotto of what happened to people's accounts. That inspires zero in their back end processes.

>makes it sound like RH was robbing them at gun point.

It pretty much is. With options timing is everything and being locked out is a disaster. Especially with the current volatility

Presumably it'll all get straightened out eventually but wow I'm definitely not putting in hard earned money on RH

<comment><USER23> >makes it sound like RH was robbing them at gun point.

>It pretty much is.

It really really isn't. This is the type of exaggeration why I find that sub insufferable.

Robinhood's stability issues are well known and normal for a fast growing, early stage startup. You as a user need to understand the limitations of the platform and incorporate them into your trading strategy.

Swing trading options on RH is like carving a turkey with a chainsaw. Sure, you can do it, but it's not the right tool for the job.

<comment><USER22> >stability issues are well known

This isn't someone startup app going wonky that needs a server reboot. It's peoples money & expectations for reliability are much higher. Justifiably so.

>limitations of the platform

This isn't a 'limitation'!?!?! Their system crapped out and caused chaos

>Swing trading options on RH is like carving a turkey with a chainsaw

Agreed. This isn't about which broker is best for what strategy. This is about a broker failing to fulfil its core purpose - reliably executing orders

<comment><USER23> > This isn't someone startup app

It totally is. The company is exactly 5 years old and has only had customers on their platform for 3.5 years. The company only has like 300 employees. It's a start up through and through.

For reference, Coinbase and Acorns are older than Robinhood.

> This isn't a 'limitation'!?!?!

It's totally a limitation in terms of availability of the platform. They are not promising 100% uptime and no reasonable person should be expecting that from an app barely out of the beta stage.

If your trading strategy can't handle a few hours of downtime, you should find a platform that has an SLA guaranteeing uptime.

> This is about a broker failing to fulfil its core purpose - <USER2> > executing orders

It's also about understanding that shit happens, especially with startups.

I'm not trying to let RH off the hook here, but people using their platform need to understand that they are a new company growing quickly and things will break. If your lively hood depends on things not being broken then you are going to have a bad time.

Robinhood has gone down before and will go down again, don't use it if you can't handle that truth. To use an old adage "Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "Dude, have you tried ifood? After you ingest it your daily workout becomes 3% more effective."

"Sounds interesting. Is it FDA approved?"

"Well, no, it's _FCC_ approved. You see, legacy foods are ripe for disruption because regulatory has capture created an artificial barrier to new marketplace entrants. With ifood we're able to end run that barrier by..."

"Goodbye."

<comment><USER18> This is an underrated comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is higher than even most long-term CDs at the moment. Anyone have thoughts on how this is possible? Possibly a teaser that will adjust down soon?

<comment><USER26> Exactly the correct point... it's not possible. You have to keep your money in there for a while (minimum thresholds)- there are probably caveats that you need to turnover a certain % of your Mastercard (since part of that 3% is on chargebacks). short term (1 year) treasuries are yielding 2.7%... so the only way to get 3% is to take more risk. Risky proposal to park your money with robin hood.

<comment><USER27> Well, it's FDIC insured when I checked, so you can get your money back if things go south. I wouldn't park all of my cash there, but I would consider putting a chunk of my savings there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This whole checking account / savings account, credit card/ debit card system that Americans have to deal with is so cumbersome and backwards.

For Europeans that don't know: Most Americans have (at least) those two accounts, and those two cards. They usually spend from their checking account with their credit card, and save on the savings account. When they spend on their credit card, they sometimes "earn" points, depending on what agreement their bank has with the major retailers. Salary is inserted on the checking account. Some people still receive salary on old fashioned paper checks. Some people still pay in stores using paper checks. Almost everyone, has a lot of paper dollars in their wallet since there are plenty of places in which you need it. Now, on regular intervals, for example at the end of the month, Americans then transfer money from their savings account to their checking account if the salary is not enough to cover. If they forget, they pay high interests and fees. Generally speaking, it's a hassle to transfer money to people you know and fees are hefty. When you use your credit card, no pin code is usually needed. There are regularly issues with your credit card being abused.

In the three European countries I have lived in, people have one account, and one card. Depending on your agreement with the bank, it can dip into negative (in which case you pay some interest, but usually not much). If it dips below the agreed max, let's say minus EUR 5,000, then you can't withdraw more until you receive your salary or until you insert money otherwise. People have one card attached to that card. When the balance on the account is positive, it is essentially a debit card. When the balance on the account is negative, it's a credit card. Usually, no points are earned on any spending. In most of Europe, you use your pin code if you use your credit card. Where in America, you regularly spend time on the phone talking to robots and objecting to expenditures you didn't make, that's almost never the case in Europe. People transfer electronically without any fees from account to account. If you go out, and your friend pays dinner, you can transfer your half directly from your smart phone using just his phone number (so essentially just using the contacts on your phone). You don't need Apple or Google pay or similar. It's your bank's app. No fee is charged.

<comment><USER29> This is a flawed view of the American system.

Credit and Debit cards are different things. Debit cards are the European style 'put in a pin and money is debited directly from your bank checking account'. Credit cards are a revolving line of credit from a bank - you're spending against the LOC, and settle up on a monthly basis (to some extent - there's interest and pay-over-time involved in most as well).

The difference in accounts: banks offer substantially higher (although, basically still really low due to todays market) interest on money sitting in savings accounts, and restrict the use and availability of that money. Banks backed by the Federal reserve have to maintain a minimum ratio of deposited money to loans, and these restrictions/incentives are how they keep those in line and stay legal.

And for what it's worth, 99% of my spending is on a credit card, which I pay off monthly. I can't remember the last time I used cash or paper checks.

We also have many different ways to transfer money around, etc. using apps and things.

<comment><USER30> Don't forget fraud protection on a credit card vs debit card.

<comment><USER18> Is there a difference? Last time I checked, my debit card offered the same protections my credits cards do.

<comment><USER31> The main difference is that if someone steals your debit card info and goes on a spending spree, that money is gone from your account until the fraud folks at your bank can deal with it.

This may result in overdrafts from other automatic payments or not being able to pay for things you need, until the money is restored to your account.

<comment><USER29> I used a debit card to pay for dinner. Merchant accidentally charged me 15 times. Noticed the next day - called bank. '7-10 business days to resolve', or I could go get the merchant to refund it (which I did immediately). That money came directly out of my checking account, and was 'gone', functionally until I got them to credit it back.

Same thing happens on my credit card: the credit card company floats the missing cash for at least 30 days, at no loss to me while it 'gets worked out'.

And that's with everybody (merchant, bank, etc.) agreeing it was an accident. If it was actually fraudulent, I dunno how long it'd take...

<comment><USER14> Similar experience here. Now I exclusively use credit cards for all purchases, my debit card is only for pulling cash out of a machine or sometimes grocery purchases where I am going to get cash back. Better to have the banks money on the line than mine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is massive news.

Banks are going to have to decide whether they want to raise their rates to compete, or face bleeding customers.

The best part is that the money comes from merchants and credit card companies, and is being returned to consumers.

Robinhood truly is living up to their name: stealing from the rich and giving to the poor.

<comment><USER33> >Banks are going to have to decide whether they want to raise their rates to compete, or face bleeding customers.

I'm sure the big boy banks are here stay. Most of them are in the category of, "too big to fail" (as the crisis a decade ago highlighted) and upstarts like Robinhood are but a blip-in-the-radar than a _real_ threat to the established players, imo.

<comment><USER34> To big to fail doesn't really protect them if they lose their costumers. A bank with tons of customers that's bleeding cash due to a market crash is salvageable(and remember the investment in bailing them out payed off), a bank that's bleeding cash because it doesn't have any customers is not salvageable and no longer "big", so it will fail.

<comment><USER35> > _To big to fail doesn't really protect them if they lose their costumers._

In fact, if they lose their customers they will no longer be "too big to fail".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Unless I'm completely ignorant of what's out there, 3% interest on a free personal checking account is absolutely bonkers.

I can only imagine everyone in /r/churning jumping on this if they have an invite.

<comment><USER37> When banks in the UK have offered 3% (Tesco bank did this) it was for the first 12 months and the number of new accounts was eventually limited.

from what I understand Tesco bank had purchased bonds/securities/whatevs with a 5% interest rate, so made 2% off the deal. (and a slew of new customers worth x each to the bank)

Hopefully something similar is funding this

<comment><USER38> Santander offered 3% up to £20k to all customers on their main checking account but had to cut that rate in the end.

<comment><USER39> They had some sweet deals I was making just under £20 a month on cash back plus a good (for the time) interest rate.

But the half baked eu ruling on merchant fees screwed savvy investors and the banks found another way to charge merchants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> "Robinhood expects to turn a profit thanks to a lean 300-employee operation, earning a margin on investing your money in US treasuries, and a revenue share with Mastercard on interchange fees charged to merchants when you swipe"

</comment><comment><USER41> For all the folks suggesting that this is funded by selling your data: is there reason to expect that other banks with lower rates aren't also selling your data? They may be less technically apt, but banks aren't usually ones to leave money on the table.

</comment><comment><USER42> PSA: those using Robinhood for trading, they use the FIFO/first-in-first-out method for determining your cost basis when you sell. This can have unexpected tax consequences.

[https://support.robinhood.com/hc/en- us/articles/360001226966](https://support.robinhood.com/hc/en- us/articles/360001226966)

<comment><USER43> As someone with limited investment experience, what's a more normal strategy? Highest cost basis first? What are the pros/cons?

<comment><USER44> Any I have seen allow you to set what you want as the default for your sales and also chose to use a different style on each sale. Default setting for accounts I have seen is selling high cost first (as that will result in the lowest taxes).

Selling high cost first is likely the best strategy but if say you had some that was long term versus short term capital gain that might lead you to make a different decision on a particular case. Also if you had a choice to sell something that is about to be a long term gain versus one that you bought much more recently you might want to sell the more recent purchase first (in the event you were going to sell again say in a month - which could let you claim a long term gain for the 2nd sale). So there are reasons to make different choices in individual cases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> FDIC insurance exists for a reason. It prevents runs on the bank. There will be a time of financial crisis in the future and anyone with a Robin Hood account will flee for an FDIC guaranteed account. The run on liquidity will probably destroy the institution.

</comment><comment><USER46> 3% on checking sounds too good to be true. What's the catch?

For example, I didn't see anything about how funds are insured. If Robinhood were to somehow lose depositor funds, what recourse would account holders have?

<comment><USER47> Like all "tech" companies - they're selling your data. They already do it in their brokerage accounts. Now imagine the value of knowing what you spend every single dollar on, how often you're shopping at a competitor, what time of day you're most likely to swipe your card, etc.

They're SIPC insured (like a brokerge account) instead of FDIC insured (like a bank account) which is a subtle difference and ever-so-slightly riskier for the consumer but not terribly different.[1] The biggest/riskiest difference is that the insurance here is provided by a group-funded non-profit as opposed to the federal government.

But mostly it's about making up the difference with your data.

[1][https://www.schwabmoneywise.com/public/moneywise/essentials/...](https://www.schwabmoneywise.com/public/moneywise/essentials/understanding_fdic_and_sipc_insurance)

<comment><USER48> With 3% interest, that would be where I park money. What information will they get from me other than I dumped $ in and it's sitting there?

<comment><USER49> Why have two checking accounts?

<comment><USER50> Why not? It doesn't cost anything extra except some time for the initial setup and you get a guaranteed short term return on your parked money.

<comment><USER49> But why not just close the old account? You'll get that short term return for all your checking float in that case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> This article has some of the worst pr-speak I've seen in an "article." It sounds like it was pasted straight from a press release. The only thing this company is doing that tons of other online banks isn't is 3%. A lot of smaller banks are offering 2%+ so I would guess it is likely other banks will match this 3% [https://www.depositaccounts.com/](https://www.depositaccounts.com/)

</comment><comment><USER52> Lot of misinformation in the marketing. This is not a checking nor savings account. Checking and savings accounts are FDIC insured which gurantees $1 in / $1 out. This is a brokerage account, and if the way robinhood invests the cash goes down, so does your "checking" account. The company could choose to cover the losses but insurance will not if robinhood fails.

</comment><comment><USER53> I wouldn't mind switching to them, but they don't integrate with financial tracking systems like Mint. I find the ability to get a birds eye view of my finances too valuable. Sticking with Ally and their 2% for now. Do wish they integrate with Mint or Personal Capital.

<comment><USER54> They integrate with personal capital now, still waiting on Mint!

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> So it looks like this is covered by SIPC [0] not FDIC.

That's pretty bad so the account get zeroed out by identity theft, or embezzlement, or robin hood going bankrupt. These are all terrible risks for checking accounts (or money market even). This is basically investing in RobinHood in an easy manner.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securities_Investor_Protection...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securities_Investor_Protection_Corporation)

</comment><comment> y-c-o-m-b There is a wait-list of more than 45,000 people when you sign up for the checking. An email is sent out after you register and it says the feature arrives in early 2019.

<comment><USER56> But they're claiming each card design is in "limited" supply with ~650K each. Something doesn't make sense there. If they can't process 45K signups why have 3M cards up for grabs?

<comment><USER57> Because plastic is cheap!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Sorry if this is ignorant but how does the ATM system for this work? Who owns the ATMs at Target and 7-11? Is there a limit to how much cash you can deposit? I'd like to use this but I will be processing a lot of cash in the future and worry about depositing thousands of dollars at an ATM.

<comment><USER59> I would be very unconfortable depositing large amounts of cash at an ATM unless it was a first-party (owned by my bank) ATM with the newest tech that can scan bills as they go in.

Even then I think for cash I might be more comfortable handing it to a teller and getting a receipt.

These third party low-rent ATMs at convenience stores don't even take deposits. They are withdrawal only.

<comment><USER60> Not to come across like this is an attack, but do you have any evidence/rationale behind that fear? I've never heard of ATMs mishandling money, although I haven't researched it before.

<comment><USER61> This is anecdotal, and not explicitly about ATMs, but I have had those "Pay your bills here" machines at 7/11 and other convenience stores mishandle my money a couple times. It would report I paid $150 instead of $200, missing a single $50 note.

This was resolved after about 2 hours on the phone with the company who manages the machines, but I still don't use them anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Link to their blog post instead - [https://blog.robinhood.com/news/2018/12/13/introducing- robin...](https://blog.robinhood.com/news/2018/12/13/introducing-robinhood- checking-amp-savings)

<comment><USER63> >With Robinhood, you'll earn 3% on your money in both Checking & Savings, and interest compounds and is paid out daily. That's an extra $240 a year for the average American household with $8,000 in the bank

Does not compute. If it compounds daily then yearly total is above 3%

<comment><USER64> It's standard to talk in annualized interest rates to make simple comparisons between accounts. A daily interest rate of 0.008 % will compound up to just over 3 % of effective annual rate.

<comment><USER63> If the daily interest rate is 0.008 then the annualized rate is 2.92%, not 3%. The standard is to multiply by the number of periods, not to take compounding into the calculation.

<comment><USER34> Why would the standard be to calculate a number that has no use and isn't rooted in reality? If the rate is 3% annually and paid out daily, the the daily rate is the number that compounded yields 3% annually....

<comment><USER63> Because it makes it easy to calculate how much is distributed. Just take the annual rate, divide by number of periods, and multiply by the amount of principle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Assuming the transfer from the checking account to the brokerage account is instant, this can give you a lot more liquidity to your stocks. Traditionally, I have to set aside few thousand dollars that I'm absolutely sure I won't need anytime soon, transfer it to a brokerage account, wait few days, remember to check if then money is in, buy the stock, then reverse the process to sell the stock. The round trip of money in checking account to owning a stock took few days but now it can be done under a minute for free.

Investing day to day with the money in your checking account is probably not a recommended personal finance practice but I definitely have more money in my checking account than I probably need this month because moving money is too painful.

</comment><comment><USER66> "Robinhood" steals from its users to gives to its investors:

"Robinhood Is Making Millions Selling Out Their Millennial Customers To High- Frequency Traders" [1]

"Robinhood Investing App Secretly Makes Millions Selling Millennials' User Data To HFT Firms" [2]

[1][https://seekingalpha.com/article/4205379-robinhood-making- mi...](https://seekingalpha.com/article/4205379-robinhood-making-millions- selling-millennial-customers-high-frequency-traders)

[2][https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-09-15/robinhood- investin...](https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-09-15/robinhood-investing- app-makes-millions-selling-users-data-high-frequencstealing)

<comment><USER34> Robinhood is a small operation that's skimming pennies off your transactions to fund its operation. The alternative is banks who are doing the sambut times a hundred and banks are making a ton of money off their customers even with 100 times as many employees as robinhood.

They are not bad guys's. They are still making money(surprice!?), but they are much much more modest about it than traditional banks. This account is a fine example. They don't need to give you a 3% deal, but they are doing it anyway because it's benefitting both them and their costumers.

<comment><USER67> > Robinhood is a small operation that's skimming pennies off your transactions > to fund its operation. The alternative is banks

There are other alternatives, e.g., credit unions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> For users asking questions about how this will tell you a lot.

Users of Robinhood Checking and Savings earn 3% interest annually on each of their Checking and Savings balances. Robinhood does not charge account maintenance, account minimum, overdraft, ATM, transaction, foreign transaction, transfer, or card replacement fees for Robinhood Checking and Savings. Robinhood Checking and Savings is offered through Robinhood Financial LLC. Robinhood Checking and Savings is an added feature to existing Robinhood accounts and is not a separate account or a bank account. The Robinhood Debit Card is issued by Sutton Bank pursuant to a license from Mastercard International, Inc. Neither Sutton Bank nor Mastercard International, Inc. are members of FINRA or SIPC.

</comment><comment><USER69> Will the 3% be a long term thing or is it just a sign up gimmick?

<comment><USER59> The only fine print at the bottom of their signup page simple says;

"Users of Robinhood Checking and Savings earn 3% interest annually on each of their Checking and Savings balances."

I would have thought a more precise disclosure would be required. But it certainly does not say anything about fixed, guaranteed, etc.

Presumably when you get to actually creating an account there will be more specific terms which must allow them to adjust the rate in the future.

But it does not seem to be a kind of "teaser" rate. It seems like, I'm guessing, that everyone with a Robinhood Checking account will get the same rate, if they change it in the future it would be a product-wide adjustment.

<comment><USER70> More fine print elsewhere:

[https://checking.robinhood.com](https://checking.robinhood.com)

>Robinhood Checking and Savings is an added feature to existing Robinhood accounts and is not a separate account or a bank account.

This enables shifting of revenue from other fees to help support the 3% rate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> M1 has a checking/savings account coming in 2019 Q1, so this seems to be getting into the territory of tablestakes rather quickly. I'm kinda ready to say good riddance to my brick-and-mortar bank, other than maybe maintaining it at a low level for any in-branch needs (and as a source to transfer into robinhood).

([https://old.reddit.com/r/M1Finance/comments/9hk0dc/m1_team_a...](https://old.reddit.com/r/M1Finance/comments/9hk0dc/m1_team_ama_101118_1pm_cst/) has some light details on the M1 banking product for anyone interested)

</comment><comment><USER72> As a user of the Robinhood brokerage for all of my "fun investment money" I'm a fan of this. I do wonder how the big banks are going to respond however as this is blatantly a "shots fired" kind of event.

<comment><USER47> Oddly enough I suspect the result will be lobbying for stricter financial privacy regulations. Almost half of Robinhood's revenue is from selling data.[1] Big banks won't be able to compete on that front and most of the big players don't participate/make enough money on order flow sales that they'd miss it if it were prohibited. So the banks will do what they do best: lobby congress & regulators to legislate & regulate their competition away. Though in this case, I would argue that's in the best interest of the consumer.

[1][https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-15/robinhood...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-15/robinhood- gets-almost-half-its-revenue-in-controversial-bargain-with-high-speed-traders)

<comment><USER72> I don't think this means what you think it means...

Every single broker like Robinhood sells order flow to electronic trading firms. This flow is then executed faster due to improved market access. All of that to say that you're probably getting better execution because Robinhood wasn't stupid enough to try to go through some crappy broker or build their own order entry system.

Also, the order data can not be mapped back to you. That simply isn't how the stock market works _at all_. Every single other broker (Schwab, Merril Lynch, etc) does this.

Source: I work for one of those big market making electronic trading firms, the kind you try to demonize but fail fundamentally to understand.

<comment><USER47> > I don't think this means what you think it means...

You might work in IT for a market making electronic trading firm (it's not big, I looked them up). I'm a securities regulation attorney. I've worked for banks, hedge funds, and RIAs. This is _so_ far away from best execution that any attempt to argue that this is to the consumer's benefit shows _you_ fundamentally do not understand the fiduciary duties that brokers are supposed to owe to their clients. You're parroting the party line without fully understanding how the system works (and why should you? you're just a distributed systems engineer) yet you have the audacity to tell me in another comment that I've "read Flash Boys" without doing any research and don't understand how the stock market works.

Okay, bud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Is it FDIC insured?

<comment><USER74> They aren't part of FDIC but they have SIPC insurance

[https://support.robinhood.com/hc/en- us/articles/360001469903](https://support.robinhood.com/hc/en- us/articles/360001469903)

 _Is my money insured?

Your cash in Robinhood is insured up to $250,000 by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC). SIPC protects cash deposits in your account in the unlikely event that Robinhood fails.

Up to what amount?

SIPC insurance covers your checking, savings and investments. Your cash and securities in Robinhood are protected up to a total of $500,000 by the SIPC, $250,000 of which can be in cash, the rest in securities. SIPC insurance provides protection for your cash balance and securities holdings if Robinhood fails financially, but does not cover investment losses due to declines in the value of securities themselves.

Is this different from bank insurance?

Similar to FDIC insurance, SIPC protects cash in your account if the financial firm fails. FDIC insurance covers deposits in FDIC-insured federal banks. SIPC insurance covers cash and securities at SIPC-member brokerage firms. Robinhood Securities, LLC is a member of SIPC. Additional information can be found at sipc.org._

<comment><USER75> Apparently, SIPC doesn't provide blanket coverage[1].

So no coverage against, i.e. fire, flood, robbery or embezzlement [2]. The first 3 may not be relevant with digital bank that doesn't handle cash, but the last one might be.

EDIT: I misread the second reference. apparently FDIC does not insure against theft or embezzlement, but according to the first link FDIC does provide blanket coverage unlike SPIC. it's still not clear to me what blanket coverage means in this instance.

[1] [https://www.schwabmoneywise.com/public/moneywise/essentials/...](https://www.schwabmoneywise.com/public/moneywise/essentials/understanding_fdic_and_sipc_insurance)

[2] [https://www.fdic.gov/consumers/consumer/information/fdiciorn...](https://www.fdic.gov/consumers/consumer/information/fdiciorn.html)

<comment><USER73> My understanding (which is limited, so someone please jump in if I'm wrong) is that SIPC does not protect against a decline in value of your assets.

I'm wondering:

First, whether Robin Hood is lending out deposits to margin traders. If not, what are they doing with the money? I don't think that they are, as the article implies, making > 3% on US treasuries.

Second, if that investment loses money, are those losses passed on to account holders? If not, someone must be insuring that investment. Who?

<comment><USER75> > SIPC does not protect against a decline in value of your assets.

Neither does FDIC, right? Still doesn't explain what FDIC "blanket" coverage offers that SPIC doesnt

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> This is a marketing bait and switch. One of two things must happen:

1) They lower the interest rate down the line after they've acquired a bunch of customers

2) They limit the offer to certain customers who are lucrative

If they sustain this offer for the general public, they will 100% go out of business.

The 5 year treasury rate is currently set at 2.75%. Traditionally, people use treasury bonds as a place to park safe money, but the SIPC insurance makes this just as safe (up to $250K).

</comment><comment><USER77> > The checking and savings products are not technically bank accounts. They > are separate balances held within a Robinhood brokerage account. Your > checking and savings funds are not FDIC-insured, but they are protected by > insurance from the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, up to > $250,000 in cash, according to Robinhood's FAQs.

Is there any risk to the SIPC insurance vs FDIC-insured?

</comment><comment><USER78> I don't think anyone has mentioned it, but could their motive for this launch is to get in before Monzo launches in the states (source: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/oliversmith/2018/10/31/with- a-f...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/oliversmith/2018/10/31/with-a-fresh- billion-dollar-valuation-monzo-is-already-planning-a-2019-funding-round-to- enter-the-us/#6ffde7ea61c2))

Monzo has blown up in the UK, and I know their team is growing at a crazy rate. While they aren't profitable yet, they plan to sell financial services through their marketplace (insurance, mortgages etc.) which seems to be a major source of potential income for them (source: [https://monzo.com/blog/2017/11/16/monzo- marketplace/](https://monzo.com/blog/2017/11/16/monzo-marketplace/))

</comment><comment><USER79> I love how this is breaking the mold, paying 3% on checking.

But when you look at it, it's actually not particularly useful. You want to put money in, and take money out right? In this account, you basically can only withdraw money in 3 ways: 1) use their debit card (inc ATM) 2) transfer money out to a bank via their brokerage account 3) have them mail a check (up to $2500 per day)

This excludes all sorts of common use cases: 1) auto pay credit cards 2) link to venmo / other app 3) use other debt cards (e.g., Target) 4) give a check to someone in person 5) make larger payments (e.g., mortgage) ...etc...

My guess is these restrictions are there to protect themselves financially. As they reach a certain mass of users, they may relax and be able to take on more risk.

<comment><USER40> How do you know it cannot be used for Venmo? It has a debit card and you can use debit cards for free on Venmo

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> Til they lose your money I guess just like the options yesterday (actually, that really stinks for some developer somewhere and was completely horrible so wishing the engineers some good vibes over that and hopefully work out).

</comment><comment><USER81> Can someone provide some examples where you would lose money in an SIPC insured account(like in Robinhood, presumably backed by low risk securities) that would otherwise be safe in a FDIC insured account?

</comment><comment><USER82> My bank just launched an "online only" division which gives me savings at 2.65%, the option to attach checking, and no fees to speak of. The rate is a little lower but still pretty solid. The only caveat is I can't access that account through their branches; it's just through their website.

I don't think the whole "we don't have branches so we can pass along the savings to you" thing is as defensible as it was 5 years ago. Other businesses can do the math and move in that direction if pressured to do so, and it seems like some of the bigger banks already are.

</comment><comment><USER83> To anyone knowledgeable with SIPC, what happens in the event that many firms go bankrupt at the same time (e.g. global financial collapse) and SIPC doesn't have enough funds to cover losses across all firms? As far as I'm aware, FDIC (for bona fide bank accounts) is backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. Government (even though, on its own, it may not have enough funds to cover all liabilities, Congress can and will authorize additional funding to cover said liabilities), but I'm not sure if that's true for SIPC.

</comment><comment><USER84> Maybe I'm doing it wrong but the "no foreign transaction fees" is just as exciting. Using my BofA card on trips always results in a welcome home set of charges I could do without.

<comment><USER85> Charles Schwab checking account has offered free ATM withdrawal worldwide for a long time.

<comment><USER86> Happy Charles Schwab customer of over 10 years here. I've never once paid a fee on my checking account. Heck, one time I forgot about a one-time bill that caused me to overdraft (first overdraft since around 2005). Instead of charging me the overdraft fee, they sent me an email asking me to make sure the money was in the account by Monday (email received on Thursday) and there would be no fees charged.

I'll be staying a Schwab customer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> I can get ~8% APY on VND in Vietnamese bank accounts with a time deposit of around 6-12 months. This sounds wonderful until you realize...

Inflation is around 4% [1], the account is only insured up to about $3500 (if you are lucky) and VND keeps deflating in value against USD. Never mind the US tax filings take another chunk.

There is always a catch.

[1] [https://tradingeconomics.com/vietnam/inflation- cpi](https://tradingeconomics.com/vietnam/inflation-cpi)

</comment><comment><USER88> Can anyone explain to me how they are able to offer 3% when 1 year treasury notes are less than 3% right now?

If they use longer term bonds, they will face potential losses as those tend to be volatile relative to interest rate changes. If they use higher-yielding corporate bonds, they face default risk.

There's something critical that's not being explained here which is important, and I wouldn't want to put my money in something like that without understanding it thoroughly.

<comment><USER67> > Can anyone explain to me how they are able to offer 3% when 1 year treasury > notes are less than 3% right now?

It's a deal to get more trading accounts opened, both directly (people coming to RH for these accounts, which are not separate from trading accounts) and indirectly (e.g., it's a waitlisted feature that you move up in the waitlist by referring people to RH.)

They don't need to make money on the savings feature considered in isolation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> I'm not sure why other banks haven't followed. One month treasury rate is already up to 2.3% now and banks can certainly lend it out at higher than treasury rate.

<comment><USER90> Because there is basically no competition. Plenty of credit unions around my area offer 3% or sometimes 4% checking, but the best bank rate I could find was under 1%.

But credit unions and especially new small players like Robinhood aren't going to threaten PNC or BoA or Chase. So why would they give up free money if they don't have to?

<comment><USER91> Which credit union offers 4% on all money with them? I know of a few CUs that will offer much higher interest on the first X dollars. Ex: inspiruscu.org

<comment><USER92> There is usually a cap on those high interest rates - at my CU, its $25k. They pay 2% though, not 4% - it used to be a pretty good deal, but these days its easy to get a money market fund elsewhere that pays more than that with no maximum.

<comment><USER91> Mind sharing the name of your CU?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER93> This lack of FDIC is slightly worrying:

"In an email to Barron's the head of the SIPC cast doubt on the idea that it would insure checking or savings accounts."

source: [https://www.barrons.com/articles/robinhood-app-is- offering-a...](https://www.barrons.com/articles/robinhood-app-is- offering-a-3-interest-rate-to-take-on-the-banks-51544723146)

</comment><comment><USER94> I've using their brokerage services -- no fee on stock and option trading -- and I'm ready to move my primary ETrade account to Robinhood soon.

Capital One currently offers 5-yr CD for 3.15%. I just signed up for Citi Priority to save a few pennies on "foreign transaction fees," but it pays paltry 0.03%. That 3% sounds to good to be true, but it's probably not impossible.

<comment><USER95> Its not too good to be true. These are simply the effects of true non crony capitalism at work. Decentralisation of everything is forcing the crony status quo capitalistic system to change, thus pushing the boundaries of progress further than before. This is simply the beginning.

<comment><USER96> Until Robinhood exhausts its runway, is acquired by a traditional finance firm, or is run out of business by FINRA complaints because they kill options trading for hours at a time for their users during market hours [1].

[1] [https://i.imgur.com/VTZifUQ.png](https://i.imgur.com/VTZifUQ.png)

<comment><USER97> Best was when they exercised out of the money expiring options. I wonder how much they lost on that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER98> For those interested in maximizing their interest rate on their cash holdings, I like [https://www.maxmyinterest.com/](https://www.maxmyinterest.com/) which has deals with many banks for high interest accounts. They make it very easy to move your money around to get the maximum ... uh ... return.

</comment><comment><USER99> For those where no FDIC insurance is a dealbreaker, I recently signed up for SoFi Money [https://www.sofi.com/money/fees/](https://www.sofi.com/money/fees/) which is FDIC insured up to 1.5m, offers 2% APY checking, and unlimited ATM fee rebates from any ATM in the world.

</comment><comment><USER26> 3 percent is insane and not sustainable _. One year treasuries are at 2.7 percent. I could short treasuries and put all my money in Robinhood... ripe for arbing. How are they making money? My first inclination is to think parking my money with them is super risky...

_ Edit: Looking at today's market and interest rates.

</comment><comment><USER100> This is great to see. It's even better than the current 1-year CD's I've seen for 1 year. And since this is a checking/savings account there's no time aspect to locking up your cash.

If my bank can't compete with this then I will be moving some cash savings into a new Robinhood account.

</comment><comment><USER99> I actually like the newish Sofi Money debit card. It offers 2% for checking (so not as good but better than any other checking account at the moment), but the real benefit to me is unlimited ATM fee rebates at any ATM worldwide (which doesn't seem to be true of RH's product).

<comment><USER41> If you're so inclined, the Schwab Investor Checking accounts offer the same benefit.

<comment><USER101> Not the 2% interest. Nope.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> Monzo in the UK is a great example of non-bricks and mortar bank. I know that UK financial startups always find it hard to break into America simply because banking laws are crazy over there. But I would expect a lot of the UK Fintech to think about trying to break america soon.

</comment><comment><USER103> I registered for this and I am in line. To get prior access. I am asked to refer my friends.

Just wondering how robinhood shows all my friends though I have not connected robinhood to any of my social network. I feel this as a big privacy issue and it's concerning a lot.

</comment><comment><USER104> My credit union has 3% yield on checking. However it has requirements (direct deposit, minimum debit uses, etc) and only applies on up to $15,000. I'll be curious to see how Robinhood's will work out though since there's no cap.

<comment><USER105> Which credit union?

</comment></comment><comment><USER106> Are there any reasons for not moving my cash reserves from Marcus to Robinhood given:

* Marcus' interest rate is also adjustable and is lower than 3%.

* Marcus has no ATM access/debit card.

* Getting money out of Marcus requires it to be transferred to another checking account.

<comment><USER107> Robinhood's reliability, maybe: [https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/a5iwgh/robi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/a5iwgh/robinhood_options_fat_finger_glitchbug_thread/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER108> Earlier today I simply visited the early access page for Robinhood, and this evening I got an invitation to join it, without having submitted my email address. Presumably it was a blanket spam mailing? Kinda scary.

</comment><comment><USER109> I really, really like these new startups in this space: I super admire Robinhood and N26. I use them both and have nothing but good things to say about my time with them. I'd love to work for either of them too

</comment><comment><USER110> If you're looking for a good liquid place to park cash and you don't have a Robinhood invite, check out Dollar Savings Direct. They currently pay 1.8% interest on their savings accounts.

<comment><USER111> Synchrony Bank, Goldman Sachs Bank, Barclays Bank, HSBC Direct pay 2.05%.

Ally Bank, American Express National Bank, Discover Bank pay 2%.

Google "high yield savings" for lists that are updated monthly.

However, this Robinhood offer is for a "checking" account, which while not actually a checking account, still offers the liquidity of one. Savings accounts have a limited number of monthly transfers you're allowed, and you can't use one with a debit card as your main payment account.

<comment><USER110> Wow, it's crazy how sometimes search queries have a "magic" quality to them. I spent a good 1-2 hours trying to find the place with the best rate when I discovered Dollar Savings Direct, but never came across a list like the one you find when searching for "high yield savings".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER112> While 3% is a good deal, there have been internet-only banks for quite some time now, all of whom look pretty much like this. Radius and Axos are two examples that have been around for a while.

<comment><USER113> It's not very common on checking accounts though, even for online banks. 3% interest on online savings though is a different story!

<comment><USER4> Is it really? I search for the best interest rates on savings accounts fairly regularly and I haven't seen 3% since the Great Recession. Radius only offers 2.05% and Axos a mere 1.3%. A quick survey reveals a handful of places offering 2.25%, and I don't see anything higher.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER114> accompanying commercial cringe level over 9000 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f48SglGrpEg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f48SglGrpEg)

</comment><comment><USER115> I'm sure there is a catch. Normally whenever banks offer good interest rates there is some maximum amount you can invest, or it's only valid for a year, or etc. etc. etc.

</comment><comment><USER116> It seems like RH is positioning themselves to become the provider of choice for all things financial to consumers. It'll be interesting to see how that evolves.

</comment><comment><USER117> Is there any way to get cash out? I used Simple for years, and it was great but for the handful of times I needed a thousand dollars in cash.

</comment><comment><USER118> Anyone know of similar (short term) rates over here in Europe? Gotta be lucky to snatch up 1% for the first 6 months after signing up...

<comment><USER119> Also looking for something similar to Robinhood in Europe

<comment><USER120> FreeTrade in UK is mostly the same. By the way, the transaction is not always free: it is only free of commission if the operation is delayed until 4 PM (when all batched operations of multiple customers are processed).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER121> You can move up the list by aliasing like firstname.lastname@example.com, firstname.lastname@example.com, email@example.com etc :/ I expected validation.

</comment><comment><USER122> Robinhood has never posted its AUM. Are they going to try to count checking balances as brokerage balances?

</comment><comment><USER123> Do they offer paper checks? I still have need to send out paper checks from time to time.

</comment><comment><USER124> They are paying more than treasury rates, aside from the 30 year.

</comment><comment><USER125> 3% checking is huge, it beats all saving accounts out there.

</comment><comment><USER126> So, Robinhood is following the steps of E*Trade?!

</comment><comment><USER127> Can't even unsubscribe from their emails ugh.

</comment><comment><USER128> How would they make money on this?

</comment><comment><USER110> *invite only

</comment><comment><USER129> Robinhood has a horrible track-record for support.

People routinely have their money stuck in Robinhood with no response from support.

Cannot recommend using them.

<comment><USER70> Exactly. "Lean 300-person staff ..."

<comment><USER129> Crazy. The current organization I work for has easily over 1000 people customer support agents working 24/7\. Large home heating oil provider in the US.

Most calls are "where's the driver" and has honestly been partially automated but older clients still like to call.

Either way, it takes humans to make sure the 600k customers don't fall through the cracks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER130> The flour company?

</comment><comment><USER131> People still have checking accounts? In 2018? And that's a completely serious question.

I literally haven't seen a check used anywhere the last 25 years. I doubt any place I frequent would accept one.

In fact I don't know a single bank which issues checks...

I assume most university students these days wouldn't even know what a check was, if given one.

So where is the market? The past? I mean... you'd need a time machine to use these, right?

<comment><USER132> What country do you live in?

In America, the barebones basic place to keep your money is referred to as a 'checking account'.

<comment><USER131> Norway. We just call a generic bank account a bank account.

Why bring in the term "checking" if it's not related to checks? I'd call that being intentionally confusing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER133> "These fees like overdraft fees — they're not fees millionaires are paying. It's ordinary folks paying. It's actually more expensive for those that have less money and it's cheaper for those that have more money. We think that isn't right and we think that's bad business" Bhatt gripes.

</comment><comment></comment><comment>====

It's been pretty good business for many banks for years. ???</comment>


Bay Area Doctors Quit Medicine to Work for Digital Health Startups - <AUTHOR> http://ww2.kqed.org/science/2015/07/17/increasingly-young-bay-area-doctors-leave-medicine-for-digital-health/

<comment><USER2> None of the people quit medicine. They just chose to have a greater impact by not seeing patients.

Doctors who see patients are effectively professional laborers. Their impact is limited primarily to the patients they see.

Doctors who step off the patient treadmill can contribute to health in ways that affect more people than they could if they were just seeing individuals.

<comment><USER3> IMHO, a trained professional who can effectively diagnose and treat someone's medical condition, from something serious like cancer to minor like skin rash made a bigger difference in that person's life than someone who improved seconds off that person's "e-commerce checkout funnel" or delivered more "personal targeted ads" or even more improved "electronic medical patient records retrieval and storage" for that matter.

<comment><USER4> You should measure this statistically in terms of lives impacted. For instance, a service matching patients to clinical trials could have a massive impact. Ad tech that connects donors to allow free delivery of clean water. It's a false dichotomy to say such work is not impactful.

Good, intuitive portable emergency records would save millions of lives. Checklists (as pioneered by airlines) save lives in medicine. Is a good collaborative checklist technology not up to this standard?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The title is a little misleading in my opinion, as the article is describing new med-school graduates.

</comment><comment><USER6> Mike Judge's "Silicon Valley" show hits closer to reality everyday.

</comment><comment><USER7> How much of this is caused by the absurd economic pressure in the Bay Area?

<comment><USER8> The median lifetime earnings of a practicing doctor are much higher than a med school graduate working in digital health.</comment></comment>


Show HN: mobile ID card for Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://linkstore.ru/fbcard/

<comment><USER2> How about a picture of an example before I give my Facebook info away to yet another app developer?

<comment><AUTHOR> The process pictured here: [http://servletsuite.blogspot.com/2010/08/mobile- id-card-for-...](http://servletsuite.blogspot.com/2010/08/mobile-id-card-for- facebook.html)

And you does not give actually your info away. Mashup does not store your data - it just links to your FB profile</comment></comment>


[infographic] Anatomy of a Crypto Nut - <AUTHOR> http://m.imgur.com/a/RTD78 <comment><USER2> Can't help feeling that they missed the most important part - Balls of steel, for when your favourite coin crashes and you know you must hodl!

<comment><USER3> I think they put it mildly as spine ___</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why can thepiratebay's URLs be used for redirecting but not hosting? - <AUTHOR> The torrent-hosting site thepiratebay is constantly changing TLDs. Right now it's thepiratebay10.org, but its previous URL at thepiratebay.rocks still redirects to the new one.<p>How can it be that the .rocks url needed to be moved on from, but can still be used for forwarding? I don't understand how the game works. I would have thought that if it had been seized, they wouldn't be able to use it at all. And if it hadn't been seized, why move on and forward to another one? <comment><USER2> That's a hard question because it involves the laws of several different countries. There probably isn't a single answer.

Part of it likely relates to indirection. Hosting illegal content, vs linking to illegal content, vs redirecting to a site that links to illegal content are all increasing levels of indirection.

A country may wish to take down illegally hosted content, but not want to take down indirect links.</comment>


Can You Ever Be Too Smart for Your Own Good? Effects of Cognitive Ability - <AUTHOR> https://psyarxiv.com/rpgea/ <comment><USER2> Flowers for Algernon? [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_for_Algernon](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_for_Algernon)</comment>


Show HN: Avoiding distractions with /etc/hosts - <AUTHOR> Last week I discovered slither.io, and it nearly ruined me. If you don't know what it is, turn around and continue about your day. However, if you've had the unfortunate luck of stumbling upon it, please read on... I've logged countless hours attaining leader board status to display my politically antagonizing username only to be killed by some punk name joey. The glow of dead snakes clouds my vision when I'm not playing this terribly terribly addicting game. My family looks at me with distain when they see me playing it. My work is suffering, my personal life non existent.
Today is the day I killed slither.io
According to toggl, it took me 2 hours and 17 minutes to do so (including this post). If you too suffer from an addition to slither.io or any other web based distraction (perhaps even hn?) my solution is available to you for the low low cost of the time it takes you to edit a txt file.
Open up /etc/hosts in your favorite text editor (vim of course) and add the following...

  126.96.36.199 slither.io
 Windows users (do they still exist?), you are on your own. Beside you probably need a good distraction to avoid bashing your computer with a hammer the next time that pleasant little paperclip tells you what to do.
Upon future visits to slither.io you will be greeted with a friendly reminder that you are not working. Your life will be saved. <comment><USER2> Yep, I keep a bunch of distracting sites in my /etc/hosts file (slither.io included) and even wrote a script to quickly block them all [1] ... but of course don't have a script to unblock them :)

[1]: [https://gist.github.com/shmay/f09c0ce1c9f36064f7dc12b0b2331c...](https://gist.github.com/shmay/f09c0ce1c9f36064f7dc12b0b2331c78)</comment>


Performance Tuning PostgreSQL - <AUTHOR> http://www.revsys.com/writings/postgresql-performance.html <comment><USER3> After working with PostgreSQL for many years, my best advice (for repeated queries, e.g. often hit Web app queries) is to make sure they all use indexes and all the indexes fit in memory.

You can get sizes from: SELECT relname,relfilenode,relpages*8/1024 AS MB FROM pg_class ORDER BY MB DESC LIMIT 10;

Newer versions avoid bloat better, but it can still happen if you don't vacuum full, which you don't because of downtime implications. So every now and then it is good to recopy everything in.

</comment><comment><USER4> The guts of the article: give your DB lots of RAM for its cache, prepare your statements, normalize your tables.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think the article does a decent job of explaining how important properly written SQL is to the health of an application.

I disagree with the notion that you should rely on your hardware or juice up your system to gain performance. This should be a last resort only after ensuring that you have well written SQL running on a properly laid-out database.*

*caveat: Hardware can sometimes be cheaper than paying somebody to write SQL statements the right way.

Edit: changed "can" to "rely"

</comment><comment><USER6> There are another great tutorial about performance tuning from IBM - <USER2> Dynamic Server Performance Guide - all those ideas are discussed in that volume.

By the way, Informix Dynamic Server itself is an advanced and very stable product. From version 7.30 which was released almost a decade ago it offers advanced functionality with low resource consumption. (No bloated java stuff and other buzzwords).

It was a collection of multithreaded apps written in portable c++ which were purchased by IBM for $1bn.

I personally had run several big installations for some chain of retail stores in 2000, when all those magazines were never mention linux and informix as enterprice solution.

Today Informix was resurected by IBM which once decided to discontinue it in favour to support its DB/2 monster.

<comment><USER7> i'm curious why this was downovted. the author seems to have personal experience when sharing his opinion...so doesn't seem like bad spam to me.

<comment><USER8> Seems off-topic to me.</comment></comment></comment>


The Case for a High Minimum Wage - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/opinion/sunday/the-case-for-a-higher-minimum-wage.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0

<comment><AUTHOR> 1) These are not teenager summer jobbers, Avg age is 35; most work full time; more than one-fourth are parents; and, on average, they earn half of their families' total income. 2) This is an old debate since 1968 - $10.10 an hour by 2016 (also adjusted to 2013 dollars) would lift the minimum to just above its real value in 1968. 3) Doesn't hurt employment

</comment><comment><USER2> It's just a shame it's not spread out over a longer period of time so business can adjust more slowly. Most service business will be effected if their labor costs go up by 30%.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [http://s4.epi.org/files/2013/EPI-top- charts-2013-11.png](http://s4.epi.org/files/2013/EPI-top-charts-2013-11.png)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.epi.org/publication/top- charts-2013/](http://www.epi.org/publication/top-charts-2013/)</comment>


Redis, from the Ground Up - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mjrusso.com/2010/10/17/redis-from-the-ground-up.html <comment><USER2> "Lists, sets, etc. are more fundamental to computer scientists than relational database tables, columns, and rows."

That does not ring true to me. I'm curious what his data source for that claim is.

<comment><USER3> If I'll ever meet Aliens I'm sure lists, sets, hash tables, and trees are in their CS books as well. But I bet their mainstream DB model may really be different than our relational one.

Edit: I reflected a bit more on the issue. It seems like that our mainstream DB model is clearly due to the kind of applications computers were mainly used for when the DB technology was developing: business application programs.

Imagine a DB technology emerging instead in completely different scenarios, like social applications where you need to update the status of users in a chronological way. Or a DB designed where most softwares had to deal with geo locations... as you can see the DB model is much more an ad-hoc affair.

A DB modeled after the fundamental data structures like Redis may not be the perfect fit for everything but should be able to model any kind of problem eventually without too much efforts, and with a very clear understanding of what will be needed in terms of storage and access time.

<comment><USER2> > If I'll ever meet Aliens I'm sure lists, sets, hash tables, and trees are in > their CS books as well. But I bet their mainstream DB model may really be > different than our relational one.

I actually doubt that. The relational database model (relational algebra/calculus, tuples, etc.) is a mathematical model. I would expect aliens to have essentially the same model, actually, just like I'd expect them to have the same set theory we do. They're equally as basic.

<comment><USER3> I don't agree: the relational model is a pretty specific and ad-hoc idea that can be mathematically modeled using trivial math structures. For sure they could understand it in a second and recognize this as part of their math, but will their mainstream database systems be modeled after the _same_ model? I doubt it.

Instead I would expect to see lists, hashes, trees, and most of our sorting algorithms in their code as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Redis' internal design typically trades off memory for speed. For some workloads, there can be an order of magnitude difference between the raw number of bytes handed off to Redis to store, and the amount of memory that Redis uses._

What are the circumstances that make this kind of tradeoff worthwhile?

A generic Key-Value store, say Kyoto Cabinet, is pretty fast and you can configure its cache to be huge if you need it. Does reconstructing and using a list/set/hash take that much time?

Edit: Is the "order of magnitude" here greater or less than the extra space that keeping a b-tree index in memory would take? Is it doing something akin to that or a completely different thing?

<comment><USER3> The tradeoff is especially worthwhile because we export complex data structures (I wrote a great deal of articles about this, please check the latest at antirez.com), but this time I'll try to provide a proof by paradox: what you are saying here is that memcached may be replaced with TC from the point of view of performances, if you add an LRU expiry, that I think it's not true.

<comment><USER4> I hope this didn't come off as a criticism. I was simply trying to understand what Redis does.

I'm using Kyoto cabinet to serialize various hashlist-based-classes and I'm wondering what bottlenecks etc. I might encounter are. I'll take a look at your site.</comment></comment></comment>


Decensoring Hentai with Deep Neural Networks - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/deeppomf/DeepCreamPy <comment><USER2> I believe "Image Inpainting for Irregular Holes Using Partial Convolutions" has been superseded by "Free-Form Image Inpainting with Gated Convolution", especially for interactive use cases?

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.03589.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.03589.pdf)

[http://jiahuiyu.com/deepfill2/](http://jiahuiyu.com/deepfill2/)

I think the most interesting part of this project would be generating the dataset. That is _a lot_ of manual redrawing of vaginas/penises. Or the reverse, where you find already decensored stuff and add realistic censorship yourself. Either way, a lot of time will be spent tagging genitals to build a large enough dataset to make NN techniques work...

<comment><USER3> It's not clear to me that you'd actually need to manually label individual images for training. The work of detecting and marking the censored regions is left to the user, so the model just needs to be good at inpainting. There are probably enough specialized sites to get a decently-sized training set with little effort beyond writing a crawler.

<comment><USER4> I suggested that to deeppomf a while ago (I was thinking of simply using unlabeled anime images from [https://gwern.net/Danbooru2017](https://gwern.net/Danbooru2017) with random area deletions to simplify the model & training process as much as possible) and his belief is that because genitals are such a small fraction of any images, and the rest of images vary so much while genitals are a fairly small narrow domain, a generic inpainting/denoising CNN will learn to inpaint pretty much anything else possible and neglect genitals specifically.

Presumably if you trained a _really_ big inpainting CNN a _lot_ , it would learn genitals (along with everything else), but it's understandable that he would try a much more targeted approach.

<comment><USER3> So do you know what exactly the model was trained on? Unless I missed it, there's no training code in the repo, or any other indication of how data was prepared.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure. I suggested Danbooru2017, as I mentioned, and I thought he was using it, but double-checking his Reddit comments he seems to imply he's using a custom private dataset only at this point. Maybe he hand-extracted a lot of censored/original pairs from various places.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I predict that the porn industry will be the first industry to suffer mass unemployment due to AI.

Phase I: Deep learning combined with realistic physics simulation will eventually replace human actors. At some point amateurs can record their movements, then use variational autoencoders to improve their features (bigger boobs, thinner waist, smooth skin) and replace professionals. This is 'Uber phase' for porn and drives down the wages.

Phase II: Eventually AI can mimic complete scenes and adjust the 'plot' to the current state of the observer. Tight sexual biofeedback loop will form.

Phase III: The rapture of the nerds. Fully interactive VR + toolset. In the context of the Fermi paradox, Phase III is the Great Filter.

\----

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter)

<comment><USER6> Porn has always been the earliest adopters of technology. While porn actors may be individually replaced by deep agents, actual porn sales will do fine, especially since extremely targeted pornography will be in everyone's budget.

A market for verifiable human pornography will exist alongside the new porn.

Also, have we already dubbed virtual ML pornography "deep throat"?

<comment><USER7> I thought it was deep fakes?

<comment><USER6> Deep facials

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Gotta give them some credit, that is a brilliant name.

<comment><USER9> Next up in deep learning for porn augmentation: TenseHerFlow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Finally, a use case for Deep Neural Networks that we actually need as a society!

<comment><USER11> I wouldn't say _need_ per se, since this is something that can and has been done in other ways already, but it's at least a use case with positive, rather than negative, value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Saw this a few days ago. It could use some work for mosaic censors but bar censors looked pretty good. I heard it was just some guy on /g/ who said he would make it and then actually did it, so I'm pretty impressed.

</comment><comment><USER13> There should be NSFW examples in the Readme. I saw some practical (NSFW) examples on 4chan and it doesn't seem to work very well. Most hentai doesn't contain simple lines and blobs covering homogenous skin area. There is detail under those areas that the algorithm does not reproduce at all.

<comment><USER14> On the contrary, the examples I saw on /h/ looked pretty impressive for the most part.

<comment><USER13> Well, I guess we have different definitions of impressive. The de-censored areas did not reproduce genitalia properly at all.

<comment><USER14> The original illustrators of plenty of hentai do not reproduce genitalia properly at all, if we're being honest.

<comment><USER13> I fail to see how that is relevant to the discussion. I'm saying that unblur(blur(x)) !== x. Whether or not x === y is not important here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Are there any more examples? Removing a few lines doesn't seem that impressive and can be done with the PhotoShop pattern tool without any fancy neural net.

<comment><USER16> More examples and commentary found here: [https://boards.4chan.org/g/thread/68220714#p68220714](https://boards.4chan.org/g/thread/68220714#p68220714)

Edit: should have mentioned NSFW

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> At least for the most common forms of obfuscation, pixellation and fuzz, why do you need AI for this? It seems conceptually simple to interpolate from several similar but moving frames, how a small obfuscated feature travelled across a huge pixel boundary to cause the small change in the entire oversized pixel.

You'd need I, be it AI or the normal kind, to invent a guess from a single frame. But watch frames that each differ a little over time, and you should be able to deobfuscate pixellation and fuzz with plain math.

Conceptually simple. Not saying I could knock it out over the weekend, just that there doesn't seem to be a mystery about how to proceed that puts it into "throw some ai at it and see if anything happens by ai magic" territory.

</comment><comment><USER18> The project name is GOLD

</comment><comment><USER19> I wonder how this deals with the stippling seen in black and white printed pages. As someone familiar with digital drawing/editing, any slight imperfection in the pattern becomes super obvious and it's even worse with stippled gradients.

I'm sure it'll be a useful tool with refinement, but this is still a solution to an artificial problem. There's no reason for Japan's current censor laws to exist in 2018.

<comment><USER14> FAQ says they currently make no attempt to deal with that and it straight up won't work if you try.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is exactly why AI was needed (and subsequently created) in the first place!

</comment><comment><USER21> This is genius. Give the network a bunch of photos with a persons' face censored (donald trump, for example). What would it replace the face with?

<comment><USER22> _What would it replace the face with?_

Judging by the examples, correctly-coloured yet featureless skin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder what will happen when neural networks can generate illegal content, like child pornography.

<comment><USER24> It will vary by country. In a lot of Europe and the US the content will still be illegal. In Japan it won't be. At some point the issue is going to come down to what you want to spend manpower and money fighting, people who actually endanger and harm children, or people who use computers to emulate it. It might not be a very clear cut thing though, because I frankly wouldn't be shocked to find out that the overlap between people who want pornography of real and simulated children is significant.

Where it might be a little more clear cut is feeding the market that clearly exists for "teen" porn, which is currently filled by 18+ actresses. I suspect a non-trivial percentage of the non-child-abusing population would consume simulated 16 year old porn without ever considering the real thing. In that case you might see some changes.

Reply edit It's already outlawed. In the US for example pornographic _drawings_ of children are outlawed. In the same way it's illegal to try and sell cocaine stimulants, it's illegal to try and sell child pornography simulations. I doubt the A.I. itself would be illegal, just its output.

<comment><USER23> But how would you outlaw it? A neural network is simply a set of coefficients, would certain coefficient combinations be illegal? It's an interesting question.

PS: I am obviously against child pornography, I'm just curious about the implications of being able to generate illegal content and how governments would deal with it.

<comment><USER25> How is cp illegal now? Each image is just 1s and 0s on your drive. It's really just an illegal number.

<comment><USER23> That's pushing it too far. An image might be represented as 1s and 0s but what it represents is a "real world event" which actually happened. If it was stored on magnetic tape instead of on a hard drive it would still represent the same thing. It's what the event represents (child abuse) which is illegal.

However, a neural network represents a mathematical model, not a specific "real world event". Although I suppose you might argue that since the dataset required to generate it would be illegal, it is illegal?

<comment><USER3> In most Western countries, the content can be illegal independent of the real- world event being legal or not, or even if there's no real-world event at all (i.e. fictional depictions). It's not illegal for a teenager to pose in the nude, but it might be considered illegal for them to take a photo of themselves and post it on the internet.

I think linking illegal depictions to illegal events would be saner, but that's not how it currently works.

<comment><USER23> Interesting. Yeah I agree that it would make sense for the link to be clear.

Come to think of it, a couple of years ago there was this app called FaceApp which came out which used neural networks to modify selfies in funny ways (like making you older/younger/of the opposite sex).

I wonder if anyone has ever run a pornographic image with the "younger" filter in the app. Would that be illegal?

<comment><USER26> Under some jurisdictions, I imagine so, since even purely computer-generated images are illegal, and there are other laws which criminalise purely drawn material. It may hit a gray spot in the law, but I doubt a judge would have trouble interpreting the existing law. This is in reference to English and Welsh law, by the way. The exact wording of the law concerns a depiction of someone who "conveys the predominant impression of a child".</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple Google Contact Tracing API – need for interoperability and standardisation - <AUTHOR> https://email@example.com/covid-19-tracker-apps-and-apple-google-contact-tracing-api-ed9983ea049a <comment><USER2> Some of this seems to overcomplicate matters. DP-3T for example (in the centralized setup) suggest in the whitepaper you linked to simply upload data to the health authority backend of the countries you visit. Having a single health authority registry sounds impractical.

At the very least, if you want this to gain any traction in the EU, please amend this specification to include a way to get a single users data back out by revocation or deletion.

Sidenote: What's with all the GraphQL? Do the data formats being exchanged here really warrant that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here:

Uploading diagnosis keys to health authorities backends of each realm you've visited is unfortunately not a trivial requirement. To prevent fraud and pranksters health authorities would need define a trusted set of apps, which requires a complicated process or architecture. But a trusted set of apps in itself won't prevent fraud. The critical transaction is the push of keys after a positive diagnosis which needs to be secured extra and the trust propagated to other health authorities. Our approach reduces the complexity by focusing on the securing the push by the proposed signed one time token.

The proposed solution tries to be compatible with the Contact tracing API. In terms of GDPR the sensitive data set could be the diagnosis keys and to some extend the geohashes. However both data sets are aggregated and anonymized so that a contact service backend provider can't match it with a specific user. Hence we don't see significant limitations for the proposed solution by GDPR in the EU.

The proposed solutions assumes that there won't global standardized apps. Even the EU struggles to standardize it's efforts and a frictioned set of tracking apps might be reality. We think that this will limit the effectiveness of tracking as soon as travel restrictions are reduced and shall be addressed in an early stage of development.

We use the SDL capabilities of graphQL to define the required mutations, queries and types as technical but platform agnostic documentation of the proposed interfaces.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> hope the apple/google PMs take it into consideration, seems like a valid enhancement to me</comment>


Ask HN: What app do you use for Podcasts? - <AUTHOR> iOS 9 has ruined the default Podcast app for me. I subscribe to around 50 podcasts and then I cherry-pick the episodes I want to listen to and add them to 'On-the-go'. Now that the playlist functionality is essentially gone I am looking for an alternative. <comment><USER2> I've tried quite a few and have to admit that Overcast has been the best for me. You should give it a try: [https://overcast.fm/](https://overcast.fm/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Hate to break it to you - they're all shit, even Overcast.fm. I'm using Soundcloud. Its not ideal but then what is?</comment>


Fortune Profiles a 14-year-old 419 Scammer - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/05/29/8378124/

<comment><USER2> My favourite 419 eater story: <http://www.419eater.com/html/john_boko.htm>

You don't have to read it (although it is hilarious), just check the pictures :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> And here is the corresponding music video where they speak about the 'business'. "Yahoozee" refers to the scam business.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQ1YLL9mvBU>

</comment><comment><USER4> I actually received a 419 scam in the _post_ the other day; it was sent from the UK. I thought 419ers had entirely switched to the internet, but apparently not. I don't know how they got my address though, I can only assume it's because of my business being listed in the public directory.

</comment><comment><USER5> Many of these scams involve lonely Americans who are convinced to ship the stolen products overseas after they are purchased and shipped with stolen card numbers. These Nigerians are targeting the lonely, dumb and Internet connected in American and using them to steal everyone's money. Comforting.

<comment><USER6> You'll be surprised by the kind of people scammed up in this mess ... preachers, accountants, soccer moms etc..

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't really have sympathy for scam victims. a fool and his money...</comment>


The Weird Rise of Cyber Funerals - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.co.uk/article/cyber-funerals <comment><USER2> Huh, that's kind of a cool concept. Now I'm wondering if we're ever going to have regular visits with "Cyber" doctors that survey your online "condition" and make recommendations for "healthier online living".</comment>


Ruling Is Victory for Drug Companies in Promoting Medicine for Other Uses - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/04/business/ruling-backs-drug-industry-on-off-label-marketing.html?_r=0

<comment><AUTHOR> conversely, this also means if:

drug A treats disease B with + outcomes

and

drug A treats diseace C with + outcomes

They rename the drug A'

Drug A and Drug A' differ in price by a multiple.

This just seems wrong.</comment>


WOW Alert - A jQuery plugin to override native alert() method - <AUTHOR> http://thiagovian.github.io/wow-alert/

<comment><USER2> That page doesn't implement the single method plugin it's supposed to be informing us about.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry baxer001, I did not understand your point.</comment></comment>


Chasing the man who caught the storm - <AUTHOR> https://longreads.com/2018/04/11/chasing-the-man-who-caught-the-storm-an-interview-with-brantley-hargrove/ <comment><AUTHOR> It's kind of hard to explain but tornadoes are both scary as hell but magical. I never chased one but have been out walking farmers fields in my previous career as an agronomist and seen a few come down. Almost every instinct in your body says run yet you stand there for a moment dumbfounded at the sheer beauty of the beast.</comment>


Show HN: Espeakui – a text-to-speech interface with mplayer-like bindings - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/asrp/espeakui <comment><AUTHOR> This project is related to a "life hack" of sorts where you get to process more information by listening to it read aloud. In this case its by a computer using the espeak speech synthesizer. One way is to skim text by setting the speech rate rather high and pause/slowdown if anything catches your attention.

However, sending large amounts of text to espeak is too fragile. If you miss a bit you have to restart the entire thing. If some parts are uninteresting its not possible to skip through it. But large amounts of text is where espeak is really useful. An audio/video player's interface on the other hand _is_ very good for playback. So I made this, a TTS with (some of) mplayer's playback interface.

So I made this. It has evolved quite a bit with my personal use and I now use this much more than anything else I've made. This also means there are some leftovers when I thought the interface would go in a different direction. There's surprisingly little information about designing audio interfaces that I could find (so that I'd have a better chance of getting it right on the first few tries).</comment>


Open Source Access Management, SSO and Identity Management Platform - <AUTHOR> http://www.openidentityplatform.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello, guys, we would like to introduce an open source platform to provide SSO and Access and Indentity Management. They initially developed by Sun Microsystems, then supported and maintained by ForgeRock, but then ForgeRock closed source code, so we continued to maintain and develop this software by community</comment>


Show HN: Byteconf React, free remote React conf streaming on YouTube [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEeZLM1XVLI <comment><AUTHOR> hey all! byteconf is a two-day remote React conference streaming for free on youtube. ton of great speakers – kent c. dodds, ali spittel, shawn wang, and many others. we're about halfway through day one and the reception so far has been awesome. tune in!

<comment><USER2> Will the individual talks be packaged into separate videos?

<comment><USER3> I think they've said everything will be up on youtube and their site in the next week or so</comment></comment></comment>