Fair enough, you have a good point! My goal was to address this to someone who's considering starting a new job there maybe or who is curious about how things are internally but doesn't have visibility into it. Lots of people said they found it useful but I can certainly see why this can rub people the wrong way, and that's fine. If this helps at least one person, then I think it was worth it :)
You don't have to trust it. Just fork the code and deploy to your own heroku app.
I'm just proxying the calls through to the robinhood API. You can view the code on Github, server.js is what you're looking for.
The API is not exactly open yet, but it has been reverse engineered multiple times and Robinhood is aware of that.
So let's assume it is not a bug in HN, as other users are stating that it works for them. How do you expect them to help you with your problem? I ask because you said their attitude was wrong, but just curious to know how you think they should have addressed it. Also, the title is very presumptive, as already stated.
The freaky thing is that the YC rep appears, from these transactions, to have no idea how to communicate with the HN production database. (Perhaps the costs are so high that they simply refuse to do so.) They appear to have made no effort to check.
So for example they say "we can't authenticate you." That could mean one of two different things: it may mean "we can't verify that you are who you say you are," or else, "we can't change the system to reflect the fact that we have confirmed who you say you are."
In the former case, it's pretty straightforward to see that username `delan` has an `about` section which contains just one link, and has three times submitted posts of content on that domain name. Clearly they identify with the owner of that domain. And hey, the owner of that domain appears to now be contacting you, wanting access! So in this case, with less than five minutes' inquiry you can see that this is probably a legit request.
Since they say things like "well, maybe we don't have an email for your account?" rather than, "I checked and you forgot to set an email for your account," it seems rather like the latter -- they just don't have database or admin access, period. That sounds crazy, though.
It doesn't, but you are verifying that a) a bug actually doesn't exist b) showing the "customer" you have actually done something/investigated and not just replied with a standard email template.
I think it would be better if some semblance of effort was made to investigate the cause of the issue instead of repeatedly restating that nothing could be done.
