MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: FLOX – C++ framework for building trading systems
by eeiaao | 2025-06-02 11:46:10+00:00
Finished my trading infrastructure project over the weekend - it’s called FLOX. Built in pure C++ (uses C++20 features), it’s a modular framework for building HFT systems, trading infra, market data feeds, or even something like a TradingView clone.

Everything is open source: https://github.com/eeiaao/flox Docs: https://eeiaao.github.io/flox/

There are tests and benchmarks to keep it stable. Might add JS engine support later for scripting strategies.

Open to feedback and contributions.
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-06-02 11:46:15+00:00
Because the language of the week changes often, and learning can be done by solving the problems of today instead of rewriting software into a version that will never be used. I mean... who still uses all the rewrites to ruby?

Even emacs was rewritten to rust ( https://github.com/remacs/remacs ), many hours were spent, and the last actual code commit was 5 years ago.... why not spend that time by making the "normal" emacs better? Or make something new in rust?
by energy123 | 2025-06-02 11:46:40+00:00
A lot of people say crypto bubbles are evidence of inefficiency but just because the moves are craze driven doesn't mean there's a profit opportunity, and it doesn't mean that historical price data can be used to predict future price data. It's common to conflate "market doesn't follow economic fundamentals" with "market inefficiency" but afaik those are two different concepts.
by BoxFour | 2025-06-02 11:46:45+00:00
> Bad term. If I get employed as a quantitative trader on Jane Street after completing a philosophy major am I underemployed because I'm not writing papers on ontology?

No, not by the common definition of underemployment. You're not over-qualified to work at Jane Street and presumably you want to work there.

But it would be worth tracking if you wanted to work in academia and ended up at Jane Street. It's about measuring labor demand vs. supply, because labor supply is difficult to measure over time (because people don't just sit forever waiting for a job in their field to open).

> Underemployment as "not working as many hours as you'd like" is the standard definition

These are related concepts and tracked for similar reasons. You're "not working as many hours as you'd like at a job you're qualified for and would like to have". The number of hours you're working at that desired job is 0, and you're replacing it with some undesired job instead.
by k3vinw | 2025-06-02 11:47:52+00:00
This hits close to home after recently being laid off.

I believe in making yourself invaluable, but would caution against falling into a niche. Especially if you want to avoid getting caught up in a layoff. But as long as you have valuable skills you will be able to find other work. Some companies are better at hiring (talent acquisition) than others.
by giantg2 | 2025-06-02 11:48:29+00:00
"If this weeds out the people who are just there for the paychecks, it might actually be a relief to get back to teaching students who genuinely want to learn about computing."

It's not going to work that way. I was genuinely interested and took many high level electives. I felt the program was very good 15 years ago at the school I attended. I also got an MSIS at a different school, but feel that one was not any more advanced than BS, just a faster pace and weirdly less coding. I did well for years at my job. Now it looks like I might lose my job and probably won't get another IT one. I will probably end up working at Walmart or something.
by throw0101b | 2025-06-02 11:48:42+00:00
> […] a lot of top schools don't even really teach programming in their computer science programs. It's something you just pick up on your own.

"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes, biology is about microscopes or chemistry is about beakers and test tubes. Science is not about tools. It is about how we use them, and what we find out when we do."

* https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/04/02/computer-science/

* https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Computer_science#Disputed

Perhaps a trade school would be better if someone wants to focus on 'just' programming.
by api | 2025-06-02 11:48:47+00:00
A lot of human status is based on primate signaling, not merit or usefulness, nor kindness or trustworthiness. It’s based in the brain stem, not the neocortex.

I have met useless, dumb or insane, but charismatic people who can instantly be in charge of any room they walk into. It is not rational. It’s monkey stuff. One of them is currently the President of the USA, and truth be told I think most presidents have these qualities to varying degrees. (The current one is just a very pure example.)

That being said, it doesn’t always work. It tends to work best on people who are inexperienced or who have some emotional need for a parent figure. But that's a lot of people.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-02 11:49:10+00:00
Ironically, just yesterday I had a situation that made me change my mind on some of this; it convinced me that the world isn't ready for "AI results" in search in their current form.

Imagine: an impulsive person, suddenly facing the need to change the ownership structure of their mortgage, worried they'll have to pay a lot for this. A person who doesn't really know first thing about it. They enter a query in Google; because of their lack of domain knowledge, the query is missing one word. Without that word, the query matches two related but distinct kinds of ownership structures. Results for both come, and then AI summary happily blends them together. The person sees an explanation, panics, and shouts my ear off about the bad situation they've been put in by a third party. I'm confused (I know a bit more about this, but not much); they show me the phone.

I'm staring dumbfounded, looking at a seemingly nonsensical AI summary. But it's not the text that made me pause in shock - it's the fact that the other person took it as gospel, and yelled it at me.

Garbage in, garbage out, as they say. The way I see it now, the biggest problem isn't the garbage out that sometimes comes out of LLMs. The problem is the "garbage in" - specifically, the garbage that passes for thinking and communication among most of human population. An LLM may reason 100% correctly - it won't help when user supplies "wrong figures" without realizing it, and then acts on answer without thinking.

The world is not ready for systems that indulge people in their bullshit.
by einpoklum | 2025-06-02 11:49:19+00:00
There is another kind of useful-but-not-valued, and that's the person who does things that management ignores, or finds not worthy of investment of time, but inoculate against future trouble or enable other work, or make it considerably easier, down the line.

If you engage in that kind of work, it's not just that you'll not be recognized/valued, but rather - be thought negatively of, for doing that.
by ndriscoll | 2025-06-02 11:49:30+00:00
From your link:

> Interestingly, Americans report, on average, a weaker materialistic value orientation than Europeans (US average = 1.39, Europe average = 2.08 on a scale from 0 to 5)... However, in both continents, we find a positive association between inequality and materialism: the higher the level of income inequality is, the higher the level of materialistic values is as well.

This doesn't really dispute my understanding, which is that "luxury brands" like Gucci are what lower class poor people buy to feel rich; actual rich people (except specific groups like celebrities who even then might be getting paid to wear "luxury" items) generally do not buy these things. It could be that I grew up in AZ which is near the bottom on the materialism scale, but I've never known conspicuous consumption to be anything other than tacky. Except for SF techies, the rich people I've known have generally been penny pinchers.
by paxys | 2025-06-02 11:49:36+00:00
$80-100 is incredibly cheap for any mainstream tech device when you factor in design, manufacturing, marketing, shipping, software, support. eReaders are already sold at or below cost because companies are hoping that you will buy books to make up the difference. Wanting one for the price of a paperback so you can throw it away once you are done is absurd.

I got a Kindle Paperwhite for ~$100 in 2016 and still use it almost every day. Easily the best value gadget I have ever owned.
by bilbo0s | 2025-06-02 11:51:07+00:00
Well, essentially you have the language used in the class match the subject being taught.

Python gets language difficulty out of the way of learning a given algorithm. Bonus points for exacerbating the time issue when trying to introduce Big O timing notation. The kids can actually "feel it" in an in your face kind of way.

Systems, it's different, as you say.

Compilers. Different AI courses. And on and on. Each you may have legit reasons for using different languages.

The concern starts to grow when Python is being used across many courses to the exclusion of any other language or technology. That's the issue that's growing across CS departments right now. Couple that with kids who have no interest in learning the other languages on their own and voilá! You have an issue with uninterested kids graduating, but now they're also unprepared.
by steveBK123 | 2025-06-02 11:51:41+00:00
CT & NJ being top of the list points to the great NYC metropolitan wage premium though doesn't it? MA at #4 picks up Boston, MD at #5 picks up DC, etc.

CA probably nowhere on the list because its such a small state that any Silicon Valley premium gets diluted at the state level average.

I am not finding a clear definition of this index but it appears to be $saved/$income (or $saved/$living expenses) right? So 114% in CT dollars is probably way more than 102% Kansas dollars..

It's also worth noting the point I was making is - if you take a "one years NYC income in savings" amount of money and relocate to say, New Mexico.. the money goes a lot further than trying to do the opposite!
by hilbert42 | 2025-06-02 11:51:43+00:00
It's a great shame John Walker is no longer with us, he was a bright fellow (even though I thought his company's products were too expensive). I loved his Hacker's Diet book, a true techie's approach to dieting. Certainly worth a read if one's interested in such things.

No doubt those of us who've gravitated to this link like watching things that go bang so make sure you read Walker's link at the bottom of the Nitrogen Triiodide page to his article on FOOF—aka Dioxygen Difluoride (O2F2). Also, make sure you read the link in that page to Derek Lowe's blog in Science's site Things I Won't Work With.

Every chemist should read Lowe's blogs, they're not only informative but often entertaining. I've copied the FOOF link here for convenience (this truly is chemistry at the bleeding edge):

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-wor...
by bookofjoe | 2025-06-02 11:53:17+00:00
>quality audio book narrators often do consistent and distinct character voices, understand complex emotional states, and are capable of reacting to contextual clues and subtext.

The best experience I've ever had with audio books is John le Carré reading his early novels (not in public domain). He uses a different voice for each character and they are SO pulsing with life it's breathtaking.
by sfmz | 2025-06-02 11:53:58+00:00
My friend used to clip a dragon from the ren-fest onto his ear. Thinking like that you could clip a camera onto your ear and dashcam your life into the cloud.

Hardware-wise its got be a camera, bluetooth (pair w/ phone for cloud access), microphone. The human body doesn't offer a lot of options for stashing a dashcam. Wear around the neck, put into glasses, put it on the ear, or embed into clothing, whereas a watch doesn't work because its not facing the right direction.

Reminds me of how I think about last-mile transportation; the way the body works you can either ride something forward like a bicycle/scooter or sideways like a skateboard, you only get two options.
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-06-02 11:54:06+00:00
Markets aren't perfectly information-efficient. They're just _very_ information-efficient. So there's at least some room for non-luck-based strategies to outperform the market.

More important than information efficiency, is the subjective nature of investments, and the inter-sectoral complexity of the modern economy. There's lots of meaningful calculations you can do to predict the longterm value of a company, but massive and mostly unseen shifts in expectations happen regularly.

A fairly small number of people in Feb 2020 saw that 1/3 of students globally were suddenly home-schooled, and connected the dots to turn that into an ultra-strong signal to invest in Moderna.

Similarly, lots of people saw that Nvidia's CUDA granted it a near absolute-monopoly over anything that requires matrix multiplication. They were able to connect the dots to turn that into an ultra-strong signal that NVDA would turn from a relatively obscure company into a significant company.

Domain specialists have an edge over the aggregate-market within their narrow field of interest.
by abrookewood | 2025-06-02 11:54:07+00:00
Congrats on the launch. I think you should have some pictures or diagrams on the main page to better explain what it does - the demo is good, but people want to see something up front, not necessarily watch a video.

And think about renaming the "Bugger Agent" ... Bugger has a particular meaning in English that you won't like.
by simiones | 2025-06-02 11:54:28+00:00
While I agree with the gist of your argument, you should also note that "organizations that hire outside consultancies for urgent issues" is a self-selecting set of orgs with terrible coding practices. There are probably many more such orgs than GP would imagine, but they are not necessarily the norm, even though they are likely to represent the vast majority of what someone working for such a consultancy would see.
by giantg2 | 2025-06-02 11:55:01+00:00
Yeah, but I'd work that in the same way it's actually used - as a secondary language in one of the data related classes, such as a database course where you learn SQL, then have the students do calculations on in python. Or do it in one of the course that is used for introduction or non-CS students minoring in CS (like business majors). The real thing is that if you learn other stuff like Java, Python is super easy to pick up and doesn't need to be formally taught.
by flowerthoughts | 2025-06-02 11:55:19+00:00
> Alpha Factors incorporates 108 technical indicators and factors with their expressions, which are believed to possess predictive power regarding stock price movements.

Examples of the indicators are in Figure 15. The ablation studies in Table 4 suggest that market and news information made a much bigger impact than the magic indicators. Makes sense if the indicators are simple enough that the LLM can reproduce them without losing processing power.

I somewhat like that they used DJI and not SPX, but 2023 was a sideways bull year with DJI +12% and SPX +23%. One year is way too short of a study.

> Hardware: NVIDIA A5000 GPU x 4, AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3975WX CPU, 256 GB RAM

Seems approachable.

> The proposed TradExpert framework utilizes a Mixture of Experts (MoE) approach, where four LLMs are specialized in processing distinct sources of financial data. All these LLMs are based on the LLaMA-2-7B Touvron et al. (2023b) model and fine-tuned using the LoRA mechanism Hu et al. (2022)

Relatively small LLM.

Overall, this does seem like an interesting study, even for just comparing data sources.
by mrkramer | 2025-06-02 11:55:19+00:00
I tried to study IT(lighter version of CS) without any prior programming experience and our first programming language was Java because apparently with Java you "Write once, run anywhere". But when I saw Java's syntax, I was like....this is not happening. That was the golden age of mobile apps and our focus was on the mobile development since Web was not sexy anymore. I'm actually happy that I quit because all I heard were horror stories of Java's mobile development on Android. My interest is actually Web development and if I had to choose all over again I would rather learn JavaScript. I can only imagine and speculate how hard it is for someone with no prior CS and programming experience to learn computer architecture, assembly, C and C++ for the first time.
by JohnBooty | 2025-06-02 11:55:26+00:00
Perhaps a different monetization model would fix that. The ideal outcome of a dating app [...] means you won't need the app anymore.

I used to run a moderately profitable social site with a dating slant.

I get what you're saying. In a way, yeah: your ideal moneymaker is somebody who signs up for a $20/year recurring subscription and forgets about it for the next 30 years.

But that was not how I viewed things. There's always a fresh "supply" of people who are looking for connections.

Think of a college bar. You don't need people to become "lifer" customers. There are always new people coming into town.

In some senses, if you're running a "pure" dating site (ala Tinder, as opposed to something with more of a community/social slant) it's probably not even advantageous to have the same people hanging around the site indefinitely. Most people want to date local people, and they would like to see a constant supply of new local search results/recommendations rather than the same people over and over.
by ghaff | 2025-06-02 11:55:31+00:00
Totally. One consequence which I'm somewhat ambivalent about is that people with interest in engineering fields other than computer science may not be expected to have the degree of familiarity with the tools of the trade that budding computer scientists do. But, given the popularity of computer science as a major, it's probably inevitable to expect that freshmen at least in top schools have done at least some programming.
by rs186 | 2025-06-02 11:57:06+00:00
Great way to fool yourself.

Sure you might get a surprise 50% bonus during a layoff. So you work even harder and put your heart in the company because you feel "grateful" for the appreciation -- the company apparently values you a lot. Guess what? You might be the perfect guy to lay off in the next round (as soon as within a few months), whether because of your role/performance of the quarter/relationship with new boss or just no reason.

Good for you that it didn't happen like that. But plenty of people had such experience.

Which is why I never put more effort or emotion than necessary for my job. When I think I need to work overtime, or when I get frustrated about something/someone at work and keep thinking about it after work, I ask myself, what if I get laid off tomorrow? Then the answer becomes apparent.

It's funny that peasants tell each other the difference between "useful" and "valued". Capitalists can't get more of these. Executives are laughing in their chair reading this article.
by closewith | 2025-06-02 11:57:30+00:00
With respect, having lived across both continents, Europe is winning the real victory (as well as obviously the moral victory in as far as outcomes for its own citizens).

The United States is a cruel, dystopian nightmare of a market masquerading as a country. No amount of corporate success will save it from it's inevitable collapse as the working class awaken to their situation.
by esskay | 2025-06-02 11:57:55+00:00
You can also jailbreak most kindles. I picked up my first one a couple of weeks ago here in the UK and intentionally bought it from Argos (high street shop) rather than Amazon so that I'd stand more of a chance of the installed firmware being slighly older as the jailbreak currently available was patched in the latest version (apparently it happens a lot, someone just finds a new way around it).

Took about 20 minutes to have it jailbroken and KOReader installed, I can now wirelessly copy over books from Calibre on my Mac to the kindle and don't have to touch amazons storefront at all.
by zkmon | 2025-06-02 11:58:01+00:00
Well, all this sounds inspiring, motivational, puristic or platonic etc. But the reality hits. You are connected to the world around you. That means you need to make deals with it, interact with it, please it etc. The feedback (or the lack of it) from the world does affect you. If you don't care about the feedback, then there is no point in posting. Sing it in your shower. So you really expect some future fame. In more likelihood, it may not come. Does it affect you? I know, you have some belief that it will come. But is that belief rational and practical? Does it justify the investment you make right now?

Face it. Blogging, or for that matter any online creative content, is becoming extremely low-rewarding effort. First, no one pays for content any more. Next, they don't even have time to clap, or grasp the quality. And then, there is this AI slop.

About 30 years back, I spent days on an abstract art, perfecting it's shading using only an ink pen. It looked a bit geometric. When I showed it to my college hostel mates, they could not believe it was hand-made. Some of them claimed that they know the instruments which can be used to make it, and dismissed my entire effort.
by graemep | 2025-06-02 11:58:07+00:00
> E-Book platforms sometimes even directly support sending that mail.

I believe that stopped many years ago: https://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/baen-books-can-no-l...

Its not difficult but I think a lot of non-technical users will have trouble with it:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email/
by maccard | 2025-06-02 11:58:08+00:00
I realise “cheap” is in the eye of the beholder, but a new kindle is £95 today and is probably one of the best bang for buck spends for hours spent. I’m using my wife’s kindle from 2013 and other than a decade of cosmetic damage it works just as well as it did on release.

At a certain point them being “cheap” makes them disposable not accessible. If you can afford a few new books a year you can afford a new kindle. If you can’t, they are readily available for about 90 minutes of minimum wage work on eBay.
by Moomoomoo309 | 2025-06-02 11:58:21+00:00
I work at a fintech company doing Spring Boot, and the only python I've seen here is in some CI scripts (which I can see but do not have access to edit, we have a team that maintains CI). Everything else is Java, Kotlin, or JS for some websites, that's about it. I've heard the AI teams use python, but while pretty much all the devs in my team know python, we don't use it at all.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-02 12:00:37+00:00
FWIW, two days later, I kinda changed my mind about AI in search - or at least, "AI answers". They're going to (and probably already are) cause a lot of issues for a lot of people.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44157837

TL;DR: it's not the correctness that's the problem, but that AI is too good at making bad queries work. A regular person making underspecified query due to their ignorance, will get a sensible (and possibly correct) answer to a wrong question, and might try to act on it - where pre-AI, they'd get a mix of confusing result that would hopefully made them realize their query (and understanding) is wrong.
by Wilduck | 2025-06-02 12:00:51+00:00
Agree! I bought my kindle in 2016 and have read hundreds of books on it. The cost per book at this point is in the pennies. It's not like you have to buy a new device every book, or even every few years.

Also I was very confused by the assertion that ebooks are a niche market. By the authors math more than 20% of people in the UK use e-readers to read on a regular basis. That seems like a very healthy market to me!