skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this is a great choice for you. Nobody in your target market will know that you bought a logo off the rack and had it tailored. They're just going to think you're so professional that you have a logo like a Microsoft product.

The median-quality logo here --- and I don't think this will give offense since you didn't do your own logo --- looks more professional than your current one.
The thing is, LL(1) is almost always all you need in practice. Left recursion doesn't buy you a lot more in practice than the loops I describe. But I also don't think PEGs are particularly elegant - I think the translation of LL(1) (including loops) to recursive descent is perfectly straightforward, and I think backtracking combined with memoization is a hack.

And for stuff that LL(1) can't handle, I think GLR is a better approach.
Great design, I don't see myself using it though, maybe a firefox plugin???
The Bible is not scripture that you can just link to a quote from to end debate, you know.
Thanks for the link - bookmarked for further reading, I wish I'd read this a lot earlier. This is why I love the internet - information empowers us all.
I'm not a professional trader, like yourself, but from what I've gathered over the last several years of HFT coming up in the news is that it is in fact a low-barrier to entry field. All you need is a decent quant, application designer, and some co-located machines as close as you can get them (and other easily acquired amenities.) So I could make a reasonable bet you could open a HFT firm with a couple hundred thousand, plus the talent. (And I've confirmed this with a few hedge fund guys, and they pretty much agreed.)

And I do completely understand the argument for liquidity: more transactions = more accurate price discovery. But I think problem here is that this entire field is black box, meaning property trading algorithms and trading patterns can and are used within the system. This can allow a trading AI to go out into the market place, look for pattens, and to create and cancel millions of orders within the fraction of a second.

I'm sure you know about the former Goldman Sachs programmer who was charged with theft by the FBI. It was totaled at around 32 megabytes of software code. Not very much. But Goldman insisted that if this code got out into the market it would be detrimental to their business and violate their trades secrets confidentiality clause. Not to mention Goldman's largest profit center in their business is their proprietary trading desk, which is heavily into HFT.

My contention is that if we are really interested in a utility that uniformly benefits the market, then let's have an open source platform that provides that, so we can verify that any of these firms aren't "front-running" their trades.

Thats my opinion. I think a lot of the debate over HFT is just filler, it doesn't matter. The guys who are hip to the scene are already making a killing on it now, and it may last a few more years before we begin to regulate.
A lot more rooftop than many of the other panoramas, lately. This appears to have allowed them to find and blur out peoples' faces.

Amusing thing - pan far right and sight down along the shadowed street in the center of the view. Look for the patch of sunlight a bit less than halfway up, at an intersection (apparently with the Rue de Tournon). Now, on the left side of the street just short of that intersection, look for a green, electronic sign - it will stand out.
I know all of that. My point is that the if/else problem really is an ambiguity (i.e. it is a language bug, not just a problem you have to get around in parsing), and problems similar to it crop up when your tool doesn't alert you to first/follow conflicts, in LL(1) parlance. That PEGs encode the implementation strategy inside the declarative grammar is a flaw, in my opinion, not a benefit.
Actually, I don't think my advance was unfair. I self published a book a couple years ago and it was a logistical nightmare. When you think about what a publisher actually does, it's really a daunting task.

I think there was a post here on HN about that recently, but I can't remember the link. The author who wrote it described pretty much the exact process I went through, even though I think he was working with another publisher...
How are you supposed to do it since you don't know the gender? Honest question. I am not a native speaker.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether this is "exploitation". I don't think they can disagree about the fact that it isn't a pyramid scheme. Words mean things.

I'm on the other side of the spec-work debate as you; I respect where you're coming from but disagree that designers should exist in a market that functions differently from all other professional services.

I also think that this new, designer-"friendly", less-exploitative approach is going to do more violence to the bill rates of graphic designers than spec work contests ever could.
Building Google Chrome extensions
Actually, you probably payed a hell of a lot more than that for your current cell phone. I don't know how it works in Europe, but in the US, when you let the carrier subsidize the phone, they're charging you a lot more than $520 cost of the N1 over the course of your 2 year contract.

On the other hand, if you buy the N1 at full price, Tmobile in the US has a set of unsubsidized plans (called "Even More Plus") that are a lot cheaper than the normal subsidized plans that they, and the other US carriers, usually offer.
Having a bad (derogatory, tease-worthy) name is not necessarily bad you can swing that to your advantage as you (or Cash at least) indicate.
You might post it to a Scheme related list:

http://www.wisdomandwonder.com/scheme
http://99designs.com/logo-design/store/1152

This is the Windows logo rotated 1/4 counter clockwise and skewed slightly...Hopefully they have some sort of way of reporting/dealing with issues like this (aka image stolen from somewhere else)
I believe there's occasional small ads for it on the Google home page.
Brillant. It is simple and intuitive. I love it :D A lil work needed on the implementation though; when I clicked on a link in the same site, it disappeared, the timer that is.
Thanks for the clarification, and you make a good point there about how a client who wants to pay $99 for a logo is likely to be a difficult client!
It looks like $99designs does designers a favour by allowing cheap/difficult clients to eliminate themselves from the client pool.
> most entries for logo contests on 99 designs were already templates

What's more relevant, there are a lot of quick-buck rip-offs created by simply copying a piece from http://logopond.com and tweaking it slightly. You buy one of these and you are on the hook for your name being dragged through the mud and for a copyright violation lawsuit.

Perhaps they have implemented a proper due diligence process for their $99 store, i.e. they do verify the authenticity and uniqueness of the design before accepting it for sale. If so, then great. If not, then just use http://brandstack.com which was the first place to let the designers sell their unused concepts.
> You make the assumption that they would trade. That assumption is only valid because of people like me.

You make the same assumption yourself, every time you trade. The entire purpose of high frequency trading is to beat others to good deals -- not to do a better job of discovering good deals.
Sure, you can get the point where you're placing trades for a couple hundred grand... as long as a lot of things fall into place for you. Writing your own apps? Unless you think you can get talent that is willing to roll the dice and possibly be out of a job in a couple months, you're looking at 12 months x the cost of those people... how much is that? $500k? This isn't framework-style assembly of components. If you want to be competitive, the SLOWEST things you can use are linux and C++.

Colocation agreements usually require a minimum commitment of 12-36 months... probably $10k/mo if you have some rudimentary failover and the like.

I'd say anyone who tries with less than 12 months and $500k to truly burn has 0 shot at success. And if you want to really do it right, you're looking at an order of magnitude more.
It looks like there's a "Report this logo" link at the bottom of the page
for every share I purchase "ahead of" a big order, a seller has been filled at the price he desired.

But they would have been filled at the price they desired if they sold directly to the big order, as well. The end effect of the hft systems is just to run up the big order to the max of what they're willing to pay, and take their profit as the difference between that max and the original offer (split up between however many of these things managed to make it over to the feeding frenzy before the real buyer got what they wanted).
Agreed. This isn't a problem for just Apple and Nokia, it is a problem for the entire industry. In fact, I'd argue that this should be less of a problem for Apple, because their products aren't necessarily as pricing sensitive as the Lenovo, Dell, and HPs of the world.

I think that there is a reason why other companies haven't done or published an audit like Apple... they don't want to know the results. If they knew the results, then they'd be obligated to do something about it.
Sealed bids against yourself could go well...
I'm betting that had this been available a year ago, one of these would be Patrick McKenzie's logos.

I sympathize with the general point, but you're false in the specifics. I am totally willing to buy custom design at 3rd world prices rather than trying to shave that even farther and getting something which is generic.

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/images/blog_logo.gif

I got three concepts done for the above from the same designer, and it cost me (checks records) $117 total. The two losing logos got shelved. Doing it the custom way let me get specify two things: that the BCC logo actually have a stylized bingo card on it (surprisingly hard to find in clip art -- trust me, I've looked) and that it use the blue/green color scheme I was going for.

But yeah, in general, design is too cheap these days for me to ever do a project without it. I kid you not, I have three applications to give conference presentations in the works at the moment and they all are getting custom logos. There is an 80/20 return to visual design and I want to get the 80 rather than wasting it.
Let me explain what I think the parent is getting at. Say there is a $20/share sell order registered on the exchange. Then another investor submits a $30/share buy order. As I understand it, at this point HFTs jump in, buy out the sell order at $20/share, and then resell the shares to fill the buy order at $30/share, pocketing a $10/share profit.

The question is, why can't the buy and sell orders be matched directly, allowing the buyer to pocket the discount off the price he was willing to pay, instead of the difference going to an HFT with access to the incoming order stream? What possible benefit is provided to the market by skimming off the difference like this?

The behavior I talked about above is one of the objections to HFT as it's currently practiced, and I'd like to know whether it reflects a misunderstanding.
There's a limited support for unit/functional testing in the Android SDK, but it's not well documented and rather cumbersome (IMHO). Maybe it'd be easier for someone with previous Java/Junit experience, but certainly haven't made much progress on figuring it out yet. Although there are a few projects (like robotium) that look like they might bring a decent testing environment to Android.
"Asking a VC to sign a NDA is tantamount to splitting 10’s at the blackjack table" - Funny.
Super mario bros on 8x8 led matrix
Too true. I considered using their logo contests when I was looking for a designer for my logo.
A quick browse through the current contests showed that most 'designers' had not even read the brief and were submitting generic logos that in no way reflected the company's aims. That was enough to make me realise that 99designs was a false economy.
Duplicate: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1192255 (2 days ago)
My intention wasn't to end the debate, but rather to steer it away from the substance-lessness that characterizes most debates about HFT.

That being said (disclaimer: I am a HFTer), this article is a pretty weak defense of HFT. Like others have pointed out it makes a lot of assertions not based on data/fact. However, I've yet to read a criticism of HFT that doesn't commit the same mistake (and I've read a lot of them).

For a defense of HFT that uses hard data I'd direct people here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1501135
Completely untrue. Pure speed games are "winner take most", and brutally difficult. It is very hard to win on speed.
This navigation is entirely unlike just about every other click-and-drag navigation that the rest of the internet seems to have standardized on. I find it extremely hard to use.
or a live wallpaper (not sure why I got down voted for my last comment... oh well)
In programming, ambiguity is bad! Explicitly encoding disambiguation rules in the grammar is a good thing, just like it's a good thing in functional pattern matching, in Prolog... I'd be interested to hear any reason why you would want to not disambiguate a grammar in any language designed to be computer-recognizable.
> And that’s not just a novelty.

Except it is, clearly.

Or I'm wrong and in the future everyone will wear t-shirts with QR-Codes linking to their Twitter streams at all times. Which would be really really lame if you ask me :p
How the New York Times and CNN try to keep up with the tech companies
Official Avatar DVD / Blu-Ray Release Date - 3D Release Date Still Unknown
Traces of the past: computer algorithm ‘reads’ memories
Ask HN: iPad File Sync?
I don't have a blog or anywhere else to put this, so I ask you: do you think the iPad will allow App Store apps to sync files with iTunes?

I ask this because iBooks (an app from the App Store) allows you to "add free ePub titles to iTunes and sync them to the iBooks app on your iPad" (http://www.apple.com/ipad/features/ibooks.html). Apple does have crazy restrictions, but I don't think they would use an API nobody else is allowed to touch.

I know this sounds fanboyish/rumorish, but it could open up a lot of app possibilities, such as letting users sync and view content Apple doesn't like.
Maybe. Humans are getting larger from one generation to the next, but we're still not as tall as our agricultural ancestors.
I'm surprised to see the recommendation to incorporate in Delaware.

Downsides to incorporating in Delaware:

1) You still pay full taxes in the state you are operating in (you don't get to avoid taxes by incorporating somewhere else).

2) If someone sues you, they can choose to sue you either in Delaware (forcing you to travel to Delaware to defend yourself), or your local jurisdiction. The Delaware courts can be friendly to business, simply because they are often not jury based, but since you're not operating there, they don't have to sue you in those courts. And, the person suing you gets to choose the place they are most likely to win in.

3) Many states will require you to register as a "foreign corporation", possibly for more money than just incorporating there.

Yes, you can structure your company more flexibly, but are you really using some complicated structure that is only allowable in Delaware?

Edit: Just in case I'm misinterpreted, I do think this is a valuable post as a whole.
so how do you win? my naive impression is that speed must play an important part, or it wouldn't be called high frequency.

(so speed is important to you, just as water is important to a fish; it may not be what you focus on, but that doesn't mean that it's not critical).
Going in places in a group of friends is the only way I know things also. In fact, asking a girl on a date almost certainly implies interest in her and even the chance of "hooking up" afterward. All this is on top of the apprehension of the formal interaction a date requires, which isn't appealing to either party in the least.

This is in the Western U.S., and I'm 23. I hoped that as I moved past college and into the "adult" world this would change but the fact that others have experienced it indicates that that may not be true... and I thought it was just me.
Sure--why don't you e-mail me: cynicalkane at gmail dot com
They're just going to think you're so professional that you have a logo like a Microsoft product.

If my designer gave me something which could pass muster at Microsoft or Apple, I would fire his ass and get something made for people who are scared of things that Microsoft and Apple make.
Thanks! My new homepage :)
There's now a followup blog post at http://www.makingstrange.net/2010/03/update-are-amazon-selle.... Amazon contacted her and offered the usual story (it was an inexperienced employee, various people screwed up, the issues involved have been escalated), and she's giving them the benefit of the doubt.
"fair wage" was a poor choice of words on my part. I didn't mean to imply that your payment was "unfair", but rather that minimum wage is to low (imo) for an advanced programming book.
I think that is pretty short sighted of you. The applications for this stuff expand way beyond simply linking to your facebook profile. Especially from a marketing perspective, these codes seem to have real potential for promotions, etc.
Pretty good articles. The blog is really nicely designed, too.
Love the simplicity of the idea (and the implementation too, for that matter). The cancel button, however, doesn't cancel.
also worth checking out is http://logoworks.com/ . They're more expensive (logo packages start at $300) but still cheap. They did my logo for http://www.flyingmachinestudios.com . I think Guy Kawasaki also has used and recommended them.
His list implies he's raising money and issuing options.

Although only the percentage ownership should matter, many employees react very differently to getting a tiny number of options at a relatively high strike price vs. a big whopping number of options at a miniscule strike price.
One other aspect of HFT that was not mentioned in the article is that HFTers often seek arbitrage opportunities. For example, the value of many ETFs such as SPY (i.e. an ETF tracking the S&P 500) are derived from the value of underlying securities. If the value of SPY versus the value of the underlying securities becomes out of sync, HFTers may go long one and short the other and then profit when they converge again. In this sense, HFTers only profit if the market returns to fair value. This applies to many ETFs, convertible securities, and options.
I believe that the classical generated parser has generally better performance potential - there is less function calling, less string passing (but this may be avoided easily in combinators too) and more opportunity for optimalization if you have the whole grammar AST in hand.
For anyone interested in creating a submit to HN, the URL to submit links to http://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u= + tabURL + "&t=" + encodeURIComponent(tabTitle)
It's certainly an interesting idea. I'd get rid of the dialog boxes and just do a form, jquery makes that extremely easy. I'd honestly never use it. I clicked the link because I am very interested in making myself more aware of time, but I don't care to have my activities limited. Here's an example: I want to take a 5min break and read HN. I read HN mostly because occasionally, something new and useful shows up. This happens very rarely but when it does, I'll be there for 20min instead of 5.
Reading between the lines this is about attacking the growth of android. It isn't in Apple's or Microsoft's interest to have Google Android steal their market from under them. Android remember uses the Linux kernel, and potentially is not the only mobile O/S that will be Linux based. Linux has a good track record in the embedded space.

Or put another way, if Google is going to rule the mobile: they would both like a piece of the action.

Whether or not it is true is a different matter, but it's plausible.
I hate to make a meta-comment, but what in the world does this stuff have to do with Hacker News? I continually see people complaining about newsworthy but non-technical articles being posted, and yet hundreds of comments on these posts. Is the HN community really that sex-starved?
It's crucial, for sure. But there are trades for which it is the only determinant, and those are dangerous waters.

There are market participants who make their money on pure latency arbitrage; it is a 100% speed game (because anyone can figure out that 1 - 1 = 0).

The majority of HFT falls into the "you have to be fast enough to not get run over" bucket.
I reported the logo, as its 5am there, I dont expect to hear from them til later, but I'm curious of the process for an artist that gets ripped off. Something like the example I listed is easy to take care of (we know windows had it first)
If he can give his house, his car, his money, etc. to his children, I don't see why he can't give them his copyright.

It would be very unfortunate if an author worked for 10 years (not unreasonable) on a fantastic novel, published it, it became a bestseller, and then he died one week later, and it instantly became public domain.

The publishing company that gave him an advance and spent money on marketing the book would lose money (and so they would probably never sign a deal with an old man or someone with bad health again), and the author's children would not benefit from their parent's 10 years of work. If his children died then 1 month later, surely their children (the author's grandchildren) should be able to benefit. It seems that length of time is more relevant than number of generations.
Certainly he does have a vested interest. Not the end all-be-all, but he does cite the board of governors and hendershott-riodan as evidence it reduces volatility, some indirect evidence in the short selling ban, the history of QQQ as evidence of lowering cost, tightening spreads.

The 'fair value' he's talking about us just the supply-meets-demand of that stock for that particular moment-- that moment could definitely take place in a larger bubble of that security. The mini-bubble within high freq trading he refutes by reasoning only ("another hft would detect this"), so I think a more concrete example would've been more convincing. As with all bubbles the question is how far out of line can the price get, and how quickly will the price be brought back to reality
Teal and Orange - Part 2
Oh, that's great that you have a tool. I should have said that my reply was for the eTrex *X series that store the maps and logs on an SD card and that things might be different for different models.
It actually seems to be more like a quadruple-negative. Let's try to simplify.

"No serious market observer disputes the claim that volatility would not be higher without the liquidity provided by high frequency traders."

"[serious market observers believe] that volatility would not be higher without the liquidity provided by high frequency traders."

"[serious market observers believe] that volatility would [be lower] without the liquidity provided by high frequency traders."

"[serious market observers believe] that volatility would [be lower] without ... high frequency traders."

"[serious market observers believe] that volatility [is higher with] ... high frequency traders."

"[high frequency traders increase volatility]"

This, of course, is exactly the opposite of what the author proceeds to argue in the following paragraphs. My conclusion is that the author managed to create a sentence so overly complicated that even he could not understand what he was saying.