skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Recast as a "tax" on inefficient middlemen, it seems like HFT would be a net wealth generator by compressing the time it takes to discover prices. Is the author's argument that low frequency trading finds the same result, only over a longer period of time? If so, then HFT doesn't add wealth but it does time-shift it. Since there is a limitless supply of future time, doesn't that make HFT similar to being able to crank out more widgets in an hour?
It recognizes most of the people in my inbox. I love reportive, it's especially useful when I get a cold email from someone I don't know.
I think the crux of the argument is really against speculative trading as a whole. The stock market has nothing to do with allocating resources. When you buy/sell stocks, you have a counter party that is doing the opposite. No part of that transaction has to do with allocating resources.

An angel investment allocates resources. A VC round allocates resources. And yes, an IPO does allocate resources. But trading stocks is just a way for mutual fund managers to charge a fee.

Once, owning stock had to do with dividends. But that's back in the day. Now, the only way to reliably make money in the stock market is to spend other people's money and charge them for the honor.

If I'm investing in a company, I should have an asymmetric informational advantage or an ability to direct management. Public companies, by definition, don't make this possible (unless you have significant voting power).
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I'd be very happy if 10% of the emails I receive was from real people.
Except when a disobedient cyclist causes the auto to swerve and hit another car head-on.
I was trying to get runit to work last week and it consistently broke my terminal. After calling runit nothing I typed would show up, including newline.
Rapportive is awesome, and this'll make it even better. I just launched the search on HN for a cofounder a couple days ago, and I probably got around 150 emails all in response. Getting a picture, name, location, Twitter, and other details for nearly every email really helped make things more personal and easier to whittle down applicants without intensive googling. Great application.
Or, "Liquidity is good, right?" ;)
The original post is from 2003. Much has changed since then. For example, in Python 3.x it's possible to write the "counter" example like this:

def make_counter():
count = 0
def f():
nonlocal count
count = count + 1
return count
return f

c = make_counter()
for i in range(3):
print(c())

(In Python 2.x and earlier, you would probably create a Counter class to do the same thing. That approach was, and likely still is, considered more "Pythonic", by the way.)
If Australia is on the ball with infrastructure and government policy, your little private continent might end up a bastion of energy stability in the post peak-oil world! You have your own deserts with lots of potential for massive Solar Thermal. Add some high-tech distribution, and you're in a very enviable position.
Right, and Smalltalk had for a long time no lexical binding, thus returned blocks were never closures. Just as in early Lisp dialects.
> I just launched the search on HN for a cofounder a couple days ago, and I probably got around 150 emails all in response.

That was the marriage invite one right ? That's an amazing number of respondents.
"making duplicate products with different packaging"

Over-processing Muda!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muda_(Japanese_term)
Yes, that's the story behind Erlang as well.
Equities are a fraction of what's traded on "the markets", and a huge chunk of "everything that is traded" is traded on electronic markets that could or are HFT'd (fixed income being a notable counterexample, a paragon of the ideal universe you sort of allude to, and an unmitigated debacle when it comes to transparency and fairness).

One doesn't really need to engage your argument about whether equities are truly about allocating resources to observe that electronic markets do play a pivotal role in resource allocation. How do you think anyone knows what wheat, iron, or bulk block cheddar costs?
Blekko search engine demo by CEO Rich Skrenta at Crunchup
WOW! What a great read. He comes out in prose. Personality galore!

Do yourself a favor and read it.
If so, then they should be disallowed. Regardless, they accounted for for a tiny fraction of all trading volume. I doubt most HFT firms make much from them. Saying HFT is bad because of flash trading is like saying driving cars is bad because once in a while, someone dies from a car crash. The latter part is a true statement, but that's 0.01% of the picture.

On another note, it should be pointed out that flash orders were created by EXCHANGES, not by demand from traders. The exchanges didn't want to have to route orders to other exchanges because of NBBO, so they offered this to traders hoping that someone would come fill the order at NBBO.
As a Canadian, would I face any challenges incorporating in America?

Great article BTW!
I was thinking "wouldn't it be cheaper to just install some cameras and an intercom?" But I guess that becomes surveillance instead of remote presence. Hence the raison d'etre of anybots.
Microsoft "innovation": Three rotten product generations followed by an Apple clone.
> Does it hurt the buyer and seller more than the little nibbles these guys are taking to smooth out that curve?

Why are you assuming that the buyer and seller are hurt?

> I see a lot of paychecks being cut in this industry and I don't see the value being created. Looks like highway robbery to me.

I don't see the value in smurfs, but don't think that they're "highway robbery".

Liquidity, on the other hand, has huge value. Disagree? Try to sell an illiquid asset.
I understand that. Still he said 'Python has closures' in the title and failed to give examples of closures.
Such a misleading headline. "Entrepreneurs", in this case means "entrepreneurs that Conway invested in". That's like if Harvard put out an article saying that their graduates only had a 1% unemployment rate, and TechCrunch ran an article saying "Harvard study claims that unemployment rate is actually 1%".

The best conclusion to draw from those numbers is probably that Conway has become a much more effective investor from a combinator of his experience making him better and his reputation allowing him to pretty much get in on whatever deal he wants (and possibly his network getting better, since that's apparently a major part of his value-added).
I have had mixed results. For my corporate inbox it's not as useful (except to identify sales goons who are cold calling and to see who in my company has profiles on which social sites -- which can be very entertaining indeed!). For my personal inbox it works better but is less entertaining since I typically know everyone I'm corresponding with and already follow the twitterers, etc.

What I'd like to see is some enhancement in the area of CRMness similar to what http://noteleaf.com/ provides, notably the tasks/alerts feature.

To answer your question, though, yes, I am going to turn it back on. :)
What if you are working for a company who might be a bit
reticent about letting their employees blog about whatever
they want? How would you go about broaching the subject so
as to get around this?
Comments other than 'quit your job' would be useful!
Another common issue he doesn't mention: using observed differences (or observed significance-test values) as the stopping criterion. The common statistical-significance tests don't work if the decision when to stop collecting data is dependent on the observed levels of significance. Instead, you must ahead of time decide how many trials to do, and stick to that decision, or use more complicated significance tests. (This is the "multiple testing" problem.)

For example, it works to flip two coins 50 times each, and then run a statistical-significance test. It does not work to flip two coins 50 times each, run a test; if no significance yet, continue to 100, then 150, etc. until you either find a significant difference or give up. That greatly increases the chance that you'll get a spurious significance, because your stopping is biased in favor of answering "yes": if you found a difference at 50, you don't go on to 100 (where maybe the difference would disappear again), but if you didn't find a difference at 50, you do go on to 100.

Put differently, it's using separate p-values for "what is the chance I could've gotten this result in [50|100|150|...] trials with unweighted coins?" to reject the null hypothesis each time, as if they were independent, but the null hypothesis for the entire series has to be the union, "what is the chance I could've seen this result at any of the 50, 100, 150, or 200, ... stopping points with unweighted coins?", which is higher. Yet that's exactly how many A/B tests are done: you start collecting data, and let the trials run until you find "significant" differences or give up.

(It's possible to set up a series of tests where you choose when to stop based on observed values, but you have to use different statistical machinery than the common significance-tests.)
I think social factors will be big stumbling blocks too. Already there is dissent in some ranks on tech immigration. Imagine this spreading to fields like medicine, dentistry etc which have been safe career choices with few disruptions. Cant see specialised fields taking kindly to telepresence.
Rapportive is YC? I had no fucking clue. I signed up in March with the other 10,000 (yes, 10,000) who did in their first 24 hours. (EDIT: I originally said 30K; their blog says it was merely 10K in first 24 hours. My bad.)
That talk is only about design! Do you know who Philippe Starck is?
I believe race conditions can still occur in pure message-passing languages, like Erlang (Joe Armstrong says so in Programming Erlang, p.173). This doesn't get much press, perhaps because it's much easier to get right than shared-memory, and because not that many people are actually doing it yet.

Does Spin address this issue?
Yup, we suspect anecdotally that the percentage of email volume people receive from organisations - notifications or list mail - is much more than 10%. So adding this useful context to email from organisations should have a large impact.
> Go read the article - Sherrod is nothing but a minor anecdote in what is primarily a criticism of liberals, the media and the NAACP and a defense of the Tea Party.

What kind of nutjob actually reads something before opining about it? Or, for that matter, firing someone "based" on it?
If a patent is filed by someone other than the inventor then it is void. They would have to put the taptaptap people on the patent.
I wasn't expecting that second quote to be by... Charlie Brown. Must not always be easy to be named like that.
I don't think that the companies being traded on exchanges where HFT is prevalent are the big losers from HFT.

I think the big losses are from the all of the wasted resources being put into making trades faster and faster. It seems to me that if merely swapping one set of machines out from a data center near the exchange and moving a few miles away is going to drastically change how that it performs, something is wrong.

From my personal experience, a brilliant friend of mine left his job at some Silicon Valley startup where he was definitely creating value for society to work at an HFT shop. After a few months of working there, he calls me and we talk about some C++/algorithms stuff (I think he is much, much smarter than me, I just happened to have written a lot more C++ than he has) about how he needs to make his code run microseconds faster so that it can make more trades.

I am all in favor of people who change the world for the better being rewarded immensely. I have no love for the iphone, but since many, many people do, I am sure Steve Jobs is worth his billions. But for people getting rich doing HFT, the only return for society I see are some nebulous claims about liquidity. Can the societal gains be quantified in some manner? If every transaction on the exchange had an added latency of a microsecond, how would things change? What if it was a millisecond? What about a second? How much worse off would the world be?
I think part of it is to remove ego from the equation. The likelihood that anyone will be followed by name/blog alone is minuscule.

However, if you treat writing as a personal exercise, and understand that "marketing" (for want of a better word) a post of yours you particularly like, it's definitely useful. Submit high signal posts to here/Reddit/Digg/communities you are part of and you think will enjoy it.

I've had two blog posts hit the HN front page; both garnered about 4000 views. One of them also hit Reddit's /r/programming, pushing the view count to 20000. However, the Reddit commentary was essentially useless, whereas the HN commentary was awesome. In fact, the Reddit commentary was quite scathing, and that bruised my pride for a good couple of days afterwards. Sometimes obscurity is better.

However, I don't regret writing. The writing is the most important bit. The reading... less so.
While the comparison seems reasonable, it has one fatal flaw:

you are saying coders should be treated the same as bricklayers (salary); but are algorithm designers treated same as architects? I believe the former are paid percentage and later paid salary.

It seems financial sector do not follow the same rule as construction business.
It didn't take us too long to get to 30K either :)
> I want to show this to my <spouse/friend/child>.

I've never accepted a graphic design proposal that I didn't run by someone outside of the company to be sure, from a usability standpoint, we weren't taking a step backwards using symbolism, layouts, etc, that someone outside of the project would be confused by. Or where their initial reaction would be "that site reminds me of a spammer/virus/porn site". Such a "spammer" comment killed one design right away because until then I didn't realize it, but they were very much right.

Edit: I wanted to note that this applies to designs my teams make, the design that I make, or designs we get outside designers to make. I'm confident that it helped us make better products by getting external sanity checks on designs before rolling them out.
The app in question only sends your phone number, IMSI, and voicemail number. They posted a clarification here: http://blog.mylookout.com/2010/07/mobile-application-analysi...
It will be outsourcing squared, all those 'safe' jobs suddenly having to deal with their jobs being outsourced to the lowest global bidder. Talk about disruptive.

edit: Let's hope the dentists that serve the people building this tech are not reading HN, the negotiations could be fairly painful.
I believe Google Apps offers everything you're looking for, including WYSIWYG editing. Get them a domain e.g. at Namecheap. Do the initial DNS configuration (Google Apps' help will tell you what to change). This will also give them separate, Gmail-backed email accounts. The free version currently offers up to 50 accounts. There is also a non-profit version that adds some Premier level features. I haven't looked into how one qualifies, but it probably involves significant documentation of one's non-profit status.

Note: "Powered by Google" appears at the bottom of the page, in the free version -- removable at the Premier level. Also, site design is limited particularly in overall page layout, but there are good options/settings and if you are interested in function over form, and free but robust, it's worth a look. The one limitation is space; for most small organizations it should be plenty, but if you are going to load up with bulky content and/or video, you may want to look elsewhere or be sure to qualify for the non-profit Premier version.
Big Data in Context
So the boss can sit on his ass at home and send a robot to see what I'm up to? I can't see that being very inspiring to the rank and file..
Great feedback, thanks!
A Peek Inside the M&A Playbooks of Technology’s Top Acquirers
You just need to allow and encourage everyone to submit ideas, and if they don’t cost anything, but they’re good ideas, implement them!

There are two sides of this. One, indeed per OP, having no resources forces you to be more inventive and having too many resources causes bloat. I believe this does apply to software - I have seen it.

But when I look around me, I see only a loose correlation between lack of money and inventiveness; so I am forced to assume that having no resources forces you to be more inventive if you are driven to innovate in the first place.

To continue the OP's example, lots of people didn't have resources, but only the Wright Brothers built a plane.
> the big losses are from the all of the wasted resources being put into making trades faster and faster

But you could also see it as "pushing the limit", similar to people trying to see who runs 100m the fastest, or Formula 1, or Kasparov-beating chess machines. Of course, in and of themselves, these look like silly activities and a total waste of dollars and energy given the poverty in the world. It strikes me, though, that these boundary pushing activities are somehow useful to the rest of us, in some weird and non-obvious way sometimes. Also, given that technologies have a habit of moving down the exclusivity scale, perhaps this persistent boundary pushing in HFT is contributing to general liquidity (speed of execution, lack of price impact, etc.) in a trickle-down way
Anybots have had considerable press here on HN. It's an interesting advance, and there has been a great deal of discussion already.

In case you're interested in seeing what people said in the past, and the predictions made then, here are some of the HN items about them:

http://searchyc.com/submissions/anybot?sort=by_date

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=538848 <- 2 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=552929 <- 10 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=575394 <- 2 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=629143 <- 2 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=745831 <- 14 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1076157 <- 10 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1357787

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1357896 <- 40 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1388509

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1499582 <- 45 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1506155 <- 3 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1554166

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1554420

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1557937

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1561736
But how are prices synchronized between exchanges (if at all)?
i.e. say the best chance for my order being filled is
at ARCA, but I submit it at INET. Does the fact that it
will most likely get routed to ARCA via INET imply there is a greater chance of the order not filling than if the order had been submitted to ARCA directly?
This sounds like skepticism. Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World" is similar in nature, though hardly systematic. James "The Amazing" Randi has also written a handful of books aimed at debunking some of the more prominent results of irrational thinking (homeopathy, astrology, etc.)
Some like it hot: How to heat a 'nano bathtub'
The brain drain created by HFT profits is also a valid argument against HFT (and computational finance in general), but, not to refute anything you just said, that's not an argument Krugman made. HFT also seems to cause crazy spikes and dips in the market, which is also bad. But it doesn't appear to screw over average investors in order to make GS more money.

Liquidity also isn't a nebulous concept. Look at over-the-counter fixed income trading markets, where prices are governed by ratings agencies and salesmanship as much as real price discovery, for a telling case study.

One way to look at the current situation --- probably idealistically --- is that HFT are to broker/dealers what ITA and Kayak are to travel agencies. That what liquidity is supposed to mean, right?
Great news, I have been hoping that someone would focus on robots for telepresence for a while now. I really see a demand for this, in particular because I live in a remote location (Norway), and hope that telepresence robots will make the job market truely international. This is a positive effect of globalization, in my opinion.

However, I always imagined that the telepresence would include a holographic projection of the person being telepresenced, rather than an ugly robot. This might also solve the problem of people not naturally prefering to communicate through a robot.
You, Eliezer Yudkowsky, annoy me with your presence here.

Although your ideas aren't nearly as dire nor your followers as obnoxious, it feels like the 1960s Ayn Rand is all over Hacker News.
"That apps on Apple's devices are more secure is an illusion."

Yeah, and careful sandboxing of each app and control of the functions you use has nothing to do with security either.

Apple knows what functions you use and when, and the data you send receive using them. They know the format, nothing else is needed. That's one of the reason they only let you use documented calls.

For me its easy to make a software that monitors that activity,so with so many people smarter than me, I can not imagine that Apple has not done it. I know they have automated tools for analyzing Apps proposals, so I'm confident they monitor live the apps activity.
Who says the robot has to be ugly? ;)
I think this sort of telerobotics is going to be a growth area in the next 5-10 years. All of the necessary technologies have been coming into place within the last decade, and there are some compelling reasons for using such devices - avoiding unnecessary and expensive business trips, and helping to reduce energy consumption and pollution. I can think of past occasions in my own career where having one of these robots at a customer site would have saved a lot of time and money, and resulted in a much more rapid diagnosis of issues.
Milwaukee's got what sounds like a similar station: http://radiomilwaukee.org

Broadcasts at 88.9 FM in the city and streaming at the site.
Ive done this, it is amazingly productive. We had jabber server at one place, and all 10 devs were in the same room physically, as well as the chats: #dev #dev_pvt #dev_funny #dev_offtopic #bugs as well as having a dozen side conversations, and talking out loud in the room. Never too much time blocking on conversations, and easily ignorable when working on something deep, but since physical presence is happening, anything super important can trigger an "out loud" interrupt.
What about it is disappointing? We're all human, so we all work pretty much the same way. Everyone has their problems, and typically those problems are similar to someone else's.

This means that the means to treating most of your problems apply to everyone.
Supersexy