skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm in a management position at a large ecommerce site.

I still code every day.

I expect to see code from candidates.

They can either send in code beforehand or walk me through some code they have written. Either way, I need to see some code, ask them questions about it, and see how well they can explain the decisions they made when writing the code.

Someone who cannot talk naturally, authoritatively and objectively about code they have written is not someone we need on the team.

Also, as someone else has said in the thread:

"It tests ... whether they have a passion for the field outside of the standard 9-5."

This is a great point. If a candidate for a programming job tells me they have zero code to show (because of NDA or whatever) then I instantly know that programming is just a job to them. Again, not the kind of person we want on a tight, motivated team.
Ah, but your point is more philosophical than technical.

Who should SEC and public interests side with? Bob, the retail investors Bob trades with, or the HFT/professional broker-dealers that Bob trade with?

Bob would argue that public interests should ultimately place the highest priority with him, as he represents the "pension fund and 401(k) accounts of the hard working American public." (Never mind the fund fees, soft dollars & insider trading)

The retail investors argue that public interests should ultimately rest with them. What how do you define retail investors? The long-term investors that trade blue chips and the day-traders with IB accounts? How are the day-traders with IB accounts different from professional broker-dealer except that they are typically less sophisticated but both out for blood? Should you really let the inmates run the asylums.

The broker-dealers argue that public interests should side with them. Because they are the psychiatrists of the asylum that could orderly organize the inmates, make that the mental hospital is well-run and efficient place. But can you trust people when they have so much more leverage and power at a place? And but if you do away with them, wouldn't mental asylum collapse?
And making 100k/day using the tens or hundreds of millions of principal an investment bank can provide is a far cry from making 100k/day trading one's own savings.
For all those reading this thinking, man, I could never do this or be successful at my own business, follow his advice, JUST DO IT!

It isn't that hard, it is especially not that hard if you approach it like he did and grow very slowly and keep your costs down. I did the same thing with my best friend years ago, starting off while still having a job, then making a leap when things were slightly vetted.

Best decision of my life. I've travelled the world, set my own schedules, always worked on what I wanted to work on and had a far more interesting set of challenges than I would have staying coding at another startup.

The key is not to aim for the moon, aim to pay the bills. We reduced our expenses to $5k (pre tax) a month, then set that as our goal our first year. It was achievable, but more importantly we eventually grew to making far, far more than that. But I've still always kept my expenses low because I've always wanted the freedom to do what I wanted.

I'm now in Africa, doing a startup here because it is new and exciting and satisfies my need to do good. Never would have been here if I had stayed at the day job.

DO IT!
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I don't recall us having significant liquidity problems prior to HFT, except during crisis, and as the recent one shows, we had liquidity problems even with HFT then.

I'm not buying the argument that 'HFT' provides any meaningful additional liquidity.
> However, the other counter argument against HFT is that it actually doesn't really provide liquidity to the market, as evident by the June flash-crash.

As far as I can tell, this is the only argument presented against HFT.

> But HFT dealers stopped trading that day, triggering a lot of people's stop-market orders

Are there other factors involved in this outcome, or is this a canonical HFT failure?
Can binaural beats improve your mood?
Funnily enough, this article just hit my inbox - "the origin of nautical terms like jibe, tack etc".

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2950/whats-the-orig...
This was the best exchange in the interview:

Q: Can you share the key metrics you watch on a
daily basis? Why are they important to you?

A: I have published a variety of stats but I don’t watch
metrics on a daily basis because I don’t make
metrics-based decisions on a daily basis, and absent
making decisions watching metrics is only as
productive as playing WoW.
Rails developer with good frontend & web-design skills. Resume here: http://snitko.ru/cv.html

Willing to relocate to US. Currently have a great job here, so only interested in on-site relocation offers.
Another pitfall is to do a start-up while having kids and a family and to let the start-up take precedence while ignoring the needs of your family.

It's pretty common.
> It's funny how you can make the argument about money that "would have been spent".

It's still billions of saving that are not being used in taxes/licensing and being used for doing actual things for the public which is the job of the government and yes, that includes health, employment, education among other things.

> Microsoft brought computers in every home and made computers "interesting".

No, the internet did. I have yet to find "regular" people who were actively using computers at home before the internet era. Give a computer with no internet connection to a non geek, in most case he'll tell you it's useless.

> Gates has proof that he has helped the poor with billions of dollars. Stallman has possibilities and no direct proof of anything.

The cost of a Gnu/Linux distribution is estimated to the billion dollar, not to forget other big free software projects such as Samba and others. And it's all for free. Plus the saving done by governments are very real, they are real proof. This is huge for both governments, people trying to build a business and people living in 3rd world like myself (Peru) where people cannot afford to pay billions in licensing. I'm glad our governments is not wasting their money on Microsoft licenses as they are switching to free software. This is real proof, real benefit no matter how much you want to deny it and it's way bigger than all of Gates billions put together because once spent they won't be there unlike Gnu/Linux and Free Software which will benefit the world for many many generations to come.
Everything turns out ok though:

http://www.joeydevilla.com/2008/01/09/calvin-and-hobbes-off-...
In Defense of Photoshop
To add a little more, it is often a good tactic in competition. If you take the same tack as your competitor, then you are simply following them in their "dirty wind" and are unlikely to overtake.

If you take the opposite tack, then you may well find clean wind, or better wind, and you may also be able to approach them on starboard tack, forcing them to give way.

Don't follow your competitor - take the opposite tack.
Ask HN: Ruby for  automated trading strategies
Has anyone implemented an aautomated trading strategy using Ruby? I know that java and c++ are much faster, assuming u not trading at the high frequency level but around 15min and lower, what has been some of your experiences? Also with server side javaScript going through so much innovation lately, will we see it being used in trading systems over the next 2yrs?
Please don't edit the title. 'WEIRD people:' references an acronym in the paper's title (Western Educated Industrial Rich Democracies) which is fundamental to the thesis presented.
[Stackoverflow] What’s your biggest fear as a programmer?
Overall a very pleasant read. I'm certainly going to check out the bibliography presented, and I'd like to read more along this line. I deeply enjoyed "The Nerd Handbook" as well. Could anyone recommend other readings in the fashion of those two?
By your logic, U.S. government are a bunch of armed thugs who happen to control some territory. 50% of the U.S. population aren't voting. 50% of the remaining 50% decides the next government. Basically 25% of the population impose their will on the rest of the 75% of people. That's tyranny.

In Civil War era, the Southern States had democratically voted to leave the Union. The North ignored the democratic result and went to war to bring them back, killing half of millions in the process.

The Southern States had voted democratically, with super majority, to keep blacks as slaves. By your logic, that's just a-ok.

Some democracy at work.
This is cute and interesting, but it's grossly misleading, informed by a pervasive stigma that we would do well to be rid of.

There's no reason he'd be less creative or imaginative. There's no reason he wouldn't decide to go play in the snow. Getting to work on a paper for school early is a sign that he's learning to enjoy school, not a sign that he's become some kind of little automaton as implied. The world would not go gray for poor Calvin. In fact, he'd be better able to entertain even more complicated fantasies, to even better ponder life's mysteries, and to savor the world around him more fully.

I'm not saying that medicine is always the thing for everyone, but this comic implies that medicating children for ADHD is a tragedy. It implies that we'd be left with Calvin alone rather than Calvin and Hobbes. An imagination crushed and a childhood ruined.

On the contrary, it would be more likely to become Calvin and Hobbes and Crusoe and Harry Potter and Native Americans and Beethoven and Newton. Because he would be able to read a wider variety of books more easily.

And Calvin would finally be able to do math, complete his homework without it taking three times as long as it should, and to think about what he wants to say prior to actually saying it instead of lacking that capability.

It doesn't wipe out the interest in or capacity for daydreaming; it prevents daydreaming from running unchecked and unintended over other valuable and interesting things that a kid can do.
One task to a machine can save a lot of trouble, ie, not having the database on the local app server + having varnish + nginx in front of it.
I did all the programming for BCC. I am not sure what you are specifically referring to with "syncing", but the code to all features discussed in this writeup is only a few hundred lines. Aside from having to put an HTTP client in my Java app it is fairly painless.
I find this doubly amusing because he used to play WoW.
> As far as I can tell, this is the only argument presented against HFT.

The argument is that HFT provides liquidity precisely when traders don't need it. You need broker/dealer to step in and take the other side of the trade when someone wants to trade and there isn't anyone else willing to trade. The issue with HFT is that, as the predatory example provided above, that HFT is actually buying up your liquidity in the market and selling it back to you at a higher price. Specifically, most HFT prop shops deals in ETB (easy to borrow) stocks such as GOOG, AAPL, & BAC where tens of millions of shares are traded daily. These securities don't need liquidity broker/dealers, as there are already tons of true buyers and sellers out there. Are there any HFT dealers in penny stocks or small caps where some liquidity would be much needed? Nope.

> Are there other factors involved in this outcome, or is this a canonical HFT failure?

Nope. The reason a lot of dealers stopped trading that day were tactical. A lot of stat-arb prop shops got burned during when Bear collapsed, one black box decided to sell everything which cascaded another black box to sell everything, which cascaded to everyone wanting to dump everything. So from that experience, HFT shops decided to not hold any positions beyond seconds and shut down everything when market crashes seriously. So they provide liquidity when the market is doing well, but when the shit hits the fan, self-interests also hits in and the "liquidity-providers" head for the hills.
100M Facebook Profiles Now Available For Download
Yes, I think it would take some time to get used to it.
Oh, yes, they're active, but only in their interest. You won't see apple freeing the source of cocoa...
True, I agree that it will take a while. Turning physical pages is fun :-)
Google doesn't have a market-share that constitutes monopoly in anything, especially in a market (search) where the switch cost is nothing.

You'd be closer to the mark accusing the iPhone of having a monopoly on telephony simply because it costs money to buy a different one.
Joey gets credit for the part of my config which functions as designed.
I have a different interpretation.

I think Calvin is a pretty normal kid in the scheme of things and that the comic is a commentary on medicating our kids . . . not to be kids! I'm not a ADHD denier but my reading suggests that it is both over diagnosed and over prescribed for. A commentary on this over diagnosis is what I get from the comic. I have definitely met ADHD kids who you cannot doubt have behavioural problems and for whom medication should be an option.
The main issue is that any text editor which is sufficiently advanced will be far removed from the standard CUA + GUI model that most people are used to. With such a separation, everybody has to start at ground zero when learning the new editor. CUA modes are the only sort of learning-curve helper that I can think of, but that doesn't help much because then people just keep their dependence to CUA. They have to immerse themselves in the editor to actually learn it; not get caught up in a "compatibility" mode that makes it easier to use when they start.
Google is not helping much with this. What are "rolling funding rounds"?
Silicon valley is a lot larger than just web start-ups. If and when YC launches something that eventually turns in to the next google or something on that scale it will have a real impact, but for now the big winners have not been created using the YC model.

Who knows, maybe one day.
You can always re-map. I use Tab for indent-region, instead of bothering with indent-block.
Just in case, it's not obvious to someone, that comic is built using panels from different actual C&H. The first time I came across it I was intrigued how I had missed this one and went out hunting for it's publishing date.
HFT seems different. It is comparable to front-running other people's orders

I think you're confusing HFT (which is a broad term) with flash trading.
go through the hacker folklore and portrait sections of the jargon file: http://www.outpost9.com/reference/jargon/jargon_toc.html
Of course that's the intended purpose of the comic. It's a statement about over-medication, that we should let kids be kids, and so on.

But it makes a slew of misleading implications on the way there, and in doing so, it perpetuates the stigma I mentioned before.

Edit to add: My reading has been that it is both over-diagnosed and under-diagnosed depending on a variety of factors. Some social contexts lead to one, some lead to the other.

One of the main reasons for under-diagnosis is that some popular beliefs about the brain, behavior, and medicine are off the mark, extending to parents, teachers, administrators, and even doctors. It's a very, very frustrating situation.
Thanks for the feedback.

I understand your point about it being unclear.

Right now you can use Taskforce within Gmail. We are looking to do outlook and other email clients. The emails are stored (archived).

In terms of browsers we currently support: Firefox and Chrome, and we are looking to do safari soon.

We are creating an app that should help you deal with your overloaded inbox, by allowing you to create tasks from emails (thereby hopefully allowing you to archive if you like); and turning 'broadcast' emails from: twitter, linkedin, facebook, CC's (as we define broadcast - not necessarily directed at you but notifications) you've been included on and turning them into an 'activity' feed.

This combination of tools, we think should reduce the amount of unread emails in your inbox.
WMV to iMovie Converter
Mabrook! Good work. Few cosmetic issues on main page. Remove "!" in "read more!" button. Does not look professional. There are some minor language errors on the main page which need to corrected.

On pricing page(http://rm.bettermeans.com/front/pricing.html) please change to 'take a tour' from 'watch the tour'. Surprisingly it there was only one video after clicking the button. I was expecting multiple videos to highlight features of your product. Include Safari 5 on browser list.

Made a good decision by announcing it to the public. Hopefully, it will make up and running smoothly soon.
lack of a good package manager is holding it back. sure, there is port, but port's library is tiny compared to its linux counterparts...
Yeah, sound like 1999.

To me, however, the biggest reason this is true is that if you have to push your website (or product) so much, it's because it sucks - and if it sucks, you have to be able to draw in a pretty high number of suckers who will pay a disproportionate amount of subscription money for the kind of service you're offering, as for example happens with online dating services...
Graphics chip market seeing big changes
As Nvidia falters, Advanced Micro Devices' ATI graphics unit is on the rise, spurred by "radical" shifts in the market, according to Mercury Research, which tracks the market for GPUs or graphics processing units.
When phones are too big for pockets
Something weird is happening to mobile phones: After shrinking from enormous Zack Morris proportions in the '80s and '90s, they're getting bigger again.
The same reasoning could be applied to argue that the US and US corporations should have no influence whatsoever over who governs the Chinese.
I think you answered my question. By syncing I meant that, for instance, when a customer makes a purchase, a whole chain of events unfolds (databases are updated, keys are sent out, analytics packages are updated).
The value created by the work that you did for hire does not have to translate in to your salary at all, just like you're not going to have to share in the losses if the project turns out to be a dud.

When a welder helps to put together an oil rig that then either makes millions of dollars or explodes, sinks and causes billions in damage the fact that he did it as a salaried employee shields him from the damage just as much as it will insulate him from taking a share in the profits.

That's why it's work for hire. You get to decide up-front if that sort of thing is what you want.

So if someone offers you the opportunity to program a computer and make that company millions of dollars you are being compensated for your time, not for how much money your software will make.

The shareholders of the investment bank and the people that thought up the spec for the thing that you are building will have a much bigger claim to the profits than the guy that codes it up, and not surprising, they're the ones that will eventually make more money on it than you.

Why programmers should be different in this way from welders is not clear to me. Everybody that works for 'big-corp' makes the same kind of deal, and if you didn't make more money for the company than you cost you probably wouldn't have a job to begin with.
StumbleUpon: The Silent Social Media Success Story
What's wrong with ticket scalping?

Anti-scalping laws are a good example of the government intervening in a market to prevent natural price discovery, and to hand advantage to the sell-side.
Well you can keep the database file in Dropbox :)
Nintendo 3DS - A Broken Business Model?
I wish I knew who made this one, but it gets even better.
http://media.photobucket.com/image/calvinhobbeskidsc8/Caspia...
They run a C++ compiler on user-supplied code. That should dominate context-switching overhead.
You clearly haven't worked in finance. The traders get a percentage cut, as do the quants, it's only reasonable the hackers started asking where their cut was. However they are conflating programmers and quants here, the guy who puts together a FIX interface is a pretty replaceable cog, the guys who develop algorithms and their implementations are quite literally worth their weight in gold if they're good. The thing with the serious high-freq stuff is the line between implementation and algorithm really starts to blur, you need people who can write seriously fast code that's also bulletproof and can be turned around fast. You need a deep understand of how markets work, how feeds work, how to handle everything from fast market conditions to managing latency issues in multi-venue trade distribution setups.
How about http://www.myca.com ?
They also guard their compilation environment (I think)

http://ideone.com/icJVj
> You clearly haven't worked in finance.

Chase Manhattan bank, the Netherlands branch, formerly the Nederlandse Crediet bank, about 3 years from when I was 19 to when I was 21, both as a systems level programmer as well as an application programmer.

> However they are conflating programmers and quants here

Yes, but I didn't, I only spoke about the programmers. They do not come up with the models, they just lay the bricks.

The algorithm developer has a different role here and is more than likely not the same guy as the one that codes it up.
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Nope, not confusing them. I'm well acquainted with MSR. Just saying that the focus on papers and conference presence/sponsorship has not translated into impact on products. Seems a pity.
False. I can think of multiple exceptions.

Let me give three. First some large companies (like eBay) which do not do a good job of figuring out where to advertise for themselves, and are willing to let affiliates scoop up margin instead of figuring it out. Second there are comparison shopping companies which buy ads to sell traffic, but with the trick being that the traffic is sold to multiple places. (This is actually a benefit to the consumer because it saves them having to look on multiple sites.) Third there are companies that collect enough information to deliver more targeted advertising than could have been delivered from the original spot the ad was placed. An example of this is Campus Explorer.

I personally know people who are making money with all of these approaches. Details differ widely. However the commonality is that if you're getting into this type of business, execution matters a lot. You are explicitly trying to live off of the difference between your ability to buy advertising and someone else's ability to do the same. So unless you can execute better than them, and better than your competitors, you're going to quickly find yourself losing money on every transaction. Which is the fate of most who try this approach.
Ballmer says Microsoft at work to rival iPad
It is nice for some things though, like static file server, gzip support, and other mundane things that you almost always want (or want the option to enable). I think a decent framework is unstructured (such as web.py) so you can write incredibly light quick and dirty apps or set up MVC for significant apps. It just helps you with the plumbing.

connect, geddy, and (fab) all look good for this purpose and I hope to look into them a bit more when I have a chance. For now I'm just gluing things together with node-machine at the core.
Today is System Administrator Appreciation Day
Microsoft, bring life back to the Courier and I'll be a customer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Courier
New Kindle - $139
Statistical significance & other A/B test pitfalls
I'd prefer we just discard the concept of sharps and flats entirely, and name each of the 12 notes as an individual.
Darl McBride. Top on my shitlist, hard to forget. If I ever run in to him I'll probably end up going to jail ;)