skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why would one even consider entering these markets without the ability to demonstrate alpha over historical results?

Yes, your alpha needs to include the ability to beat transaction costs... so if you can't pay for the [relatively exceptionally cheap] cost of several years of your chosen market's historical data, maybe you're not really serious.

It's fun to play at being a financier, but let's not pretend that access to market data is the significant barrier to entry which is preventing disruption in the world financial markets.
Meh, it’s only a phone and Apple is no government. I wouldn’t want my government to be run by Apple – and luckily they don’t. I’m ok with buying their phones. I’m more than happy to give up that particular freedom for that particular comfortableness and as long as there are viable alternatives – as long as iPhones aren’t the only smart phones I can buy – I see nothing whatsoever wrong with that position.

But that’s rather beside the point. I think it is important that both Apple and Google have infrastructure in place to stop malware from ever reaching their stores and to remove it if it does. One of the reasons why Google I/O and Apple’s WWDC were both sold out within less than a day is that people love apps on mobile devices and I’m willing to speculate that the reasons for that are that apps are easy to install and delete, cheap and you can trust them. That last point is important. Malware is rare to non-existing in app stores, people consequently don’t have to think before installing (as they have to when downloading software from the web). They don’t have to fear software (as many do on the web).
Start at: http://www.traderslog.com/proprietarytradingfirms/

Some of these are purely manual trading but many have software APIs.
I think you're correct; we are talking about a game.

But then, success == triumph == a satisfied ego.

I think it's foolish to forget that ultimately ego often fuels people's motivation.

Quite a lot of the time, if ego can be singled out as a motivator - the activity in question probably has dubious value.
Fantastic site. I think I am going to pick up online chess again. Really nice work.

Could you put some contact info in your about? I'll send some feedback after I use it for some time.
Immediate-Mode Graphical User Interfaces (Video)
Geeky dad, My daughter is turning one soon, and  I decided we...
Possibly I'm making the mistake we're all accusing Tesla of here which is taking TG too seriously.

In regard to it's view of electric cars I'd say it's position is pretty much to deliberately miss the point (that is that they are practical items rather than performance ones) and to play that for comic effect.

As you say, they like attractive, fast cars (and curiously the Renault Megane which I recall Hammond liked which is neither) and electric cars are designed to be practical and functional - two things which generally are lower down the list of what they consider worthy of note.

Where I have trouble (and I'm running the risk of contradicting things I've said elsewhere in this thread) is that while the presenters and programme makers exaggerate this for entertainment value, I'm not so convinced that it isn't a more accurate representation of the opinions of many of the shows viewers who do have an overly negative view of electric cars.

But maybe that's just me being biased against how I perceive a "typical" TG viewer (to be clear I do watch it, though not always and I'm really not typical in that I don't really care about cars, I just find it amusing).
This is a career ender -- instantaneously -- if you do it to another print publication. Somebody at the Washington Post lifted a few paragraphs of one article from a newspaper you've never heard of in Arizona. Bam, lost her job the same day it was brought to the ombudsman's attention.

However, if you just run a website, you are not a journalist and the unwritten rules do not apply. (This is one of the cultural reasons why newspapers cannot conceive of getting out of the dead tree distribution business, even if it is killing them -- that is the source of their power and privilege, after all.)
BBC denies rigging Top Gear Tesla Roadster car race
Companies buy reputation all the time (branding, association ). Doing things is not enough. People must also know about what you did and that takes publicity.
Lunch with Drew Houston and Trip Adler, How cool is that?
Just to make it clear, while I agree with the idea of a tax-funded government, I do have issues with specific implementations of this idea, the US budget being one of them.

Your Mafia example is spurious, as it's not subject to elections. A democratic government only exists by the consent of the governed. I do not think that corporations or organized crime have taxing authority.
I thought that same thing... It's a update on buzz' privacy data leak not the service. I would like Google to add Buzz support for Google Apps for Domains and an iPhone app.
I think you are missing the point entirely.

But that's ok.
The situation is not unlike Apple's desktop platforms. Yes, OS X has a good security model (Unix style), but it's not impenetrable, as has been proven over and over again at events like pwn2own, yet there has never been a significant outbreak of OS X malware. The answer to the "why" question isn't clear.
Sorry you feel that way.

It wasn't our intension to come across like that. How could we have got our message across more positively?
Book review: Delivering Happiness
Cringely wrote a piece in 2006 about Allen progressively distancing himself from Gates, Ballmer and Microsoft. It certainly raises questions about Gates' character.

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2006/pulpit_20060330_0008...

Edit: Beaten to the punch by about 2 hours. Oops.
Wow. This is almost entirely wrong.

Any modern FPGA (hint: the Virtex-5 they are using in these machines) can implement a relatively complex general purpose CPU. It wont be a Pentium 4, but it can be complex enough to run programs you'd need to design your own compiler for.

Of course, they only ever use the IP cores that they need to implement the algorithm they want. That usually means modeling the limit order book.

Monte Carlo, anyone?
Bill Gates vs. Paul Allen: How Important Is the Wingman? - Digits - WSJ
Discussion about it: http://mollyrocket.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=10
> i submitted a link ... about an hour ago, and after
> watching it depressingly fall off the first page of
> the new list, i think i'm giving up on ever submitting
> a link to HN again.

> What's so frustrating is that i can identify content
> that is good, and relevant (the link above is about
> open data, citizen access to data, and information
> management), which are obviously relevant to the
> hacker news community.

Maybe it's just me, but I submit that you are mistaken. For example, I saw it, and it is of zero interest to me. I write code for a living, I manage people who write code, I run two companies, one of which produces code, and I don't think it's of interest.

That doesn't mean it's of zero interest to everyone. That doesn't mean it should be of zero interest to everyone. It does mean that you are mistaken in your belief that founders and hackers would be interested, if only they'd seen it.
It was clear :] I just find weird to say this about an application like skype that obviously needs to be cross platform.
I think that, like me, the downvoters don't understand what CPython has to do with anything.
I'm pretty sure the way calories are measured is using a calorimeter. There's no correction for the ability of our body to absorb calories from a particular food, because 1) it would be really subjective and controversial and 2) the junk food industry would go bonkers over it.

Here's how the FDA site defines it:
Calories — on the Nutrition Facts label are the measure (amount) of energy in a serving of food. For example, there are about 110 calories in 1 cup (8 fluid ounces) of orange juice.

Note that they describe it as the "energy in a serving"... not the "energy absorbed from a serving." The measure is independent of our body's ability to extract that energy, which can vary wildly.
I kind of agree with you but for different reasons and therefore come to a different conclusion.

I think that many viewers don't realise that TG is entertainment rather than factual because sadly most viewers have a pretty uncritical view of anything they see on TV.

And for this reason I think it could be branded entertainment, documentary, drama or children's and it wouldn't make any difference as it's all soaked up largely without question. If people aren't taking the hints from the tongue in cheek comments and the OTT stunts then I don't think a message at the front of the show or in the TV listings would make any difference.
Then that's what someone should say, and then promptly get upvoted. Some questions need to be asked, alternative points of view made, and then shown to the world why it's a bad idea; we shouldn't hide them from view to be missed so someone else can make the same mistake.
You meant "pervasive", not "persuasive", didn't you?
The article wasn't clear on exactly what blueprint does, and I didn't know, so I did some digging in their README.

"blueprint is DevStructure's workhorse tool that looks inside popular package managers, finds changes you made to configuration files, and archives software you built from source to generate Puppet, Chef, or shell code. Everything blueprint sees is stored in Git to be diffed and pushed. It runs on Debian and RPM based distros with Python 2.6."

Seems pretty cool, glad I looked.
I was a bit disappointed by how nicely it was furnished. It seems to me like some of the magic was lost. Still, it looks like it would be really cool to work in. Give me a little hidey hole in that big room, and I'm set.
Heh, yep :)

It's 5pm so not really concentrating ;)
I try not to publicly complain too much, but when I got this upgrade a month ago I was shocked. Its so bloated and unevenly proportionate for use. It seems like they are trying to take up as much real estate on the desktop and compete for the attention of the user , i.e. move them away from gmail/gchat etc.
http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/sec/2011/040411sec1....

Samsung responds to installation of keylogger on its laptop computers

The supervisor who spoke with me was not sure how this software ended up in the new laptop thus put me on hold. He confirmed that yes, Samsung did knowingly put this software on the laptop to, as he put it, "monitor the performance of the machine and to find out how it is being used."

In other words, Samsung wanted to gather usage data without obtaining consent from laptop owners.

[…]

We contacted three public relations officers for Samsung for comment about this issue and gave them a week to send us their comments. No one from the company replied.
I think two submissions with the same URL but different scheme names should be considered the same, at least in the case of http and https: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2387495.
I can echo the article's sentiments. I upgraded to the new client a few weeks ago and cannot adequately express the horror I experienced when my clean, intuitive UI/UX went away and was replaced by some forsaken window vomited up from a designer's darkest nightmare.

In what possible world does coverflow for contacts make better sense than just a simple list?

It took actual time for me to figure out how to find my contacts and place a call. I hold a degree, I am not an idiot. For a program designed specifically for the purpose of calling people, for that functionality to be that un-intuitive is simply mind-boggling.
I was surprised to read in the caption of one photo that the Colombian Navy actually piloted one of the subs rather than transport it by lift or tow!
The stale-ness of the code is briefly addressed 20 min into the talk below.

In a perfect world, an exokernel OS would be roughly as stale as the architecture it was built for.

Imagine an operating system that could conceivably be 'done', in a development sense.
Google doesn't have to worry about SEO I guess ;)
No, the equivalent would be to click reply, and then type "I think that your point of view is dangerous."
"least loyal and trustworthy friends a person could ask for": citation?

Are you referring to the discussion Gates and Ballmer had about diluting Allen? That seems to be a way to dilute a founder who was slacking off. The word partnership is used several times; this may imply that everybody was 100% vested already. If so, this is the only thing they could do to somebody who wasn't pulling his weight.
http://mac.oldversion.com/Skype.html
Since some will wonder, an e-cigarette is "an electrical device that attempts to simulate the act of tobacco smoking by producing an inhaled mist bearing the physical sensation, appearance, and often the flavor and nicotine content of inhaled tobacco smoke." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_cigarette

So, it's a physical object that makes you feel like you're smoking a real cigarette. I was picturing some kind of software. :)
This for me, is the root of the problem.

I don't believe any corporation can be 'good' or 'evil'. Corporations are comprised of people - some of whom will choose to do 'bad things'.

Digital technology provides a huge amount of power to those who have access to it. People are necessarily subject to human emotions and motivations - some will choose to do things which place people at risk.

Transparency and division of power within an organisation needs to be set-up and maintained to prevent abuses from occurring .. but I'd imagine, in most cases the stage has already been set to allow this kind of thing to happen without a corporation's knowledge.
Ah neat. Not obvious on how to get there though. Thanks for the link.
Thank heavens this was software based - now imagine if they shipped keyboard firmware with a built in keylogger! Who knows, may be some do - that would be nearly impossible to detect as they can encrypt it.

On a related note - My bank requires me to use a on-screen virtual keyboard to log into the online account. The keys of this virtual keyboard are randomly rearranged every time it is invoked. That could certainly beat keyloggers.
Yeah that "premature optimization..." trope always bugs me. It is not a license to write the most non-performant code you can think of and then spend hours and hours tuning it later. That phrase was coined back when optimization meant inlining assembly, not simply putting some thought into your algorithms.

Part of the problem is TDD, people see the green bars fill but the customer regects it because guess what. In real world usage we arent running the method once, we are running it millions of times.
for those looking to reinstall Skype 2.8 for Mac:
http://mac.oldapps.com/skype.php?old_skype=37
>There's also that whole mood message thing which just dumbfounds me.

My friends and I have come up with a pretty good use for the mood message: with a custom chatstyle I hacked together, if you set your mood message to a hex color, the header on your message shows up in that color. It's great for our multi-person chats to keep messages straight.
"Jeremy Clarkson the TV character often tries to make much the same attacks while laughing them off as 'just a bit of fun'. That isn't intellectually honest."

Are you talking about the more extreme rubbish like "all lorry drivers are prostitute murderers"? His genuine political opinions like the ones he has on bendy buses, speed cameras, the M4 bus lane etc. strike me as genuine and not veiled in the 'boys will be boys' disguise you talk of.

I should probably bail from this conversation lest people mistake me as a JC supporter, I just think you're being a little unfair.
Good plan Dr Evil - the reason you need the generators is that a shut-down reactor still generates typically a few percent of it's power output for a while. Covering this in concrete is rather like deciding to deal with a burning car by sealing it in a large cast iron box, painting "pipe-bomb" on the side and then putting that in an infant school.
If you can come up with something that is catchy, memorable and available that is the ideal. That is easier said than done. With the domain market the way it is, you do the best you can. All of your proposals sound like suitable domains for your purposes.
Sigh, once again we see the sad and sorry state of open source adoption in .NET. The choice seems to be to first have a taste of the swill Microsoft makes available and then fall back to the NIH philosophy when that doesn't cut it.

Of note here, is that nHibernate, one of the strongest ORMs for .NET (and basically what EF is attempting to copy features from) was not even mentioned or considered. It's this whole "but there's open source in there, it might touch me" attitude I find ridiculous.

Obviously I'm making assumptions here, but any discussion of ORM in .NET that doesn't even bring up nHibernate is suspect to me.
Twitoaster shutting down
> The rich have just as much right

and a greater level of privilege to free speech, imho.
What about data persistence? Is it still enforced only through replication?

I really liked MongoDB's philosophy but this was the show stopper for me when I was exploring it. At least for some services I need to be certain that if the DB says it stored some data that really stored and not kept in volatile memory until it decides it's the right time to write them to disk.

It's been a while since I looked at it though, and that may no longer be the case. Are there any improvements in this area?
How To Launch Any Product Using Social Media
My understanding is that there's no property tax in China [1] which makes holding empty property a lot more attractive than it is here.

[1] I lived in China for years, but I learnt that here: http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/06/china-eyes-propert...
Yes, I ran an eBay business, selling signed comic books back in 2003 through 2004 during the retro comics craze (G.I. Joe, Transformers, Street Fighter).

I was doing something I deeply enjoyed and forged a new friendships, partnerships, and learned about price arbitrage and the timing of the comic book markets.

I didn't realize at the time, but I had incredibly low startup costs and did it for about a year. Paid for my hobby of comic books at the time and made a hefty $10,000 profit.

I didn't really "choose" tech entrepreneurship, I just fell into it after applying for Extreme University and got in (think Y-Combinator in Toronto, Canada)
Facebook Users Targeted by Cross-Site Scripting Exploit
> Who is it good for?

Someone who desires to keep track of a user's key strokes, for example a corporation. This is coming from someone who consents to monitoring every day.

While I agree it is not good for the singular, non-ignorant person, I'm sure there's a massive market for "Corporate Consumers" who'd like to save a buck instead of spending effort configuring a system.

About having the capability of auditing, I suppose it saves production costs to have one laptop with a switch, as opposed to two laptops with slight hardware or software differences.
Sophisticated Attack Yields Data On IEEE Members
In Chrome, on your sign up and log in pages, the https has a red slash through it warning that the page contains unencrypted resources.
MIT Multicopter Maps Environment With Kinect
1.8 has single server durability, but TBH I haven't had a chance to check it out in depth yet.
I have to agree with RiderOfGiraffes -- an article with a high number of comments relative to points usually indicates that the article is more opinionated than informative, since most everyone who upvoted it posted their personal reaction to it. Although they are popular, I feel these are usually low-value articles and discussions.

Additionally, it's very hard to have a high-quality discussion that is also high-volume. Once an article's comments get over several pages long, you can be sure that most commenters are not reading everything before commenting, so you get a lot of similar comments. Sometimes this is valuable (e.g. "Ask HN"), but most of the time it just worsens the signal-to-noise ratio.
Enough social-media business already
That may be true, but in web-over-data scenarios architectural design issues are going to trump language choice almost every time.

Node.js is a somewhat decent example of this principle at work.
My last two freelance jobs involved two freelancers: one developer and one designer (who might also be a front end developer). This allowed a considerable amount of parallelization, but it can get messy if the split between the workload is not well-defined. I've always been on the development end of the workload and finding work hasn't been hard so far.
I've never seen my coworkers as universally excited as the day one of them posted the old version of the Skype for Mac dmg in our campfire room.

I'm exaggerating, sure, but everybody was thrilled to get rid of the Skype 5 horror.
Why can we develop athletes and not writers?
Samsung responds to installation of keylogger on its laptop computers
Nope, this is all node.js. The scraper hits the homepage every 10 seconds or so with a generous fallback timing if a non 200 response is received. Have to be nice to the server.

The response is then parsed into a json object using node-jquery
The conversion rate is embarrassingly low right now, but to be fair its only been live for a few weeks so maybe I'm just being impatient. I don't think so though, or at least I don't think its ever too early to start tackling the problem.

Anyway, as far as the single user is concerned, it is a free feed management site - maybe a bit unexciting, but I think the features are an improvement some of the other options out there. Where it gets cool though, and this goes back to what I was saying about the social-networking aspect, is how users can share and redistribute content. This is the exciting stuff that seems hard to convey to my visitors in the few seconds they're engaging. I know how impatient or hurried I can be while browsing, so I am not entirely surprised by the problem.

I've place a link below if you are still intersted in having a look.
Meaning can be inferred from the down-voting. I think that was probably the meaning behind most of the negative votes.

I actually believe that it's okay to use voting to express whether you agree or disagree with a point. Where's the harm?

I think that the experience of reading HN is enhanced when there's contrast between popular and unpopular ideas. If a post is unpopular, it doesn't mean that I don't read it. If anything, I might pay more attention to it.

In some cases its lack of popularity might spark more debate; like it has in this case.
They've public admitted that the show (at least in it's current form) is closer to the end of it's run than the beginning and that they accept that the presenters and opinions are approaching self parody.

Personally I think that that's under stating it but to be fair to them it remains a valuable franchise and one that they're really obliged to keep going so long as it remains relatively successful.
It's pretty terrible (in HFT terms), particularly if you're trying to use a junky on-board NIC.

Folks not using FPGAs use separate ethernet cards and enable kernel bypass and can do significantly better with that.
We use Skype to communicate at work and pretty much curse Skype 5 every time we use it. My personal favorite interface feature is that double clicking someone when you're video chatting between multiple people MINIMIZES that person. I've watched no fewer than 10 people double click the main presenter in chat only to make a face and start fiddling with things when it does the opposite of what they want.
You cant dismantle a plant that still generates residual heat while a used fuel pool is on fire nearby. Its just too dangerous a place for humans to be. What should they have done? Sent Asimo?
But a Virtex 5 could hold several simple CPUs designed for this task ;)

I don't know if the algorithms they use can be expressed easily as state machines though.