skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The quote was given in 12/07. Back then, Verizon's network was largely made with BPON nodes (655mbit down, 155mbit up to each node). It really couldn't handle 100mbit at the time. Since then, the FiOS network's been getting GPON upgrades (2.44gbit down, 1.22gbit up to each node), and is easily capable of handling 100mbit to the home. Times change and some companies really do upgrade equipment instead of overselling lines.

Rich and poor has nothing to do with it at all. Population does. All I'm saying is to get the service to the largest number of people first - which happens to be urban areas. This way, there's more equipment being made and the techs have more practice doing said installations which will speed things up. Which then goes and brings the cost down and makes it cheaper to bring services out to more rural areas.

Monticello, MN was sued by TDS Telecom, not Verizon. You can't blame telco x for what telco y does when they're unrelated to each other beyond being telco's.

When did I say America was too big to wire up? Don't put words into my mouth. All I'm saying is that it costs more to run fiber one or two miles to a house then it does to run fiber ten or twenty miles. It's not hard to build a network, but it takes time and is expensive.

Comcast, Optimum Online, Time Warner, etc. They're cable companies that started in on telco. Verizon's the other way around - a telco that started in on cable. Which happened right around the time they started laying Fiber out for the first time.

Yes, we should be outraged at the shit that some of the companies do. But please don't lump every company into your bad egg basket just because a majority of them suck.

Now, if you want to be outraged at the fact that because the lines are fiber and not copper, Verizon doesn't have to share them anymore, go for it. If you want to be outraged at what Verizon is doing with Verizon Wireless caps, feel free to be. You'll be correct to be pissed off. But that's got nothing to do with FiOS.
I think you can from these guys if you qualify:

http://individuals.interactivebrokers.com/en/main.php

Tradeking is $4.95 per trade.
Humanism.
Not knowing everything. I don't know exactly what drives me, but i have an enormous need to find out. The same with all sorts of other questions, if most people were me, and asked themselves the same stuff as i do, and got similar answers, they would be either mad, or really weird, I've managed to stay slightly mad and moderately weird, but i don't know for how long, and I'm eager to find out.
What is investing if its not a IF/THEN statement?

If price goes up then sell, if price goes down then buy.
If the company meets these financial criteria then buy, if not then sell.
If the price approaches a resistance level then sell.

Whether your basing the investment decisions on fundamental or technical analysis, either way its an IF/THEN statement at some level.
um well, hello. so thats my website. quite the site here. and quite the surprise to see that i'm getting any attention at all. a lot of very intelligent commentary.
Do you think evolution really cares whether constraints are artificial or not?
Flagging it for lack of value.
The Inquirer is a pretty crappy news site, with a really weird spin on everything.
EnJOY
Just the idea that you could bring a lot of value by only displaying content that is truly related to startups. For example, you are pulling in the straight TechCrunch feed, but in reality only a small percentage of TechCrunch stories are really relevant to startups. One potential way to improve on the sites that inspired your site is by creating some filtering system to only show the relevant stuff. I know Guy Kawasaki has said that AllTop is targeted to folks who don't know how to use feed readers (i.e. non-techies). But an audience for a startup related news is probably already grabbing the feeds for a lot of these sites. So, you could make the user experience better by filtering out some of the "other stuff" either programatically or by hand. Anyway, hope this is helpful.
Matt1,

you're exactly right. its just a bunch of if then statements. I played with quite a few variations of a VERY simple, primitive strategy.

I'm the first to admit that that day's P&L was largely the product of luck. In fact, I had quite a bit of remorse after the fact and was thankful that the coin flipped my way that day.

Regarding predictive engines, you're definitely right as well. Most educated financial professionals don't believe tat you can predict future price movement with any degree of certainty, but there IS a fairly large following up that believes that price behavior is at least price reverting in the short term.

I got lucky, I basically flipped a coin and HAPPENED to do it on a day where the SP500 moved a LOT. moving averages do TERRIBLY in environments where the market doesn't trend hugely in one direction. I think I talked about that a bit later.

On that note though, I still work with this, though my approach has changed dramatically. Its certainly possible to structure a trading strategy to fit your risk profile.

Nobody can win every time, but you can design the strategy to provide losses you are comfortable with.

Regarding tweaking buy/sell algos to predict future movement though, there's plenty of literature on that on both sides, so I won't really argue with you.

If you're itnerested, I recommend reading about high frequency algorithmic trading. You can also read my similar blog posts about why I think technical analysis is absolute drivel and the potentical justification for running a moving average algo.
The quest for happiness
Thats a great idea.
its quite true that a lot of people do it. Its not ACTUALLY a profitable venture in the sense that the risk-reward profile from a purely monetary standpoint is probably unjustified.

I did it for fun, to learn, to gamble, and hopefully get lucky. God knows I've spent money in worse ways before.

Regarding the theory that other players would jump in the market and cause the opportunity to go away: you're right, but they'd really have to parametrize the same strategy in the same way as you. thousands of people use moving averages already, but all parametrized differently so they produce buy and sell signals at different times.

There's certainly no ideal parametrization that is alawys profitable, as most research shows (and I tend to believe)
> His urine is a brighter yellow, a sign that he is ingesting more vitamins and nutrients.

Other, equally scientific explanations: He's happier. He's drinking more sunshine juice. The yellow humors are growing.
you're right. and i ran it until it started losing. I announced the day i quit running the basic moving average crossover algo.

I still dabble with variations of it (made like 250 bucks last friday), but I'm now doing way more research and backtesting before I drop things into the market for real.
Flag you and your family!
Hyperinflation forces Zimbabwe to print $200 million notes
on that note, i lost over 1000 bucks a day for 3 days straight, which is when i quit.

and on having the "secret sauce" to beat the market. Read about Edward Thorpe. He's a badass. He wrote the book "beat the dealer" which was the bible on counting cards and beating vegas at blackjack.

Then he figured out how to price options (convertibles, really) and made a killing in his own hedge fund (Princeton Newport Associates, I believe).

He had the secret sauce, used it to make a killing instead of publishing it. YEARS later, black and scholes published the essentially SAME formula for price options and eventually won a nobel price for their work.

But Thorpe stuck to his guns and made his fortune. Merits to both sides, I suppose.
TradeStation is $0.01 per share for equities (for the first 500 shares; $0.006 after that), $1/min per trade: http://www.tradestation.com/brokerage/commissions.shtm
I think the no-arbitrage principle comes into play as well:
If there is an (easy) set of rules that you can follow to make money, then there are enought people to act according to these rules so that you can't win anything. Seriously, this simplistic view of the market is just a threat to your hard earned bucks.

There are historical prices available at finance.google.com. Backtesting your strategy before playing around with real money is probably a good idea.
Intelligent Investor: absolutely. My first investment book. My deep suspicion is that THIS book will be more important in the next few years as company valuations tank. Even now tons of firms trade below book value, which was one of Ben Graham's great criteria. For years this has been impossible to find, but with the credit crisis, its back. Now... to choose the good ones...

Options Volatility and Pricing by S. Natenberg (sp) is a great theoretical primer for options, though typically a bit dense for people outside the industry. The writing style is brutal, but this book has probably made more millionaires than any single other book in history. Walk around the option exchange floors and every clerk has a copy, to this day.
do unto others then run like hell
using past performance to estimate future performance simply does not work

This is not always true.

I had a theory a few years ago that went like this: The price of a stock is a direct function of the perceived price of the company multiplied by a risk factor: The more risk the less the stock is worth. On the day the yearly report is publicised for a company the risk is big just before the publication because nobody knows for sure what the numbers are, and low just after the publication because everybody now knows. So according to my theory the stock price of an arbitrary company should statistically go up on the day that the yearly report is made public.

I, painstakingly, found some historical data on this (it wasn't easy) and found that it was spot on. A bit of statistical analysis showed thet there was a definite gap to be exploited.

A friend of mine showed in his Masters thesis that there were certain patterns that would almost always be present in IPO's that could be exploited if you knew them.

So there are definitely loopholes where past behaviour shows future performance, but not a lot of them.

And professional investors aren't always as smart as they're made out to be. I know a few, and hackers are a lot smarter in regard to numbers.
http://fattyfatfat.com/2008/10/automated-day-trader-most-tec...

I still stand by my above claim that Tech Analysis (and especially LONG term trending) has no theoretical basis, except for the fact that everyone else believes in it.
Tobacco causes severe side effects which get progressively worse before the "big stuff" kicks in. That's a pretty good cue that you're poisoning yourself. Not so with Provigil.
you have nine holes. if you can control what goes into them, and what goes out of them, you will be fine
I've heard good things about http://www.prophet.net/
from other finance professionals.

I've personally never used it. I just download raw pricing data then backtest it myself. You could learn how to do it on even yahoo data if you wanted (for day-over-day trading). Bloomberg is by far the best for intraday price information.
Pulitzer Prizes Expand to Include Web-Only News Outlets
We are in the Online Travel Industry, for people who dont know the forward book and high possibility of cancellations (Chargebacks) makes travel regarded in the same category as Adult Porn and Online Gambling sites in terms of risk.

It has taken us 7 months to get a card merchant facility, the bonding and legal registration requirements alone for trading are pretty damn difficult within the UK so following this we were hit with little or no co-operation from Merchant facilities, despite holding an IATA bonded Licence, UK TTA Licence and ATOL Licence, literally no card acquirers would touch a new travel startup it really shed some light on the way the industry can make or break a business. Common conversations would start with..."what sector"...."online Travel"..."oh we dont like that..sorry"!

If I were aware of the utter disdain towards travel companies worldwide from card merchant services then I certainly would not have gone into the sector.

Suffice to say we eventually got our card acquirer 2 weeks ago after 7 months of applications!, we eventually tried 7 UK merchant services & high street banks, 7 offshore merchant services - Panama / Belize / Delaware / Amsterdam / Estonia / China / Cayman Islands and were not even entertained by Google Checkout / Paypal / Neteller!!

Additionally to give you guys an idea, our margin is about 10-12% of the Total Transaction Value, on the two occasions we actually got to terms of business they wanted a 10% rolling reserve for 6months (our margin!!) and on top would require a rate of 5.5% on credit AND debit cards!! therefore for each transaction when charging the customer a 2% CC fee we would infact be losing 3.5%. A completely unworkable situation, in essence...we've seen your business plan and your financials and if you want to trade your gonna have to bootstrap and borrow for your first year at least!!

Luckily we have managed to find an excellent company in Moneybookers who are very open to negotiation...terms started at 180 rolling reserve of 10%, we have negotiated down to 45 days and 3% Rolling Reserve and a credit card rate of 1.9% which given our margins is MUCH more workable!!

Sorry if this sounds like an anti merchant rant but when i saw this topic I had to share the problems we have experienced, after finishing complete integration with 45 xml suppliers, building a custom platform and new social media elements for travel and obtaining every licence under the sun its literally been 7 months of uncertainty and hell while we have had a fully working site just sat there!!

Rant over!! lol
Thanks for submitting. This post has really opened my eyes.
I use interactive brokers.

The cost of a ES mini (SP500 mini future) trade is $2.40.

Stocks trade for half a penny to a penny per share with a minimum of $1.00 per transaction.

I think they require 20k to start a new account these days though.

IB has been by far my favorite brokerage
Ask HN: Recommended broadband provider?
I am moving to the bay area (and the country) and I need to get a broadband connection for my apartment here. Would love to find out what most people here use, and if there is any particular provider/deal that you recommend.

Thanks in advance!
When I read the title, I thought it was going to be an ironic post by the NYT about post-barriers ("teasers.")
i ain't got nothin' better to do
And lastly:
I wrote a lot of that just as I was figuring things out, so I don't know how much of that I still stand by. But this morning, I wrote the one thing that I'd recommend to anyone who is interested in this sort of thing.

http://fattyfatfat.com/2008/12/moving-average-crossover-theo...
Always taking the fork in the road that'll result in the best story.
Don't experience life through the filter of a philosophy.
I agree that trend analysis has a lot smaller foundation for the long term, but in the short run its essentially analyzing the supply and demand of the stock, which can be predicted (not all of the time of course).

Outside factors like news don't occur everyday, so the using technical analysis for intraday trading is very reasonable
Well, it's hard to tell from just a few lines, but I would guess that your are an INTP personality.
Your coworker doesn't really understand ActiveX; ActiveX controls execute unchecked native x86 code with full access to the system call table. NaCL falls somewhere in between VMWare and the Java Bytecode Verifier.
It was game over long before NaCL, which is why I'm not bullish on this particular browser plugin: very, very few information problems people need solved require native code, and those few problems are already pretty well represented. If this was a killer problem, the JVM applet plugin would have evolved faster.
NaCL doesn't run "arbitrary" native code; it runs a strictly controlled subset of x86, with all bblock edges verified, in a per-process environment that uses segment access controls to prevent code from overwriting code, and without access to the full system call table. It is basically a faster version of the Java applet sandbox.
I want to live my life, not just exist within it.
I'm talking more about the Firefox extension they have. Where you basically select text on the page (including images, etc) and then click Google's notebook button-- it will index that, store the snippet, etc.

http://www.google.com/googlenotebook/tour1.html
What's the merit to publishing a successful algorithm? Or using a previously published algorithm that any hedge fund manager or resourceful individual can find and implement trivially.
Yes. And have been doing so for years. Not the only thing I track, but works quite well. Of late, I also track particular terms on twitter, made easier if you use Tweetdeck
<flips coin>

I flipped a coin to decide whether I should up mod or down mod this. Was the coin flip pre-determined by my previous actions? Did I actually up mod or down mod this? :)
Must be a millionaire
well trying to prevent a midlife crisis. By the time I hit mid to late 30s I want to be spending a lot more time on things that I am passionate about - my family, kids (hopefully when I have them), my violin and entrepreneurship, and lot less at a job that sucks out my life!
The problem is that the market is dynamic and chaotic. Measuring past data doesn't give you much indication of how much your algorithm would have made, even in hindsight, because every buy and sell you would have executed would have changed the market and the future. Even relatively small orders can have big ripple effects, especially if they just happen to trigger standing limit orders.

Genuinely measuring the market (by trading) changes it.
>If price goes up then sell, if price goes down then buy

By how much? Within what time period? Are there any other factors that might be pertinent?

The world is not simple.
I exist to misbehave, it's fun.
Curiosity, and for the pure enjoyment of it.
Tradional media companies won't be buying internet companies for a while
come on mate who did not see that one coming. I am waiting for the days of the Billion dollar notes. Mugabe should consider himself lucky that the current financial crisis meant less attention on Zimbabwe!
boolean TraderAnxiety(boolean mktStatus) {

if (mktStatus == FALLING) {
Sell();
return true;
}

if (mktStatus == SURGING) {
Buy();
return true;
}

if (mktStatus == FEAR) {
Loathing();
return true;
}

if (mktStatus == OVERMYHEAD) {
UseProfanity();
return true;
}

return true;
All successful day traders are lucky. People who give day trading advice are frauds.

That's not the most polite thing to say. Some of the people who give day trading advice might even be sincere and not know that they are frauds. But it's the truth.
I miss the culture of acceptable teasing in Australia.
I would imagine hedge funds test just about every parametrization you can think of. And since it's a market, wouldn't even similar trading algorithms ruin your chances? Especially considering the tax and fee implications of trading frequently.
Interesting, I hadn't noticed that feature. Pretty similar then, although I used a bookmarklet rather than a browser extension. Personally I prefer the bookmarklet because it works in most browsers and I generally don't use FireFox.
Yeah, don't daytrade. It's a sucker's game. The market is too close to efficient for you to recoup what you lose in brokerage fees and excess taxes.

Fund your IRA to the max, and if you're 20+ years from retirement buy all ETFs with low expense rations. If you're closer to retirement, buy fewer stocks and more t-bills, etc.
A Wiki of Social Media Marketing Examples‎
at 990 and 1700 USD for the two models do they really add that much benefit? The price to me doesnt seem like to be low enough for a mac lover to go to a clone.

And I wonder if their strategy is to simply make marketing waves rather than a full-time product with a Pystar clone and then to leverage all that marketing hype to switch to a product that is their bread and butter.
Thanks, I'll look in to it.
This looks pretty amazing. On their pricing page, they claim that the $60/month plan is specifically for individuals, not business use, though - how do you get around that? Just sign up for a personal plan, and so far they let you use it in the way you describe?
The Google Pump & Dump Scheme
YUI on GitHub
"But there is a big public benefit to be gained if everyone is connected and online."

Is there?

Seems to me 90+ odd percent would be good enough.
The only metaphysical purpose of a human being is to survive.

The only moral purpose of a human being is to pursue happiness.
Your startup idea is awesome!

A few things:

1. If you want to get more signups, make your homepage LOOK better.

2. If you could get the referral source of the user (and make it optional, cause I might want to use it on my webapp), you could get more of an idea of what that person wanted from your site (like if they got there by searching "how to write user interaction javascript", you would know their goal)

3. You need to charge for this!

4. I'll get more once I sign up and implement it on my site(s).
To make something from nothing that has an impact, hopefully for the better, in how people live.

Hitting payroll, though, in the more short term. :)
20% percent more people chose google over yahoo than life over death.
Hence why I said "at some level"
Java 7 Language Changes?
Yes, in that respect it's like physics - by measuring you are altering the experiment.

The volume on the day the reports came out was quite heavy, but if you had bought a substantial amount of stock it would certainly alter the market as you say. The point is that I'm pretty certain there are holes that will allow you to look at historic data and make statistically good buys - but you have to look where noone else is looking. Like the correlation of Nokia stock to the Finnish weather. Some of these will be large enough that you can make money, even though you alter the experiment.

On an unrelated note - I just read through your blog and found it very insightful :-)
Strive for excellence.
I would like to think that java programmers adhere to objectivism thus I must be into functionalism which I feel is an analog to utility? Making proceduralism futility?
Seems to be the thing to do.
Best Posts of 2008 for Developers
Gmail Finally Gets A To-Do List
Maybe "arbitrary" wasn't the right word; my point is that it looks like BrowserPlus lets you run a small selection of native things approved by Yahoo, while NaCl lets you run whatever you want in a sandbox. Most of the restrictions of NaCl are inconsequential since they only block things that well-behaved code doesn't do anyway.
There's not any reason you need objects for that, though. Python's join in the string module is called as join(list [,sep])*, and you could say

def br(sl):
return string.join(sl, "<br>")

or

br = lambda sl: string.join(sl, "<br>")

for the same effect. It's actually due to first-class functions.
See a hard drive being made
I'm toying with being an Anti-Solipsist, which basically states that everybody exists but me. I am completely imaginary and just a figment of real people's perceptions.

Since you exist, you should find this interesting, except that it came from me, an entity that is just a figment of your imagination.

Then again maybe not.

As you can see, I'm still working out some bugs with this worldview.

(grin)

I joke because I find the question slightly inane: people are who they are. It's not like they choose a philosophy and suddenly become something besides the emotional, reasoning hominids they've been all their lives. Philosophies can be bent, and people are really good at bending them to suit their predisposed character traits. In my opinion, of course.
The href can be that ugly link while the parens are still visible. The issue is when to parse the parens as part of the link.

Edit: but I guess you're saying I could do this to make it clickable. No thanks.