skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think with the automated trading example, it makes it seem much easier for anyone to dip their cup in the stream.

When you think Facebook/Instagram, you think "Damn, those guys got lucky as hell". When you think automated trading, you think, "Hey, it can't be that hard", and start firing up your IDE and rolling out code to talk to an easily provisioned API.

Sure, it may take months to lose your shirt selling a photo service to Face/Goog/Apple. You can lose everything overnight with automated trading.

My father used to trade commodities for a living in the pit at the CME many moons ago, and when I was growing up I would be his technical side when he was trading out of our suburban Chicago home (setting up FM receiver/satellite dish/etc for real time quote data, staying up late nights with him running through trading scenarios in Tradestation on Win3.1 with data downloaded in bulk from Knight Ridder, and so forth).

Something very important I learned from him was: "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." With a startup, you can hit bottom. In the right market, bottom is much further down than you can ever see.
It could have easily been called "how i lost 500k with machine learning".

If you've really worked in that field than it's very surprising you've never heard about what professional poker players call bankroll management (and they "stole" the concept from professional traders).

The whole point is that you can --either if you gain an edge or get lucky-- win big. Very big. But you're never exposing a large part of your funds in the process.

Maybe OP had an overall "stop loss" at, say, $10K. Had he had five minus $2K days in a row at the start, he'd be out. He wouldn't be broke. He wouldn't be without a car and without a bank account. He just would have lost $10K.

But there's no upper limit as to how much you can win.

All you need is discipline and sound bankroll management.

And, yes, I've won a five-digits figure (hence not anywhere near what OP did) real $$$ at online poker. Starting from $0.01/$0.02 small blind/big blind tables and then working my way up using bankroll management.

It's assymetric. You're foolish if you think that succesful traders who won $x were as likely to lose $x. This is simply not how it works and it's very well explained in OP's article. He's detailing what his maximal daily exposure was and it was tiny compared to what he made.
Trust me, you earned that much because of your luck. Otherwise Andrew Ng would have partnered with another finance professor and they would have been the richest people on earth!! Imagine trading with their expert systems on global markets.

I traded stocks and Forex for years and my experience says, it is not for everyone. What ever indicators,discipline or model you follow it is going to work only if you have the right intuition or luck!
nVidia doesn't say the Steam Linux Beta starts today, they just say that they have tested their new drivers with the beta. They have probably tested them with an internal Valve steam beta that nobody else has access to yet.
That's funny, I actually am more drawn to being a polyglot as I get older. Part of this is to keep my mind nimble and myself excited, as I was when I first started learning things as a young adult.

Also, I think as I get wiser (I hope), I'm realizing more and more the precept of "when all you have is a hammer." It also helps that I'm decent enough in the things I've specialized in that I can learn new things with the purpose of supplementing the deficiencies in my specialties...which makes learning those new things both easier and more profitable.
The Case Against Constantly Bright Hands
It wasn't safe the minute my local supermarket cashier told me he was MCSE 2000 certified a couple of years ago.
I am curious as to exactly why the profitability decreased steadily and rather rapidly all the way to ~zero. The article doesn't seem to expound on that unless I missed something.

Is this a result of bots on the other side adapting in some way to what you were doing? I would have thought you would be too small a player for them to notice.
Show HN: EJSCrunch - Crunches EJS templates into library-independent functions
The Crowdwire - Live social media poll of US election
It was in the context of riots elsewhere in England -- if you read the whole article, there was a nationwide directive to treat rioting related incidents far more harshly than is the norm. (I'm not defending this!)

Some other examples from the article were jail sentences for small thefts, such as a single bottle of water. Like stealing a bottle of water, calling for a riot (regardless of whether anyone shows up) is a crime. The real story here is the general pattern: harsh prosecutions for crimes that would normally be forgiven.
The psychology behind people believing they aren't creative.
Whilst a laudable sentiment, you might be better off putting your energy into ensuring a similar law is never passed in the US.

We have have a very similar law in the UK, Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986, and I'm sure it won't be long before something similar is proposed in the US after the 'innocence of muslims' debacle / tragedy (which is exactly the kind of thing that the UK law was brought in for, but has been similarly abused by the authorities).

We also have rather interesting laws surrounding libel in the UK... India seems to be a bit more sane on that front at least.
Surface disk space: a bit better, and a bit worse, than Microsoft says
Just as a reminder/caution: Might not have happend if you checked https://news.ycombinator.com/robots.txt or used the unofficial Hacker News API: http://api.ihackernews.com/
The difficulty is in identifying what is a 'flash crash' (i.e. a temporary downward blip in prices caused by computer or human error) and what is a genuine downward price movement.

If the market dives and you quickly get into a big long position, and then it dives some more - what do you do? You can either close out your losing trade and take the loss, or hope that the market comes back up, all the while holding on to the risk of further losses.

Also, there's no guarantee that trades in the middle of a flash crash will remain valid after the crash. The exchange could nullify all trades in a certain period of time, which would completely wipe out your upside potential.
I have to admit, the same thought occurred to me. This then made me wonder if they could even use the name EVE since EVE Online might have the trademark/copyright/whatever on that.
I feel like an idiot for only just realizing; this is valves solution to the potential windows 8 lockout isn't it
E-voting sounds cool, but it will never replace paper ballots
Looks good, one suggestion: the 3 circles in the top left corner need icons. It is non-obvious to me what they do, even after testing them out.
These people can use the keyboard - git has comprehensive command line support, even if it isn't always as quick as git gui.
1. Hook

2. Line

3. ...

Profit!
You are correct. I think I had to have $10-30k in my account. I was extremely low risk so they weren't concerned.
Clicking on the link to an article titled “The Non-technical Hacker” results in “Error establishing database connection.” An example of truth in advertising?
Show HN: Hacker News Reader (for iPhone and iPad)
Hey everyone. I finally got my HN app approved with Apple. Check it out here - https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hacker-news-reader!/id532402679?ls=1&mt=8 - and let me know what you think.

I've tried almost all of the available options and none of them were quite right for me. It probably isn't the prettiest option, but I find it to be easier to use and it's not missing and functionality (like voting and commenting).

It's a Universal iPhone/iPad app so you get it on both. It has a simple tab method to go back and forth quickly between the HN discussion and the article. You can share from email or on Twitter, and it has support for adding articles to Instapaper.

I'll leave a clickable link in the comments, as well as a few Promo Codes.
almost all bgp transit provider have prefix filtering,
ARM and Imagination take over MIPS for $350m
What can data scientists learn from DevOps?
I think you actually have to only believe you're more qualified than one other person whom you generally demonify and caricature and maybe 2 or 3 other candidates you can safely ignore and refuse to engage. You can rely on your party to "convince" you about the other millions.

It is my understanding from reading presidential biographies that ambition has not usually been a key factor in making The Big Decision(tm) to run in recent elections at least since Nixon. But who knows, not like you can really trust the sources either. Saying it's better to be King is not much of a way to create an historical legacy :)
Android Adoption Ramping Up 6X Faster Than iPhone
They do when they're identical. Unfortunately, all these links are subtly different.

When someone says "I want a programming language
in which I need only say what I wish done," give
him a lollipop.

-- Alan Perlis ACM-SIGPLAN '82,
Epigrams in Programming

I invite you to suggest a solution to the problem of duplicated content.
>Over a period of months winning that wouldn't qualify as blind luck.

Why not?
clickable link - https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hacker-news-reader!/id532402...

Promo Codes
RK4JY43F74EK
R3YX9HAN39E6
LEYR9H379JJR
http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=%5EVIX+Interactive#symbol...;

very interesting, a spike in sept-dec 2009 that roughly follows his PNL...
You're right actually. I think at the moment you can't turn off individual "goodies" either.

That would be a good set of options however.
This project makes me happy. Can't wait for it to be extended to other languages.
...or JavaScript support, for that matter. Editing JS files seems to work, including syntax highlighting, but I didn't find any way to connect the instarepl to other "projects" than Clojure
I like the "time to waste" comment. I've been universally disappointed every time I try to get wine running, and frustrated that the listings in appdb.winehq.com seem to be lies. Generally I'm willing to tinker with stuff (and pretty successful at it), but here I always give up.

"I don't have time for games anyway" is what I end up telling myself.
We'll likely do some more work to make it a bit more platform flavored - those are specifically a mac convention. From left to right:

Close - Minimize - Maxmize

The one on the far right is fullscreen.
Right, after a while you end up rehashing the same topics with slightly varying syntax. That's only interesting to amnesiacs.

I think what you describe is another case of obsessing over the tools themselves rather than building things with the tools. Building is hard, and it's hard in multiple dimensions, where tinkering is fun and interesting. (Yes, puttering around with new programming languages is tinkering)
I'm sitting here trying to decide how different these mailers are from "I Voted" stickers (that get handed out by many polling places).
We are! Crossposted from this month's hiring thread:

Knewton (Union Square, NYC, full-time) is hiring for the following:
-> Software Engineer
-> Infrastructure Software Engineer
-> Data Scientist
-> Adaptive Instruction Analyst

http://www.knewton.com/jobs/

=====

Knewton is building the world's most powerful adaptive learning engine, with the goal of making personalized and engaging education available to all. Knewton has been recognized as a Technology Pioneer for 2011 by the World Economic Forum in Davos and one of the top 25 best places to work by Crain’s New York Business. This is an outstanding opportunity to work with and learn from the world's best engineers and data scientists.

=====

On a personal note: working for us means you'll get free dinner, drinks, coffee, the benefits you'd expect from a mature company (health/dental/vision, group deals on gym memberships, 401(k)), and the great perks you'd expect from a small company (our ping-pong tournament starts next week, our happy hours start every Friday at 5:01pm, and our vacation policy is limitless).
We're also pretty flexible about getting work done. We all work remotely to some degree (I work from Miami every other month, and we have devs in Hawaii and Colorado), and those on our team who weren't impacted by Sandy are working at coffee shops, libraries, and apartments across the five boroughs.

Feel free to ask me any questions @achompas on Twitter.
Are you seriously suggesting that the cost of the physical book, and it's construction has nothing to do with the price of the book at the bookstore?
A piece of cardboard (shaped like an iPhone 5) - USED ebay
All of the above! http://HockeyBias.com
Note: Im not affiliated with Heroku, I'm just a big fan.
Nate Silver Says Obama Has a 91.6 Percent Chance of Winning the Election
Why is it his business to defend other market participants?
Beautifully Hand Drawn Video Game like Machinarium for Linux, iOS, Mac & PC
We're a group of enthusiastic creative coder, illustrator and an interaction designer that just launched this beautiful hand-drawn video game project on Kickstarter and are looking for your help.
I love this comment :)

What pains me is just this year I've heard in 3 separate occasions for 3 separate startup businesses {industries: ['transportation', 'social', and 'mobile ads']} people propose "Let's do the Instagram strategy." It may be obvious to you and me how absurd that sounds, but there are a non-trivial number of people who blindly follow headlines.

Edit: I agree with @toomuchtodo. It's just too easy to risk with HFT that the warning is needed here more than elsewhere.
You're welcome !
From memory python was the last item on the roadmap. Wasn't it an added extra if they got over a certain amount in the kickstarter project (which I think they reached).

Ah, actually, looking at the project [0] it says "Python will be the third language to be supported out of the gate"

[0] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ibdknox/light-table
Is Microsoft competing with Linux for unusability now? This sounds more involved than customizing GNOME, which is a feat...
This is a bit off-topic, but it's actually quite feasible to get a real edge in Hold'em, and it's not just about spotting other people's patterns.

To start with, there's simple probability: knowing the odds of making you hand vs. the payoff in the pot, or the chance of winning with various starting hands. This is pretty basic but a lot of low-stakes players screw it up. If you get it right, their mistakes are your gain.

At a more advanced level, game theory comes into play, using bluffs and so on. The game is complex enough that it's not completely solved, and it's an active area of research. The University of Alberta is doing a lot of working developing poker bots using game theory. By playing a good strategy, you can prevent other players from exploiting your patterns.

Only after you've got a good grasp on all that should you really think much about exploiting a particular player's weaknesses. The Alberta guys are doing work on that part too. Exploitative play can improve your profit but also makes you more vulnerable.

For a good overview of this stuff, the book Mathematics of Poker by Ankenman and Chen is a good place to start.

I agree though that HFT is awfully competitive these days. If I had to choose between the two I'd play poker.
On Windows 7, I'm getting:

CreateProcessW: The system cannot find the file specified.

after C-k instarepl -> Start a local client.
To be clear, are you saying that he is wrong, or that what he thinks is not important?
Report Details Coca-Cola Cyber Attack That Never was Disclosed
Basically this is a story about a guy who was smart enough to script up his trading tool (he discovered that there is an API and wrote some code to use it).

He trade other people's money, using other people's (probably employer's) account and resources, I suppose.

His employer have paid all the fees, and, took all the risks - if there is profit - it is mine, if there is a lose - it is theirs.)

The essence of trading is about having a special (insider) position of even being a market maker, who just collecting fees from every trade other people do.)

But this is just my guess.
I'm glad to see a healthy respect for investment among the hacker community. It's traders like this who commit to nearly a full 10 seconds of ownership that are the backbone of economic growth for this country.
> The exchange could nullify all trades in a certain period of time, which would completely wipe out your upside potential.

This is the most important thing: In every single "flash crash", the exchanges have retroactively canceled trades, in a rather arbitrary manner (e.g., "every trade between 16:30 and 16:38 is null and void"). There is some underlying justification, but it is also arbitrary (e.g., "anything below 3% of the price when the flash crash started", with no specific justification for the 3% number, or a well defined methodology for the time of the crash).

That could easily turn a +$100K profit into a -$500K profit, depending on circumstance.
Competition is good and benefits the consumer (us developers) greatly! While I cannot see how this would work and be useful for languages like Ruby/Python/PHP, maybe the Light Table creator does - and I'm excited to see what's coming.

I can't wait to try the finished product!
Great work, very interesting to me. Counter to what we're constantly told through the media this stuff can be done. Doing it year after year seems to be the elusive part. Intuitively, once you've proven your technique on 1000+ trades it's not luck.

I developed a fully-automated low-frequency stat arb system that I ran in 2007 based on a perhaps even simpler algorithm. It traded various equities equally to the long and short side regardless of market conditions so widespread rally or collapse was irrelevant. I logged about 20-30 trades/day - much slower.

The results, using no leverage, were +90% in a year with a worst drawdown of 2% and a Sharpe ratio of 2. Total trades were 5000+. Month-to-month the results were very consistent until the uptick rule was nixed in July 2007. August 2007 was a record winner for me, but Sept-Dec 2007 fell flat, not losing, but with greatly diminished profits and the same variation and more frequently getting slammed all-long or all-short instead of a mix that was often near-neutral. Also getting fills better than my orders then completely disappeared, as this was the beginning of the HFT middlemen - including your own brokerage. I shut it down at the start of 2008, keeping the profits intact and moving on to other priorities.

I continued to monitor the theoretical results for a couple of years but the conditions didn't return so I eventually cancelled my data feed.
Exactly. I've played millions (!) of real-money online poker hands and won some money in the process (not anywhere near what most people who've played that many hands did).

Most people don't understand that, when you're able to recognize patterns, playing millions of hands while never exposing more than 1% of your bankroll on any deal is not "gambling" but "printing money" (a tiny amount of money in my case compared to consulting but that is not the point).

At the same time the very fact that obviously (seen most of the posts here) most people don't understand basic bankroll management, risk management, standard deviation, expected value, variance, etc. means there are probably quite some opportunities out there to make money for those who do understand that ; )
YouTube clip shows electronic voting machine changing votes from Obama to Romney
Ask HN: "mandatory" apps for my new iPad mini
Hey all,

Just got an iPad mini and I'm really enjoying it. GoodReader, Kindle, Instapaper, and Flipboard means I have lots of high-quality reading material from academia, blogs, and the bookstore. The game selection is also great--King of Dragon Pass and Final Fantasy Tactics are the type of games I've been looking for on other platforms.

What am I missing, though? I'd like to hear about any apps that you get a lot of mileage from. "Mandatory" in the title is intentionally ambiguous--I'd like to hear about apps that you can't live without.
AMD closes Operating System Research Center (which housed the linux devs)
Relax, nobody is buying your program.

Other than sheer luck, the most plausible explanation for your diminishing returns is that you found a strategy that worked _at that point in time_, other people copied it (starting with your broking firm), and as that strategy became more common your ability to make money disappeared.

I work in the industry, this happens all the time. Trading strategies have a shorter half life than you may think.
I wouldn't trust Amazon Glacier. I'm guessing that they have a secret Glacier datacenter in the Artic Pole. What happens when the glaciers melt? You are done for.
Click Facebook’s ‘I’m Voting’ Button, Research Shows It Boosts Turnout
Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin Calls for an End to Party Politics
Did you by chance have the old one before? There may be some weird conflict with the directories. Try removing HOME/.lighttable and restarting.
Especially considering that from it's lowest point in 2009 through the end of 2010, the S&P500 rose by 71%. Need to know what the starting capital was to be able to figure out if his return beat the market.
So that I don't feel compelled to watch shitty TV - lol
I didn't say it was. But everyone should be in the business of not being evil and not exasperating the problems of others. In trading that means not contributing to flash crashes.

I am not saying that this guy's trading did contribute to flash crashes! He may have successfully implemented systems to prevent that. I hope he did, and if so I'm interested to hear how.
Uh, if you look at his daily pnl charts, it looks like gambling with some extremely great odds, he rarely looses any money. That pattern is typically associated with HFT, If you can do many small trades and your strategy really has positive expected value you'll get great returns. I don't expect it would work now though, the HFT market is much more competitive these days.
i redeemed the last one. thanks!
To me it sounds like Steam would go live today.

"new R310 drivers were also thoroughly tested with Steam for Linux, the extension of Valve's phenomenally popular Steam gaming platform that officially opened to gamers starting today."
Are we seeing the renaissance of enterprises in the cloud?
Hey, I didn't actually intend this to be a course. I do not make any money in the market right now so am certainly not qualified to teach a course on it. And of course, if I was making money in the market I wouldn't have posted this at all. So please everyone remember that. These comments have made me realize it's probably for the best if I do not post the source code. Basically you are competing against armies of PHDs who are buying buildings next to the exchange so they can get their executions slightly faster. It is indeed surprising to me that I was able to make money in the first place. But I do know for a fact that I did make money and I also know that I was not at risk of losing a bunch of money. As mentioned the most I lost in one day was $2000. That's all I was risking.
I figured that's what they were, but generally Mac apps will restore to their original size after you click "maximize" the second time. I'm using Windows right now and Maximize didn't restore on the second click.

Also, noticing in Clojure it doesn't keep your parens in order, is that something you see being done in modules?

Overall, I really enjoy it though. Going to take a little break from Emacs and give this a go.
An animated map of the US showing the prevalence of obesity from 1985-2010
I love what Chris is doing, but I have yet to understand what Light Table does differently from say Emacs's own lisp evaluation mechanism.
I love complexity and complex systems. I feel this irresistible urge to take everything and anything apart and understand the internal components and structure. I enjoy visualizing the components within hardware, devices, objects, buildings, and larger things.