skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At what point will HFT drive out the proper functioning of a Market?

Have there been any studies on this? If human traders mostly reacted to "real" news (the Orange juice crop is bad this year) then human trading was mostly linked to actual changes that affect the price mechanism

But if large volumes of trades are speculative, or even worse, are directed at affecting the behaviour of other large Market players, is there not a point where the selling of actual OJ is just noise in the Market?

One can anticipate HFT bots acting like the strange Amazon pricing of obscure books in the millions of dollars, bots competing against bots to acquire more of the rent
redistribution. If we can imagine that we can imagine a failed crop with prices being driven down in a frenzy.

Surely some research exists on this? Where is the price signal tipping point?
Yeah Word does have a few nice new things but I wouldn't say they are worth the price of the upgrade.

The advanced embedded stuff scares me a little. I can see people adding huge videos into a word document and emailing it to 100+ people on a DL. I can see it being abused.
Amazon Responds To Outage, Confirms Offline For 49 Mins
People would write blog posts complaining that the supposedly transparent government is obfuscating critical economic numbers.
Sorry, I'm a Chromium dev, and in particular I'm the net maintainer who authored the majority of the current connection management code you are discussing. Our results are not public. The web compat concerns are with more exotic, enterprise configurations, not public ones. They are not the most compelling concerns though.
I feel like a 5-inch iPhone is actually too big. The 4-inch iPhone I think is actually on the smaller side. I'd love to see data of the screen size of the most purchased Android phones over the last 12 months.
It surprises me that IRC is used. In part because IRC is old and crufty and, I fear, not very secure. Also because IRC isn't some milspec contract that made some insider hundreds of millions of dollars. It's great to adapt an existing chat technology but it surprises me.

I recently read "Predator: The Remote-Control Air War over Iraq and Afghanistan: A Pilot's Story" and it talks a lot about how UAV pilots hang out in chat rooms sharing intel during operations. Asynchronous text is the perfect medium for this kind of thing; low bandwidth, doesn't require a lot of attention. Just crazy to think it'd be IRC.
How long until Apple makes something the size on an iphone with the screen size of a note? (With some sort of magic, like the thinkpad butterfly keyboard.)
Facebook Killed Off 37% Of Spammers Since June 2012
Four guys who deserve to win a Crunchie
Interesting, I'll keep an eye on that. When do you think RethinkDB will be ready for production use?
What Rails Girls Taught Me
What I find amazing is that a government agency managed to publish a report at a specific time, to the millisecond, using somebody else's clock.
A fun thought experiment. Suppose someone invents a time machine that gives the correct price of all securities at all future points in time.

1) Would it be against current rules to trade on this information?

2) If someone did use this machine surreptitiously to their own gain, how quickly will they approach owning 100% of everything?

3) If the entire data set of future prices were made publicly available, what would happen to markets? I mean, exactly, what would happen to stock prices?
Career advice, a quick 10 year retrospective
We ask telecommuters to work out of the office for the first two tweeks. Trying to explain the code base and the many utilities we've built is too time consuming and not easily explained over the phone or remote desktop. It's much easier to look over someone's shoulder and have discussions as needed. Moreover, we get a chance to see their personality, enthusiasm and such.
There are a alternatives:

https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-lang...

I, for one, really like Dart. It's very nice to use.
I got that bit thank you :-) but I did not understand why there might be a web page on amazon named after bozos, some sort of test page? Or a joke that has completely passed me by?
We aim to be ready for production in 6 months.
Not disagreeing with you, but wanted to mention that I recently learned that quartz clocks typically drift half a second PER DAY, which was shocking to me. This seems to imply that computers are subject to the same drift unless they are syncing via NTP many times a day.
Why didn't she highlight the change she wanted to make in google docs and make a comment on it? That would have been easier for both of you, I think.
Developer responsibility: What’s missing from video game violence
But maybe -- making this discussion more public would lead the surrounding friends/family of people like Aaron and Jody to be extra aware of this possibility?

I think either way, public or (relatively) private, similar people in a bad mental place are going to hear about this.
Then you will probably find knowyourmeme.com to be educational and edifying ;). HN, however, is not usually where I want to find out about these things, especially when they're so wholly tangential.
I think you have a bit of a misunderstanding of the situation here. Fair use covers how much of a copyright-protected work can be reproduced, not whether a work should enjoy copyright protections (as opposed to being put out in the public domain).
>>Or should I basically just not run Rails on any machine ever anymore, get a different web server, and start implementing my own request routing and ORM without any sort of YAML-parsing magic?

>That is astonishingly unlikely to be a net-win for your security.

In the long run, you are probably right. Once this gets fixed, which will probably be soon considering how much attention is on it.

But in the short run, is there anything worse than a vulnerability that allows a remote attacker to automatically detect, penetrate, and execute arbitrary code on your machine? To the point where it's not even safe to run the framework on localhost on your dev box?
Canadians are known to be one of the only cultures more prissy than Americans so you entire comment is invalid.
How To Ruin Your Twenties
Sure, of course they want to minimize fragmentation. But developers have been making apps for the 3.5" (3:2) form factor since 2008. So continuing to make a 3.5" (3:2) phone alongside a 5" phone (either 3:2 or 16:9 or anything else) wouldn't make any more work for developers than they've already made.
Does the code you deploy have access to the database?
NYTimes and more Rainbow Table nonsense
In addition (and i think this is actually more important) you could use a rubygems.org proxy cache (similar to http://blog.sprout-technology.com/setting-up-rubygems-proxy-...)
My favorite: "ANY GUN IS AN ASSAULT WEAPON"
Commodity futures is not my specialty but I looked into the lagging quotes from leveraged natural gas ETFs and from natural gas producers.

It's well known that tracking index for gold (GLD) correlates to the tracking index of gold producers (GDX) and they diverge and converge. People would do pair-trading on GLD-GDX pairs to bet on convergence.

Given that there's a binary catalyst event for natural gas, I wonder if there's a viable strategy to identify the thinly traded natural gas producers and exploit the stale quotes by market-makers (if the laggards are not responding as actively as the more liquid traded natural gas companies like CHK).

On the other side, I wonder if in a highly volatile event where a lot of punters would bid up leveraged natural gas ETF (GASL) above its intrinsic value, and you can take the other side of that trade and hedge with more liquidly traded UNG or FCX options or futures market. Just food for thought.

EDIT: Also I wonder if there's a spread between IV in UNG options and in the futures market to do a calendar or ratio spread.
> This is an example of one of those design decisions that you don’t usually notice until you see someone doing it wrong.
It’s one of the things that makes Apple products Apple products.

http://dcurt.is/3-point-5-inches
I think the justification is: "if you're going to have only one size of phone, you'll appeal to the most people by going with a smaller size" not "the smaller size screen is the only one anyone could ever want."

Based on my family's reaction to my Lumia 920 (skepticism from my parents, outright ridicule from my wife), I think Apple put smart money on their choice of screen size.
Coming soon to your Dropbox: Document previews and easier sharing
Out of curiosity, what's your first and second choice?
It means that he has donated enough money to the EFF's endowment[1] to fund a position at the EFF in perpetuity. That is, it's a big enough chunk of money that it can sit in an investment account, and the interest can be used to pay for a person's salary and other costs.

Calling it a "chair" just means that Mark Cuban's name gets associated with the position, and the role comes with specific instructions. In this case, fighting stupid patents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_endowment
I wish this were true, I really do, but it's just not true. Maybe for python-only packages. But, for the myriad of python extensions necessary for Scientific Computing with Python, pip and virtualenv are not enough.

We think conda is a useful tool, and have freed it for use by everyone.

Perhaps something like pip + a better virtualenv + wheel would be close, but we needed something that works now.
Word. I got hit by a car while biking 7 years ago and had all sorts of back problems afterwards. It wasn't like a sharp pain, but my back was always very tense and ache-y.

What has really helped me is doing handstand-pushups. You do a handstand against a wall, and then do a push up, lowering your head towards the floor. It really engages all the muscles in the shoulders/back. You'll probably start off by just doing a handstand and then go from there slowly. Once you are a bit more confident you can also arch your back away from the wall engaging muscles lower in your back.

Just like with any exercise, don't push yourself too much and make sure to keep proper form.
I've seen guys with Notes 2. I really hate them, but Samsung is on to something.
The Galaxy S3 is too large to type with one hand. Whenever I hold it, I have to kind of 'shake' the thing further down my hand to click on buttons in the top corners.
I'm beyond words about this. How is it that a modern, civilized country fails to see the correlation between guns and people getting killed by them? Why would you want to keep a firearm near you and your children?

The whole 'bad guys have guns' argument is moot, it's a chicken and egg thing. It's the exact same right that allows people to buy guns that gets the guns into society in the first place.

Another argument is that cars kill more people each year than guns. Fair point, but cars are meant as means of transportation, but the sole purpose of guns is to kill.

I understand the appeal of guns, but shouldn't we keep them locked up at the gun club? Why bring them home?

I grew up in The Netherlands, a country with very strict gun control laws and, sadly, one known case of a spree killer. I travelled a lot in the Middle East, where gun ownership is a lot higher. I can honestly say that I feel safer in The Netherlands, without people carrying guns to 'protect' themselves.

Banning assault weapons is not a finite solution, but IMHO a baby step in the right direction.
This is a marketplace business. You can't expect explosive growth when dealing with a two-sided market. You have to grow solidly on both sides or you risk having too much supply or demand, and alienating your early customers.
Yes, but haven't the tools for working remotely improved a lot since 2006?
I read Curtis's article as saying "one of the things that makes Apple products Apple products" is that the screen size was chosen to appeal to the maximum number of people, not that it was the perfect screen size for everyone.
I think about this sometimes, and I think it ultimately comes down to how society acts as a whole, which is mostly out of our direct control. Society can use any tool for good or evil; just as a knife can cut bread or hurt a person, so too can Apache serve Wikipedia or serve the MPAA/RIAA's intranet.

There's definitely a cutoff point (if you're designing a nuclear-tipped rocket, there's usually just one reason for that) but stressing about whether or not the general-purpose software we create will be used for evil will only frustrate the cause of good.
I'll bite.

Chances are, the existence of a perfect trader would cause enormous shifts in how a market handles trading. This trader would, by default, be barred from trading, because her influence on the market would be staggering to the effect that it would influence the market itself. Even Warren Buffet has to temper things he says, so as not to accidentally push the market around.

But, assuming the FTC just decided to take a nap on the whole thing, I imagine those shifts in trading would so quickly dilute value that you'd end up with a system very similar to one we see now: machines doing the majority of the trading, but rather than on algorithms, more on observing Perfect Trader X.
Stories of good ideas (or not) that never made it out the door
I think you might have missed a joke there.
So it's basically a very pragmatic tradeoff for getting 80% of the value of geo-based DNS with only 20% of the effort.

Nice work ...
"Knowing that “Contribute” converted visitors to click more often than “Donate,” the team changed verbiage all over the site – and in all email messaging – to reflect the test results."

Is it a good idea make this change to all contexts as the result of an A/B test for a specific context?
I'm not spending a dime on Apple products anymore. After the shitty lawsuit war they started, I'm not paying to support that behavior. Fuck Apple.
Polish becomes England's second language
The problem is that VCs don't really compete with each other at all. They co-fund a lot of deals and it's more important to them, in the long term, that they "get in on" the few blockbuster deals that exist every year, than it is that they make the best investments. So they're not going to piss off another VC who might have access to good deals. The result is that they end up colluding more than they compete, and the result is that entrepreneurs don't get fair terms, but terms set by a VC in-crowd.

They also compare notes on who they like and who they don't, and if you turn down a term sheet you're likely to have that VC pick up a phone and dry up interest in other VC firms that are supposed to be his competitors.
Great design, very simple yet entertaining. If I may ask, how much time did you spend making it?
The funny bit is that it is almost exclusively referred to as "mIRC chat."

I don't know how extensively it is used elsewhere, but IRC is considered a primary communications method (and often the preferred vs. land lines, sat phones, and secure radios) for UAV pilots communicating with Air Traffic Control and the Control and Reporting Center.
The Eavesdropping System in Your Computer
Blackberry: The Charge Of The Light Brigade
>My template knows that submission should be handled by `addTodo()`? Or even worse, looping.

Most template engines support loops. Would be very weird without that capability, really.

Also, you have to add hooks to buttons and the like somehow. There isn't much of a difference between adding a class like "js-addWhatever" or using Angular's in-your-face approach.
I think the reason Diamond's books are so popular and influencial is because academics do a poor job of relating to the public the consequences of their discoveries. By building on the latest scientific findings and filling in some gaps with speculative theories Diamond is able to astound readers with insights that the general public rarely hears. Even if the theories aren't the most accepted by academics the fact that the ideas are being discussed in a publicly digestible way is beneficial.
What happens when I force my browser to use font "X"? Answer: I won't get to see your fancy trick, use an image!
Chiropractic is often very effective for manipulating bones and muscles into a correct alignment.

While there is a part of chiropractic that is, imo, alchemy,
don't disregard the rest.
Chinese Hackers Attacked 'The New York Times' for Months
Short answer is availability - we have three datacenters, and redundant connectivity around the globe. We have 12 of the Fortune 100 as customers for this reason.

Others:
Our phone and SMS alerts read the text of the alert to you, and you can ack/resolve/escalate right from there.
Centralized management of all alerting
If you lose a rack, we wake you up and tell you you have a thousand incidents, we don't page you a thousand times (and DoS your phone in the process)
Super-simple drag-and-drop scheduling
Easy multi-timezone rotations
Fantastic REST API

Happy to elaborate if you're interested - email is in profile.
Google goes to the Grand Canyon
Mega-search.me engine unavailable: Blame Mega for deleting all indexed files
You get less overhead by using less often the low-level concurrency primitives that involve cross-core synchronization. Cross-core synchronization happens in rethinkdb mainly when you see an on_thread_t object constructed or destroyed (and also in a few other places) and those get batched when you have more than one per event loop (which is not necessarily good, inflated queue sizes is also something to be wary of). So if you want to attach a bunch of network cards and high-speed storage devices on opposite ends of a handful of CPUs, your throughput won't be hindered by the fact that millions of threads are trying to talk to one another.
I love it when people who don't understand the concept of expected value circle around it intuitively without quite getting there.
I don't think Apple made the iPhone 5's screen bigger to appeal to people who wanted a big screen. I think they did it to appeal to people who wanted a 16x9 screen for watching movies. The extra size is a side-effect of moving to a 16x9 ratio while maintaining the same width as the iPhone 4.
its pretty
Smartphone Wars: Micron’s Slide-to-Unlock Patent
After using a 3GS for 3 years and iPhone 5 for a month, I have to say I like the 3.5" iPhones over 4" iPhone 5.

4" is marginally bigger in terms of screen size, but it's quite a lot more awkward to use with one hand only.

I also don't like the 16:9 aspect ratio of iPhone 5, it's too narrow in portrait and too short in landscape. 3:2 was so much nicer. I love iPad's 4:3.

Finally, it feels like there's too much bezel on the iPhone 5 (compared to say Galaxy S3 and Note 2).
"I know, we'll give it a bigger screen!" is a tad shy of what I'd call "innovation."
My very tall coworker seems to enjoy using the Note 2.
Yes! Not to mention it makes you much more resilient even if you do fall.
It is easier to ensure absolute security of the transport layer and the physical facilities the computers are in, as opposed to designing absolute security of every application.

The DoD runs its own worldwide IP network called DISN, on top of which many compartmentalized networks run. Check out http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6f/Intel_Gre... for a visual example.
"Talking to Huckleberry, it also seems clear that the most important software tools for small business haven’t been invented yet. There is no “google analytics” for a shop or measurable ways they can promote themselves offline or online. "

Hmmm, I guess there's already people working on systems using cameras, face detection and recognition, and linking them to records of faces previously in the store (pr eben passing by), and to cash register sales (and credit card identities)?

I find the idea bth fascinating and creepy.

And I'm now wondering how many stores I walk into are doing it already? What're the chances that most big casinos don't already have something like this automatically alerting customer service when whales arrive (and security when card counters arrive)?
Stylebootstrap.info works with any Twitter Bootstrap version now!
I find the Macbook Air comparisons absolutely ridiculous. Without a real keyboard and real trackpad, the Surface is absolutely not a Macbook Air competitor. Ever read a laptop review? They eviscerate products for having far better keyboards/trackpads than the Type Cover.
This is an interesting well designed app. Congrats
Show HN: My friends solution to inconsistent and crappy email signatures
Wall Street Journal 'also victim of China hacking attack'
Your humour radar needs calibrating
Love how smooth and minimal the design is. Great work.
CBC.ca mentioned a study by Simon Fraser University in BC, Canada.

> "We show that the most common causes of falls are incorrect weight shifting and tripping, and the most common activities leading to falls are forward walking, standing quietly and sitting down,"

http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2012/10/16/falls-elderly...
The next problem will be when they get to having large numbers of servers in a region.

Then two problems will manifest themselves.

1) The client will take long enough to work through the list of servers that the wrong server is chosen simply because the connection is initiated first.

2) This design has all servers seeing all calls. The load represented by all the TCP connections hitting all of the servers will consume more and more of a server.

Neither is a problem you can solve by adding more servers. In fact, they are made worse by adding servers!

However, if you're charging per call, that's what they call a "good problem to have".

Nifty solution to the problem though.
Our firm (CB Insights) put out the report that this article references so some additional color on this.

Unfortunately, there is no data to support PG's assertion above (or refute it) about most acquisitions are HR acquisitions so I won't try to address that part of his comment.

The power law is real. Only 0.35% of private tech company acquisitions in 2012 were > $1B (8 of 2277). And more than 50% were less than $50M and more than 80% were less than $200M (of those with disclosed values).

If you really like graphs, the full report is here - http://www.cbinsights.com/reports/Private%20Tech%20Company%2...
This is not compatible with Ginger Bread... you will loose lots of potential downloaders.
Shameless plug but Font Custom [1] will let you generate icon fonts from the command line and spits out all of the file types (eot, woff, ttf, svg) plus a ready-to-rock CSS file for you.

[1] http://fontcustom.com
As a Dropbox employee, both of these things have been super useful, especially being able to share sets of pictures without shuffling them around into shared folders. Glad they're shipping to everyone now :)
I have to say, it sounds to me like the lesson isn't about bosses who can't program, so much as "don't have a terrible boos". There are plenty of fields I know nothing about, but if I was managing people in that field, I would expect that on 2 hours sleep they wouldn't be effective, and I also wouldn't expect them to work both night and day shifts. It's common sense.
VentureBeat is hiring a full-time Director of Event Content
Simple concept and excellent design. Just read the blog (http://blog.kiip.me/), it seems that making puzzles and games does not seem to seem to be core to kiip.me?

Can you share the decision to create this app? Was it a showcase on an app being integrated into the kiip reward system?
An Angled Mind – Why AngularJS is awesome
Modularity. Details. Pick One.
This was after I deleted the downloaded files, if I recall correctly.
I think that HFT is responsible for over 70% of the volume on the major exchanges these days. Very little of what happens on the exchanges anymore is directly attributable to long positions.

I'm not sure how current this is, but the average time a stock is held is roughly 20 seconds [1] and that's definitely not long-term value investing.

I think we're already a long ways away from Kansas Dorothy, and I don't think we'll be going back any time soon.

[1]http://seekingalpha.com/currents/post/110468