skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
High frequency trader here:

This is only looking at the volume on public exchanges. There are a lot of regulations around public exchanges which prevent them from operating efficiently. For instance, unless the stock has a very small price, you cannot offer sub-penny prices on this exchange.

Most retail trades actually never see the exchange, they are sold in bulk by brokers to places like Knight or Getco who internalize the order flow. They cross customer orders and take on some orders. Since this does not happen on a public exchange, they can give sub-penny price improvements.

The same happen with dark pools where many hedge funds will send their trade to obtain better executions.

When the market makers who handle these order flow start carrying to much risk on their book, or if they don't want to take the opposite side of your trade, they send it to the stock exchange.

This means that the stock exchange is mostly a place where high-frequency traders meet to offset their exposures to one another. In this respect, it is not surprising, nor problematic that 70% of the volume come from HFT.
This is really a case of 'your mileage may vary'. Some people's problems will be fixed by a bit of exercise, some won't. This is true whether or not you can pull 350 or 530, and/or do chins. As an old man by gym standards, I have both been broken and fixed by lifting weights, in different places.

The most treacherous thing about this is that lifting weights (with a good warmup) often makes pain go away in a temporary fashion (while you're doing it), only to return big-time when your joints aren't all nicely lubed up.
Sorry, bit late to this discussion. Took me a while to read through all of it. I think there is no one system that can teach languages fluently. As a language learner, I currently use a variety of ways - from speaking to native speakers, watching movies, using flashcards, playing games and listening to podcasts.

I'm also the founder of language startup called http://www.nativetongue.com If you are interested check us out. We combine language learning with gaming, to make it fun and addictive. We have the following apps available:

- Learn Chinese with Mandarin Madness http://itunes.apple.com/app/mandarin-madness/id494800742

- Learn Spanish with Spanish Smash
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/learn-spanish-spanish-smash/...

I think the ultimate would be learning like Neo in Matrix. Just plug a cord into the back of your head and upload the mandarin lesson module, and absorb it in seconds!
And/or that you should look before you speak.
I've worked remotely for about 7 years now, with startups and more established companies. These companies have typically been distributed themselves, realizing that it is easier to work with smart people where they are than to try to get everyone to move to a specific place. We are constantly connected with IM, IRC, phones, Skype, etc. And we can handle development and problem solving around the clock easily.

I have no commute, nor does anyone else. And yet we have all seemed to function efficiently, with now problem that I've seen. And we are as effective as any team I have ever worked with, with none of the water cooler chat that goes on in the office. In fact, any team situation I've worked in has easily seen 50% of the day consumed by non-work-related conversation and meetings with no agenda and no responsibilities given.

I'll stick with remote work thanks.
>> but i am good with applied math <<

Really? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5141025

>> Please show me the actual calculations performed to arrive at the median values shown in the overview graph <<

http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/benchmarksgame/benchmarksga...
When I look at the Ruby/Rails community, the word that comes to my mind more than any other is hubris.

You see this in things such as security issues being marked as wontfix until they are actively exploited (e.g. the Homakov/GitHub incident), in the attitude that developer cycles are more expensive than CPU cycles, and on a more puerile level in the tendency towards swearing in presentations.

I've always had the impression that the Rails ecosystem favours convenience over security, in an Agile Manifesto kind of way (yes, we value the stuff on the right, but we value the stuff on the left even more). One of the attractions of Rails is that it is very easy to get stuff up and running with it, but some of the security exploits that I've seen cropping up recently with it make me pretty worried about it. I get especially concerned when I see SQL injection vulnerabilities in a framework based on an O/R mapper, for instance.
Read Aaron Swartz's Afterword From Cory Doctorow's 'Homeland'
GIF still rules on animation (long live memes!)
PNG does not do animation however (love it for 32bit alpha)

BUT APNG does:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG
Congrats on launching guys! I've known the founders for a while.. Extremely talented and persuasive 18 year old college dropouts, check out their team bios.
> what does clean and tidy buy besides a sense of satisfaction?

What does anything buy except for a sense of satisfaction?
Vintage bits on cassettes
dsl the user: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5148079
For a potential reason why this might not make any difference to Amazons revenue/sales/whatever one should read this gem of a past by John Allspaw (Ops whiz kid for those who have no idea who he is) :: http://www.kitchensoap.com/2013/01/03/availability-nuance-as...
Behind the scenes at Adioso - Part 3: Patience
"Doesn't make much sense to sink a lot of money into a team and then have a bunch of 20-somethings who struggle with the reality of startup life."

And the cynic in me says the trick is not to sink a lot of money in eg YC only funds a team for a few months. VC's etc can wait to see who survives in the 'sink or swim' game and the follow-on accordingly.
Look I have talked about this before but was ignored. There is a lot of stress in the industry, and if people don't know how to handle that stress a mental illness may develop from it.

In my case I developed schzioaffective disorder, and ended up in a hospital and short-term disability. After that I was fired after having a panic attack. When others discovered I was mentally ill they bullied and harassed me. Yes adult bullying, and harassing, and adult social kliqs and all that exist. It is not just teenagers who are abused by bullies but adults as well.

In your startup you have to have a way to treat people who develop a mental illness and find a way to get them therapy and medication to get better and accommodate them and support them. You should not consider them of less value and demote them and cut their salary, you should not fire them, or consider it a weakness or personality flaw.

The way classical management treats the mentally ill, it is no wonder that suicides are up, and that some became workplace shooters, and many others just go on disability or become homeless or end up in an endless cycle of jails and mental hospitals. You need to have management deal with mental illnesses better than it currently does and it can even effect the CEO of your business as well.

It would do you well to hire some people with psychology, and sociology skills that can work with therapy that any employee can go to for help. You also need people who can watch out for warning signs as well. This should be a function of your HR department and your EAP (Employee Assistance Program) with the state or some other government agency.

Yes I've been suicidal in the past, yes I had friends kill themselves over issues of not finding work, stress from the job, and other stuff. I am a member of Generation-X the suicide generation and in my early 40's. It is a miracle that I am still alive, but since I am mentally ill no startup or community wants me. Being excluded can lead to suicidal thoughts as well you know.
wait a sec. The article totally leaps to that conclusion without evidence. It presents two facts - There were strong racist elements to the anti-cocaine movement, and that Coke removed cocaine. But you can't show from those two facts that Coke removed the cocaine for racist reasons. Maybe the removal was racist, but there wasn't any evidence of it in that article. And there was regulation happening at the same time which is even pointed out in the quotation he includes from the NY Times.
Yeah. We live in a crazy time, when people think a convenience for a $400 device is "changing the world."

You're right… it IS arrogant. And it's also sad, like a group of little kids talking about how important and badass they are, who they're gonna beat up and which famous actress/actor they're going to marry, right up til mom & dad call them home. Especially because they seem to be in denial that it's all fantasy.

This year we (my husband & I) funded 3 full fistula surgeries for poor women in the developing world: http://www.fistulafoundation.org/whatyoucando/loveasister.ht...

For the low low cost of $1500, we gave three women back the ability to be productive, to be a part of their communities again, to be free from stigma… in short, not to be covered in their own excrement and urine all the time, for the lack of a simple surgery. Three women. Changed lives. And all it took was a little bit of our money and an organization that is actually changing the world. I had it easy… I just had to fork over the money. They're the ones on the ground making it happen. Doctors who do the surgeries in adverse conditions, coordinating to keep costs low, taking care of the women post-op, the women who walk so far to get taken care of and endure all the awful things they've endured…

We just develop software. No big deal.

I think people like to wrap themselves in illusions because they think it'll make them feel better… when really, deep down, they know they're lying to themselves, which only makes them feel worse.

Screw grandiosity.
I think based on "invent a time machine" the implication is that Perfect Trader X (I imagine him dressed like Racer X) would make a trade, then gather future information based on his latest trade, then make the next trade.
As Paredes de Gesso que Conservam Energia
The Mark Zuckerberg Era Is Over
Congrads on the Relaunch guys
Great work from the Under20 network
Good luck guys =)
>What is the benefit of trading over ms resolutions. What problem is it solving?

The problem it's solving is that people want to do it. Exchanges on which they can't are outcompeted by exchanges on which they can.

>Wouldn't trade be more efficient if it were lock stepped - say one trade per hour (per day?):

No.

>you agree your trade and the exchange processes it on the hour.

You "agree" your trade outside the exchange? What do you think an exchange is?

>What would be lost that benefits the pseudo-capitalism of these systems by having such a regime. How would this negatively impact production.

Spreads would get wider, i.e. more investor cash would get creamed off by middlemen, leaving less for the productive companies it was actually invested in.
You can post jobs for free at http://techcomjob.com/
Hmm. In the US it really depends on your insurance. I was annoyed when my excellent therapist's copay went up from $15 to $20... I don't know anyone in my social circle who feels any stigma about therapy, it's fantastic!
That's not the whole story. If 70% of the volume is HFT, it means you necessarily have a lot of HFT trading against HFT, which means a lot of HFT is going to be liquidity taking.

Fortunately, that's only on public exchanges. Most of the liquidity provision happens before trade even hit those exchanges.
You could make the (weak) argument that HFT has created market inefficiencies due to excess liquidity and furthering information asymmetry. Most exchanges (NYSE, NASDAQ, BATS, etc) have "circuit breakers" to prevent a massive sell-off. As far as "noise in the market", you could make the argument that speculative trading is simply that: noise. In this case it is just an algobot doing the noise trading, rather than some idiot that thinks he's found the next best way to "beat the market".
Should everyone learn to code?
I don't imagine that there is a difference. Both sides vote for horrible copyright legislation. Both try to keep the horribleness secret from everyone except the lobbyists until the last moment. Both are happy to use secret international treaty negotiations as a way to keep those secrets. There is no difference, which is why it was big news that some on the Republican side considered doing otherwise.

My point was that this is obvious to anyone who does a little research. Therefore seeing the government serving copyright-holders' interests is no surprise.
Yep. Though you may eventually be found not guilty by the courts when there is no other evidence around that still doesn't mean the prosecutor won't try to invent evidence, like finding out you used Tor once upon a time through your ISP logs, or something else minor they will blow up to make you look like Scarface.

Also you'll have to spend a huge amount of money on a lawyer, and most likely will be refused bail so could languish in pretrial prison for a year or so.

That's why you never sign for anything if you don't know what it is, in court they claim because you signed for it you ordered it
Design teams that aren't techy enough for VMs, OSes that don't support emulating X (ie, Windows users wanting to test their mobile site on an iOS device), and testing a large number of variations come to mind.

For instance, how long (and how much HD space!) would it take you to set up emulators for all these? http://www.browserstack.com/list-of-browsers-and-platforms (note that these are in-your-browser remote desktop sessions, essentially. some services are static images, like BrowserShots.org, some are not)

For most people, I totally agree, especially with e.g. the IEVMS script. Pretty simple, low cost, and it probably covers all the variety you need, since it's not too hard to install multiple versions of Firefox and Chrome on most OSes. But exceptions exist, and I'd be willing to bet they're relatively large (absolute) numbers.
I was thinking about trying to go the angel.co route but it seems like pretty much all of the companies there are well past their seed investment. Beyond that, I think an in-person pitch would do me much, much better than hoping an investor finds me on what I can only imagine is a massive database full of startups ranging from vaporware to etsy
Agreed, I'm going to make the change.
Show HN: Taurus.io launch - Set up product tours for web apps in 15 min
This is a bit dense with legalese, but if you search for placebo it would seem to indicate that it /is/ required that they disclose placebos ...

"(a) A sponsor who intends to conduct a clinical investigation subject to this part shall submit an "Investigational New Drug Application" (IND) including, in the following order:

...

(c ) A brief general description of the composition, manufacture, and control of any placebo used in a controlled clinical trial."

http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFRS...
"(a) can be accomplished by Nanex, if they so choose."

Doing so doesn't give them a sensationalist headline that finds its way to the top of HN.
Re-deployed the site @ http://www.founder-school.org/

Included your suggestions. Thank you again!
After being in beta for almost 4 months and a ton of great feedback from HN, we've finally launched Taurus. We're still looking for ways to improve the product so any feedback or comments are of course welcome.
The size of initial capital investment isn't what separates startups from bicycle shops.

It's the size of the possible exits which does. Huckleberry Bikes cannot scale to a billion dollar exit in seven years. The sorts of businesses which PG considers startups can. That's why they are attractive to investors.
Network syncing time is hard, my team (at a bank) built our own infrastructure to monitor time sync errors on our own internal servers, we synced externally with two independent clocks. An atomic clock in London and NIST in the US. But we also modelled the exchange's time as well.

We had six independent connections to the exchange (hitting different servers) and we'd reverse engineered the exchanges internal infrastructure so based upon the timing of their messages, the tcp packet headers and their own timestamps we knew exactly what clocks their internal servers were running on (more valuably in our case is it also gave us their internal latency figures). Half the time we knew when their clocks were drifting before they did and could tell them which internal server had the wrong time.

This stuff is hard, you need to know a lot about network latency and time to make sure you're doing it right (have a look at the NTP spec for starters), there's probably only a handful of people in the world who are capable of nailing it and probably most of them work in the military or atomic physics research labs.
not 500 i guess, i am not able to downvote with 1624 now.
Except, I don't think it's even all that easy. In fact, there was a bit of a meme I remember from last year in which people stated "Rails was never marketed as easy to use!".

I think in 2006/2007, there was a simplicity to the basic "get up and running" aspect, but Rails 3.x+ is a pretty large ecosystem with quite a lot of decision points to educate yourself on to do any sized project beyond 'hello world'.
Looking for a Hadoop / Hive Engineer
I'm sure it's just a typo. But for the record, it's "bait and switch". A 'bate and switch model is something else entirely.
And for what it's worth, stories like this are basically why the Pi exists.
That would be single blind (edit: actually, now I see what you mean, double WRT location), but yes, the locations can be tested - and they have been. The needle action itself is what can't be properly tested.
Reaching 200K events/sec
As you suspected, I'm developing solutions in the areas I work in specifically (stuff I'm "knee-deep" in).

I read the usual CS papers, plus lots of PhDs thesis. I follow the references in the bibliographies like crazy, and I also look up the writer's on the 'Net and see what other stuff they've done/written.

It feels like detective work, actually: the most-cited papers are frequently not the best. There's tons of researchers working in obscurity but who nevertheless have useful results.

I see my role as taking advances from research and bringing them into practical use.
First of all mediocre is a relative term. Be careful who you are comparing yourself against.

I used to be able to run a 5K in under 17 minutes. That made me a mediocre high school cross country runner but way faster than I am now.

Also consider that if you are at the 99th percentile in something that means 70,000,000 are better than you. There will always be someone better than you at something. By the way, being in the 99th percentile is very good.

Finally even if you aren't very good at something doesn't mean you can't enjoy it anyway.
I read the comment not as a critique of the author, but rather as a further rant against the target of the author's ire.
Yeah, Amazon's got trust, an established relationship, excellent customer service/satisfaction, and a good payment management history, all of which are crucial in online commerce (and for all of that I still prefer not to use them, for what it's worth).

Musing over my own post, I can think of instances where the same would not be true. A financial trading platform in particular -- trades are already occurring at volume, and lost time would be lost trades.
not an encyclopedia galactica :(
I bet that kid that went to jail for DDOSing Amazon back in the day would've liked to have this engineer's comment for his defence when they claimed he did 'millions' in damages
Right ... this scenario is far more likely as, at the moment, it is very much in vogue for larger companies to snatch up the engineers around smaller, flailing companies that did not have enough revenue to sustain and could not attract funding to keep the engine running longer.

Many acquisitions that I saw this year were either starving engineers or soft landings.
Awesome Guys! I know personally Adam & Pulkit, both 18 year old Stanford & Upen dropouts..Extremely Hard-workers and Talented! May the force be with you my young Padawans!
So for a couple hundred dollars, you can run 2 vms at once, or sign up for BrowserStack for a year or two and run waaaay more. Neat setup, but you're not selling it too well.
I can't believe Apple is stooping down to copying the Samsung phablets. I think the galaxy note is the stupidest thing around.

Apple should go the iPod nano/Shuffle route with the iPhone. I practically don't use mine anymore now that I have an iPad.
Good point (and yeah I picked poor examples).
Any Haskell web-application framework is awesome - Yesod in particular as it has the most active community and written material for it.

I've lately been working on an (unpublished) project using Haskell+Yesod+Fay+Clay and it's remarkable how productive I am; in that most of my time is spent figuring out my types, writing the code, then...it's done? In Python I run into a lot of programmer related bugs that Haskell's rigid type system prevents. It can't prevent logic/flow "bugs" but it does keep a lot of other bugs out that would normally have me spending potential future hours fixing/debugging.

It's also not just the type safety that increases my productivity, it's also...Haskell. Abstraction in Haskell can make for very concise and correct programs.

Fay and Clay are particularly awesome too.

Haskell definitely has a learning curve, there was a steep curve for me and I already had significant functional programming experience (Erlang & Scheme). I'm really happy to see these guys taking that on!
Or perhaps to encourage more long-term thinking there is a rate limit to the number of trades you can execute. We could start slowly: 1 trade per second, perhaps.
I'm reminded of the Conan spoof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J2Au80BmHc

Its interesting to watch the conversation here. Whether or not Apple creates a new 'size' phone or ipad or ipod for that matter its really based on their idea that there is some segment of the market out there that hinges on a particular size. The only limit here is the cost to bring out a new SKU versus the expected revenue it will bring in over its lifetime. If that number crosses the threshold them bam! you get a new SKU.

A little as a year ago people were saying "There is no 'tablet' market, there is an 'ipad' market." Those people have, for the most part, stopped saying that but as a new market there is very little history to tell you what is and what is not important for consumers. That information is developed by releasing products and evaluating the reactions.
Thanks for the prod. They are now adjudicating all the outstanding best. Stigler did indeed win that one!
all the bike shops in my city are also repair places which is where they make all their money charging crazy hourly rates to change a tire or for tuning, and from triple marked up accessories. they all know each other too and will collectively bulk buy everything to get a cheaper wholesale price
This is literally a first world problem. In the US, we have a culture that encourages self-actualization. This is a double-edged sword. While this encourages individuals to achieve their dreams, it also puts pressure on them to do great things.

I think the key is to do what you want, and not what society pressures you into doing.
A solution that doesn't solve 100% of the problem is still not a bad solution. The most popular gems would all be signed, thereby dramatically reducing attack vectors.
ID OpenStreetMap Editor by Mapbox (d3, pure javascript)
It seems like the irony eluded you.

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/thats-the-joke
The future of online education
"we're not really that far from kansas"

Funny given that one of the largest high frequency trading firm, Tradebot, is based in Kansas City MO (not that far from Kansas)