skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hear a lot of complaining about the HFT business, and there is plenty to complain about, but I think every so often we need to take a step back and remember what the alternative is: Insular, inefficient, corrupt, pit-based trading.

We now complain about a few pennies being scraped off of each order, which stings a little, but read Reminiscences of a Stock Operator to get some context about the dollars that used to be scraped off of each order by pit traders. Today, if you're trading a low dollar stock like Bank of America or Zynga, the vast majority of the money you're giving up to make a trade goes to brokerage, rather than to market makers like Getco.

Where computers are involved in trading, there will always be an edge to be gained from writing better, faster programs. We can take some steps to de-emphasize making programs that have a speed advantage (e.g. assign random latencies to all entered orders, or to bring all orders in each stock to trade on a single, specially-designated exchange), but I'll take computers over pit traders any day.
Perhaps, but they were caught pretty fast already, to be honest. The insinuation is that somehow this technology would have prevented the attacks in the first place, which is highly improbable.
Agree. Kilian Jornet is the most impressive runner imho (Kilimandjaro record, Mont-Blanc ...). But Karnazes clever use of storytelling makes him an attractive subject for the media.
I don't know about less ambiguous, it can still require only single token lookahead and be context-free without any parentheses, but Lisp-ish languages are easier to parse because you have fewer productions to worry about compared to more complex languages.
I don't think the argument is focused on what Meetup should do, but what they could do if new user acquisition were a priority. It's a growth tactic that can be balanced with retention and engagement approaches, that Meetup right now understands and is heavily investing in.

Taking this approach also doesn't mean you'd have to go full throttle. You could test and decrease the pace by only allowing a segment of quality organizers the ability to create their own app.
I do love me my eggs.

Not just protein, but healthy fats and tons of nutrients in those yolks.
Thank you Judge Brown!

You are my newest hero!

This is the USA, not some tin-hat dictatorship, and it's about time someone within the federal government acknowledges these facts.
> God I hate this carrier a well as the world's "cheaper is better" attitude.

RyanAir has enabled people who could not afford to travel in the past to be able to do so (especially in Europe, where many immigrants have family in North Africa/Eastern countries). While I share your contempt for some of RyanAir's practices, I do think that low cost flights are good for society as a whole.
So you are from England. Are you afraid that your country might be attacked? This is not a forum to ask such questions.
I hope someone can correct me here if I'm wrong, but wasn't this the purpose of the Volcker Rule? Wasn't it designed to put a collar on HFT?
Then you should oppose Germany's law, because it would take my kid away too. It makes no distinction. It doesn't set an educational standard -- it simply demands obedience.
you know, you could grow a whole baby chicken from one of those!
I've been making some good progress coding on the bus, fwiw... but a new, light-ish laptop with battery life certainly helps with that, so that's more an argument for why more people with means should be taking the bus more rather than any kind of dismissal of your thesis.
Mr. Wilmunder, I presume?
Thanks for the thorough explanation. IPA seems useful, like the kind of thing schools should teach, but it also scares me with its complexity.
Whoever started this theory that HFT would somehow be hurt by periodic auctions must be in the HFT industry. Because disparate auctions just make it more difficult for the myriad exchanges to maintain compliance with Reg NMS, and the fastest market makers will be the ones to make all the money arbing the auctions against one-another.
> It looks to me there are a few errors in his conclusions

What errors are those?

> Also he didn't actually make an algorithm to do the trading and back test it, he just assumed that "with a good algorithm" you could do this.

What kind of algorithm do you need? He's able to buy stock at $100 when he already knows that a second later, the stock WILL BE at $101. The risk is zero. The algorithm is a one-liner.

> Also the fact that this is represented as a broad threat to the market is just false. This only effects day traders and other HFT's.

Not at all. It's a tax on every other participant in the market, on every transaction they make. Every time you buy or sell anything, you make less profit because someone is front-running you.
Wot wot pip pip cheerio get the torch line's engaged eat some crisps there's a good chap.
yeah, they just proved Maslow's hierarchy of needs from another angle.
The STEM Crisis is a Myth
This is a nice and concise way to articulate it.
And this (Ham Internet) is what comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMPRNet

Years ago I found some software (on SourceForge?) for operating Linux over Ham. Can't find it.
"There are no half measures. Either your side wins, and therefore the other army is dead, or yours is. "

This is completely false. Did we kill the entire Serb army when we intervened in Kosovo?
I think there is something much larger at stake though.

The question as you put it, I think, is whether culture should be allowed to arise from the grass roots or whether it should be formed by the state in public schools.

You put it in one way but what about when it comes down to cultural values? We have extended the definition of bullying so far as to cover stated ideological opinions in the US, and therefore we use public school (as I think you are advocating btw) to destroy the diversity and pluralism that has traditionally underscored our society. But what if Indian immigrants want to teach that there is value in the caste system? Must the state use public schools to try to stamp out such a view?

I am btw a large proponent of homeschooling because I think it represents a way for parents to take control of passing culture on to the next generation and that this helps encourage a tolerant and pluralistic society. If Indians want to teach that the caste system is a noble part of India's heritage, bully for them. If Catholics want to teach that radical individualism is harmful, and that marriage is extremely important because it supports the key relationships that hold society together, particularly between parents, grandparents, and children, bully for them.

Accepting and encouraging such diversity is important for our nation. Encouraging culture at the grass roots, I think, is universally important, and it is worth noting that public schools have been, since the time of Lycurgus, an institution intended to destroy that role, and foster the primary loyalty not to one's parents or family but to the state. While this may have worked in ancient Sparta on that scale without destroying the local nature of culture, it cannot scale to the level of a modern country.

I can't help but think about this in relation to the responses I get every time I suggest that the US should try to implement a Canada-style state-by-state single payer system for health care. A few on the right get upset at any notion of single payer, apparently believing that "private sector" is a magical incantation of great power, but the big objections I get are from the left. "But we can't let Alabama run their own health care system! That would be a disaster!" is one typical response. It is as if the role of the government in a democratic country is there to save people from democracy and that, paraphrasing Orwell (in "Animal Farm"), that people are free to make decisions as long as it is decisions that those in power like. But what if families should take responsibility for raising children? What if the general problems of state government belong properly to the residents of that state (aside from things which clearly violate the Constitution, including the Equal Protection Clause, of course)?

I don't understand this hostility towards localism.
"Do we ever make it better?"

Yes actually.
So what happens when they come for your Legos?

Bottom line:
Nanny State = Risk averse
Entrepreneur = Risk Taker
Thanks! To help those who know the recent kerfluffle moreso than My Fair Lady:

"Why Can't The English Learn To Speak"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhninL_G3Fg
I was conceding to fleitz that there's room in those subject areas for a particular interpretation to be pushed over others. I had a great and very academic APUSH teacher with a PhD and we often joked about the hilariously pro-America bias in our textbook. These things should still be taught, objectively and well like you say, but in these areas I wouldn't dismiss outright the claim that the state often has a bias.

My physics and chemistry teachers were very clear that they were teaching us a process and where it's led us for now, not the be all end all truth. We laughed at ancient chemistry (fire comes from phlogiston, an element with sometimes negative mass) and then discussed the possibility that what we're taught now could be just as hilarious in another hundred years. My physics teacher was well-versed in the current frontiers of particle physics and encouraged us to understand uncertainty. The lesson wasn't "the universe is x years old," the lesson was "hey look, we can use these measurements and some provably sound mathematical tools to come up with a number which, if certain pretty good assumptions hold true, is the age of the universe. If someone disproves the assumptions or the data, then our number is wrong, but that's really exciting because it will lead us to new understanding."

I guess what I'm really supporting here is the scientific mindset. Some people who value faith feel very threatened by that, don't want their children going anywhere near it, and hold them out of school. I think the children deserve to learn about it anyway, and decide on their own what to accept.
Our grandchildren will run ski mountain making startups.
Exchanges charge. HFT firms don't pay a broker, but thy still have to pay exchange fees. Most don't clear themselves, too, so they have a clearing fee. Also, some small FINRA fees. And this is not to mention that the right to be a market maker often costs a lot to begin with.
Thanks for that perspective. I certainly didn't mean that all ESL speakers exhibit wanton mispronunciation. Perhaps none do. In fact, your eloquent rebuttal has left me sympathizing with even Arnold Schwarzenegger.
How much is he starting with to make that $377k? If I had ten million dollars to play around with, I could easily make that in a day. That figure it meaningless if it's not relative to something. What % return is it?
I think the fundamental question and why these are closely tied is it comes down to the question of "what is a right?"

The arguments here regarding same-sex marriage and due process get to that. My argument is it is a functional question, and that rights arise from the functions that they fill, not the other way around.

I don't think we can answer a question regarding whether the no-fly list violates rights unless we can come up with some sense of what the basis for rights theory is. Calling into question things regarding gender I think is relevant to that larger discussion.

My complaint is that all too often "rights" become articles of faith, and so we can't debate whether a given right exists. The concerns over same-sex marriage underscore that point, but it is no different than when we look at whether the Verizon warrant and the NSA violates the 4th Amendment, and whether the no-fly list violates the 5th Amendment.

I don't think "I strongly feel" or "we culturally assume" is a basis for long-standing rights. I think there has to be something more.
Why tax stock purchases? Or is this just anti-rich grumbling?

Unfortunately, there are various positive properties of a marketplace that are in tension. In this case, the fairness of price over time and the availability of the market.
LOL - it was probably a bug in his sim, some future information leak most likely. Getting your timestamps right is always tough.
Only a very few cases? Oh really? If you think that you live in a pipe dream. I am not sure if Germany has been studied specifically, but other European countries have, and the USA. Minorities with ethnic sounding names in a white majority face discrimination and challenges.

http://m.nber.org//digest/sep03/w9873.html

"It indicates that a white name yields as many more callbacks as an additional eight years of experience. Race, the authors add, also affects the reward to having a better resume. Whites with higher quality resumes received 30 percent more callbacks than whites with lower quality resumes. But the positive impact of a better resume for those with Africa-American names was much smaller."

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/11/2...

"Adida found that in at least two sectors, a Muslim candidate is around 2.5 times less likely to get a job interview than a Christian one, with all else being equal. These results were backed up by a large survey, which showed that among second-generation Senegalese immigrants, Muslim households earn far less than Christian equivalents."

http://writers.unconsciousbias.org/2009/09/best-man-for-the-...

"They found that resumes with Arab/Muslim names were 10% less likely to be called in for an interview and that IAT scores indicating bias against Arabs directly correlated with the likelihood of a callback.

Rooth then followed up with many of the employers who had unwittingly taken part in the first half of the study. The employers filled out three different explicit measures of bias against Arabs and Muslims and then took an IAT that paired Swedish and Arab names with work- associated words such as “lazy”, “slow”, “efficient” and “hard-working”. Not surprisingly, “the IAT scores of the 193 recruiters participating in this study show that a very clear majority associate words signaling negative productivity… with belonging to the Arab/Muslim minority”."
Re. the implementation of weather prediction: the api that powers the dark sky iphone app is free for >1000 requests a day: https://developer.forecast.io/ -in sf this kind of data is doubly useful too (weather that changes quickly)
yes but do they have to clear all the trades or just at the end of a session ? I was under the impression that you could pool your holdings and clear them once instead of for each individual trade.

Also I thought exchanges charge for access not for activity. So Its a fixed fee to be able to talk to the exchange,but I can send in as many orders as I want.
Most days never had communication in the first place, so it's really not that crazy.
Then Germany's law is bad and needs revision to set an educational standard instead of demanding obedience. Parents still don't have a right to isolate their children from information they don't like.
NuPIC was released as free software, in part, because there has been a strong interest in the academic research community. I encourage you to check out the mailing list (http://lists.numenta.org/mailman/listinfo/nupic_lists.nument...) for some recent examples.
The Truth About War With Syria
I don't think it takes hours to take the teeth out of HFT - just put in a delay one order of magnitude above the timescale it is operating on currently should be enough to neuter it.
Obama stated that if any nation conducted cyber attacks against the USA that such attacks constituted an "act of war."

http://www.forbes.com/sites/reuvencohen/2012/06/05/the-white...

Funny how the double standard rears its ugly head from time to time...
> Every time you buy or sell anything, you make less profit because someone is front-running you.

The whole front-running charge w.r.t to HFT is such nonsense. When you send a market-taking order to an exchange, there's no way for an HFT trader to see that order before it hits the market and game it. On the other hand, if you want to get cute and work the bid or offer, then yeah, someone who can process and react to the market data feed faster will have an advantage over, say, some overpaid fund manager who's just trying to mimic the S&P 500 and is still getting his data from a Quotron machine.
Darn. I thought I was going to make 377 000 dollars a day. That would have been around $94M trading stock. Now I have to work for a living... Instead I got this article about fair game. Whats up with that=)
He made that $377k in the simulation. Not in the real market.
Cool! A sign guaranteed to be wrong 24/7!!

:)
> Censorship by parents is censorship, too. Learning to think critically and being presented with information which may challenge your parents' religious beliefs are basic freedom of speech and freedom of information principles. I would call them human rights.

I totally disagree with you here. The problem is that the state tends to create information vacuums that are harder to detect and compensate for.

> Let human beings decide for themselves whether to disregard science, believe in God, believe the Bible is literally true, etc.

Does that go for "let humans decide for themselves whether to accept homosexuality as normal for some people?" If so, would you agree that the state must remain neutral on that issue? And if so, then would you agree that expressing hostility to gay rights can never be harassment or bullying in the eyes of the state?

Now if you aren't prepared to go there, then isn't the argument over who gets to make these decisions, whether culture must arise from the grass roots of a culture or whether it should be imposed by an arguably benevolant state?

I would argue that if anything a vacuum that goes against the prevailing attitudes is easier for people to question as they grow up. A vacuum which does nothing but reinforce prevailing cultural attitudes is much harder to rethink. It is easier for someone to question whether their parents were right about gay rights in the current climate if their parents were opposed than it is to question the state, when nobody else does.
I would conjecture that the reason for overwhelming force here is a reasonable guess that people who don't recognize the government's authority to enforce laws might attempt armed resistance, especially where their children are concerned. Swift and overwhelming force lowers the risk of anyone (government or citizen) actually getting violent.

That doesn't necessarily justify the trauma of getting raided, but it would make sense if that's why they did it.
Even if you get the timestamps exactly right, predicting whether you actually would have been filled at the exchange on a given simulated order is fraught with error (almost always in the direction of overestimating profits). Anyone who thinks this can be done with simple simulations or "a one-line algo" is speaking from a position of severe ignorance.
I met a one of these faux investor, charlatan, stone soup types a few years ago. When he talked about making investments, it took a while to figure out he'd invest time and no cash. When he talked about how was was affiliated with some impressive named and organizations, he really meant he'd done a shitty website for a semi well known author and he'd visited the Harvard campus once. At every turn when I asked him for a hard commitment of something I could use, actionable advice or hard cash, he never produced.

I recommend demanding excellence from your investors and expect them to demand excellence from you. Strong relationships improve when tested, others buckle and fade away. That's been my experience anyway.
DoublyLinked - A New Programming Forum/Community
But one argument against marijuana decriminalization of drugs is that it violates international treaties we are a party to. One real problem with treaties of this sort is that they remove public policy decisions from political discourse.
Most exchanges now charge on a "maker/taker" basis, where liquidity-taking trades (lifting an offer or hitting a bid) are assessed a fee, while liquidity-providing trades (working a bid or offer which is ultimately filled) are paid a small rebate.
Please say it here or I, probably along with others, will classify your marketing tactics as shady.

Is withholding the price that important that you're willing to risk a reputation black mark on your product?
How are you protecting against the likelihood that the US Government will require you to install plaintext intercept capabilities into this (for decryption keys, etc.)? (And also that they'll gag you from revealing this, open source or not.)
Why don't the pension funds use HFT too if it works better?
Curation is key on a project like this. Don't just dump a bunch of random bands on the screen. Give us a reason to want to explore them.
'Cosmic caterpillar' spotted by Hubble telescope that's 6 TRILLION miles long
I've been wondering - couldn't you just impose a small delay, say one or two seconds, on each order - forcing everyone to wait a moment to get their order on the order book.

Seems like that should eliminate high-frequency trading altogether?

Betting exchanges use this idea to prevent people doing time-based arbitrage on live sporting events. For example, to prevent one guy who's watching a match live in the stadium gaining an advantage against someone else watching on TV, where the pictures are delayed a few seconds.
mega bonus points for dumping the number pad! a typical ergo keyboard with number pad is too big for many undershelf keyboard trays.

ugh, they jacked the Esc key. I guess the war with VI users is full on.
Hacker news clone for tv, movies series and documentaries
Unfortunately this is in the Opinion section which has been known to be reliably frothing at the mouth, anti-goverment, ayn randian propaganda machine.
No. The primary purpose of Volcker was to stop prop trading at insured banks. Most HFT is done by smaller shops.
You ( like him ) assume that because he see's something at a given point of time, that he can make decision on it. Yes he might see that there is an offer to sell at one exchange that is below the offer to buy at another exchange, but even if you knew that at some time X you can't place a trade at time X you need at least X + <some finite amount of time to get the trade to the correct market>. In that time lots of stuff can happen. That specific order might be filled or canceled by someone else who knew about it sooner or was quicker to act on it. So what do you do ? Do you wait to buy until you can sell ? What if I am in the same business and I send an order and then cancel it an extremely short period later, before that order could even propigate outside the market I placed it in ? I bet I could get you to buy my stock from me at a good price because you think you can turn it around and fence it really quickly. Guess what you might be taking a haircut on that one. And if I can get you to bite once I am sure I can get a computer to make you do it over and over and over again. This isn't made up people have done it [1] ( and gone to jail for it once they got caught )

1.http://www.securitiestechnologymonitor.com/news/norwegian-da...
I certainly did. I started with HN when I was messed up and depressed and wanted to fill my mind with crap that was completely contrarian to everything I believe as a form of self-destruction.

Every once in a while there's something important that I get from HN, which is why I've kept coming back since starting to get better. Some time ago I decided it really wasn't worth it, and I haven't yet quit because I'm just on auto-pilot and come here when I'm bored. I'll get around to quitting soon though. Thanks for the reminder.