skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So the way this maintains anonymity is by not trying?

What you've described is a central authority architecture which is in charge of issuing the credentials. But we already have CA authorities that issue SSL certs. They're brittle to government influence, because it's impossible to know whether the government has acquired the secret keys. In your case it'd be impossible to know whether the hypothetical CA has stored your secret credential / whether they've told anyone your real identity.

Even if this model were to work, it wouldn't protect users from themselves. Here's a fascinating read about the problems of staying anonymous even in an environment with perfect anonymity guarantees: https://whonix.org/wiki/DoNot

For example, no anonymity network can protect against stylometry, so that's always a concern. I was also shocked to realize that something as simple as automated time synchronization will reveal your general location when using Tor, because your machine requests a time update for your specific timezone. You have to set your clock to UTC to avoid that. There are about two dozen other vectors by which you can accidentally reveal your true identity even when using a rock-solid protocol. Anyone who's interested in this should read the entirety of the Whonix wiki. In addition to being comprehensive, it's also a lot of fun to read.

(Most of my comment was meandering and not really related to yours. It's just interesting how difficult perfect anonymity is. It's probably true to say that getting the tech implemented correctly is only a small fraction of the total amount of work required to be truly anonymous.)
This paper makes a lot of assumptions that don't make sense. He believes you can trade at the NBBO midpoint on dark pools whenever you please, both to enter and exit the trade. This is unlikely in reality. Midpoint orders are uncommon in wider names like AAPL and your fill rate would be really low. Pools can also segment who clients can interact with. If you are constantly picking off slow institutional orders and your trades have high short-term alpha, you will end up getting segmented out or banned entirely. Also many pools build their own NBBO from composite feeds these days.

Just as a sanity check, GETCO, who used to be one of the largest HFT firms (as far as I know they're still pretty large) made about $100mm in gross trading revenue last quarter in all asset classes. That's about $2mm a day for everything and they are in pretty much every market in the world. There's no way this strategy on one name makes almost half a million a day even in aggregate.
This defaulting to bank transfers is a relatively recent thing in their history;

I've had a paypal account since before Ebay bought them and they've always used sneaky user interface tricks to push customers into using bank transfers over credit cards. It was the first thing I noticed about them after signing up.
We decided to build an anonymous group communication platform with some other assumptions and requirements:

In our case, speed was an issue. And so was encryption of communication. + We did not want anyone except Bob and Alice to know what they were talking about. We did want to allow formation of groups... ( https://register.blib.us )
Sidenote, the funny part is the people who tell you that, "No, the U.S. government of today is the most tyrannical government in history".
So the problem I see with that solution is twofold:

* If there is a central authority collecting the information, then as far as Jeff the User knows, his information could be stored in plain text on a subpoenable hard disk by the central authority.

* If the information is verified by a set of moderators, then the moderators must be numerous enough that no single moderator could capture a substantial portion of the identity data. But to achieve that, the mod requirements would be low enough that an attacker could infiltrate their ranks and uncover the identities of users.
> who's

http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/who's.html
Hi Prof. Doug Tygar, Good evening, I am a Berkeley student in your cs161 class. I fully understand the situation. I have to say that the current syllabus is not too bad. Although the quiz part is kinda 'crazy', those quizzes will certainly force students to read the required reading before lectures, which is a good thing!!! I am not against this syllabus. However, if the student is 5 min late and he is unable to take the quiz, that would be really sad. So, if we can have a policy like having quizzes in the middle of the lecture and dropping the lowest 2 quizzes, that would solve all the problems. Again, I do believe that quiz will help students study more and read the required reading ahead. I am looking forward to a great 161 this semester. Thanks a lot for all the efforts that you have been taking in to make this course better.
yes this is more like giving a would be future tyrannical government a large armory and list of people who may potentially oppose them in the future.

As long as those checks and balances work it will never matter that anything any would be protester has said or done online can be recalled at a whim in the future for ad homimem attacks as needed.
Also more and more institutional investors are using bank algos that basically act like a one-sided market-making strategy. They can actually crowd out market-making HFTs since they're willing to trade for less edge.
1. Dictators can make laws without the agreement of a community; enfranchisement is not required for lawmaking. The only thing that establishes a law is the use of force as a punishment for breaking it. There is no other condition, although other things may be involved in the process.

2. I have no real idea whether the outcome of this will be good or bad, it seems like it could go either way. I'm mostly just clarifying that the words law and force go hand in hand; this is neither good nor bad, it just is.
I have a prepaid dumb phone. I also have a Samsung Galaxy S4 with no cellular plan. I use OpenStreetMaps with GPS turned on. I can download the state I am interested in while on WiFi at home. Then I can navigate anywhere using my phone's GPS without even having a plan. I travel cross country on my motorcycle, and use turn by turn directions via my headphone while listening to pre-recorded music.
"Do all Muslims hate freedom and america?"
Lets not forget that Asha is an Indian name!
Translation from cable-news-speak: Henderschott used paper trading to estimate an upper bound on the amount of money to be made by _all arbitrageurs combined_ trading AAPL on BATS for one day. He assumed perfect execution as an estimation tool and this was not an error. He's not claiming that he would have made $377k, he's estimating the size of the pie.

Re: the intermittent auction idea: Having an intermittent auction doesn't take speed out of the picture, but it forces traders to be really fast at the moment before the auction instead of all the time. Lots of exchanges have opening and closing auctions where we can see empirical data. Some exchanges try to solve last-moment problem by having a randomized start time for the auction: you know it will be between, e.g. 3:25 and 3:30, but not exactly when.

That said, Henderschott is a really smart guy and I haven't read the paper. I'm curious to see what his suggested solution looks like. I was at a talk he gave a few years ago and someone asked him about this, and I understood that he was against the auction idea for pretty much the standard reasons. I wonder what's changed.

Aside, "Latency arbitrage" is an oxymoron. Latency is more or less the defining characteristic of arbitrage. Just because we're using computers instead of carrier pigeons doesn't mean the situation is somehow changed. Saying "latency arbitrage" instead of just "arbitrage" seems like a rhetorical device to paint HFT as something new and dangerous, rather than as a continuation of stuff that has always happened. There are plenty of substantive things to debate about HFT, but using scare words doesn't improve the quality of the debate.

Anybody interested in this stuff should read former high-speed trader Chris Stucchio's (yummyfajitas) awesome blog posts and HN discussion. Part 1 here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3852341
I've never had to deal with RyanAir, but I have to give them credit for their criticism of all the bullshit with airport security - this what their website actually looked like for at least a day:

http://www.owenkelly.net/763/ryanairs-new-check-in-procedure...
A sobering factoid :

Cook County itself has had 92 known exonerations since 1989 – far more
than any other county in the country — and, as we saw in 2001, it has a
special affinity for false confessions. Nearly 40 percent of Cook County
exonerations involved false confessions by the exonerated defendants
(35 of 92), and an additional 16 percent were based on false
confessions by codefendants.

Can we start prohibiting confessions from admissible evidence now? I don't care how convincing the story is, unless the confession itself can lead to actual physical evidence, it should be completely discounted.

Meanwhile, the prosecutor and the detectives involved are not charged with conspiracy.
Craig Zucker created a product that harmed upwards of 80 children. He created the mess, not the Commission. They were doing their job, which is to make sure that products sold in the US are safe for use.

Buckyballs were most definitely not safe, and should never have been marketed as toys for children.
You hit the nail on the head. I was trying to understand Rick James's position, and it occurred to me that if you thought of parents as having the right to total and complete control over everything about their child (as some conservatives do) - what we're calling ownership - then the thought of transferring that right to the state is indeed pretty disgusting.

Commenters are articulating this pretty well, though. Children have their own rights, and the state enforces them. Even a "ward of the state" is not owned by the state, the state is just the entity which is currently responsible for meeting his needs.
Politely, I know you think you're helping people by maintaining awareness of the NSA, but a passing mention of Lavabit on a PayPal thread doesn't warrant a a tangent about the NSA and privacy. It seems kind of obsessive.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Can you elaborate on this? Why did the practice of preferring bank withdrawals prevent you from just choosing a card...or paying some other way?
"That report argued that the best indicator of a shortfall would be a widespread rise in salaries throughout the STEM community. But the price of labor has not risen, as you would expect it to do if STEM workers were scarce."

The huge disparity of pay between different STEM disciplines should clearly show where the demand is. Biologists compete over shrinking government grants, while petroleum engineering students receive job offers of $90K starting. Treating STEM as a homogenous bloc will hurt the less in-demand fields while failing to treat the shortfall in others.
PIC 16F84 is also non-von neumann
Duh? There has never been a STEM shortage, at least in the US. Ever. There has only been duplicitous propaganda on the part of companies that want to raise the H1-B limit in order to push down wages.
Hate to say it, but international "law" has as much actual basis as the scare quotes I give it. Much of it is built more on custom than on ironclad stricture, and the parts that are very strict the U.S. has never bothered to ratify, so claiming that the U.S. must comply with Russia's demands makes as much sense as saying that Minnesota should enforce Saskatchewan's legal code.

The Kosovo bombings in the late 90s were also not sanctioned by the U.N. and yet the world didn't fall apart then (and in fact, can be argued that it was indeed instrumental to bringing peace).

And really, it's hard to argue that there's ever a persuasive strictly legal basis to employ the use of force against nations in a role other than self-defense, which has very interesting corollaries of its own. For example, was the U.K.'s and France's opposition to Germany's war in Poland even legally just? Especially in the U.K.'s case, they almost certainly could have made a separate peace with Hitler but chose to declare a state of war for some other nation entirely. Don't talk about treaty obligations either, they certainly demonstrated they were willing to part ways with that given their treatment of Czechoslovakia.

As for your second point, it's pretty apparent that dictators are already incentivized to stockpile chemical weapons. Dictators have had (and used) chemical weapons for war for decades and if anything, should be more incentivized to use them after seeing the tepid world response to thousands of non-combatant fatalities in Syria.
How much of the opposing army was destroyed in Iraq?
He claims in the article that they were specifically not marketed as toys for children, and went to great trouble to ensure his retailers didn't do it either.
Lowering the interval makes the effect less pronounced, but it's still there. When you have fixed intervals the order book will keep increasing in size until the trades execute on the 1 second interval or whatever it is, and the book will be larger than for our current instantaneous ticks. Larger book means wider spread, as basic game theory says when you have more participants you need a stronger hand to have the same odds, so if you want that trade to execute you put it way outside the last price. HFT firms narrow the spread and take the difference as profit, as they don't really care if 1 particular order executes so they play closer to the last price.

Randomizing the execution order makes the spread even wider, because now you need to beat everyone instead of just tying if you want to guarantee execution. And again, the HFT firms don't care if any particular order executes. Although randomizing the order would probably reduce the incentive to co-locate, but I'm guessing the larger firms would still want quicker access to the last price, just in case.

Also, in all of this I'm assuming no one outside of the exchange can view the actual book, just the last price. If you let people see the full book, as they can now, this is all a wash anyway as they'll just "trade" by placing and cancelling orders right up until the next tick.
Hmm, I suppose I did phrase that in a way that would mislead someone who didn't already know what I meant by it. :)

I didn't mean that Bayes nets are themselves naive--they're extremely good models for many use-cases. In fact, they're eventually ideal models for all use-cases, given enough training, since all ML models are ways to approximate Bayes' law, while Bayes nets just solve for Bayes' law directly. However, for being so generic, they have no embedded structure that allows them to efficiently learn/represent/compress data in any particular domain.[1]

When I have a Big Data problem, and I have a BNN library close to hand, I just throw it at a random subsampling and see what happens. This is what I mean by "naive": since it's a generic solution, you can try applying it to a problem before even studying the structure of the problem domain, and you might just detect a signal soon enough that you don't need to go any further.[2]

The rest of the machine-learning toolbox, then, is basically a set of models that you replace your BNN with when you have a model that hews closely to the structure of your data (in est, a set of screwdrivers for different kinds of screws.) The approximate model will get quicker training and clearer signals for that data, but not for just any data.

---

[1] Another way to say it: a Bayes-net implementation is to gzip as other ML models are to JPEG, MP3, etc. Bayes-nets can learn anything, but they can only learn it as well as the data can be used to model the data.

[2] People do use linear regression as the same kind of general-purpose tool, as you say--and linear classifier libraries are much easier to write, so you'll find them as "batteries included" in more math packages--but if you don't know whether the data is linearly separable, linear models aren't gonna give you even the slightest hint. A BNN is an extremely-inefficient, but completely-general probe.
I tried your demo and immediately got a "SSL cert not trusted!" chrome error. https://rrc.imp.blib.us/link/album/private?albumid=117bc3
I second this. I was hesitant at first but after trying it for a couple of minutes after getting the tricky config right (thanks to some helpful bloggers) I was very happy. And shuogo was very responsive to new issues, providing fixes within hours sometimes.
Seems to me that someone powerful on the commission had a personal issue with the owner or the product itself.

Look for the parent whose child has swallowed one of these magnets and had surgery (or worse, had complications and died), then it all makes sense.

That doesn't make it right, of course...
This looks like more a case of GIFT(1) and less a case of any industry in particular.

(1)http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/greater-internet-fuckwad-theor...
It seems reasonable to ask what it is that actually happened before the Prussians and Plato are deployed, that is all.
I recently embedded my WOFFs on my blog as data uris, specifically to eliminate some http requests. I have three fonts. My uncompressed CSS is 100k, but gzips to 73k.

Then I read that IE doesn't like data uris larger than 32k, so I recompressed my fonts with zopfli, but one was still ~35k. I did more digging and discovered that the 32k limit is for IE8; IE9's limit is 4 gig, and everything is fine.

Some recent articles have seriously questioned the wisdom of doing this.

http://theandrewbailey.com/

http://wizard.ae.krakow.pl/~jb/ttf2woff/

http://caniuse.com/datauri
"Wages for technologists have not increased" is often evidenced by claims about averages. By the same token, one could argue persuasively that devs do not age, because a year goes by and they get a few months younger.

The explanation is that the number of devs (and many related trades) is increasing rapidly, largely driven by hires of young neophytes rather than retraining of e.g. 50 year old lawyers. The neophytes are younger and have lower wages than the mean dev. This brings the average down faster than raises and aging bring the average up.

You can verify this if you look at data for particular career cohorts, either people or experience levels. In the 4 years I've been on HN the quotes I hear for "generic CS undergrad from Stanford" are up more than 25% (80k to 110k or so, starting salary offer). Companies that I work with complain bitterly that their competitors are bidding irresponsibly. The going wages for interns are substantially in excess of what I expected to earn in mid career when I graduate not even 10 years ago.

Also, anecdotally, of the couple hundred people whose professional statuses I'm routinely exposed to I don't think I've ever heard "Boo, got to take a pay cut" except for making the BigCo to startup or self-employment transition.
Yep. Single click purchases shouldn't be utilized as much on mobile devices. The state of mobile apps is such that it's already not intensive to get to a checkout page where you buy something; it's not like Amazon where you might jump through 4-5 pages of confirmations and it's useful to seasoned buyers. Apps are so much smaller (comparatively) than entire websites that really you just need to tap a button from the options/main menu and then get to the selection area before payment. There's no address to put it, or shipping details that a "one-tap" could bypass and expediate.

I think whoever first thought, "Let's port one-click purchases to mobile!" either was being disingenuous or was only successful because it was used in an unintended, quasi-fraudulent way.
I'd also like an option on one that looks nice, but only does calling and a directory with no texting.

I so rarely text that I don't need that feature. However, people send me texts that I don't read, yet somehow expect me to have read them. I'd rather just have them get a message back saying my phone doesn't support that feature, so they know to call me.
In our system, every user generates a self-signed certificate and has the option of buying a signed certificate. That demo is from a user of the system that did not buy a signed certificate.
Is front-running illegal because the broker owes a duty to their client or because we want people to feel markets are fair? There are clear cases where HFT algos disadvantage poorly placed orders (e.g. lazy portfolio manager rests a huge bid inside the spread, HFTs are likely to join or improve his quote and trade ahead of him) but isn't that just helping the markets move to the correct price more quickly? The lazy PM is hurt but another investor ends up getting a better price.

In any case it always strikes me as odd that the financial markets are the only place where untrained individuals decide to play head-to-head against pros and are then outraged when they lose. As long as access is fair and non-discriminatory I think that's all you can hope for.
The goal of a war is to win

Define "win". The goal of war is to gain or maintain power. Every war ever fought was to assert power.

This does not necessarily require that those over whom you wish to assert power must die, but in reality most people prefer not to have someone else come in and tell them what to do, so they fight against the invader, thus requiring the death of those that oppose.

Other armies will throw up a white flag and welcome the invaders in exchange for their lives, disproving your point that "the opposing army must die".
If you simplify an explanation, it still needs to do the explaining, even if it's in the form of a high-level overview. I don't even see mention of the dialect you're teaching. Especially since you're targeting people in the STEM industry (people who tend to value knowledge and precision), I'd recommend having a more specific description available for those who want, even if it's not the first message that greets the viewer.

Since we're on the subject of what your software does, and since as a native English speaker, I don't want to [ab]use your free trial just to study its workings, could you please provide that explanation here? :) Do you teach the basics of English phonology or do you just provide [auto-generated] text for users to mimic. Do you provide Rosetta Stone-like pronunciation feedback? If you don't provide basic instruction in English phonology, I highly recommend you consider adding it. Being well versed in articulatory phonetics, I taught myself Chinese phonology (Standard Mandarin) from Wikipedia. Despite not having very good Chinese, I've passed for a native speaker in short telephone conversations on multiple occasions. Even if it takes weeks to give the student the phonetic background that I had (I don't know if it would), you'll then be able to give them near-native pronunciation almost instantly, and then they'll only need to iron out the kinks with your mimic drills before sounding like a native. I don't know if this is the approach used by most accent coaches, but it's highly effective.
Maybe time to register isTumblrEvil.com

I now need to consider where to move my tumblr blog.
No one even talks about a crisis of too few English majors. That seems to be beyond dispute. So maybe there is a bit more of a kernel of truth to the idea that some (perhaps not all) STEM occupations have a limited supply of capable workers.
That's awesome! How old is she?
Eventually, like a decade ago...