skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, it is pretty specific. In essence, Buffett says you should first figure out what it would be worth to own the entire company (the "intrinsic value"; calculating this is something of a black art) then divide that by the number of shares the company has issued. Only if the current price per share is significantly lower than that (the "margin of safety") should you think about buying.
I was so skeptical when I first say them launch. I was like, "who is going to use this?". But after reading the article and viewing the site again, I think my wife and I are going to give it a try. There are so many places listed in our area with reviews. And it is a lot cheaper then going to a hotel for a night or weekend.
Facebook and YouTube have a lot of user who spend a lot of time there. This at least makes an ad model possible. Twitter does not have that, especially considering how long it's been around (it was launched about 6 months after YouTube) and how unbelievably overhyped it is, and a large share of the users it does have are spam accounts.

Only time will tell, but I think along with "make their investors infinitely rich in the not too distant future" there's also a strong option of "completely forgotten in the not too distant future".
Just so you guys know, there's actually nothing economically inefficient with what these high frequency algorithmic traders are doing.

With the example they gave, the buyer was WILLING to pay up to 26.40. This means, in the buyer's opinion, the stock is worth $26.40 per share. The sellers were willing to sell for anything above 26.10, which was the ask price. As basic economics teaches us, them trading for ANY amount between these two prices is 100% efficient. And, in this case, it doesn't matter who gets the extra money, whether that be the seller, the buyer, or the high frequency trader.

The trader is doing nothing to hurt the liquidity of the market - they are not 'gaming' the system in any way, nothing and nobody is being 'manipulated'. The seller sold for a price that they thought was a fair value, and the buyer bought for a price that they thought was a fair value. The traders are simply looking to make that 30 cent difference. Although it seems like they are contributing nothing, it is still economically efficient.
For things besides chat, Comet sounds simpler than XMPP.

I'm planning a project management project with a whiteboard, this article is going to save me the time I was going to spend trying to make a chat server act like things it's not.

edit: For anyone else who reads this article and starts digging around, check out http://www.ape-project.org/wiki/index.php/How_to_write_an_ap...
How do you know what your user id is?
That was a great article, but it struck a nerve and made me a little depressed because it made me think more about my online life. Even when I'm away from the computer, my mind is filled with a million different things I have to do once I get back online. I'm a tech blogger and most of my friends think it's a cushy job and all I do is sit around at home all day in pajamas and write. But the reading, keeping up with news, trying to break stories at all hours of the day... it's frying my brain. I stay up several days in a row just so I don't miss any good stories to report while I'm asleep. If I force myself to take a break by going out, I'll be worried the whole time that I'm missing a story so I end up checking my email on my phone every 5 minutes.

I wish I could take a month off like the author did, but I'm not rich. I can't afford to not work for a few days let alone a whole month. But after doing this for more than a year non-stop, with drinking and eating binges and staying up several days at a time, I'm just about ready to give everything up. This is unsustainable.

The NY Times wrote about this last year:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/technology/06sweat.html?_r...
If you plop a big limit buy order at $26.40 and the market's at $26.20, you will wind up paying close to $26.40 because you'll eat through all the sell offers and transact inefficiently. It's called slippage.

However, what's preventing you from getting f*ed is that this is a market, so basically you have 10+ HF shops fighting who can be on the other side of that slippage. The fact that it's a competitive market ensures you don't get raped like the guy claims.
Front running is illegal and is regulated (Rule 92 - also called the "Manning" rule I believe). This should not be keeping average investors away from the markets today.

To refute your second point, there are probably more firms trading today then there ever were before. It's really an economy of scales issues. The large firms have the capital and the resources to: lease fiber lines, buy servers, and hire analysts/developers to build the systems required to be an efficient player in the market players. Many smaller firms simply employ the services offered by these institutions.

To reply to a previous point, the article is very biased and tells a small part of the story. Most of the noise in the media and in blogs today about HFT is very one-sided. The fact is that these HF proprietary trading systems which trade on behalf of the big wall st firms are competing against similar systems offered as "algorithms" to the Institutional investors. To use an example, a mutual fund manager will try to buy 100,000 shares of IBM. That fund manager will go to an investment bank and route his order through a VWAP Algorithm. That Algorithm may be competing in the market against the same investment bank's HFT Black Box trading app. These two "Algos" don't know about each other due to "Chinese Wall" restrictions. I digress.

Bottom line is that these systems which are "gaming" the market are competing against similar systems which aim to prevent such practices. The playing field is much more level than the author leads his audience to believe.

Hope that offers some insightful perspective.
Yes. I'd really like to have: "$upvotes - $downvotes = $score". I wonder if the past upvotes and downvotes count for each comment is stored in the database or just the final score figures?

I posted this on the suggestions page long ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=107060
It has only 20 points, I don't know if it means almost nobody else wants that...
I think this characterization of HFT is a bit overblown. The activity he's calling unethical--offering a security at price, getting hit at that price and continuing to raise your price until you stop getting hit--is exactly what market makers have always done. This is basic free market dynamics. You offer at $100, you get hit, you raise your price a little bit, say $100.05, and see if you get hit again. Don't get hit? Ok, drop your price back down a little. The same thing happens in open pit trading, it's just a lot slower.
> If you have the points in the convex hull and a set of points representing each hole, then rectangularization should be easy because the convex hull should be rectilinear.

I don't follow.

aa
aa
bbbbbb
bbbbbb
cc
cc

Convex hull is an octagon (with no right angles)?
I don't understand what the big deal is. If you don't like Apple's policies regarding their products there's a simple solution: buy something else. It's not like Apple has changed overnight. Just like Nintendo, Apple has been doing this for decades; this isn't some new shocker like the Kindle.

In this day and age I have no idea why someone who primarily uses Linux would even bother using an iPod when there are good alternatives to Apple's "circle of one" products.
Except that they're paying money (both to the exchange, for privileged access to the low-latency data, and to their own employees/vendors for their software and hardware) to be the ones who pocket that $0.30/share surplus. That's rent-seeking, and from the point of view of the economy as a whole it is a deadweight loss. The resources used on HFT could have gone toward creating wealth, rather than generating a zero-sum transfer from one market participant to another.
They're not going to leave because they can't.

Their 401ks, IRAs and the like only work as tax shelters if they invest and (for the most part) they don't even have a choice of which firm they work with.

So long as the firms don't skim more than the tax benefit is worth to the average investor, it's still in the investor's best interest to keep contributing.
It could have been a great book if he had put his own views and opinions more to the background.

Put in a modern setting he's clearly a libertarian economist with little regard for the success of the modern European system in ensuring availability of essentials (food, health care, housing), while stimulating competition on non-essentials (mobile phones, internet access, commercial real estate).

Still a good read though.
I upvote comments that are factually wrong, but where the phenomenon of someone on HN saying it interests me.
http://twitter.com/users/show.xml?screen_name=yegg
I am not sure, is there some way to find out ?
That's not so much a lesson as an idealized (and in practice unachievable) mission statement.
I was not offering a defense. I was offering commentary. I thought that what I wrote would be more acceptable than simply saying that the author clearly doesn't understand finance or how Wall Street operates. Perhaps I should just go back to my usual sledge-hammer comments. At least my intentions are understood when I do that.
When it comes to technical books, I agree with you. I have pored over more than one dreadfully boring technical/scientific book because I needed the information.

When it comes to fiction, I cannot disagree more with your implied sentiment. The primary point of fiction is to entertain, and if I do not enjoy the book, then I am certainly not being entertained.

Some books come with side effects. Some fiction books push an agenda or try to make a political point (1984 comes to mind), but then it is the author's task to both convince me their point is right and keep me sufficiently entertained to keep me reading. Also, some books are supposed to help expand your "cultural horizons" and can increase your vocabulary or introduce you to interesting ideas.

But I find that a bad reason to read fiction. If entertaining fiction comes with a good side effect, then that is an added bonus. If it is the side effect itself that I am truly looking for then I am better off taking it in its concentrated form. If I want interesting new ideas, I will sit down with a book purely on the subject I am looking into.

In short, it is little problem if nonfiction is boring, but fiction which is boring has failed its primary purpose entirely.
It's not really his job to care what the private sector does with GPS. In fact, if some kind of combat ever broke out inside the borders of the USA, civilian GPS would be shut off in a heartbeat.
Keep in mind that 70% of trading volume is not at all the same thing as 70% of all the money in the system.
Can you just modify the gift wrapping algorithm such that the next point selected must be on a straight line from the previous point?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonal_convex_hull Suggests it is doable in O(n log n) still, but totally overlooked this modification in my post my bad...
I almost had to laugh, this sounds like a plot from an Ayn Rand novel.
Desk-PC-Coffee-n-Conferenceroom.com
I agree Les Miserables is worth finishing, and I eventually did finish it, about two years after starting.

It was my "gym book." I'd read it while on the cardio machines at the gym, and only allowed myself to read it there, so as to provide encouragement to go and to stay longer.

(This was at Caltech where reading at the gym is normal: holders for books are provided.)
Business Guys on Business Trips: brilliant comic series
True, but stories like this makes them pull out of equity funds and into bond funds.
I agree. It seems that the result of this is that Microsoft cannot make a better product (by adding value) rather than helping consumers.
It's a number that really means nothing in the whole scope life. Why are you so concerned with it? This is a legitimate question. No one has ever answered it.
Those investors (no idea what they were doing to begin with) already got spooked by the 60% drop and pulled out of 401k/into bonds. I mean the average investors who have some knowledge of the market, and have decent capital (20k-200k) but is just trading normally using online trading services.
Forrester: Vista and Mac OS gaining in the enterprise
It's kind of impressive how the NYT is regarded as The Enemy's Propaganda Organ for people of so many disparate political alignments.

Really, people - noting a genuine technical problem with effects on peoples' lives is some attempt at sabotaging renewable energy? That attitude's right up there with the warbloggers from a few years back who'd squeal in outrage if anyone in the media dared question the president.
Wow, selling rocks with no actual value is no longer profitable? Who would have thunk it! (This is like the Web 1.0 version of those "things" you can buy your friends on Facebook. No actual value, they're just a row in the database, but marketing and artificial scarcity makes people want to buy them. It doesn't last, though, once people realize that your worthless shit is worthless.)
Every single asset class experiences some firm using some software to effect some strategy. Moving into bond funds wouldn't eliminate exposure to Wall Street's technology.
The following lisp simulation gets numbers on about the same order of magnitude:

(defun flip () (if (< (random 100) 49) nil t))

(defun game (n d)
(declare (optimize speed))
(if (>= d 10) n
(if (flip)
(game (incf n) (incf d))
(game (incf n) (decf d)))))

(print (nth 1000 (sort (loop for i from 1 to 100000
collect (game 0 0)) #'> )))
You're (probably) a federal criminal
Good point. There is a difference between saying "Apple made a bad business move here" and "Apple crossed the line in my opinion and I will not buy from them in the future."
Yes, but restricting the number of foo businesses in town is a boon to the existing local foo industry, since it protects all current foo businesses from competition. It's easy for established players to say, "oh yes, regulate us, make us get scarce operating permits to which we are already grandfathered into!" to eliminate future competition.

I don't think the collusion is necessarily overt, but most businesses welcome this kind of barrier to entry.
You can't even invest in frozen concentrate orange juice without dealing with scalpers.
Trust me, they don't leave. There's something about the markets that make people think that they can compete against a firm with a multi-billion dollar IT department, a slew of economists, and direct access to the exchanges. I'm not denying that the game is in favor of Wall Street firms. I'm simply saying that this will not cause retail investors to exit the market.
Thank you. I had been a little "hmm...that seems fishy but I can't put my finger on it", but your analysis gives the missing piece.
Ask HN: What Non-Tech Product or Service Do You Want?
I don't have the skills or desire to develop a tech product or service. But I would like to make something -- be an entrepreneur.

The HN community is a unique one. I've been a reader for awhile now, and would be grateful if you shared your thoughts.

So, what do you want?

*I respect what goes on at HN and apologize if this does not meet HN submission guidelines.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonal_convex_hull

Ah, that's what I was missing, thanks.
Ever since I read that article, maybe 10 years ago, I've been wondering "If that's all true then why is it taking so long?"
It always bothers me when people who are obviously pushing a libertarian agenda market "economic arguments for libertarianism" as "economics".

I'm vaguely libertarian, and even mainstream economics implies a lot of scary libertarian things (minimum wages and rent controls have terrible side effects!) but fundamentally, economics is an "is" and libertarianism is an "ought". Seeing them mixed together is broken.

This book has lots of good things in it, but it's clearly trying to push you in one direction rather than simply educate you.
I do see the bigger picture. I've worked in the industry, but I've moved myself outside the industry to go back to school. I do not feel in any manner that I am being stolen from. When I enter a trade as a retail investor, I accept that I don't have nearly as much information about my trade as I would like to have. I wouldn't walk onto an NFL field expecting them to change their ways simply because I can't bench 400 pounds.
I'm not normally a fan of Fox, but I found this to be an interesting article about over-criminalization in the States. I knew there were some crazy laws down there (I'm Canadian), but I found the stories quite surprising.

Edit: I just remembered where I found this article, so credit should go to noblethrasher: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=722425
That, and how everything ends up needing to be tunneled through port 80 and speak HTTP (for proxies) to work because of draconian firewall rules.
Rule 92 is NYSE, Manning is FINRA, and both --- if I understand them correctly --- apply mostly to traders trading for themselves against their customers interests. (NB: this is just Google research).
tybris & philwelch: I am new to economics, your comments make me feel I am started with the wrong book! Can you recommend some places to start learning ?
Thanks!
In MS's defense, some of those past experiments paid off:

- Word and Excel (which morphed into Office)

- XBox (which is now a success as the 360)

MS has taken a lot of risks that most companies their size would never take; they don't like resting on their laurels
Wind turbines are high tech equipment, you cannot really make them on-site.

You could make them in States instead of Europe/China, but ocean transport is cheap and doesn't have any problems with big items, so it wouldn't save you that much money.

On the other hand - Zeppelins FTW!
Aren't the HF traders exposing themselves to price risk, creating more opportunities for sellers to sell and buyers to buy, and narrowing the bid-ask spread?
There should have been more specific details on the laws rather than the fear mongering followed by a few examples of people impacted. If there are thousands of people impacted by this every year, shouldn't they have done some more research on the laws prone to abuse and listed them down?
Just did a single test - 6MB file for an advert I did yesterday. 10K bigger with optiPNG than with pngcrush (using defaults) and took longer to process with optiPNG. I'm not bothered enough to test further ...

Also the optiPNG website doesn't say it's based on pngcrush, it does appear to have started by using the same methods though.
Just checked it, and I cannot see them on Console, only the Net tab (Firefox 3.0.12, firebug 1.4). Perhaps its different in Firefox 3.5
> Step 2: Turn your phrase into an acronym. Be sure to use some numbers and symbols and capital letters, too

Adding symbols to passwords is a huge inconvenience. Why? Because some of the sites that I use fairly regularly don't allow the characters. I end up having a first-class password and a second-class password for websites that are overly draconian. The last time I used Digg (2 years ago or so) it had this restriction, and that's the only site I feel comfortable about sharing ;). Some well-known companies who should know better have the same restriction.

It doesn't seem awful on the surface, but I also switch my password semi-regularly. If I go back to a website 2 years later, I not only have to guess all of my primary passwords, but I have to guess my secondary passwords as well in hopes that it was one of the ones with a bad password restriction.
AFAIK Comet's not really an XMPP alternative, rather XMPP works (usually) on top of a Comet implementation.

BTW I posted a little Chat over Comet intro with some code, perhaps it might interest some: http://niryariv.wordpress.com/2009/07/13/the-long-poll-imple...
I'm not sure how that's zero-sum. There's value in a) liquidity and b) the exchange existing at all. If the exchange didn't get "rent" how could it function?
Yes, that's a good point - and both my criticism and your rebuttal could be applied to any number of professional traders, not just HFT systems.

I was mainly focused on this claim from the New York Times article: "A loophole in regulations allows marketplaces like Nasdaq to show traders some orders ahead of everyone else in exchange for a fee."

If true, this means that the HFT operators are not necessarily taking on the normal level of price risk, and their incentives aren't necessarily aligned with efficiency as they would be in a neutral market.

And the point I should have made is that most of our market regulations are not about efficiency, but about more specific ideas of fairness or transparency. For example, insider trading does not introduce inefficiency into a market, but it's regulated nevertheless.
There's a whole slew of strategies used by these people. There are a lot of strategies used just to find out what other strategies are being used. People are paid big bucks to develop new strategies that hide what the trader's intentions are. This is a very difficult thing to do, and that is why the salaries are so large.
Other People's Money and How the Bankers Use it
I like to think someone who owns jim.com, a very good domain name, and puts up good content with nice, clean formatting, knows what he's doing.
F.A.S.T. Pulls In $1 Million In Six Weeks
When you say "already established" and "capitalized" do you know the exact criterion? I am just curious because I will be going through the same hassle very soon.
strange article, they seem to cite one example of the scary feds huting one guy down without really going into any of the details at all.

Does fox have some kind of devolution agenda?
How long is that lesson, 25 pages of at least 1000 words.

I'd say in "25 short lessons". TLDR.
A conversation with Michael Arrington, TechCrunch
Seconded. It's a bit idealistic but is also very simply and dramatically demonstrates how poorly most people understand economics. Politicians are especially serious offenders, possibly because even if they know better, solutions that are economically silly are often publicly popular. For example, the "Cash for Clunkers" car programs are not a good idea. Although this book was written years ago, the exact same boneheaded policies are implemented today, advanced by the exact same nonsensical arguments.

This book will make you very frustrated when you have to listen to politicians talk about economics. :-)
The reasoning is like running a firewall - you block everything, then open up only the services you need open, and only from the sources you need things accessible to.

By analogy, Apple can make it so that nothing syncs with iTunes, then open it up so that the iPod and iPhone do.

By doing that, they cut off anyone ranting that iTunes is rubbish because it crashed when syncing their music (unmentioned: to a third party device).

Microsoft picked up an incredibly bad rap for bluescreens, enormous numbers of them were caused by poor device drivers and shoddy third party software. Apple has little benefit in allowing El-Cheapo Music System to sync with iTunes, but lots of potential downside (support calls, lowered image of Apple, people migrating away from the Apple ecosystem towards less profitable accessories, buggy integration that requires development and testing of software update workarounds).
SearchMe now points to Google