skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Liquidity during trading hours is important because an open market with little liquidity makes it difficult to to sell and buy assets in significant quantities. Even reasonably sized transaction start having massive effects on price. Short-term price stability gets lost and what you ultimately have is a significant increase in transactions costs.

Ultimately, liquidity during trading hours is a different question from what hours the exchange is open for trading in the first place.
Have we turned against fun facts?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reve%27s_puzzle
or quote stocks in a separate "non stop" market
"I don't know of any business that would keep supporting something that was so obviously not going to succeed."

Well... MS was that company, up until they weren't.
Actually, there is a name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism

Also called "managed democracy."
The worst part, I believe, is that these systems which are set in place are placed there in good faith of someone. I don't think that there's some huge government official conspiracy spanning thousands of people orchestrating this to control the "sheeple".

It's just that to understand implications of privacy violations and mass surveillance is quite complex topic and definitely something you can't explain to a layman in a few minutes and expect them to understand the importance. If the result is not immediately obvious with concrete examples, "nobody" will give a damn.

Those same "nobodies" act in good faith to increase surveillance to fight crime or terrorism. Then of course there are people who don't believe surveillance is effective against terrorism(as some of the leaks indicate) but have ulterior motives to support it, whatever they may be.
Realistic statue of man in his underwear at Wellesley College sparks controversy
Well it sounds like you have no qualm learning the right tool for the job. I would consider numpy to be an API, but the difference here is it's one that helps you with your domain. If widging widges was your domain I'd expect the professional thing to do would be for you to learn that API. I'm talking about people who in your job wouldn't bother with Julia or numpy and would just trundle along with C.
OpenFiddle – instantly coding the web
John Gruber's Liberal, Accurate Regex Pattern for Matching URLs
A local copy of Alexa.com's top 1 million websites
What is a good conversion rate for Facebook ads?
The Internet of Things: Turning Blue(tooth) at the Edges?
My biggest gripe about the list: since when did it become acceptable to alphabetize using leading "A" and "The". You're supposed to skip those.
I think that you missed my point. The guys that was in charge of developing Windows Phone 8 is now the guy in charge of Windows. Windows Phone won't be canceled, it and Windows will become the same thing...just with form factor differences. Same thing with XBOX OS. It's Windows. Things that make sense for the desktop won't be on the XBOX or the Phone...and vice versa. You sound like you aren't a metro fan...They do need to make sure that the desktop is still a useful tool...but here's the thing. In 5 years you will be hard pressed to find a monitor of any size or type that isn't touch enabled.

As to selling off the device division...I don't see that happening either. MS needed Nokia's supply chain, and delivery systems. They needed to have a division that knows how to take a device from the drawing board to the shelf quickly...which Nokia should be able to do now that it doesn't have to make money. It's weird, but taking a long term view with the device department just like bing and xbox gives the people in that org some room to move.

I find it crazy how much people dislike one company while another company...also a legal fiction that exists solely to make money...that company is ok. They "get" me...or "it". Like Google's PR moves like "solving death"? Seriously? They sell advertising. Meaning that they sell YOU. I"m under no illusions about MS prior behavior. I'm also under no illusions that Apple or Google are somehow different. They aren't.
I work in racing, not many people turn up with stock road cars / bikes.
Why do you need to segregate based on gender, anyway? Boys can crush on boys, and girls can crush on girls. If they discover that they are a mutual crush, why deny them the fun?

If you really want to filter views, let the user make a explicit decision to filer view based on gender, using a drop-down menu or something.
> The zoo defended the decision to slaughter Marius, saying that to send Marius to another zoo would also risk problems of inbreeding, as Marius's genes were already well represented among giraffes at the zoo.

Is it not possible to fix a giraffe? I know it's possible with cats.
I missed the part of the article that claimed all speculation is bad.

I did not, however, miss the part of the article that explained why charging for early access to information is socially useful (it pays for the information to be gathered). But I guess if a human uses that info it's ok, while if a machine uses that info it's evil. Or something.
Privacy, security and lack of ads aren't "specialized features"
This seems quite similar to the responsibilities of a good PM.
Are there any protections in place for if an investor is hovering a cursor over a buy button that the stock doesn't get pumped up?
I don't know how I personally feel about HFT. I don't have a high enough view of the system as a whole to make a determination if HFT is or will be a problem.

But the mention (http://www.cnbc.com/id/100809395) of Reuters selling data to customers 2 seconds before the conference calls (which occurr 5 minutes before the public receives the data) unsettles me a bit. Two seconds isn't a long time except when you consider that HFT operates in milli, micro, or maybe even nano seconds.

I am not sure whether I would go as far as to consider it insider trading, but I do think the conference call and the data meant for HFT should all be released at the same time as the public data.
It's really weird that people talk about phones like general purpose computers that they should be in control of...I'm just pointing out that it has NEVER been the case. I'm not even sure what it would take to get to where it could be.

With PC's there was some FCC oversight, being a device without a transmitter meant that there wasn't a whole lot though. With cell phones they are so heavily regulated...and the carrier is such an integral part of the equation. It seems like you might get more of what you want with a wifi handset or device. The carriers have no vested interest in making a handset like you describe and their monopoly status makes market pressures almost non-existent forces for change.

Just rambling...
Make Your Products Guilt-Free
I don't know how instantClick is implemented, but to me attaching some callback to a second event is not added complexity, it's just a few duplicated lines of "administrative" code.
Sometimes it happens that code is moved between repositories in a way that doesn't preserve each single commit.

DVCSs are designed to overcome this problem, and there are bridges between various DVCSs, but sadly this still happens.

So, while mastering '<yourvcs> blame' is certainly useful, you shouldn't rely too much on it, and write readable and well documented code.
That was G-Man
Go up to ~$100 and the choice of smartphones becomes even more diverse. Quality would probably be a bit better too. This is with no contract, unlocked everything (chances are it's also Mediatek based, which means no bootloader locking AFAIK), and you get all the features like dual SIM, removable battery and expandable storage that most of the big-name manufacturers don't want you to have.

Edit: actually, it looks like $50 is already enough to get a pretty good entry-level Android phone; look up the Jiayu F1.
I've seen it myself, having worked for a dev shop that was deeply married to silverlight (within the past year). Glad I got out of that gig.
A $7 PC: Keepod Launches Project To Give African Slums Computer Access
There comes a point where you're going overboard about privacy.
I think the problem of a shared state is that you're starting the new life with many preassumptions, which is not good.

To get the most learnings, you need to be completely open, unbiased.
I reckon that learning Maths, Statistics, Electronics or any related other field would make you a better programmer than having a superficial understanding of a plethora of technologies.

I've devoted this year to learning some Statistics. Will check if my hypothesis is true in a few months.
1) These are not teenager summer jobbers, Avg age is 35; most work full time; more than one-fourth are parents; and, on average, they earn half of their families’ total income.
2) This is an old debate since 1968 - $10.10 an hour by 2016 (also adjusted to 2013 dollars) would lift the minimum to just above its real value in 1968.
3) Doesn't hurt employment
There is no reason to trust the government of Turkey with those kinds of powers. There is also no reason to trust the government of the UK with them.
Since most of the people commenting here don't seem to even understand HFT, I'll just leave this here (a tutorial I wrote a while back):

http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/hft_apology.html

http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/hft_apology2.html

http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/hft_whats_broken.html
http://s4.epi.org/files/2013/EPI-top-charts-2013-11.png
no worries, Microsoft now has free IMAP on outlook. back to hotmail :-)
http://www.epi.org/publication/top-charts-2013/
On Using The HTML Media Capture in Mobile Browsers
No one can predict what the landscape will look like in 5 - 10 years. My advice is to look at the tools being used in a field that interests you, and learn those. Technologies cycle in and out of popularity so you can never be sure what the 'next big thing' will be. But, it's never a waste of time if you learn something that you want to, and you'll be surprised at how often you'll find use cases for your new knowledge. Plus, from my experience, learning any new language/technology makes you better at what you already know - having a new perspective is a very valuable thing.

You're an iOS dev, so you're familiar with OOP. Why not learn a functional programming language like Erlang or Haskell? There's a lot of momentum behind FP right now, and both languages can solve problems in different ways than what you're probably used to.
It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure.
Asking Questions beats Giving Advice
In one month, everyone in Iceland will own cryptocurrency
Trades executing in microseconds is about beating the other HFT. It's useless for consumers.

Price competition (one HFT bidding 10.01 instead of 10.00) and depth of book (the ability to buy 10,000 shares in one shot) is what helps traders.
“Pyramiding”: Efficient identification of rare subjects [pdf]
I agree that there is something anarchic, sometimes cruel, inside humor. However, though pain is a useful ingredient, it ought to be one's own--the difference is comparable to the difference in cooking between butter and margarine. Richard Prior telling his own jokes was great; a white guy doing Richard Prior's material is just uncomfortably weird.
CSS oscilloscope
All you've done is tell a story about how upscale apartments cost more per square foot than traditional apartments.

> The takeaway is that until everyone who can pay ridiculous prices has housing, prices are going nowhere but up in SF. Decent middle-class apartments with a couple bedrooms in Mountain View are $3k+.

So you're saying that adding more housing will make prices stop going up. So why do you simultaneously claim that building more housing won't bring prices down?
A quick Googling reveals that some people do use algobot to talk about HFT software.

I guess it's a dumbed down idea to sell to the masses.
Look for the hard things in software development. To learn a new programming language or framework is not that hard. Software architecture, requirements engineering or the overall development process are hard.
There is a subset of HFT (Arbitrage) that does have a value to society, because it allows you to trade between markets without fearing that you're somehow losing out (Because the arbritage players would have swept that up).
> Then people would get upset because computers could trade exactly on that second...

I would think the way to do it would be to hold every trade open for five seconds during which time either party can cancel it.
The similarity that Social Security has to a Ponzi scheme is that they are both ultimately zero-sum games. The difference is that the government can run a zero-sum game forever, because it's the government.

You have a standard lie in your screed above, which when revealed demonstrates exactly how the zero-sum game will shift during our lifetimes to keep Social Security solvent forever and ever, amen. You claim that Social Security has no investments. This is a blatant lie. Social Security has been running a surplus for all of my life, and investing the surplus in trillions and trillions of US government debt, partially because it's the safest investment in the world and probably mostly because it's really convenient for the government.

Ah-ha, I'm sure you're going to say. When the one hand cashes in the T-bills, the other hand will have to pick our pockets to pay for it with more taxation, you're going to say.

Yes. But which pockets the government picks to pay off our internal obligations is extremely important.

Social Security, you see, is funded by a more-or-less flat tax on the first $XYZ,000 of workers incomes. It is basically the most regressive a tax can be, short of it being a fixed dollar amount regardless of income, which usually only happens for licensing fees, but that's another story. On the other hand, the mature T-bills are going to be paid for out of the general fund, the taxation structure for which is honestly one of the more progressive tax bases in the world.

When you combine this with the most probable fixes for Social Security -- dropping the income cap on the tax -- the future of Social Security is quite clear. Social Security is going to quietly shift from intergenerational wealth transfers to intragenerational wealth transfers. Some people in a generation, the poorest, will get back more money from Social Security than they pay in. Some people in a generation, the richest, will pay in more money than they get back.

The difference between Social Security and a Ponzi scheme is that, in a Ponzi scheme, if every group did not statistically get back more than they paid in, they would stop paying into it. Social Security, being involuntary, can collect 15% of $250,000 from a man while telling him upfront and outright he's only getting back 15% of $150,000 after he retires. At this point, a Ponzi scheme would collapse. Social Security will just putter along happily, running exactly as it should.

The difference between a Ponzi scheme and Social Security is that a Ponzi scheme is an investment, while Social Security is an insurance. As an insurance, a statistical loss is expected, but it provides a guarantee, in this case that when you are old you will never be destitute, living on the street eating catfood, or cats and rats when you can catch them.
I don't think it helps a lot to suggest one specific technology, because nobody actually knows the future (what that next big thing will be).

Stay agile, aware, and receptive. Learn how to learn better. Don't wed yourself off for life to one technology, and don't grow stubborn. Be prepared to turn the ship, quickly, when it comes time. Learn JS today? Sure, I'd argue however that it's far more important that you're ready to alter your priorities when that Thing comes along and smashes whatever you think is important today.
In other news gravity works on apples and spicy food can be enjoyable.
Peak jobs for a technology happens several years after the technology peak. To give an example -- Rails is definitely uncool in 2014, yet there are far more Rails jobs available now than there were while Rails was cool (<2010).

So if you're looking for a job now, stop listening to hipsters and start looking at want ads.

Any "cool" technology today is going to take 5 years to have a significant impact on the want ads. You can try and pick one, and if you get lucky you'll be one of the few to be able to check the "5 years experience" box in 5 years time and be in a position to choose your own salary.

However, your chances of choosing it are slim -- many more technology choices wither and die than succeed.

My advice: when you have a problem, solve it with the best stack for the problem. Winners are chosen because they're good at solving problems.

You chose Javascript. Javascript's a good choice and a bad one. It's hot right now and shows few signs of diminishing. But there are lots of people who can write "10 years experience in Javascript" on their resume, and many of those aren't all that good in Javascript. It doesn't take long to pick up a language like Javascript, but it takes longer to pick up an entire ecosystem. So knowledgeable employers will be looking for experience in the ecosystem, not just Javascript. In Javascript, there are several of those; jQuery, node, angular, backbone are some of the largest but there are lots more. Some will be big in 5 years, some will be forgotten.

IMO, the Javascript/HTML ecosystem that's seems most likely to be much larger in 5 years than it is now is Web Components. It may or may not be polymer.js, but that's a good place to start. If a competitor to polymer.js "wins" Web Components, then polymer.js will at least give you a large running head start. But that's just my opinion, and it's not going to be useful for a while.

If you're going to be job hunting soon, angular may be your best choice. It appears to have reached "escape velocity", and is starting to be adopted in places that actually hire people. It may or may not be uncool soon, but demand should handily outstrip supply for a few years.
No new insights in this article.

What I've been thinking about recently though is that the problems HFT companies work on may have unexpected benefits in other fields. For instance they are working on things like machine learning, transmission speed, long range networking, mathematical modelling, and software. If we were to ban HFT we would lose the potential upside of all this. In the words of NN Taleb, this sort of 'stochastic tinkering' is primarily how scientific progress is made.
Debian Technical Committee chooses systemd as default init system
Actually, if the OP's way to stay ahead of it is to learn an emerging technology every 7 years or so, it seems the steam-roller is moving quite slowly.

80 - everybody does fortran (57)
- play around with pascal (70), basic (64)
- evaluates Unix and C (73)
- play around with small-talk (80), learn OO

I seems, like the pattern is, to figure out what language/paradigm, that was invented 10 years ago, and just seems to have matured enough, that everybody will be trying to use it/imitate it 10 years down the line :-)
> 10/20 years from now, everyone will have to learn how to write parallel algorithms to a degree not even imagined today

So you could learn about low-level code and compilers. Application of graph and set theories. Automated modeling.

As far as I know, there have been developments for more than 10 years that aim towards better parallelising compilers. I believe the current compilers can already use some SIMD instructions when they conclude that the working set is possible to split for parallel execution. (Without programmer hinting, that is!) As the problems become better understood, I expect this trend to continue. Right now it's done by some binary compilers. The next step will likely involve using the same logic in JIT compilers and hence in some language runtimes. After that? I have no idea. Maybe going way beyond map-reduce by applying the same logical solutions to bigger data sets and allowing for more delayed execution. Instead of doing map-reduce by hand, why not have a logical "warehouse compiler" which generates these jobs and their pipelines for you automatically?

My point is that there are fields with known hard problems. As technology and theories evolve, some or perhaps even many of these fields will find new applications outside their current (possibly narrow) scope. Finding interest in them, and tinkering with the problems will expand your own knowledge about the field - as well as the practical applications. From there, applying that knowledge in other fields should become a possibility.

If you're ever-curious, just focus on the fields you are already interested in. (You will discover new ones that overlap.) Find out what's still missing, and then... let there be hacking.
you should probably link part 2 from the end of part 1, if not it's not obvious that you did write part 2.
The previous submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7203364 was a bit premature. Now that Colin Watson has voted other options before F, it's clear that D (systemd) will be the winner.
JavaScript the NEXT big thing :)
That's a interesting way of looking at stuff.
Your are not essentially wrong, just that it is not the NEXT one.

If we are talking work and programming php will not diminish, it is great for most glue stuff.

If we are talking forefront cool stuff programming GOlang.

Just general stuff, I would say the "next" big thing is embedded stuff and what annoying people like to call "the internet of things".
And that point is same sex crushes?
Do you give all your disposable income to poor kids?

So, I mostly do this. And the cost of saving a child's life in the developing world is around $3k, 1/300th of what AOL's insurance paid for those two babies. Looking at it one way it's sad that we're willing to prioritize one child so highly above another.

But while I'd like to see our society become much more altruistic I don't see how we're going to get away from people considering their child to be far more important than a stranger's child. So if you hear from your company that they think some amount of money was too much to pay to keep your child alive, or to keep a coworker's child alive, you hear it as "you're not family to us, you're not special to us, your family doesn't matter".

(Running through all of this is that people, and especially Americans, are really unwilling to think of healthcare as a system of trading large-but-finite amounts of money for better health. Any sort of statement like "we should not be willing to spend $X to keep one person alive" makes people very upset for even considering the tradeoff, even though there must be some sufficiently high level of $X at which it doesn't make sense.)
Ok, maybe the window is getting shorter...

I.e Ajax, invented ~2000, production use by google ~2005,
everybody's grandmother uses it ~2010.
One of the examiners candidly admitted that if the person identified had been someone without these characteristics, like the Maytag repairman, the laboratory might have revisited the identification with more skepticism and caught the error.

I know We're All Bayesian Now, but does this really seem like the way a "laboratory" ought to work? If fingerprinting really is a science, then it's a study of patterns and how they do or do not match. I'm pretty sure we have computers for that sort of task. Why isn't this totally automated by now? From the outside, the reason that springs to mind is because fingerprinting, as practiced by the FBI, is not scientific at all, and exists merely as window-dressing for the prejudice and misjudgment of agents.