skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He sets up a number of straw men which completely miss the POINT of the financial transactions tax.

>In very brief form, it wasn’t high speed trading, nor any of
>the markets where that occurs, which led to the crash.

In very brief form, the financial transactions tax is NOT about preventing another crash (other regulations are needed for this). It's about preventing HFT operators from effectively levying a tax on the rest of the participants in the equities market (e.g. pensions and value investors).

>Reducing speculation increases price volatility

Absurd. In fact, high levels of capital flows correlate with financial crises (i.e. they're a cause of volatility): http://www.crei.cat/people/broner/BDES%20pub.pdf

This can be seen in HFT by looking at the flash crash. Volatility gone nuts. Did that ever happen before HFT?

>the tax itself will not in fact raise any net revenues

Again it's NOT THE POINT of the tax to raise revenues, it's to discourage HFT: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/11/robin-hood-tax-how-re...

>and yet will have a cost to both the workers in the form of lower wages and pensioners in lower pensions.

Not only false, the opposite is true.

The profits that HFT firms make have to come from SOMEwhere, correct? Well, they come from you. Specifically, large investors (pension funds), insurance companies, value investors, etc. Other participants in the market.

HFT takes money directly from pension funds who are executing large orders, by 'skimming' off the orders they make. Their profits are not made out of thin air.

>So an FTT would indeed drive up costs for individual investors making the
>critics correct on this very point then?

Nope. FTT is infinitesimally tiny % of a transaction. Unless you're executing millions upon millions of transactions a day that's an infinitesimally tiny amount. In which case you're NOT an individual investor, you're doing HFT... the exact kind of behavior this tax is intended to cut down on.

>Sigh. The argument is now that it’s not going to cost people very much
>because we’ve decided not to count that cost which is going to be the
>largest for people.

Firstly, HFT WITHDRAWS liquidity precisely when it is needed the most. Most algos will freeze up during times of market distress. So yeah, they're not helping when the markets are ACTUALLY suffering from a lack of liquidity.

Secondly, they're adding trading volume, not liquidity. It was never hard to actually sell or buy a stock before HFT. They're not cutting down on spreads (that's what market makers do - and HFT is NOT market making).

When the markets are operating normally, they're already very, very, very liquid (as was the case before HFT). HFT makes little to no difference.

HFT is basically legalized front running. It should be banned somehow because it is parasitic on the other participants in the equities market. The financial transactions would cut down on that, but don't expect them to give up without a fight (as this guy is witness to).
Well, a cloud storage is central to the ecosystem they are trying to build, think of Chromebooks. It's not a periferic product like Reader or experiment like Wave.

There is no guarantee of course, in theory it could be replaced by a rebranded product with a completely incompatible API later on; but I doubt it would happen because it looks like Google already went through a spring cleaning of products, with the explicit aim of killing dying, orphaned products in order to strengthen the core products.
> "They'll just blacklist every single one of these sites..."

That's the point: pressure. Outside sites willing to expose themselves to an 'iron curtain' is a true form of solidarity in this era where a world is more connected. Push-back is exactly how successful, peaceful movements are waged.
That doesn't really help if the HFT firms can simply pay to be first in line during each tick.
Largest polish Bitcoin exchange attacked?
I failed to understand how undo script would work for big schema modifications ( changing 1-n to n-n or adding intermediate tables). To me, the safest way is definitely a backup / restore if things go wrong ( and you should definitely have backups anyway), but i'm not an expert. Could you elaborate ?

Also, the posts mentions ORMs as a solution. Well, clearly i would never want to let anything automaticaly generate and perform migration scripts apart for simple "new nullable column" types of change.
gabor.farkas@gmail.com

pretty please :)
Images from Space Game of the Year
If I remember correctly there were a few vendors that used to sell such tooling in the 90's.
That's because people buy them. Many of the best selling Android phones are the huge models. The thing is once you start going to 5" and above, with high PPI, your phone can start replacing small tablets. I used to carry around a 4.3" lower res phone and a 7" tablet, but with a 5" 1920x1080 display I just gradually stopped using the tablet entirely. When my may use is not as a phone but for data while commuting, huge is great.
I wouldn't call dependence on food banks a "depressing lie" - demand for food banks across the UK has tripled in the past year: http://www.trusselltrust.org/foodbank-numbers-triple
Have to admit I use simpler tools such as DbDeploy, Flyway or Play!'s evolutions. They do the trick for smaller databases, but are difficult to retroactively fit in as the OP mentions.

A great tip I also received once was to split migrations across releases when they are destructive. ie. if a column is to be removed, first release code that don't use that column, if all okay, rename to column in the next release db migration, and if still ok, in a release later on actually delete the column. If this was done in one release and didn't work your rollback would be difficult.

Other defensive actions e.g. when deleting rows of data, is to copy the affected data to a temporary table first before deleting it in the original table(s), and only in a later release when its proven you did not need to rollback should you delete the temporary table.

And if for some reason you don't have any automated database versioning, at least create a versions table to manually keep track of changes and dates for some sort of sane auditing.
Haha true. It portrays him as arrogant.

If I worked with someone like that, I would find it grating. I did once apply to work at a helium balloon factory, and they offered me the job, but I wasn't going to be spoken to like that!
Ahaha! Glad I'm not the only one who thought that!
Good point and made me go "oh yeah, makes sense!": but it's only used as a metaphor in the article which isn't about electricity - so it would be cool if this doesn't end up being the focal point and top comment!
This is a horrible criteria. People found blood letting useful as a treatment.

Maybe that was the only or the best tool available to them. Maybe it was actually beneficial.

Bloodletting's Benefits

http://www.webmd.com/men/news/20040910/bloodlettings-benefit...
He didn't get anything wrong. Many people prefer form over function (look at all the 'designer' kitchen utensils) and this was also Steve Jobs' design philosophy.
A solution that would probably be better and less easy to abuse would be to move the minimum price from a penny to like 1/100000 of a penny. It would reward those with better algorithms and it would not favor speed as much.
A phone call is a cute gesture. If he really meant what he said he'd go to court.
While I really like node.js, I always feel skeptical about "re-implemented gave X% improvement". Often a re-implementation is done because the domain-knowledge has improved significantly since the project was started. There should be an improvement even if the re-implementation was done in the same language.
Glen Green wall's First Look News Site is down?
* Because Erlang is difficult to grok and hire people for, even though it probably does a better job at a lot of the same things.
You know, I'm not a technology luddite, and I have a smartphone (iPhone), but I have to wonder about all those complaining about battery life.

Your problem isn't battery life. Your problem is you spend many, many hours a day staring at that phone and depleting its quite reasonable battery life. What the hell are you doing that takes you all so much time?

And what's with "last many days". I mean, don't you sleep? Where you sleep, is electricity not available? Honestly, I want to know.

I don't think you're "some kind of direct-current junkie", I think you're a smartphone junkie.
Does anyone know what is the production-worthy mechanism of working with database versioning in Django, Node and Go ?

It always feels strange to me (coming from Rails) that other frameworks treat versioning as optional - I mean Django is getting migrations (not as South, but as part of the default toolkit) only now ?

Does that mean there is another way to collaborate and work on database changes ?
I am still learning that the business side of things is tough, very tough. A finished product will not just 'take-off' on its own.

Sales and marketing is just as important as the tech side of a product.
Environmentally Friendly Cars Help Bring Dirty Rain to China
>It's a non-solution to a problem that doesn't even exist. The real "problem" as I understand it is that some people get information sooner than others and can profit from it

That's effectively describing the problem is a slightly reformulated way. HFT basically gives traders priority access to the market - they can receive outside information at the same time as you and just react to it quicker.

Moreover, they have priority access to information about how others in the market are behaving.

>I'm not sure if it's possible to fix that, but one idea would be to do trades in discrete increments of a few seconds or whatever.

That simply changes the race from about being the quickest trader to being first in the queue during the increments.
Web Crayons
Web Crayons is a Software, IT and web solutions company, with its forte in web design and development.
Good Friday team gathering PeoplePerHour
I wrote the article.

You are correct - Current will flow through all paths, with more current flowing through the lower-resistance paths - Just like humans :)
I have to agree.
If you take phone, turn off cell data, leave on wireless, and put in drawer, it should already last for quite a while (days, if not weeks).
When I see people talk about X% improvement because of some new tech, I always think about Fred Brooks and the No Silver Bullet essay. Nothing changes under the sun.
Better yet, use timestamps. With a sequential identifier, you'll get problems in a distributed team real quick. Rails switched because of this.
This map shows the possible new flight path of the missing MH370
SimpliField raises 450K$ with KIMA Venture
After launching their mobile solution in November, and signing their first customers, SimpliField has raised a 450 K$ seed round led by KIMA Venture and BA such as Jacques-Antoine Granjon, Oleg Tscheltzoff, Angélique Berge and Ilan Abehassera
The Mouse Systems optical mice were available for other, consumer, platforms as well. We had a Mouse Systems optical mouse (with the metal grid mousepad) for our Mac Classic in the early 90's.
Except other than a minority, no users will care if they don't get access to Google services.
I hope you don't know anyone who uses Facebook, takes a picture with you in it and puts it on Facebook, or you know, have any web presence at all.

Of course to some extent I would also argue this is where things get grey - in a practical sense, private individuals do not, and have never, existed in civil society. Civil society necessitates making parts of your life public.
Again, that's simply not true. A US employee trying to work in the EU will have just as difficult of a time as vice versa. Please look at the examples I and others have posted.
Depends how you implement it (a window for placing bids would be one way).
The author makes a point about getting high-quality node developers. That is primarily for two reasons.

1) Early adopters generally tend to do well, whatever the language may be.

2) And more importantly, the asynchrony in nodejs is not easy. Writing maintainable JS is harder than writing Python or Java. So if someone has been through that grind, chances are they could be good developers.

Being able to do everything with a single language is kind of a big deal for many companies; the only thing holding back JS of the messy nature of callbacks (and promises, yuck). I would expect real adoption of JS to begin when ES6 features (generators, classes, etc) become available.
I was listening to a podcast by the PM in charge of the WalMart node.js deployment, he had nothing but good things to say about node, but using the CPU graph as a measure is stupid and misleading.

The project was using node as a middle-man for some old Java based API which spat out products, prices and stock levels. So node was basically set up to serve static pages, in the hope that later they can migrate the API to node as well.

Anyway, I'm sure it's all great, but unfortunately since I know the WalMart statement is a load of BS I distrust the rest of the metrics provided.
Seed Funding in Wales
I liked your insight about the persuit of happiness. Did you know there are ads designed specifically to help people feel less guilty after thy made an expensive purchase? (Merdedes does this).
Did EFF complain about Ukraine government outlawing access to any Russian language news a few days ago?

Correction: Above sentence is not correct. Not all Russian language news were outlawed. Instead, only Russian TV channels were banned in Ukraine a few days ago. This has caused OSCE to express concern. See the link below.

Almost a half of Ukrainians speak Russian language. New Kiev government has banned national broadcasts in this language, effectively denying its people access to information.

When we hear the arguments that banning Russian-language press/TV in Ukraine is OK, since those are necessarily 'Putin propaganda', but banning radical sites[1] in Russia is wrong, because they are 'independent news', we can only admire the ability to maintain double standards without as much at batting an eye.

(http://www.osce.org/fom/116312)

[1] I don't necessarily agree with Russian government definition of 'extremist/radical', but their point is that above Russian sites have given their pages to neo-Nazis to call to armed struggle against the state.
The developer addresses this in his post-mortem thread. It a fascinating read, starts about half way down.

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=29750.645
> In very brief form, the financial transactions tax is NOT about preventing another crash (other regulations are needed for this). It's about preventing HFT operators from effectively levying a tax on the rest of the participants in the equities market (e.g. pensions and value investors).

Actually no. HFT drive down the costs for pensions and value investors. The ones that foot the bill is the traders and the market makers that have seen their margins collapse.

> This can be seen in HFT by looking at the flash crash. Volatility gone nuts. Did that ever happen before HFT?

Indeed it did. There was a flash crash in 1962 as well. The reason was similar - suddenly the market found they were out of buyers.

> The profits that HFT firms make have to come from SOMEwhere, correct?

Sure, but there are plenty of other players in the market that traditionally have been able to shave a lot more from investors.

As for your comments that HFT is not driving down spreads, there are plenty of evidence that they do. Spreads have collapsed to nothing in the 15-20 years of operating HFTs.

Mandatory reading: http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/hft_apology.html Don't miss part 2 and 3.
I was assuming American English, since the site is based in New York. Even so, it turns out there is a lot of nuance to this grammatical question. The Chicago Manual of Style (which is for book editing) prescribes 's, while the AP Stylebook and Libel Manual (for press, naturally) prescribes ' only.

So since it's an American news site and follows AP guidelines, the title is perfectly normal. Carry on.
The rule of thumb is that screen cannot be larger than 4" to be fully accessible using thumb only. Often you have only one hand available, which makes most of allegedly "awesome" 4.5"+ smartphones inconvenient at best and useless at worst. I don't get this whole 5"+ mindset. If you want something bigger (what for? watching movies?), isn't it better to have 7" tablet while leaving your phone handy?

---

I'm user of Galaxy Ace 2 / i8160 with 3.8" screen and 480 x 800 resolution. I'll change it only for something with 1280x768, but with screen no bigger than 4". Good pixel density (i.e. ~250+ ppi) is really important for comfortable reading. And better battery is a must.
The problem is, that there are always going to be heavier vehicles than ours on the road. Even if we make everyone drive Volkswagen Ups or Minis, there are always going to be trucks on roads which will literally ride over such a small vehicle. Not saying that you would necessarily survive in an SUV, but chances are probably better. Also - people will always drive pickups and vans because they need them for work. Even if we eliminate all SUVs from pleasure/commuting use, there is still plenty of dangers that will remain.
Microsoft's MVC database migration system has worked well for me.

The package manager handles making the "code behind" the database changes (which is committed to the CVS), and you can revert and update as needs be.
Sounds like codinghorror.com
This wouldn't help either. HFT operators would race to extract as much information from the bidders during the window (e.g. by bid stuffing) and place the bid during the last possible femtosecond before it closes.
What does it do that a mouse can't?
I really like node.js, but Ruby gives you way more 'happiness' and productivity, imo. Until I don't see ALL (or at least 80%) of the stack that frameworks like Ruby on Rails have in node.js's frameworks, I will still prefer Ruby over node.js for most of my web projects (of course node.js is sometimes more suitable for certain things, especially asynchronous services, but you can still use Ruby).
"Independent" means just "not affiliated with the current regime in your country"
I have to defend speed reading. It is in fact highly useful, and I will claim that it can even aid comprehension.

I have two examples.

(1) Last night I went to a meetup to discuss a certain topic related to religion, atheism, and a certain idea explained by Alain de Botton. So I decided to check out his book about it.

I grabbed my notebook, bought the book on Kindle, and skimmed it in 30 minutes, making notes of what struck me as interesting fodder for discussion. It's a pretty short and breezy book, so this was quite enjoyable.

Then I realized that Erich Fromm probably has something to say about this, so I googled a bit and found that he wrote a book about "Religion and Psychoanalysis," which seemed highly relevant from the preview. So I did the same thing with that.

Before the event I had dinner while looking through my notes and thinking about it. This all enabled me to be decently prepared, get a good start on the material, bring some quotes to the table, and so on.

(2) I do a weekly blog series about museum visits, for fun and to practice my writing. Sometimes I'm pretty clueless about the topic at hand, so in order to keep the blog from becoming totally vague and uninteresting, I skim a book or two. This lets me engage with the museum stuff in a more interesting way. For example last weekend I skimmed Deleuze's book about Francis Bacon, and found a couple of great ideas to build on.

So why would I say that speed reading can aid comprehension? Basically, books are tedious. I mean, how many books do you own that you haven't gotten through or even started? Speed reading, especially in combination with note taking, is a way to start engaging with material without investing a huge amount of time and attention, which are extremely scarce resources for a full time worker.

Maybe I'm just saying it's better than nothing. But I also really feel like the sheer velocity of speed reading or skimming helps me somehow. I don't get stuck as easily. I don't feel the obsessive need to "grok" everything. I don't get bogged down.

Of course this is a staple technique for people in academia, and you don't really need any special tools for it. E-book highlighting can be very useful, but manual note taking works great too.
This we actually can measure - speech recognition's comprehension rate is a big problem for its implementation.

So we know 80% accuracy is not good enough to produce cogent sentences (1 miss in every 5 words). And we know 1 miss in every 10 still doesn't produce something we'd think of as accurate.

So I'd say you need about 90%+ comprehension to actually comprehend something. But that's leaving a lot of room for error anyway - how much stuff have you read and then thought "wait, what was the modifier to that specific phrase?"
10 Great Selfies of the Past
10 Rejection Letters To Famous People Proving that You Should Never Give Up
Oh my god, on some parts i agree and on some parts you exaggerate massive.

Node is a step into the right direction, but the Node.js way is only the base for building up new or other technoligies.

Yes programmers want to experiment with new things, but when programmers grow up, they want to use things that work without inventing the wheel again.

Node grow up now and it is exciting to see what node will be.

It seems that iam too old with my 35 years ;-) because i see things like node as a tool, a tool to solve a problem. I use node, but i did not say "yesssss it is the best thing in the world, wohoooooo" ;-)
Bitcurex hacked?
I did the same thing with an older Galaxy S that I have lying around. I installed CyanogenMod on it without Google's services. Have been installing apps from F-Droid. I use Apollo, VLC, K-9 Mail, OsmAnd and Firefox. At some point I also installed some apps from Amazon's App Store, but I then realized that I don't really need any of that crap.

People saying that AOSP is not usable don't know what they are talking about.

That said, I'm also planning to get a phone with Firefox OS and I think it has a bright future, just because it is based on web standards. I really like the approach taken by Firefox OS and Chrome OS.
Erlang is hard, let's go shopping!
Google Enterprise Search
The company I license my IP from is registered in Iceland - where the major markets of Europe and North America meet.
Wow, a node.js company writes a blog post how node.js is the next technology and you should switch over (and hire them, they do node.js consulting!)

Uhm.. yes.. node.js is great but this article is not.
I can write the exact same article with success stories about PHP, Ruby, Python, Erlang, Perl and with a little bit of creativity about brainfuck..
5 Must Have Tools To Make Your Startup Life Easier
I'm 32. Let's just point at the overexcited crowds and have a chuckle as another fad is about to peak.

I like Node.JS a lot, as you say it's a tool in my toolbox. But due to the it's nature the code is quite fragile. It's best to keep Node.JS apps small and simple and play to Node's strengths, which are a high volume of computationally simple (and potentially long-running) requests.

That article is definitely hype-inspired.
I'm of the opinion that a need for daily charging is a perfectly acceptable trade-off for a phone that fits unobtrusively into one's trouser pocket.

If I'm going to be away from a USB port or wall socket for an extended period of time, I can always bring an external USB battery.
Feels like the "Easy to modify and maintain" part is confusing the benefits of using Node.js with benefits of good application design.