skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article did a good job refuting the arguments in favor an FTT, up until this point:

> In fact, we can show that the spreads must widen to be larger than the tax itself being applied. If there’s a tax of 3 bps on a trade then no one’s going to trade at a spread of less than 3 bps. Why would you trade for a margin less than the tax you have to pay?

Because you think the asset is going to increase in value in the future, of course!

You might find the article's argument compelling if you are an arbitrageur. The firms spending millions on microwave antennas to trade a few milliseconds sooner might be frustrated that transactions with puny spreads are no longer profitable, due to a .03% tax.

But we (society) swallow far more than that in other markets. How many labor transactions were rendered unprofitable (aka people choosing not to work) via income tax? How many retail sales never happened, because of sales tax? And these tax rates are four orders of magnitude higher than the proposed FTT!

People buying and selling financial instruments is not four orders of magnitude more important to the economy than is labor, or buying goods. If anything, it's much less important. So I don't see why financial instruments should enjoy a privileged tax status.

> Thus all of the revenue from the tax (and as I point out in that paper, this will be less than the revenue lost from other taxes as a result of the introduction of the FTT) will have its burden, and more, upon end investors.

How? The math doesn't work out! I am a retail investor, in a high income bracket, and a .03% FTT would cost me $1-2 a month. There's no way you could get the proposed revenue figures from people like me. I have to conclude that the majority would fall on investment firms.

The example investors, whose mutual fund does $85k in transactions a year, are either quite wealthy, or are being taken for a ride.
> Early adopters generally tend to do well, whatever the language may be.

One look at the Rails early adopters should tell you that this is false. Almost every major high-throughput architecture that was initially based on Rails had to completely reimplemented.
Do you go to Canada often? There speed limits are more strict than ours and they have pretty sophisticated enforcement (speed cameras). The world didn't come to an end there. It is even worse in Europe and Japan; I think our American ideas of "broken" is a bit warped, but I actually like going 90 mph to get from Seattle to Spokane; once you get across the mountains it is a boring trip. Europe and Canada annoy me. But then maybe we could have something like the German Autobahn.

I don't drive anymore. In my city, people barely get up to 80 kph given the traffic, but sometimes I get a crazy Beijing taxi driver who knows where all the cameras are, then I fear for my life.
> Black Friday the WalMart servers didn’t go over 1% CPU utilisation

So they massively overprovisioned? Hopefully they didn't buy all that hardware.
You do it by breaking up the potentially destructive changes so you could rollback your deployment to the previous working version. Typically all destructive modification of the schema is done in several passes: eg. in each release/deploy:

# copy the data in a new table and add code to place it in both tables

# change the code to reference only the new data but still store it in both tables

# rename the old table

# remove the old table

On top of that you have changes that are supposed to be applied before the new code is deployed (eg. creating a table, renaming a table) and after the code is deployed (eg. dropping unused columns).

As somebody else mentions in the comments this is more about Change Control than Versioning, but the two things go together to insure that you have as much idempotent and reversible changes as possible. Of course, if you have the resources you can always adopt a "never delete data" policy, so you're always copying instead of modifying the data, making sure you have a way to retract the changes. Clean-up can be done on regular, distant intervals.

Using ORM doesn't prevent you from doing a review on the changes that are about to be implemented. ActiveRecord for example, could provide you with a SQL file that will be representing your schema after the ORM is done. Usually the ORM schema changes are executed automatically by your CI upon deployment on Dev, QA and possibly Staging environments (you do have at least two of those, don't you? :) and need manual intervention (maybe to control performance degradation of your live env - locks, increased disk I/O, etc). This way you get plenty of testing of any DB changes and you should be able to spot any problems as early as possible.
The interesting thing I find about HFT discussions on HN is the mindset "it's computers, therefore I fully understand it".
My impression from reading Russian blogs on LiveJournal is that there are two kinds of people in Russia right now: those extremely anti-Putin and those extremely pro-Putin, in about 50/50 proportion. No one is "too afraid" or "silenced".
Can someone make a TL;DR and tell us what number he came out with in final?
I would very much prefer an easy way to go 'off the grid' - one button to disable all the shit that is draining your battery. 3G, data, location services, Wi-Fi.

Jailbreak used to help on iPhone and they did introduce the swipe bar to disable Wi-Fi, but put so many more obstacles to disable the rest.

Disabling location services will now prompt you whether you are sure you want to disable AFTER A FUCKING DELAY.

I would like very much that Google Maps wouldn't point me in a middle of ocean when my location services are disabled and I just want to peek at a map, not to find out where is some badly SEO'd shop.

But most of all, I would like apps to keep the data I opened 5 minutes ago. I just hate when you are in the tube, had your route planned and suddenly all the info is gone. Or the comment you wrote on HN and switched a tab is gone after refresh. Apple, PUT SOME FUCKING RAM ON YOUR IOS DEVICES.
Yes, the question mark indicates that I want you to confirm I'm understanding correctly. Seems so. Why is that impossible? We know from the trivial case of a person flying along at 60 mph with no car (maybe they were fired out of a cannon?) that you can reduce damage to the passenger by adding mass.
The problem still remains: where the fuck did that machine vanish?

I mean, you can't exactly land a big fat Boeing on a strip of bush without any ground tech support... you need a full-featured airport unless you want to risk the machine going up in a huge pile of burning mess upon the landing. Obviously no airport in the region (or planespotters) have noticed the machine landing...

Then, no "oh yeah, we blew up" confessions from terrorists or ransom demands either.

Something smells like fish. Weeks-old rotten fish.

edit: Okay, you can land a Boeing on an improvised landing strip. But preparing a 2km long, 45m wide strip in the middle of nowhere needs lots of manpower to prepare and certainly attracts attention. Unless a nation state sponsored this, no way that this plane was hijacked for passengers/cargo.
> Node will not continue to be 'new technology' for long. This is a shoddy basis on which to select a tool.

Not to worry - there will be a new hot technology within a year or two, and a good percentage of the node.js people will scramble to rewrite in it to avoid looking old fashioned.
No matter how frowned upon straight quoting wikipedia may be, this seems appropriate:

> Nothing is more unjust, however common, than to charge with hypocrisy him that expresses zeal for those virtues which he neglects to practice; since he may be sincerely convinced of the advantages of conquering his passions, without having yet obtained the victory, as a man may be confident of the advantages of a voyage, or a journey, without having courage or industry to undertake it, and may honestly recommend to others, those attempts which he neglects himself.
--- Samuel Johnson

I think Mark Zuckerberg is sincere in his request. And I think his sincerity and thus his self-delusion is the far bigger, systemic problem.
But for someone to make money, another's got to loose.

That's not true, unless you believe you "lose" everytime you buy something. You can buy and sell risk and time, for money. These may be intangibles, but they still have value.
One thing I really miss since google reader shutdown is a cross-platform (including Windows & Linux) native reader with ability to sync. I used to use RSSOwl. If any of the premium RSS services could support this I'd subscribe in a heartbeat.
It's kind of irrelevant anyway, since any financial transactions tax would be at least a couple of orders of magnitude less than 3 bps. i.e. - "harmful" for HFT, but practically irrelevant for anybody who doesn't do extremely frequent trades.
> And if there is a market for 5mm case+battery packs (and really, aren't these almost only available for iPhones?)

For phones with replaceable batteries such battery cases are somewhat unnecessary as you can just make/use an extended battery with a replacement back cover. Check out this beauty, for instance: ;)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/5200mAh-Extended-GT-I9505-18-Month-W...
The ZTE Open is probably the easiest route to go, and you can order it on ebay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/ZTE-Open-powered-by-Firefox-OS-3G-un...

But the ZTE Open C is should be just around the corner: http://www.engadget.com/2014/02/23/hands-on-zte-open-c/

Alternatively if you have a nexus 4 or 5 you can flash FirefoxOS on top of it.
I should mention I'm one of the happy NewsBlur users who jumped ship from Google Reader, and I'm definitely going to renew my subscription.
Well, users are volunteering their information to Facebook. They aren't doing it for the government.
Indeed. That fluff article reminds me of the .NET spam around 2005. Pointing out three times that "the best developers...like to use new technologies": so, they leave you with a pile of smelling javascript over two years when they are heading for <fill in>. Are they the best by the way? or does it feel like being the best when you can finally add two numbers in a new language? Oh, and that "developer hapiness" argument again. Then: "composed from modules, piped together" contrasted with "traditional monolithic applications". So the writer (or the node developers he represents) was/were unable writing composable code in the other languages they know? (must be a lot, see above) Just wait until their piped modules look like this: http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/image/brazil21.jpg

rant over
Google Drive is being monetized - that's the difference. Neither Reader, nor Wave, nor Finance nor a dozen other Google products were/are monetized, so they're the first to go when managements decides so.

If Drive is used by paid users, I think it won't go away anytime soon, just like Google Cloud or Gmail.
See, this is the first realistic comment I've seen that matches my idea of "speed reading".

The OP, other articles in the last few days, and several comments seem to rest on a misunderstanding of the term "speed reading". It is not the same as "reading faster", nor is it a method of inhaling the same amount of content in a shorter time. It is, instead, a means of grabbing the key points of a large document in a short space of time, either before studying it properly (so you know its structure and end result), or after studying it properly (so you can quickly remind yourself of the main points).

Semantic arguments are the boringest arguments.
>Sure. But it's coming out of the pockets of traders who in the aggregate would make even more.

i.e. traders like pension funds, who will end up passing the costs on to pensioners.
I think it was a long time ago that I discussed a similar tool with friends (essentially a way of mapping out an argument, and listing out premises/arguments/conclusions). The feedback I got most often:

"Yeah that would be cool, but that feels like a chore, and I wouldn't really use it".

I wish sawsay the best of luck, and some points to perhaps keep in mind:

- Make the platform fun. This is going make or break the service -- at-least for popular use.

- Spend a lot of time iterating/evolving the UX so what is essentially a hard task, is broken naturally into very simple parts.
Conferência Nacional de Mecânica dos Fluidos
I always recommend Capsule CRM: http://capsulecrm.com/

You get a reasonably generous free allowance if you try it with Google Apps for your Domain.
Radijsjes zijn vroege vogels en mogen in geen enkele tuin ontbreken |
The latest development is that the Chinese have measured a small earth quake in the sea, 1.5h after the plane has vanished.
Which kind of explains why we don't find it or we shouldn't seek where it could land: it's on sea floor.

EDIT: source http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2014planemissing/2014-03/...
HSBC might...
I have an old Mitsubishi Diamond Touch. To me it feels perfect for typing for long periods, and has media controls which are always needed.
This may be predictable, but all those things are a lot less of an issue on Android.
All of this. NodeJS is a valid tool, yes, but not the sole reason for those performance improvements.

Take the PayPal case, which (iirc) is mostly based on a 10 year old Java stack. If they were to create a new project from scratch, using current-day Java technologies and frameworks based on current-day paradigms (technologies like Play, Akka, Vert.x), they would get equal if not even higher performance improvements.

I don't know how developer productivity and happiness would be using those tools, but the Java development tools are very mature (compared to JS), and happiness... I don't know really, I'm inclined to believe a lot of developers use NodeJS because it's new and hot and Java isn't, instead of looking at their customers' needs.
My Nexus S (which admittedly is not new, but battery is) lasted about a day if I used it a bit and up to two days if I turned the cell data and wireless off and didn't touch it. Wifi, location and bluetooth were turned on strictly on need basis and for as long as I needed them.

A bit means turning the screen on for a minute 3-4 times a day and not more than one call lasting <5 minutes.

I do sleep, but not always somewhere I could plug it in (camps, cheap hotels without plugs...), but to be honest even if I can, I don't particularly like tending to my phone like it was some kind of tamagotchi.
> I mean, you can't exactly land a big fat Boeing on a strip of bush without any ground tech support...

A 777 needs between 800m (dry runway and low weight at sea level) and 2000m (altitude, loaded, wet runway) excluding security buffer. You do need a flat and clean-ish surface (definitely not bush strips), but you don't need a "full-featured airport" just to land a plane, especially if you don't expect to get it in the air again.
Most exchanges have public order books (i.e. available to everyone), so the information you gain with those small orders is also gained by everyone else; that's not front running.
I wish them good luck, but I'm happy to have gone with Fever and hosting my reader on my own.

I am more and more glad that self-hosting alternatives for applications I use exist. For me, the compromise between the technical challenge to install your own app vs. paying to have it installed shifts towards self-hosting almost every day.
I'm aware of that. That's why I suggested doing trades in discrete time blocks. All trades within the time block will be executed at the end in a nondeterministic order, regardless of who was first.

It's not perfect because someone could still get information at the end of the time block before anyone else does. I can't think of a solution to that. Perhaps instead of time blocks, execute trades randomly within a short period of them being posted. Completely disrupting millisecond advantages with random noise.
Agreed. Doctrine Migrations[1] is excellent for managing SQL schema differences and migrations across all major RDBMs (MySQL/PGSQL/MSSQL/Oracle/etc). Both upgrading and downgrading is supported, as well as custom scripts and adjustments. Conceptually there is no reason why it couldn't be integrated into non-PHP environments and be used only as an SQL versioning tool.

[1] https://github.com/doctrine/migrations
UK government culture holding back open source adoption
On top of that, you then have some people coming through where you _want_ to fudge the tests, either because they're nasties you don't want to let through, or because you're compassionate and don't want to separate families.
A bunch of recent Logitech mouses feature an unlockable "free spin" wheel. Basically, you can "lock" the scroll wheel and then it functions as a notched, precise operation for small adjustments. Alternatively, you can "unlock" it and then it scrolls very smoothly and nearly forever. Ideal when you want to move across a large document. It's hard to describe and they do it better at [1].

I would really encourage you to try one mouse with that function. You could be very pleasantly surprised :)

[1] http://xahlee.info/kbd/mouse_with_spinning_flywheel.html
>That simply changes the race from about being the quickest trader to being first in the queue during the increments.

True, it would have to be in a nondeterministic order. I posted another possible solution above, randomly fuzz the time trades are executed to within a few seconds after they are received. Completely disrupting any millisecond advantages.

I just realized the problem with that is someone could just send millions of trades through and increase the probability one of them is executed first. So maybe not.
Hm, you say that, but Goebbels didn't have any tricks of his own - he learned from the masters - two Americans, Bernays and von Wiegand, who sharpened their skills in the 20's working for the Hearst press and convincing America to smoke.
I think calling a technology overrated by pointing out a sample selenium test is pointless.

Like any technology, there are some things that node.js is good at, and somethings not good at. The callback-hell is something that will eventually be ironed out in ES6 and as a language, that'd be something that any dev will find non-appealing about javascript.
owncloud has a pretty reasonable rss reader. Slightly slow and clunky, but does the trick and has an android reader too. I run it on a $5 per month VPS.
Indeed. Here's a direct link

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=29750.msg966317#...

Thanks for bringing that to my attention
Great news that Firefox OS will be on tablets (VIA Vixen, Foxconn InFocus) too.

I wonder if there are already plans for Firefox OS release for desktop/notebook (like ChromeOS). This could be a huge thing.
I used the MightyMouse for a while, for work and didn't mind it.

There were occasionally misfires with the left/right capacitive sensors, for example if you left your right finger on the mouse while depressing the left finger. This would not work for gamers at all, and they were the most vitriolic in their disdain for this mouse.

This was one of the first mice that I was aware of that properly implemented left/right scrolling, which I used very often. It was also a decent mouse to throw in your laptop bag, as it had a door to prevent junk from getting into the optical sensor and doubled as a power switch, used built-in wireless, and took AAs. I never used the squeeze function, however... When then Magic Mouse came out, I switched to that, and still use it.

Interesting trivia: this mouse had a built in speaker, which is what generated the auditory feedback for scrolling the wheel. Very odd...
A plane on sea floor generates plenty of debris when it touches down on water, see AF 447.
Schema rollback doesn't really work, because once you have data in the database DROP TABLE is not the inverse of CREATE TABLE (going back and forth deletes the data).

I've never been in situation where losing production data is acceptable. I've stopped bothering with rollback statements that nobody ever cares to test and nobody will ever use in production. Schema changes are forward-only.
How light wakes up the brain
Why do some websites enforce lack of SSL?
"really quite good"

This is that media control thing that's being spoken about here. Go north, my son, things aren't so rosy outside of London.

People won't take to the streets here, full stop. The British populace have no appetite for it.
This is all bullshit.

There is one reason Node is popular: it's JavaScript (extremely popular) on a server and mostly works with little effort (unlike most similar runtimes).
Big Lie to Youth at “Between Two Ferns” – That ObamaCare Coverage Costs Less
No, that's till present. The announcement was a year ago, when revenue spiked.
Happy Pi Day
Let the revelry begin...
Agreed. In the other story about node.js I challenged people to describe the "Node way" of doing things, and was given a laundry list of things that applied to every technology, like "modules".

We are currently living through a programming language and tools renaissance the likes of which have never been seen before. Why are good developers deliberately blinding themselves to all the goodness throughout the whole programming ecosystem, choosing instead one tool (e.g. nodejs) as the One True Hammer? It's so unnecessary and so limiting.
What you describe is predatory trading, which is a trading strategy engaged in by players at many speeds. And all you've shown is that the price impact of a whale dumping stock is now felt by the whale, not by the other players in the market.

I.e., before the big player decided to liquidate the natural price was X. After they decided to liquidate the natural price is Y < X. The market will move from X to Y, it's only a matter of when. If the whale sells at X, the other players eat the loss. If HFTs predate on the whale, the HFTs gain, other players take less of a loss, and the whale eats more of the loss.

Why is this bad? Is it somehow a desirable feature of the markets that Goldman can dump 1M shares of AAPL and the rest of us are supposed to eat the price impact?

Also, predation is unlikely to be affected by an FTT. You typically make well over 6bps from predatory strategies. It's only the low margin market making which will be affected.
Hi, if you haven't given out yours yet, I'd be happy to take one!
mtaule@gmail.com
>the information you gain with those small orders is also gained by everyone else

I'm not certain how long before the information is made public (seconds if you pay? minutes if you don't...), but I'm absolutely certain it'd be too late for anybody else to make use of it.
"Write server side apps the way you wrote stupid web pages" meme? And all the difficulties with resource management and efficient I/O is someone else's problem. Ok, good luck for those who never learn Java's lessons.)

Btw, pamphlet forgot to mention compared to what they got many X increases and reductions. Ruby, I suppose.)

Well, V8 complies into native code, but server side is mostly about I/O and RPC and data persistence, which requires a bit more skills than getElementById, so assumption about 1/2 number of developers is overoptimistic.

Also would love to see, same as for java based "solutions", the ratio between memory used and the size of served data set
, especially compared to Golang which I think is little more appropriate for server side.)

"Let's add it all together" section is especially convincing.)
> I really don't see what every media outlet that isn't Russian state-controlled would have to gain from distributing "biased" journalism.

That's in theory. In reality, I see a very clear bias in Russian as well as non-Russian major media outlets. And it's not just my observation, either. Have a look at this Guardian article, for example: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/10/ukraine-and-wes... The author tries to explain why this is so.

A quote: The one thing we know for sure is that we don't know what's going on. The situation is volatile and murky. But that doesn't stop western politicians jumping in feet first. We don't know exactly what forces are at play, but we still desperately want to pin our naive "goodies" and "baddies" labels on to somebody.