skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I haven't read the book, but I've followed the chatter and have been listening to Lewis on Bloomberg. I get the impression that many justify HFT by comparing current or past alternatives, however his argument is that HFT is corrupting an otherwise fairer market place. In other words the market should improve and lessen these side businesses that victimize participants and add to the discredit of the exchanges.

If anyone thinks that these side business do not victimize participants you should look back to examples like Knight Capitals glitch that most certainly caused retail investors to lose trust and pull their money from the market, taking a loss. The introduction of non-relevant code is an unnecessary risk that does corrupt the system and does victimize your average investor.

1. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfina...
Vanguard is in the business of selling index funds. It's Vanguard's incentive for mutual funds and hedge funds to face unnecessary taxes on their trades. This lowers the returns of active investing versus passive investing. What's bad for everyone else is good for Vanguard.

It's true that IEX is a dark pool, and that other dark pools exist that purport to favor natural traders, but IEX is moving toward an ECN and full-fledged exchange in a staged launch. Other dark pools are highly conflicted, lack transparency, lack technical protections, and the biggest difference is that people seem to trust the principals of IEX and the incentives of the ownership structure.
I can vouch that the US doesn't have much in the way of online grocers and our brick & mortar stores already stalk you just as effectively via loyalty card programs AKA 'we raise prices and discount them to normal levels if you signup' programs. :/

I really wish a store would give me an API to purchase from. >.>
Saw many errors popping up on browser console. Fix them - make them welcoming. Always increases confidence in the product.
I wonder how many people commenting here have actually read the book? Or have they just been reading articles about it?
That's a valid point, but not one that directly supports the argument for bidets. Since most people (at least in my neck of the woods) shower at least once a day, personal hygiene is usually accomplished.
Lewis's book examines one kind of HFT, argues that it is objectionable, and takes a look at one method of mitigation. Where this bites is that this HFT method is super common and relatively common knowledge to insiders but not outsiders.

This criticism, that Lewis doesn't take a comprehensive view, is inapt since Lewis's book is not a treatise on HFT and its implications. It is like criticizing a scientist for publishing an article on a narrow topic rather than describing everything in the world in one giant book.

You can say that this method of HFT isn't front-running or that front-running shouldn't be illegal (and back up your case with arguments) but you can't say this criticism of one HFT method is wrong because HFT does other stuff too.

Edit: Source: actually read the book
We're hiring - http://www.fogcreek.com/Careers/

I think we hit all of your points (although "great culture" is very subjective), and our application process does not hinge on OSS/SO profile/GitHub or anything of the sort.
I've loved this read. Ever consider just delivering bagels all day long? :)
Slysoft DVD Ripper Owner Found Guilty in Criminal Action
Or adopted a dog!
Let's unpack that a little. For most publicly traded stocks, there are always going to be willing buyers and willing sellers, for the right price. Those prices, respectively, are the bid and ask prices. So for example, if you want to trade shares of some stock, the bid might be $100.00 and the ask might be $100.10, i.e. someone will buy from you at $100.00 and someone will sell to you at $100.10.

Obviously if the buyers and sellers hold fast then no trades get made: The buyers are offering less than the sellers are willing to accept. If you want to make a trade then someone has to cross the spread -- either the buyer has to pay $100.10 or the seller has to accept $100.00. This leaves room for speculators: When a seller decides they want to trade right now and they cross the spread, the speculator can buy the shares and then hold them until a buyer comes who is willing to cross the spread, and then the speculator profits by buying at the bid price and selling at the ask price. The speculator is taking the risk that in the meantime the price of the stock may go down and they'll lose money, and that risk is what earns the profit.

But HFT isn't that. HFT is having fast computers sitting in Chicago and New York, so that when a buyer crosses the spread in Chicago at the same time as a seller crosses the spread in New York, the HFTer can arbitrage the transactions with the foreknowledge that both trades will clear immediately. The HFTer is not taking a risk proportional to the profit but rather is profiting from trading with superior information. Moreover, the HFTer is only holding the shares for milliseconds. How does that provide any useful amount of liquidity? Why can't we arrange the exchanges so that if a buyer and seller both cross the spread at approximately the same time, they split the difference and no third party takes anything?
Good news, maybe I can open my UT3 box and play it soon.
It's a competition. I wouldn't take that top five too seriously.
GitHub Pages Now Supports HTTPS, So Use It
Seems like an easy way for a university-based "conscientious objector" to have this issue addressed would be to intentionally click on the spider trap link once a day?
true ! but long term committment and the demonstration that the project can be used to create large applications IS also important.
How long does it take to resolve a namecoin key=>value pair? Considering the variable speed in these sorts of decentralized networks, is there a noticeable lag when you initially request a .bit website?
CryEngine, Steam, Unity (engine), LeadWerks, and now Unreal. We're getting closer. This is beautiful :)
The accountability is key, too. Joining a gym you can go whenever you want -- which also means you can not go whenever you don't want. If people are relying on you for their morning bagels, you don't have an option, and removing the choice to opt-out can be crucial.
Should This iPad Rattle Really Be a Baby Toy?
Normally they get paid vacation for an infraction. They must really be concerned about dancing and charity.
Or use a secret skype if it is necessary... A lot of streamers use skype to provide content of them interacting with others in an interesting way (and skype is pretty good for this without the hassle of ventrilo, mumble, teamspeak, or whatever alternative).

I don't see why more of them don't make token skype accounts regularly. It isn't much of a hassle and it raises the security bar quite a lot compared to always using the same account.
Or captcha?
Ask HN: Tips about selling software to management consulting firms?
Do any HN readers have insights about selling software to large management consulting firms like McKinsey? We realised that the tool our team is building could also be useful for management consulting firms, but we don't really have experience in that area.

Do they try and buy new software regularly? It would make sense that they are a more forward-looking than their clients.

Can you sell to a team inside the company and expand from there, or do they have a global IT department with a strict rules?

Do they expected a lot of polish from the product, or are they willing to try a beta product, if it solves a real problem for them?
For those that didn't click through, the (very entertaining) CNBC interview can be found here:

http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000263252
We don't need to fully understand it, any more than we needed to fully understand the physics of combustion to set fire to things. I feel comfortable with my prediction based on the existing state of simple AI in robotics for things like ad-hoc swarming, for example.

I hate to burst your bubble but Johnny Five is not alive--it's a puppet.

I never thought otherwise. Don't project your personal disillusionment onto me.
RegNMS requires exchanges and trading centers to honor the Order Protection rule to route trades to the trading center with the best listed bid/ask price.

I don't think RegNMS requires a broker-dealer like RBC to route its order to any particular exchange.

Brokers already have a duty of best execution to their clients. They are allowed to use their judgement to send orders to any given exchange regardless of the NBBO. That's what enabled RBC to implement "Thor".
I also had the same thought but not that he had a child, but rather those with children don't have this problem.

Each one of his "issues" for me, are helped by kids.

They "help" me get up early, they keep me grounded and my tech-world concerns mean nothing to them.
1) I don't have a GitHub (or Bitbucket, or other "profile" on similar repository hosts), or anything else in your list--at least not that I advertise or share with people. Yet I'm in SV earning in the mid $100k. The kinds of companies who put a lot of weight on the things you list are disproportionately likely to be social media sweatshops with a dogmatic view of development (if it's not <latest fad JS framework>+RoR+Cloud developed on a Macbook Pro, it's not "development"). If you want to work for them, you need those things; otherwise you don't.

I have a full-time job, as I noted, and a toddler at home. Over the last six months I've found a half-hour here, an hour there to do side-projects. One of which (and my only, to-date) I just released to the Google Play store. There is absolutely no reason you can't do this.

What does "I'm not allowed" mean? I can't think of any employment contract that would restrict you from doing any other development work on your own time. Just pick projects that a "reasonable observer" would not think overlap with your "day job" work.

2) You should not cash out your 401k to live on. It is not that kind of savings account (i.e. an "emergency" fund). However, if you have a solid investment opportunity in something (relatively) stable for the long-term, such as real estate, it may be worth it. I've cashed out my 401k three times, two for the wrong reasons (to fund relocations), and one to purchase a home that I now rent out and derive significantly more income (net of taxes and other payments) from than had that money been in my 401k fund.
>Can someone explain how HFT would "provide liquidity", which seems to always be the pro-HFT response?

You should narrow your question to how the latency arms race provides liquidity, and if it would be different it latency was capped at some amount.
This looks really cool. I wish I had the time to read it.
One of the quotes either from the book, or one of the TV interviews, was "if it is illegal if a human does it, why is it not illegal if a machine does it"?

I think it is from an interview on The Daily Show, see here: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-04-02/jon-stewart-hft-its...

The quote seems to be 'The HFTs "function on volume and volatility" alone and "they know the prices before you do... which is illegal if it's a person, but as a computer, meh?"'

So my question to you is, i) explain how HFT serves the same purpose as market-making ii) explain how HFT is not front-running the valid trades
My concern is that Michael Lewis and his books have great popular appeal. Furthermore, he is jumping on the popular bandwagon of bashing HFT. They lay person will look at these facts and simply conclude that he's right. The problem can easily extend to other buy-siders who dont really full understand (or care to understand) how market microstructure works in the US.
That fact that people shower, usually daily, is an argument that bidets aren't necessary.
I don't think he took up a biking hobby ... he took a very small part-time job for which he uses his bike. Big whoop indeed, you don't need to bike a marathon or work a double shift to impact your life.
I recently picked up a consulting job with a company in a completely different time zone from my own.

I have to wake up at 4am and I'm done for the day at noon. It's been a week so far and I'm loving it!

I wake up, put on some Nujabes[1] and make myself a cup of coffee. Then get to work (I work from home). It's magnificent! By the time I have to pick up my son from school at noon, I'm done for the day with the entire afternoon free to me.

I'm going to have trouble switching back to a regular 9-to-5. Waking up early is almost pure pro's and minimal con's.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTH7XefE85A
No particular reason. I just now came across it.
Um. I do grow my own food. Not all of it granted, but a little household planning makes my wife's trips to the store pretty efficient. The rest comes from the garden, which we've had no problem managing ourselves without a database telling us when the carrots should be coming ready.

There was a great article in Wired a while ago about how the Amish have been misunderstood as being luddites for a long time. Rather, they make as much of an informed decision about how much technology they let into their culture as possible so as to disrupt the positive aspects of their society as little as possible.

That's not to say their experiment is perfect or a model for everyone else, but there is something to be said for taking a measured approach to introducing new tech and data to our lives.

As one example, learning to keep track of how long you've been using your current toothbrush can seem boring and un-useful, but it's those little skills that you teach your children that help them manage other, more socially-important, aspects of their lives. Sure, the adults in the house can get a leg up on keeping track of household items, but imagine for a moment a child growing up in a world where big data tracks their needs and things magically arrive when they need them. Suddenly we must be much, much more focused and intentional about teaching them basic management skills, rather than having them taught organically via their everyday experiences.
Part of me worries that an app could use this in a bad way as well. If an app asks a user for a permission, and the user says no, the current expectation is that they won't be asked again. However, with this pattern, the app could bother the user until they finally gave up and granted permissions. Of course, this could also backfire and cause the user to uninstall the app.
Sure, decentralized networks can have variable speeds, but you could put a caching layer in front and the problem should be solved, no? The writes will be variable, but reads don't have to be.
It's very fast, and if it's not fast enough, one can build an optimized data structure in another program.
The idea that homosexual relationships "have nothing to do with families" is simply laughable.
I think the invite only beta hurt it more. I got in from a random redditor, but no one else I knew was in it, so I played with it for 5 minutes and then forgot about it.
This seems like a back and forth that's quibbling about words. I didn't say there's anything wrong with arbitrage; the critique is the privileged access to market information and the ability to profit off it without adding any value to the rest of the market.

All things equal, I would prefer to trade on an exchange that makes an effort to provide equal access, and one that doesn't artificially inject middlemen into transactions that don't require them.
I think Google did incorporate a lot of this functionality into Docs - multiple users editing the same doc at once is pretty close to the functionality I wanted from Wave, and I've used it multiple times to great effect.
How was the diagnosis made? Did you have to sleep in a clinic, or at home wearing some analyzer machine?
The Greatest Ever Infographic
Also lots of people still use #define for magic numbers; I learned C in the late 80s with a book by Thomas Plum, and it recommended using enum whenever possible in preference of #define.

The reason given was superior debug support. Debuggers have gotten better at handling #defines, but #defines are still second class citizens. I've personally worked with a debugger that could precisely find all references of an enum, but only grep for a #define. In code with lots of conditional compilation, that makes a huge difference.
The whole reason for the recent resurgence in BI is the realization that automation is fast removing that bottom rung of scut jobs. Obviously, BI won't work if nothing replaces the unpleasant jobs that no one would be incentivized to do anymore.
This is a complicated issue and not very well understood as you can see in some of the replies to this comment. The term HFT is used to describe a lot of strategies, and many of them are overall good for the market. Elimination of human specialists and market makers and subsequent tightening of spreads is definitely a good thing. Also, arbing prices between different markets is also a good thing and those with the best technology will succeed there.

But there are HFT strategies that are bad for the market where the HFT algorithms are enriching themselves while providing no benefit to anyone else and actually causing the market harm.

Take a look here for more details on "quote stuffing" and other malicious HFT practices:

http://www.nanex.net/aqck2/4022.html
That quote drives me nuts, because it is completely unclear on how anything that computers are doing would be illegal if humans did it.

For decades, humans did exactly what the HFTs did, except much more brazenly: where HFTs take pennies in compensation, the humans took dimes, quarters, even dollars.

That premium wasn't outlawed. No rule was passed to eliminate the profits the middlemen took. No, the premiums were competed down to where they are now.

(I didn't downvote you).
For now. One of the developers mentioned on Reddit that editor support is planned for the future.

Plus, unlike Unity, you could theoretically port it yourself. Paying $20/month gives you complete access to the source on GitHub, and they're going to start accepting pull requests very soon.
I don't work for Apple or Google, but I can assure you that there is strong upward pressures on salaries for developers in the bay area. Housing prices are a bit more complicated.

I've also had personal experience with people relocating from Denver and having a _very_ hard time dealing with local house prices. Please investigate carefully using Trulia, Zillow, or Craigslist.
Thank you very much, this is insightful.

> Encouraging words (NO, not just "cheer up")

Would you mind sharing a little on how to go about this exactly? To be clear, I'm not surprised that "cheer up" isn't the right way - but I don't know what is. I don't even know how to talk positively to, say, cancer patients, let alone sufferers of mood disorders.
I'm from Miami, a junior studying Computer Science at the University of Miami- and I want to get involved with a startup! If anyone has any tips- contact me!
Info at: jacobmizraji.com
* Running - I try for 3x a week, usually 5k but sometimes I got 6k or 7k on the weekend.

* Volunteering - I socialize feral and semi-feral cats for 3-4 hours a week at a local animal shelter. I get a lot of cuts and scars from it, but it's great when the scared animal I met becomes someone's loving pet.

* Reading - Right now I'm reading a book on the history of Mexican food in the US ("Taco USA"). It keeps me thinking about things outside the tech scene.

* Gardening - Not as easy now that I'm living in an apartment, but I like getting my hands dirty and you can't beat the taste of food you grew yourself.
Out of curiosity, what are you doing with your time that is currently more important than reading it?
I agree, prior discussions on the mailing list have been unable to resolve this though. There are two directions in which to progress:
1) Convert the project to be primarily about the federation protocol (which was the original direction of FedOne), with the existing client being a 'demonstration' implementation of the protocol. This sets our market to be other developers.
2) Be client specific, extend the existing client, add mobile support etc. Setting our market to be users directly. 'The next communications platform'.

(2) is what we have been mostly doing for the last couple of years, but our Java6+GWT+Ant+Subversion (only recently switched to git) stack was failing to attract new developers. There were several calls to rewrite the entire thing in (say) javascript.
I've taken two separate part-time jobs while working full time elsewhere.

The first one was while I was working for the federal government. I commuted one hour each way and after spending two years in a mid-sized bedroom community I still had no friends where I lived. I got a job at a local coffee shop filling in where needed which was usually either opening up from 6 to 8A.M. or closing up from 6-10P.M.

I immediately got to know a lot of locals from the college students and young people who worked alongside me to the professionals who came in earl to the stay-at-home moms and dads that came in mid-afternoon.

I learned how to make a great espresso made some spending money and a bunch of friends. It was a great experience.

The second job was while working remotely as a developer in a tiny rural town. I took a job as a fitness instructor at a local studio and, again, met a lot of people I wouldn't have otherwise and got to make a real personal impact on many people's lives helping them get fit and stay healthy.

The author does a great job summarizing the benefits of this kind of job. There's so much more than money that can add tremendous value to your life.
I was trying to implement an interpreter for a minimal (lazy) language in C [1]. It uses Church encoding and other encodings. E.g. here are the definitions of false, true, identity, and pair:

f_ = proc_self(lambda(v0));
t_ = proc(lambda(v1), f());
id_ = proc(v0, f());
pair_ = lambda3(op_if(v0, v1, v2));

For the moment I gave up on it though but maybe it might serve as inspiration ;)

[1] https://github.com/wedesoft/blc/blob/master/src/x.c#651
> The logic behind prop 8 is that if you clearly define marriage as a union between one man and one woman, with no exceptions, then you are leaving homosexuals with no other alternative than to form some kind of alternate terminology, such as the civil union.

I just don't get this, so please explain if you can as you seem to have some insight here: why does marriage have to be between a man and a women? Why can't gay people be "married"? Why does it affect anyone else if they do?
This question shows a lack of self confidence. Be confident in your skills when networking and interviewing. Seems like you are latching onto one way of getting a more interesting job. It is a reckless plan and totally unnecessary. Finding a job is like finding a mate. There's a small overlap between what you want and what potential partners want. Willingness to fail, repeatedly, is a big help in these situations. Just keep interviewing. If you are good at what you do, someone will give you a chance.
wait.. so you can feed a bunch of facebook user ids to the ad system, and only those users will see your ads?
Ya, I deleted that comment when I realized I had made a mistake in my reasoning about a couple things.

I don't agree with everything you are saying but I can see where my worldview wouldn't work for some people. [Not-a-parent; No interest in growing/building my own things outside certain areas of interest]

Unfortunately it slipped in the gap so someone could reply :/
Just as fast as a DNS lookup. It can be cached anywhere (even locally, with your own name server on your own machine).

It's also almost exactly the same as DNS regarding name changing. You have to wait about 10 minutes for the blockchain to register a name, and then about 24 hours before all the cache servers update it.