skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If we had no price discrimination, perhaps because of a regulation requiring market makers to leave their quotes out in the market for 60 seconds, then ... [t]he net result is that Big Joe would pay more to trade and Little Billie would pay less.

The debate about HFT is largely about who gets to benefit from new information. Suppose someone does a lot of research and discovers that a firm is undervalued. Should they get to profit from the information, at the expense of current stockholders? Or is it better for stockholders to quickly figure out that their holdings are worth more? HFT helps the stockholders in this case, because it moves the price faster to its eventual higher equilibrium before the researcher can buy up many shares at the (low) current price. The researcher may have expended a lot of time and effort to get this information, and with the existence of HFT their work may not be sustainable.

Contrast this with someone who accidentally discovers public information that could be profitable, or someone who engages in insider trading. In both these cases it's hard to argue that we as a society should create rules that let them profit at others' expense.

In other spheres of life (software patents, copyrights), the law over-protects dubious discoveries and creations. Is information related to stock pricing different? Are we under-protecting it, such that we should let someone with new information collect more profit than they can today?
Ask HN: Problem Monday
In light of the popularity of Idea Sunday, why don't we have a Problem Monday where instead of talking about ideas and solutions, we start off with problems.
Although I find it interesting, what's the point of the article other than "look how most Americans are ignorant about world geography"?

And what do I gain from it?
What's the point of supporting something else, the goal of the web is to be genuinely portable and accessible to every client.
Overall, I love the idea and see the value in it. Yes, post again when relevant.

Here are a few suggestions for the demo page: Several pages of sample text would make the idea easier to evaluate. The demo would benefit from some simple instructions (show/hide instructions). I stumbled upon the functionality accidentally by using the mouse scroll wheel out of habit. It took a while before I noticed the play buttons in the bottom right. The speed adjuster is tedious to adjust. I was out of sample text before I got it adjusted to a comfortable speed. The arrows on the sides of the page don't seem to fit with the idea. I am not sure what they are for besides going back. Maybe a clickable left to right progress bar would be better. Another idea would be a vertical thumbnail of the whole document highlighting my current position.
How I Built My Startup For $62.17
Although I disagree with a lot of Google's policies (with respect to privacy, etc.), the claims made by the author here don't make much sense. It's pretty clear that the author and many of the people commenting don't understand how web development for multiple platforms works. Using a new web standard technology (http://www.w3.org/TR/media-source/) that isn't implemented by all browsers and providing a polyfill for non-compliant browsers isn't "crippling" the other browsers. It's considered best practice. If websites only used technologies that are available in all browsers, the web would never move forward.
Yep, sounds like most of the bioinformatics I know. If there is a wheel to be reinvented, do it. Who cares about mature tested code when you can write it yourself. Guess he is smarter enough not to need that.
It's a shame that the quality of open-source text to speech engines is so much worse than the current commercial state of the art, as that's the most notable difference in the demo videos between this and something like Siri. Would fixing that just be a matter of recording more high-quality free sample libraries, etc., or are there fundamental technical challenges to solve?
Should point out the most popular devices, Samsung's Galaxy S3 & S4, are 4.7" & 5" phones. The Galaxy Note series is 5.3", 5.5", and 5.7" respectively.
A Consumers' Guide to Data Visualization
Bionic Kangaroo – energy-efficient jump kinematics based on a natural model
That's the funny thing too, retail investors are fucked beyond believe and it has nothing to do with HFT and everything to do with not having satellite pictures of walmart parking lots, etc. They trade at such an unbelievable disadvantage that it's laughable that HFT could make any difference. (Plus retailers dont move big enough blocks to get into HFT issues)
Not to mention it's the eventual result of a competitive market (Econ 101).

I like how you appended that course number as a sly insult.

In a perfectly competitive market, perhaps. But there are other forces at play. Why does Whole Foods prosper when you can buy food at Wal-Mart? Why do Priuses still sell when they may not be the most cost effective transportation mechanism (after you factor in initial cost)? Why do people still buy Ralph Lauren and Louis Vuitton? Commoditization isn't inevitable in anything other than the theoretical environment you'd find in Econ 101.
All in good time. That was the first of 3 or 4 interviews I did with him as part of research for my book on the history of the PLATO system, which Alan and a number of PARC folks were keenly aware of and went out and visited (and PLATO folks came out to visit PARC).

I went back and checked the transcript of the interview. He told me he reads "somewhere between 200 and 400 books a year, since I was five or so. Depends on the year. And generally a wide range of genres and things. . . most of the sciences."
There are usually well tested libraries for most stacks. Even VB.
The English don't like any foreigners. We're not even particularly fond of the English.

We're amazingly tolerant, living in peace when surrounded by people we don't like ;)
They get early access because they pay to be colocated on the exchange. Literally anyone can do this. Can you think of a more fair system than this?
And they are also probably a lot more expensive than $30.
The Calxeda ECX-1000/2000 would have been ideal for you then - 4x10GbE interconnects with a quad core A9/A15.

Shame they went under - but there are alternatives from Marvell, Applied Micro and others. Look for ARM server chipsets and you'll usually find a good fabric attached.
Great work! What sort of recognition distance were you able to get with that microphone?
Game Boy Advance games come to the Wii U store
This kinda blows my mind. I remember back in the day when I saved up my allowance for months and months to spend $200 on a 120 megabyte hard drive. Crazy.

And today my computer has a 750GB hard drive. I use it every single day. I download stuff all the time. And I still have 500 gigs free. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around 6TB hard drives.

Crazy. We are living in the future.
Thanks. Depends on the conditions, but works most of the time around 10-15 feet away!
Yahoo Pushes Video Production | Mpelembe Media
Any idea on when investment and mining in Ethereum will begin?
Seattle uses Datacenters to heat buildings
Market makers have always made money. They now make DRAMATICALLY LESS money than they used to due to automation.

Here's the Vanguard CIO saying the same thing: http://www.cnbc.com/id/49434073

You realize that spreads used to be 12.5 cents or 25 cents and now they're generally 1 cent right?
The fact that the original comment shies from a hard standard to meet for the sake emotional appeal, is exactly my point.
> Predatory traders detect information and split the profits with the counterparties (taking a cut in the process)

No. No they do not. They detect the information, and extract part of the value without improving the situation of the seller.

The seller was going to get filled at $21 in either case, the only difference is that the front-runner bought and resold those shares to the "whale" buyer.

This intellectual backflip is premised upon two mutually exclusive things happening:

1) the predator trades on information that there is demand coming
and
2) in the counterfactual for the seller, that demand may never have come.

But because the front-runner is cutting the line, they only place trades once the demand is in the order book.

As a work of acrobatics, this is impressive. As an intellectual work, it is saddening.
Here's an explanation about why it's objectively bad: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/why-you-hate-comic-sans/

I think the reason the Internet hates it in general is mostly because of its use in inappropriate places (I even saw a picture of a funeral announcement that used it).
Walibi’s secret wordt eindelijk onthuld | PretparkenKorting.be
The GPU is part of the SoC, which is exactly the same on the Pi and on the compute module.
How does one use a 5-inch phone one-handed? My thumbs aren't large enough to hit the extremes of a 5-inch screen. (fully-grown American of European descent with a height exactly at the center of the bell curve)
San Francisco - Delightful.com (OkCupid Labs)

About Delightful:

We're tired of boring dates and dull relationships, so we've built Delightful, a personalized date concierge service for the masses. Currently available in San Francisco, our team of local experts finds, curates, and plans amazing dates built for two. We're part of the Match/OkCupid family of businesses, though we run independently of both.

Team and technology:

* Small team. < 5 people in engineering.

* Ruby on Rails, Heroku, GitHub, Macs

* Non-dogmatic in technology and process. We don’t like kool-aid, regardless of flavor. We think in terms of trade-offs. Agile with a lower-case “a”.

* Leverage many external services. Stripe, New Relic, Optimizely, etc.

Open positions:

* Full-stack Rails Engineer

* Senior Frontend Engineer

Check out http://jobs.delightful.com for details

Jon, CTO
Note that “the dots are colored based on how far removed they are from the actual country, with the most accurate responses in red and the least accurate ones in blue.” Given that the dots are not colored by a preference for intervention, but simply by location on the map, I feel that the visualization is misleading.
How to create a large-area visible-light invisibility cloak
>If I want to sell 100,000 shares of Yelp (which is a multi-million dollar transaction), the fact that several million dollars of Yelp is about to hit the market is a really, really important bit of information. I have a reason to hide that from the rest of the market at least until I can complete my sale. HFTs profit by ascertaining my intentions faster than I can complete my intended action and then broadcasting my intentions to other market participants via the ticker tape, whereas previously my intentions were proprietary information locked in my head.

Let me see if I understand your example. I want to dump 100k@100$ and yet the current book doesn't have that many buy orders (otherwise the order would just complete). The book has buy 1k@100 and sell 1k@105 So I try to be sneaky and just clean out the book with 1k@100, selling 100 shares each to 10 retail investors and wait for more 100$ retail investors to show up by placing another 1k@100 sell order. The HFT sees this quickly and puts in orders for buy at 90$ and sell at 95$. Now the next retail investor sees this and just buys at 95 instead of 100, saving 5. I need to then sell at 90 instead of 100, losing 10. The HFT firm makes 5.

So the HFT firm is taking money from informed investors and taking some for itself and giving some to people who have no special information about the market like retail investors. If that is the case the only problem with HFTs are second order. That (much like bitcoin) they spend a bunch of resources with busywork that could be at least partially eliminated by more decimal points in pricing trades. And that they may discourage some informed investors from adding information to the market because they can't profit from it, reversing their benefit.
I will likely end up upgrading my iphone 4 to a 5 instead of a 6 if the rumoured size increase happens. The only reason I still use an iphone is the smaller screen size. I would bet that Steve Jobs had the nous to make sure that the iphone comfortably fits in the front pocket of a pair of jeans.
The picture with the cars must have been much later than 1890's:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-gWoq9XFG7Go/UkgDSfJDziI/AAAAAAAAPK...

The tower was still standing until 1953, so this picture must be from the later years of the tower's life.
The only difference between front running and what HFTs do is that they've found a loophole whereby they don't have to be your broker to figure out what your trades are in advance.
CoreOS and Nuxeo: How We Built nuxeo.io
That interview screams "snake oil" at me so hard it is hard to read.

"It’s not a full capacity battery yet either." - So how much capacity is it? Pretty much everyone who has one of those USB charging IR helicopters from Think Geek have seen a battery that 'charges in 30 seconds' but how long would it run the phone?

"The diameter of these sphere is 2.1 nanometer. Very, very tiny. And these can be used, because they have special properties and they are robust, in a semi-conductor device or in a battery or in a display. We are talking about new type of materials that can be introduced into different types of devices.” -- Even though I'm trying hard not to reflexively reject anything based on "crystals" (California New Age mysticism) the statement has issues. 2.1 nanometer sphere? What element? (not carbon (1.1 nanometer for C60)).

"StoreDot’s original focus ... was memory chips ... shifted ... to ... fast-charging smartphone batteries, and cadmium-free displays — with its nano-crystal tech offering a cheaper and non-toxic alternative to cadmium in screens." -- Sounds like an experiment result in search of a product, but nowhere do they point to the original paper or research which kicked off this adventure?

"The big challenge for StoreDot is getting an industry that’s used to building electronics one way to switch to something new and different," -- this statement is always untrue for a 'better' thing. If you can do the same thing 10x better as the existing tech, the manufacturing comes to you, you don't have to do anything to 'get the industry' to change. They are motivated to build the products that are going to sell the most, period.

"”This is a new type of material, with new physics, new chemistry, that is actually coming from nature…" -- not only new physics but also new chemistry? Double Nobel Prize time here folks. That kind of statement makes me look for the evidence to back up that claim. Not provided in the article and again no referenced research.

This is one of those cases where if they had just enough money to build a single product, a full capacity battery that charged in 30 seconds. And they produced one, maybe two lots of a few thousand. Then they wake up people who are really really interested in that. But unless they come through with more information on the new physics and chemistry that makes that possible, I will remain skeptical.
That site is awfully vague about exactly when it was travelling at that speed. Every link I can find says that the speed of Voyager 1 right now, having left the solar system, is 17kph. It was travelling faster earlier, but getting away from the sun eats up velocity.

That is an interesting link about Alcubierre drive work, but as far as I know, we still don't have any idea how to get the exotic matter required for it.
Time Management at Your Organization
Looks like the certificate on this site has since expired.
I think the opinion of ggplot2 is unanimous: you can do so much more with it — but Lord Almighty, what an expense of time it is to do anything specific! People like it or not depending on how they value their free time.

I always check in details with newbies what they are trying to do before I mention that name (it used to be surprisingly hard to come across it randomly) because once I have, it’s a rabbit hole -- and they generally have weird ideas, that need more several single-dimension graphs, easily done with hist() and plot(); however, anything a little subtle benefits so much from that flexibility.

I still don’t understand why bucketed log-scale for histogram and properly typed percentage scales (i.e. “10%” and not “0.1”) are so hard to do, but I love impressing the one guy who tried by showing those casually.
I should clarify that I am using the request module to make GET requests on the url submitted. But yes, I dislike that the curl stats print by default when output is redirected :/
I'd be more impressed by a "fervent defense of HFT" from somebody who isn't in the business.
> what's the point of the article?

I took it as look how most Americans are ignorant about world geography AND how much they want to intervene in something they know nothing about.
That's not a fine legalistic distinction! That's a HUGE distinction!

One of the people is someone that you've hired to work for you. The other is someone you have no previous relationship with.
It is readable, but that's not why people dislike it. People dislike it because it gets used in inappropriate situations, like the aforementioned company-wide memos. It's fine when your kid's using it for a lemonade stand sign, but it's not when your Fortune 500 CEO sends out a monthly update.
Dispelling Mythical Holacracy
Adding a bit more after the fact: most well-written libraries in C are also like this. It's not a library's business to decide to exit the process at any time. The library doesn't know if it's some long-running process that absolutely must keep going, for example.
"Smart people are anti-war"
Obviously there's lots of research to be done on the best ways to design programming languages and the best ways to teach them.

However, the headline presumes there can be some universal standard of measuring what we can "usability" that's somehow separate from the practical "usefulness" of the tool itself. Tools that do fewer things can be made easier to use that tools that do many things. Turing-complete programming languages can be made to do anything the computer can do, which is a lot. And so there's going to be a hard limit on how "usable" they can be. Not to say we're even close to reaching that limit, but you'll never make a programming language that's as "usable" as a screwdriver, and that's okay.
Solving the credit problem for the developing world is a very challenging undertaking with huge potential rewards, which is why this is so disappointing.

Organizations like this should not be not-for-profits. I don't believe that a business with such misrepresentation would have lasted this long without being called out. Hiding behind the not-for-profit label in markets where for-profits should be operating does nothing but distort the market and lull consumers/lenders into a false sense of do-gooding. These are financial markets and so we need to find effective market actors instead of not-for-profits that can unfairly compete due to their status.

By using the not-for-profit label and misrepresenting interest rates, Zidisha is also painting the picture (whether they intend to or not) that businesses in this space are exploitative and that Zidisha is good. Micro-loans are expensive loans! Businesses have to charge a lot for them to be economical, but access to credit for high-turnover businesses can make a huge a difference if it makes sense for the business.

What is really needed in the space isn't necessarily a lending platform, but more data and better techniques to lend. It's tough to vet entrepreneurs cheaply and at scale, but something I hope we will continue to get better at. There is a ton of money in the impact investing sector right now that could do a lot of good through market channels but lending in the developing world is still just too expensive and too risky.

I'll close with another misleading statement from the October 2012 interview that the author of the blog post didn't discuss:

... the total rate paid from the borrower’s perspective averages 8.40%. Note that this is not much above the average rate of inflation in the borrowers’ countries.

The problem here is that this statement assumes a stable currency against the US dollar. While 8.40% may be close to the inflation rate, for many of these countries an additional several percentage points of currency devaluation against the US dollar will raise the effective interest rate in local currency. I would love to understand how Zidisha deals with the challenge of currency fluctuations, especially when educating its borrowers.

I hope the takeaway from this is not that micro credit and lending in the developing world is bad and exploitative - just that it is expensive and nobody is that great at it yet. I'm disappointed in Zidisha's misrepresentation but I hope it makes it clear that this isn't a solved problem that greed and bad business practice is getting in the way of. It's an extremely difficult, unsolved problem that we need more smart people working on to solve.
More like 25 years plus.

I keep seeing people talk like Apple 'lost' the PC wars and will 'lose' the phone wars the same way, yet Apple's PC business is insanely profitable by PC market standards. Commoditization of the PC market hasn't touched Apple's PC business in any way. What it does is lock the other PC vendors into a race to the bottom, leaving Apple as the only company with the resources and brand position to support premium gear at premium prices.

Exactly the same thing is happening in phones. Every single Android phone is in an even battle with every other Android phone. The market for premium Android devices in split roughly evenly between the top half dozen, perhaps even a dozen or more devices. Meanwhile the market for the premium iPhone is split between, er, one device. None of the other manufacturer can afford Apple's software, services and several-year-long device support. This dynamic isn't going to change any time soon.

At some point yes perhaps Apple's huge phone margins may decline, but there's no reason to suppose their premium brand position and margins will disappear completely for the foreseeable future. They've been living that life in the PC market for almost their entire existence. It's what they do.
Don’t Blow Your Opportunity to Squash Customer Objections
Granted the "iPhone Shuffle" is usually considered a joke, it would fit what you & I want: scrap or aggressively minimize the screen, focus on I/O via earpiece, cram "amazing talk time" motion-charging battery & radio into clip-on unit, and seamlessly integrate with the iOS ecosystem a la usually-nearby tablet.

The dumbphone has its place, and nobody is addressing it right.
A sentiment search engine. Suppose you type the name of a restaurant or a camera or a protein supplement - you get condensed view of "sentiments" with scores in different categories.
Data is scraped from individual reviews, shopping sites etc. Additionally you get information about the original source of information so you can carry further research if you want to.
Data table is the fastest and most performant for many core data frame operations.

plyr is wonderful for complex manipulations, but really slow as you start aggregating by a column with many (1000+) distinct values.

The base functions are super-fast (they're written in C), but give you output that you need to manipulate into more useful formats. Additionally, there's some frustrating subtle differences in syntax between them that makes for some annoyances.
National Robotics Week 2014
Here is a summary of the apply family of functions: http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2010/08/20/a-brief-introducti...

These are very simple functions and I generally try to use them before moving on to plyr. The are easy to set up, understand, and faster. Obviously they cannot do everything, though, which is why there is plyr.
Windows Phone user here: we got this API for 1.5 years and Cortana just brought it to a higher level :)