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dlauer

30 karma · joined March 30, 2011

Changing how people understand and adopt AI @ urvin.ai. Commenting on equity mkt structure in spare time. Passionate about science & my kids.
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dlauer··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2021)
Rust backend & Javascript / Typescript | Urvin AI | Remote (US, Berlin, Barcelona) | Contract-to-Hire | https://urvin.ai

We are looking to hire two junior developers. The first position is working exclusively with Rust (with potentially some Kotlin), and focused on developing tooling, testing our natural language engine, and helping to write backend services to interact with it. The second one is focused on frontend work, producing product/functionality demonstrations and working on client projects. We have used React before, but are open to Vue or Svelte. Typescript would be great to have.

You will help us build out our natural language understanding product, Urvin.Discover. Urvin.Discover is a high-performance language engine that is uniquely able to understand the ambiguity, context and nuance of unstructured data. Urvin.Discover is currently used primarily in the legal and finance industries for specialized document understanding, and document search and discovery. For the Rust position you should have prior experience with Rust, but not necessarily in a production environment. If you love rust, dabble with it in your free time and show some code on github we are happy. For the frontend position you should be similarly be able to show some of your work using your favourite stack.

These are contract-to-hire roles. After 3-6 months, we’d like to make each position full-time, with benefits, depending on your location.

Stack: Rust, Kotlin, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Svelta, Vue.js, RocksDB

Location: We are a 100% remote team, primarily located in Central Europe. You should be able to attend online meetings at 5pm (CET, UTC+01) at least once a week, and have at least 6 hours overlap with our core working hours (9am to 5pm UTC+01).

Contact: If you are interested or want to know more, get in touch at jobs [at] urvin [dot] ai / https://urvin.ai/careers

dlauer··on [dead]
We've launched a huge redesign, after refusing a large investment to try to build a community-supported, ad-free site on the Internet that provides refuge from the standard social network. We ask that you slow down, stay a while, read some stories, maybe tell some of your own. The site is no longer invite-only, and you can even support us with a Citizen account. Our big feature with the redesign is the ability to generate a font based on your own handwriting and tell stories with it.
dlauer··on Putting the Brakes on High Frequency Trading
I would like to say that I was misquoted in this op-ed. I have never said that "high-speed technology was “a destructive force in the market” with “no social benefit.”" I said that there is a limit to the benefit of speed, and we're finding that the latency race to 0 has found that limit.
dlauer··on Disgusted with finance, I helped to build cowbird.com
Thanks! Every story has tags, if you scroll down. You can also search by tag, and you can open up the Topics section from the menu at the top of each page. All of that being said, we are working on redesigning and simplifying the interface, and content discovery is a key part of some changes we'll be rolling out soon. We do not have any plans to add video. We find something very striking about a beautiful photo, or a photo and audio. For now, we're sticking with this, but may revisit video down the road.
dlauer··on Disgusted with finance, I helped to build cowbird.com
Cowbird is a rich-media story-telling website. We are attempting to build a public library for the human experience. My particular story is an audio story about how I left high-frequency trading to focus on startups. I'm surprised you're having trouble, can you give me more details about what's happened? I can pull it up on my Android browser with no problem.
dlauer··on Disgusted with finance, I helped to build cowbird.com
I worked in high-frequency trading for 2.5 years until I grew disgusted with it. I had worked on startups before, and knew that was where my passion was - to create rather than simply make rich people richer. I'll be on NPR's Marketplace program tonight reading a version of the cowbird story linked above.
dlauer··on A beautiful new story-telling platform - we hope to catalog the human experience
I'm shocked nobody's interested in this. The design is cutting edge, and the platform could provide some true depth and substance in our increasingly facebook-ed world...
dlauer··on CS193H: High Performance Web Sites
I don't get it, where's the class on multi-tier server architecture? Load-balancing techniques? Server scaling? Database / backend performance best practices? I appreciate the focus on the front-end, and YSlow best practices, but I'm surprised that this kind of class is completely neglecting the backend - which is just as, if not more important, for scaling a major production website.
dlauer··on Why is C++ still a very popular language in quantitative finance?
There's a dramatic difference between high-frequency trading and other quantitative trading. In HFT, speed is ALMOST everything. It's not entirely, but many of these firms are running VERY similar algorithms (most of the quants have worked at many other firms), and are primarily competing on speed or gaming each other.

Now, there is still a market for advanced quantitative modeling in which reliability is important, and the ease of maintenance, troubleshooting and extensibility make up for microseconds or nanoseconds. A lot of statistical arbitrage can be categorized in this way, although some of the ideas in stat arb are making their way to HFT.

Basically, different applications have different performance requirements. And even though performance is now measured in low microseconds, the battle for nanosecond performance is underway, and extremely lucrative.

Now as to the argument of whether any of this actually provides any value to society, I think the answer is a definitive "no" (wrt HFT). But that's just my opinion - I used to be in the industry but left because of that. The majority of arguments used to justify HFT are really just self-serving rationalizations by people who are only interested in getting rich. It's another example of a screwed up incentive system that is increasing risk in the market rather than decreasing it.

dlauer··on [dead]
Felt it in Philly - the house started shaking, some stuff fell off the shelves! First Earthquake for most of us!
dlauer··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (August 2011)
SEEKING FREELANCER - Remote We're a startup looking for a designer. Looking for someone to create our main website and a web-based mobile app (potentially iOS and Android in the future). Prefer someone who can also code up their design (not hand off a psd). Please send an intro and your portfolio to dlauer [a][t] gmail
dlauer··on Ask HN: TED like sites/videos?
The Sputnik Observatory is filled with videos similar to TED, in a very innovative interface:

http://www.sptnk.org

The videos are shorter, but the site tries to link you to similarly interesting conversations, and hopefully expose you to something you weren't aware of. It's also growing rapidly, and will have a lot more video up in the next couple of months!

dlauer··on High Frequency Trading Development Kit
Actually this is a far better explanation of High Frequency Trading:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-september-30-2009/cash...