gd1

>Eyestrain and standing around all day is definitely preferable to a job where ... start vomiting and die two days later.

I too share your fascination with the nuclear incidents, but I felt that the takeaway point of the article was that our fascination is entirely disproportionate. As cool as the 'demon core' is, you can just as easily die driving a bulldozer or digging a trench.

Perhaps our excitement and enthusiasm leads indirectly to the generally disproportionate fear that the general public have of anything linked to radiation or nuclear physics.

Very good point. There's no reason to think we can solve the Halting Problem any more than a TM can, so the 'solved' BBs mentioned in the article are only solved in the sense that we puny humans had a look at all possible programs generated by BB(3) for example, focused on the ones that didn't appear to be halting, and decided by inspection that they wouldn't halt. That inspection process is not mathematically well-defined, so I'd argue that BB numbers should be inadmissible for the contest.

>One of the most common mistake we people make is to think of intellectuals as some higher beings.

Don't worry, I can assure I'm not making that mistake.

Wrong. Zero. Do the math, they're not even close.

Can you quote me some stats on how much the equivalent middle men made in earlier decades? Both absolute and relative to the size of the market?

That's pretty simple to answer. The smaller the spread, the less going into the pocket of middlemen. Which is where we are now. Less going into the pockets of middlemen than ever before.

>And are these benefits worth the massive amount of wealth extraction

What "massive amount of wealth extraction"? Are you just making shit up?

And also, interestingly, climate science, where they face a similar problem in having a single enormously complex system that they can't bifurcate and run experiments on. To be fair, even nutrition and digestion and neuroscience/psychology tend to be a pseudo-scientific shitshow, and we've 6 billion test subjects for those. Or even epidemiology, where we get endless statistical garbage about this or that factor leading to cancer. Cancer is a real physical process, triggered by real physical causes (carcinogens, genetics, etc.)... how about we put down the statistics textbook and focus on finding the empirical causes? But again we struggle to do that with 6 billion experimental test beds. So yeah, it is best to take anything like sociology/economics/planetary climate modelling with a big grain of salt, because the simple truth is that we're nowhere near achieving accurate modelling in subjects where we have six billion verification sets, let alone subjects where we have a handful (societies, economies) or one (Earth).

Do you mean a carbon dioxide tax?

>There isn't anything on the market today that has been proven to work in environments like this and has the tooling to back it up.

Here you go:

http://kx.com/

What you describe is called 'slow playing' in poker, not bluffing. Put it this way, if spoofing (bluffing) were legalized in markets, how do you think it would work out for the little guy? Who has the advantage in no-limit Texas hold em? The guy with the biggest chip stack bullies the pot.

You seem to be mixing up different levels of wanting and intention. I may not want to eat my brussel sprouts for dinner, but when I poke them with a fork and raise them towards my mouth I am intending to eat them. Not pull them away at the last second. I'm sure no one enjoys dumping a stock as it plummets, or wants to dump a stock when it plummets, but when they are actually carrying out the process of selling that stock, then they do want the trade to go through. It is their intention to successfully complete the sale of the stock. That's what we're referring to.

That's bizarre. So let's say AAPL is trading at $120, and you put in a limit order to buy it at $110, then you should never be allowed to cancel it? How long does the order sit there for? What if AAPL's price goes up to $400 over the next few months, do you have to leave your limit order there forever?

>95 percent of high-frequency trader orders are cancelled

So what. 99.9999999% of the pixels blatted onto your screen aren't looked at. Why do you care?

Let's say I'm making a market in a derivative product (A), one where the price is 'derived' from the price of another product (B). By a simple equation. Let's say A = 2 * B. No one likes product A. No one trades it. Lots of people trade B. All day long B moves around. B ticks up, I have to cancel my bid and offer on A and move them up 2 ticks (I do it quickly, cos I'm an evil HFT). B ticks down, I have to cancel my bid and offer on B and move it down 2 ticks. All day long I move my quotes. No one fucking trades. 100% of my orders are cancelled and replaced on a different price.

Why do you care?

A limit order is a limit order. It isn't doing anyone any harm by being there.

>Some high-frequency traders have claimed to be profitable on over 99 percent of their trading days.

McDonalds are profitable on 100% of their trading days. Casinos are likely profitable on 99% of their trading days. If they weren't profitable they wouldn't be doing it. Market-makers like Virtu are more service providers than they are 'traders'. They are the middle men who allow others to trade and take risk, and extract a small fee for doing so. Here's a good analysis to read: http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/11/13/virtus-losing-day-...

>So if I offer a trade, and then withdraw the trade because I decide I don't like the idea anymore (or 'any other reason')... that's legal. And routine to do on microsecond timescales.

Yes that's right. So quickly you may as well assume that they are updating the price they are willing to buy/sell continuously in realtime. Which is the idea. And because they are updating their prices continuously and accurately, they can keep the gap between those two prices as small as possible. For some bizarre reason, this is the only field in all of technology where HN contributors get freaked out by this. Name a control system that doesn't update its outputs frequently.

>But offering a trade, and then withdrawing the trade manually a few seconds later because I never intended to execute the trade... that's not legal?

Yes that's right. Markets work on trust, if you don't actually want to buy/sell what you're claiming you want to buy/sell then you are lying. More importantly, if you don't want to trade, what are you doing putting the order in? What does that leave as your motivation? Manipulation, that's what. Which is illegal. It's very hard to define market manipulation, but that's just about the easiest way I can think of - can you think of a simpler definition? They have to settle on some way of describing it, and it's not unusual for crimes to be defined by intent.

>Doesn't HTF presuppose that we are hard-coding this behavior, this tactic, into the trading algorithms of automated traders?

I don't follow

These are limit orders under discussion, you seem to be confusing them with market orders.

I don't write the rules, I'm just telling you what they are. I guess it boils down to the idea that bluffing is banned in financial markets. What differentiates making a bluff from a regular raise in poker? You have to 'make good' on the bet either way, yes? The difference is that you're 'hoping' that you don't get called, 'hoping' that your opponent folds. Not allowed in markets. Probably a good thing too, or they'd be even more chaotic as they degenerate into bluff and double-bluff. Having said that spoofing is still widespread, likely because it is hard to prove and some regulators aren't as tough on it as they should be.

>So they really were genuine offers to sell and buy shares.

They weren't genuine, that's the point. They were offers made with the express intention and hope that they never get filled.

The orders from high frequency traders in contrast are honest orders, when they are sent they honestly express that the trader wants to trade at that price. The fact that they may then be withdrawn 800 microseconds later when the HFT recalculates its price in response to some stimuli and changes its mind about the price, doesn't change the fact they were honest. They're just fast as well. That's what control systems do, they update their outputs when their inputs change.

The issue would be that market makers would need to inject their orders (quotes) at a greater distance from the mid-price, in order to protect themselves against market movement during the minimum lifetime you propose. If my bid and offer is obligated to sit in the market for x seconds, then it is potentially a sitting duck for any adverse event during that time period, and I would have to quote wider to cover that possibility.

No, it is definitely fraud. The rule is that you may not enter an order (quote) that you have no intention of filling. You're perfectly entitled to change your mind afterwards (for whatever reason) and then cancel the order, but if you send an order with the initial objective of never having it execute, it is a fraudulent order and and a case of market manipulation.

Always hard to prove though, since it goes to the intention of the market participant.

True enough, but the positive response you feel to a red barn is just as illogical as the negative response you feel towards the word 'industrial' as applied to barns or fans. Do you see the irony in an article debunking these feel good labels applied to the eggs, by applying negative labels instead to evoke pictures of industrial factories, etc.? Do you really think the chickens are bothered by the colour and style of their barns?

My wife is one, so I somehow doubt you have a clue.

Do you think the chickens give a shit what colour the barn is?

Don't think I was 'arguing' anything really. Just commenting on the irony. Nature tends to be brutish and nasty, quite the opposite to the picture that your typical urban-living organic food enthusiast has.

"They usually live in aviaries: massive industrial barns"

Oooh, industrial barns...

"And often, Kastel says, industrial fans that suck..."

Oooh, industrial fans. As opposed to the ones that grow on trees.

"One of the most common causes of death was pecking by other chickens."

You mean we give them more freedom, and they kill each other? I thought 'natural' was meant to mean all rainbows and happiness and shit.

Remember, we're talking about the outliers here, the tail end of the distribution founding billion dollar companies. Here's a thought experiment. Take two normally distributed populations with the same mean. But one of them has a slightly higher standard deviation. How much higher does the standard deviation need to be before the combined population tails (at both ends) are dominated by the population with the higher standard deviation?

You see men don't even necessarily need to have inherent (biological or social) advantages over women... they may just be more erratic and have a higher spread, and bam, they're producing both more serial killers and more geniuses. You can speculate as to why they might have a higher st. dev, but I think it is an interesting line of thought.

I don't think there was any discussion in the link about how they would get back into orbit? Did I miss it?

Not so sure about that, these surgeons are performing the same procedure again and again. And being compared to surgeons who also perform the same procedure.

We don't tend to write the exact same code repeatedly. Or the exact same code as other coders.

>Pervasive cashless transactions, years ahead of ... even the UK

I've shuttled back and forth between the two countries for seven years now, and I can tell you, unequivocally, that you're speaking out of your bumhole.

>among the four big banks, which provides stability

I suppose "stability" is one upside of a government supported quasi-monopoly. Australian banks are an absolute disgrace. I say that as an Australian who returns home from time to time. Charging $2.50 to withdraw money from an ATM?? They get away with gouging customers in ways that simply couldn't happen in the UK or US.

I'm sorry, I can't really continue discussion with you since I've already spent 3 months worth of karma on this thread. My apologies.