Hacker News Reader

seeingfurtheron Next stop: Miami

Miami probably has some of the worst, most lawless drivers in the country — it's like a free-for-all out there. Makes me wonder if Waymo picked Miami as a kind of stress test for their self-driving tech. If they can handle the chaos there, they can probably handle just about anything.

seeingfurtheron We've been targeted with a credit card testing fraud attack on Stripe

Hi dulse, can you please make a public announcement with much more clarity. We received one of your alert emails but it was very cryptic with very little information and no mention this was happening across the network. Our fraud team spent two hours in a panic until we found this thread via Twitter.

seeingfurtheron 1min high-intensity exercise 3x a week improves fitness as much as 3x aerobics (2016)

No! No, no, not 6! I said 7. Nobody's comin' up with 6. Who works out in 6 minutes? You won't even get your heart goin, not even a mouse on a wheel

seeingfurtheron Coinbase’s chief product officer will leave with a $105M payday

This seems like an awfully high compensation package for someone who only joined around the time of the IPO.

seeingfurtheron Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

Your point is still valid. They have all this technology "sitting around" and they seem to be avoiding focus on the obvious growth areas in favor of trading. See below yao420's point.

seeingfurtheron Coinbase cuts staff by a further 20%

Counterpoint. After cobbling together a bunch of Coinbase products, we successfully use Coinbase to receive and send payments for our online marketplace in much the same way you would use a PayPal type service. The user experience is great and technologically there is no match. We literally could not do what we do with any other service. If Coinbase focused on payments they could dethrone the kings of the international payment space in no time.

seeingfurtheron FTC acts against private equity firm’s acquisition of veterinary clinics

I am right there with you. Alden Global Capital comes to mind.

seeingfurtheron Man to pay £25,000 ($34,000) damages over negative TrustPilot review

The problem is that you can't remove your business from the platform. There should be an opt out for businesses that do not want to be listed.

seeingfurtheron Market Sentiment Helps Explain the Price of Bitcoin [pdf]

2 charts updated with most recent data. With & without the sentiment data variable https://imgur.com/a/AF8SX

seeingfurtheron Citi lists Netflix, Tesla as potential takeover targets for Apple

Buy Tesla. Groom Musk for CEO of Apple.

seeingfurtheron Hillary Clinton Announces Tech Plan

Isn't that a good thing? What would be some negative consequences?

seeingfurtheron The Americans of the Panama Papers have been exposed

Sanford I. Weill is the biggest name I've spotted so far. I'm sure there are many more. https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/nodes/12116280

seeingfurtheron Scientists want to sequence the genome of all living kakapo parrots

I thought the same thing too. Although the trust might be set aside for specific purposes, of which funding research is outside the scope? My best guess.

seeingfurtheron HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

Yes they did ;-)

No we are not keeping out clients that want our data. But there are precious few clients that proactively seek data sets like our first client did with us. We are however (up until very recently) retraining outreach. We needed to encourage proper academic research which took time to acquire, create solid marketing collateral which took time to get right and even understand what clients wanted to see, we needed to harden our infrastructure, improve the technology, and we needed to understand what client concerns would be and how they could use our data. It's like having electricity, knowing it's valuable, but not knowing how to get your clients to use it to turn on a light bulb. If we screwed up at any stage it would burn our reputation. The sentiment space is similar to the blogging space. Literally almost anyone can hang out a shingle, use generic software and start a sentiment business. Just like blogging. It is, however, extremely hard to get right and our clients know this.

seeingfurtheron HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

We're learning. Move fast & break shit doesn't work on Wall St. We knew how to build the best financial sentiment NLP in the world, but we had no clue about the space we would eventually sell into. It's cautious, slow to act, skeptical, very sophisticated and secretive. We had to find a client who knew exactly what to do with our data without any handholding and was a bit forward thinking, even experimental in that they take chances on startups. We found that perfect client (actually they found us!) and they could see the value of what we built right away, probably better than we could. They loved us so much they eventually invested in us so we knew we were on the right track and they've been helping us ever since. Growing client #s required us to become experts in a number of different areas so we took our time getting them right.

Yes we make money per client. Large ARR contracts

seeingfurtheron HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

# of clients... and everything that would go into increasing that number, fundraising, head count, marketing.

seeingfurtheron HN Office Hours with Michael Seibel and Aaron Harris

Hi Michael and Aaron,

I'm the co-founder and CEO of PsychSignal (https://psychsignal.com)

PsychSignal is a provider of real time 'Trader Mood' data, analytics and indices for financial institutions & investment professionals seeking an edge.

Essentially we've built the next generation squawkbox. When I was a trader back in the day we used to use one of those old school squawk-boxes connected to the S&P Futures pit in Chicago. A guy would call the market all day long and you'd get a great feel as to where the market was going just based on the mood of the announcer and the mood of the crowd you could hear in the back ground. Fast forward to today, no more pits, but traders are online and they are talking... a lot. Voila PsychSignal.

Besides fundraising which is a challenge for everyone on here I'm sure, our concern is strategy, specifically growth. We've relied on our instincts in much of the creation of PsychSignal and growth is something we have restrained purposefully. We are in it for the long haul. To us the fin-tech space is a special beast one where new technology adopts slowly and reputation is hard won over a long period of time. This really goes counter to everything you read on here so it's always a lingering doubt for us. Wondering your thoughts. Thanks for your time!

seeingfurtheron Introducing the Shift Card: Use Bitcoin where Visa is accepted

Taylor Shift chuckles

seeingfurtheron I am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator – AMA

I see a YC Campus with dorms in the future!

seeingfurtheron Show HN: Trader Mood Index ($MIX)

We built a Trader Mood Index. The oscillation between periods of bearishness and bullishness is intended to precede market turns. If you're a Quantopian user and want to play around with the raw data in an algo feel free to access the raw data here: https://psychsignal.com/data/mood-index

seeingfurtheron 7 Rejections

This post isn't meant to call out poor judgement in VCs, but rather to encourage all the struggling founders out there who receive these emails on a daily basis.

seeingfurtheron Firms Analyze Tweets to Gauge Stock Sentiment

He was WAY too early in 2012 to achieve any sort of statistical significance in terms of number of traders talking online consistently. I have a client running 75 different strategies just on our data alone and there are quite possibly hundreds more, not all of which involve transactions. The ability to predict volatility is one that comes to mind.

seeingfurtheron Supreme Court Rules Extending Traffic Stop for Dog Sniff Unconstitutional [pdf]

Why is this down voted? I don't agree with the opinion he seemingly expresses with his questions but they are legitimate questions from the other side that we can address without suppressing debate.

seeingfurtheron A Harvard Professor Has Mixed Feelings When Students Take Jobs in Finance

Huh? Automated trading wasn't the 'system' HFT replaced? HFT is automated trading. HFT replaced humans who operated the specialist booths and the market making on NASDAQ.

Automated trading in the 80's was still run through people to execute trades.

seeingfurtheron A Harvard Professor Has Mixed Feelings When Students Take Jobs in Finance

It's not possible to conflate two things that are the same. HFT defines a trading style with shorter holding times but is still automated.

seeingfurtheron A Harvard Professor Has Mixed Feelings When Students Take Jobs in Finance

I'll say it more plainly. Long term or short term holders of stock... doesn't matter... if you are invested in the market you need to exit or enter a trade. Today you get less screwed than you did twenty years ago, that's a fact.

seeingfurtheron A Harvard Professor Has Mixed Feelings When Students Take Jobs in Finance

The liquidity benefit is a straw man in the entire HFT debate. It's easy to poke holes in liquidity as a value add.

The real benefit from HFT is what it has replaced.

Before HFT & direct access trading we had a closed system run by specialists and market-makers. Every single trade had to go through a specialist or MM. Spreads were wide and the system made incredible returns skimming each trade. That system was replaced by HFT which had the effect of opening the market up to anyone willing to run an HFT operation, tightened spreads and yes added liquidity. The fact that HFT 'skims' of trades is nothing new to the system, the real benefit is how much less we all get skimmed today than we did 20 years ago. Is it perfect? No. But it's a step in the right direction.

seeingfurtheron How wise are crowds?

Does anyone remember the name of the wise crowd app that just launched in beta? It's a GUI interface that let's groups pick things like basketball game results or the oscars?

seeingfurtheron The Shut-In Economy

We are becoming a society of eloi and morlocks

seeingfurtheron What Your Tweets Say About You

The researchers have a theory: they suggest that “the language of Twitter may be a window into the aggregated and powerful effects of the community context.”

Dr. P. is helping us apply this same idea to the community of traders and investors Tweeting their emotions as they relate to stocks.