sjbase

Not remotely what I expected to read based on the title... but interesting nonetheless. I gather we're supposed to be repulsed by the conversation between the two characters (I certainly was). A reminder that no profession, no matter how "noble," is safe from petty politics and those who thrive off of it.

I imagine there's a tiny population of poets on HN. Would love to hear what they read from this.

It's effective in getting these companies to clear your data. But do you actually get fewer unsolicited calls/emails, etc.?

The do-not-call has been fantastically ineffective for me. I imagine this could be the same. It's also possible that all of the companies strictly adhering to the FTC rules (i.e. those on the OP site) constitute a minority of the market, and spammers are getting data from other less scrupulous sources.

It's refreshing to see a mainstream news article with a neutral-ish tone on China. Usually any mention of China - regardless of political bias - is wrapped in fear or degradation. Kudos to NYT.

To continue the speculation, the hard-copy + pay wall approach would have culled a lot of the lowest quality newspapers. Bad for the broader industry, but great for the reader.

I agree that total value is a good ideal, but it's really hard to measure in some cases. Forgetting the inaccuracy of things like LoC, # of bugs fixed, etc. How do you measure the performance of someone who isn't directly on the product value chain? graphic designer delivered, office manager, technical writers, etc. Sometimes the most quantifiable and accurate method is by comparison.

Do you mind expanding on that last point? I'm interested in your take on how/why a batch auction's advantage is eliminated by the rest of the world trading around them.

Yep, therein lies the classic problem: if you want something of value, you can either spend your time or spend your money.

Most professionals I've known use Capital IQ, which is expensive.

It's surprisingly tough to get broad, machine-readable market data for free but there are some cheaper options. Check this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/SecurityAnalysis/comments/2ci5du/ca...

Or you could always scrape Yahoo Finance :)

Agreed, HFT has become a catch-all term for anyone trying to make a marketing/political statement about trading. Like the term "big data" - it's been used to describe so many things that it no longer describes anything.

Another thing that gets ignored is the the difference between a trading strategy and an execution algorithm.

Zipline (from OP's article) was created by a company that does something like that: https://www.quantopian.com/faq

Hey, that's exactly the sentence where I stopped reading! High five

Ignoring for a moment that the script makes zero sense... I expected the writing to feel more sci-fi-esque: space, aliens, computers, physics, etc.

Maybe the conclusion to draw is that sci-fi writing is 99% like any other storytelling in terms of how characters think, behave, and talk.

As far as the "40% premium" goes:

> This price represents a premium of 40% to the Company’s unaffected 10 day average stock price prior to March 3, 2016 of $21.83

Basically they took at 10-day average around a (somewhat) arbitrary date to price the stock for that 40% number. "Somewhat" because that date was when Eliott Management, an activist investor fund, bought a giant chunk of Qlik. That signaled a likely upcoming acquisition (which, as you said, the market was betting on). Thoma probably argues that signal moved the stock above it's "true" price.

The counterargument would be a defense of the efficient markets hypothesis: that the true price isn't about signals and technicals, it's just what someone is willing to pay.

There could be a couple of problems at work here:

1: Google is only banning developer accounts, not the violating developer themselves (policy problem).

2: Google is trying to ban the actual developer, but failing at identity assertion (technical/data problem).

There's a bunch of features we want to include in future releases. I can imagine a few summary points that would be interesting (net avg scores, deviation from overall HN scores, etc.) What did you have in mind for a summary?

And thanks for taking the time to give feedback, btw!

I have an interesting dilemma.

On one hand, I want to commend you for not using the author's clickbait title.

On the other hand, I don't want to give the author more exposure (because of the clickbait title) by increasing this post's comment score.

In the end, the first hand won. Thanks! :)

Very cool. I wish stuff like this was more common & easier to find for other emerging domains.

On the topic of completeness & accuracy: have you considered open-sourcing the content?

Like most here I always liked math and science. Nonetheless, growing up, I never felt like I was given a meaningful answer on "why do I need to learn math?" I think we can do better with programming.

The anecdote the OP gives, "learn coding so your really boring job [no offense to OP] will be less painful" is useful. Even better for high-school kids: "learn coding so you can Instagram all day at your job while your program works for you." I'm not condoning this, and obviously it's better to actually inspire true curiosity (extremely hard), but I think this kind of message would work for a lot of kids.

Yeah, it does seem like an "out of the air, into the groundwater" solution. But sometimes you have to stop the bleeding before the injury can heal, and China is making progress [1] on the root cause also.

[1]: https://e360.yale.edu/digest/china_anti-pollution_efforts__l...

I had the same question. I could only find info from 2013, but it seems like the content protocol for Netflix ("DASH") is heavily synchronous [1] where "the client requests one chunk [of video] at a time via HTTP." Really small video chunks == more responsive controls (e.g. rewind) but chatty control band.

[1]: https://technifyme.wordpress.com/2013/02/26/netflix-uncovere...

You're definitely asking the right question, and IMO the answer is "sortof." It's not that impressive in the grand scheme of DDoS, given major attacks will sustain 100 gigabit traffic[1] sometimes for days on end. But 20gbit/s would likely be enough to take down a small & unprepared business.

[1]: http://www.techworld.com/news/security/worlds-largest-ddos-a...

In a sense the name says it all: HIPAA's about Portability and Accountability, less about security.

I worked on a few security consulting projects in healthcare. The HIPAA security rule is way more vague about actual controls than a rational person would assume; much more than analogous regulations on financial data (e.g. PCI-DSS). The HITECH amendment added a lot of breadth regarding which parties must comply, but did little to proscribe specific controls. Most providers, contractors, etc. use a framework called HITRUST that attempts to identify and map actual security controls to HIPAA, but even that is not super actionable.

One of the hardest problems to solve is the immediate criticality of patient data. You absolutely cannot have someone die because a nurse or doctor forgot their password and couldn't look up medical history. Makes practitioners resist adoption, and you end up with "break the glass" (emergency security bypass) functionality on a lot of sensitive systems/data.

This has been around for a couple of years unofficially. If you typed "ok maps" into the search bar in maps, it would offline the area currently onscreen.

http://www.wired.com/2014/02/offline-google-maps/

To me it makes sense that post-IPO market cap would be lower than private valuation. Investors in public companies are well known for having short-term interest: "we want growth in every metric, and we want it next quarter." Anyone who has worked for a public company has felt this pressure.

VC, PE, etc. arguably incorporate more information about potential future (2 year, 3 year, 10 year) growth than public investors.

Maybe we should stop comparing the two valuations so equally?

Criticism is useful for bloggers, because it always sounds more sophisticated than optimism or praise.

I always find it soothing when a study supports what seems empirically true about the human body. So much research into the brain (especially where it intersects with the rest of the body, e.g. sleep) seems paradoxical & contradictory.

Unrelated: the ads at the bottom of this site really do a masterful job of demolishing it's credibility... wow.

I worked at a major consultancy and this is definitely true. The major parties in a large enterprise IT project are (in shit-rolls-downhill order): 1: The enterprise itself 2: Strategic advisors (consultancy) 3: Integrators (often the same company as #2, or a competitor) 4: Software vendors (note the plural) 5: Third-party QA

All but #1 have a structural incentive to make projects bigger the same way a mechanic has a structural incentive to "find new problems." The client always has final say, but people underestimate how hard it is to keep saying "no" to multiple reputable firms all warning you against going too small.

That said, this kind of swindling is far from ubiquitous. There's a philosophy that blindly upping scope is shortsighted, and you do better in the long run by actually representing your client's best interest. Where I worked, I found it pretty easy to surround myself with people who thought this way.

I completely agree that liquidity is first and foremost, and that in today's market structure HFT drives a lot of it. Retail enjoys a lot of the benefit, because trades in the $1,000s - $100,000s range probably aren't enough to slip the market. But is ultra-low-latency the ONLY way to bring about that liquidity? I have yet to come across any economic or technical reason why that has to be the case.

Also, slowing down trading doesn't mean eliminating HFT, it's a matter of what constitutes "high" frequency... I'd argue we're well past the point where incremental increases in speed result in equal gains in liquidity. And those increments now cost more than ever before.

The "new" part of this news, which not many have responded to here, is the notion of an HFT tax. The arguments on either side of HFT (liquidity/spread/etc. vs. cost/unfairness/etc.) have been largely unchanged for the last few years. There simply isn't enough data made public to declare a victor.

As far as the tax: personally I'm very in favor of slowing down trading... unfortunately, what's being proposed introduces as much structural game theory as it eliminates. What's the dominant strategy for a trader faced with a rule like "any trades resting for less than 300 micros get taxed"? To be as fast as possible without triggering the tax; staying just above the threshold.

All that economic waste on low-latency tech will just be redirected to low-jitter tech. Those who can reliably land an order within +1 microsecond of the tax line will outperform those who only have an accuracy of +10.

I'd like to see more exchanges experimenting with things like random variance in speed bump size, frequent batch auctions, etc.

I would also add portfolio integration with github. Having to manually replicate code over to a new site will turn some people away.