elemeno

The conclusion wasn't that this was caused by HFT but because NASDAQ and the NYSE only showed trades that had a size of 100 or greater in their public feeds. Since a 100 shares of APPL is worth $50,000+, there's a lot of trades being made for less than 100 shares and, until the reporting changes made a few weeks ago, they didn't show up on the public feed. This means that trade volume wasn't being reported accurately, and that the public feed wasn't representative of the active price of a stock like APPL - which is a fairly big deal when, according to the article, 45% of APPL trades are in lot sizes of under 100 shares.

For professional traders (and here's the only place where HFT is relevant) it's not a big deal since they don't use the public feeds but instead pay for feeds from the exchanges which include all trades.

Since a comment claiming to come from the CEO of PivateSky is dead, it seems worth re-posting so that more people can read it :-

" This is Brian, the CEO. Yea, it was a nice round number out of the air. But it probably wasn't far off the mark.

For all the other comments, below is a blog post on the matter which is going to go live shortly:

With the story about our PrivateSky takedown now public, I want to take the opportunity to clarify a few points in various articles that have appeared since yesterday covering the story.

The headline strongly infers our friends at GCHQ “forced” us to take PrivateSky down. That’s hogwash. In fact, the headline contradicts the article, which becomes clear as you read it.

Secondly, a very important point wasn’t printed. GCHQ couldn’t, by law, request a blanket back door on the system. There are a very rigid set of controls that mean only specific individuals can come under surveillance. The legal request for such surveillance has a due process that must be stridently followed. At no time did I or anyone at CertiVox talk about CertiVox in relation to any RIPA warrant, only the generic process by which these warrants are served.

By saying “our friends at GCHQ”, there is no facetiousness intended. The team at CertiVox have the upmost respect for the folks we interacted with at GCHQ. They took the due process I outlined in the previous point very seriously. We found that as an organisation, and every individual involved there, were as worried about a breach of public trust as much as we are.

Finally, I believe very strongly the following should be a larger part of the public discourse of these subjects. What everyone needs to understand is that every developed democracy in the world, even where privacy rights are enshrined to the maximum efficacy by statute, has laws on the books that mandate that Internet Service Providers have facilities to work with law enforcement for the purposes of legal intercept, to enforce public safety and security.

Being L.I. capable is a very important set features and functions that must be in place for any credible, commercial service on the Internet. In endeavouring to make PrivateSky as secure as possible, we overlooked this critical requirement when we built PrivateSky.

When CertiVox positioned PrivateSky as the easiest to use and most secure encrypted messaging service, we really had two significant points of differentiation. First, even though we held the root encryption keys to the system, it was architected in such as way that it would have been all but impossible for our internal staff to snoop on our customer’s communications, or for the service to leak any of our customer’s data. Secondly, our possession of the root keys, and our use of identity based encryption, made the system incredibly easy to use. For the user, there were no private or public keys to manage, every workflow was handled for the user in an easy to grasp pure HTML5 interface, no hardware or software required, just an HTML5 browser.

We boxed ourselves into a feature set and market position that when called upon to comply with legal statues, we simply had no alternative but to shut the service down. We built it, but we couldn’t host it.

Why? Because as you can probably surmise, there is an inherent impedance mismatch between being able to host a commercial communications service that gives the upmost in privacy to its users, against any breach, whilst at the same time being able to operate safely within the confines of the law as it is on the books in most countries on the planet.

Is this wrong? Actually, I don’t think it is. This may be an unpopular viewpoint, but I cannot argue against having a well regulated legal intercept function as being necessary to have in place for a society that prizes law and order and the safety of its citizens. This is speaking as someone who lived in NYC during 9/11.

In summary, it’s the abuse of the communications interception in the Snowden revelations that has everyone up in arms, as so it should. But that’s not what happened with PrivateSky.

What is our next move?

Watch this space.

-----"

From https://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/In_the_interests_of_th... -

"The House will notice that the Bill restricts the activities of the SIS and GCHQ for safeguarding the economic well-being of the country to the acts or intentions of persons outside the United Kingdom. The agencies may not and do not get involved in domestic economic, commercial or financial affairs."

So it's not quite as broad reaching as it reads on first glance. It is generally a problem though that laws need to be written so they're broad enough to cover circumstances which might not have been considered at the time of the laws' writing so that new laws don't need to be written all the time yet they can't be so overly broad as to be unworkable - which is why the judiciary has it's role in deciding how to interpret the laws and decide whether or not they ought to apply in a given circumstance.

If we're going to be accurate, it's - "You can't beat politics with new technology all the time. Sometimes you have to actually make sure that politics are in line with what people want. A lot of people are giving up on politics and thinking they can solve issues with technology. These kind of arrogant behaviours towards the rest of the society are a bit disgusting," - which isn't so far from the "You can't beat politics with technology" sentiment, and retains the color of the statement.

Ultimately, technology can empower us to do amazing things, but to achieve it's full potential we've also got to be involved in society as a whole and push to bring the various ideas we believe in into the public's sight. Technology can be a powerful embodiment of a set of ideas such as free-culture, privacy, a decentralized financial system, or what have you. Making people take interest in those ideas and bringing the debate outside the technology sphere can only lead to a better outcome for all.

Not to say that it's not true, but in a decade in finance I've never heard of anyone having gone through Officer Selection to help their career prospects.

If you want to have a good start in finance, having a degree (preferably a 1st) in Maths, Physics or Economics from Oxford, Cambridge or LSE is probably the most useful thing you can do!

The parent comment should probably be read as 'research and development' - working for IBM's research arm, Microsoft Research etc.

It's just a form of hiring bonus. While it's not so important in and of itself compared to the salary being offered it's something extra to consider when looking at the whole package being offered especially if you're considering multiple offers.

Hell, a thousand dollars is pretty tiny compared to my total comp, but it's still enough to treat myself to a new suit or watch so I can look extra sharp on my first day!

It's not abnormal to see time stamps like that with print publications - they often publish to the web in advance of the print edition coming out, but it makes sense to use the print edition as the 'reference' edition when it comes to dating articles.

It's not really a dark pattern when the Acrylic plate is the product that most people are trying to buy - without it you don't have the physical numberplate you can put on your car.

It's not strictly accurate to say that "virtually all domestic firearm ownership" is banned in the UK - it's just highly controlled and restricted. There's roughly 800,000 people in Great Britain (Northern Ireland has it's own, separate, firearms laws) with firearms licences about 80% of which are for shotguns.

In practical terms, firearm ownership is restricted to shotguns and rifles and you've got to be able to demonstrate why you wish to own a firearm - i.e. pest control, sports shooting, etc - and you've got to have a clean criminal record and pass a background check by the police. It's also at the discretion of your local police force to grant you the licence or not, which is likely to depend on things like how suitable the choice of firearm is to it's stated purpose - you'd be unlikely to get a licence for .50 calibre rifle if your stated purpose is hunting rabbits for example.

While the UK doesn't have a huge gun-culture, they're far from banned - as evidenced by there being roughly 1 legally held gun for every 70 people in Great Britain (GB - The UK less Northern Ireland, as noted above NI has different licensing laws).

- https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/firearms-law-guid...

Perhaps because there haven't been any wide scale clinical trials that prove it's effectiveness? Of the papers I read through at the given link, most seem to come to conclusion that Gendicide p53 is safe to give to humans and don't comment on whether or not it's an effective therapy, or if it's more effective than existing treatments.

In pubs in England it's traditional to tip by offering to buy the staff member a drink. They'll charge you for a nominal drink - often saying that they'll save it for later/when their shift ends as the explanation for why they're not pouring themselves a drink right then, and the money goes into the tip pool.

For more on Pub culture see the fascinating "Passport to the Pub: A guide to British pub etiquette" - http://www.sirc.org/publik/pub.html

As the article mentions, the margins on the restaurant business are slim enough that the wage pool is effectively fixed - it's not a hypothetical scenario, it's a practical constraint.

Which is why employers would usually pay you for your notice period but tell you not to come to work, or at least that's the standard practice in the UK.

To my mind, notice periods are good for both sides - the employer gets peace of mind that if you choose to leave you'll still have a period of time for handover and winding your job down and the employee knows that they've got a bit of a safety net if they're let go. There are generally clauses that allow notice not to be paid in specific circumstances as well, generally for gross misconduct.

I'd be a little weary of keeping cooked rice for a week, even in a good fridge (my fridge stays at a solid 2C, which keeps most things good to eat for long than you'd think!). Rice is a surprisingly good vector for food poisoning due to it's often carrying Bacillus Cereus spores which are heat resistant and can then germinate and grow in the fridge - most of the sources I've seen suggest that you shouldn't keep cooked rice in the fridge for more than 1 to 3 days.

Anecdote - Of all the times I've had food poisoning, probably half of them have been because I've kept cooked rice around too long. I might just be unlucky though!

It's the UK term for Wall Street. It doesn't have as much of the geographic connotation these days - working in Canary Wharf or a Mayfair hedge fund can all come under the phrase of 'working the in the city'

If you went to an 'elite' university a 2:1 would be generally taken to indicate that you worked hard, but you also had a social life as well. A 1st from an elite would not uncommonly come with the assumption that all you did is sit in your room and study for three years and that you might lack some of the softer skills.

All the above is, however, a massive generalisation.

GPs in the UK earn an average of £103k if they're a partner in a practice or £54k to £81k if they work for a primary care trust - that is if they work directly for the NHS unlike many GPs who are self employed but contract their services to the NHS but who don't work for the NHS. [1]

They also have to go through a five or six year medical school and five years of post-graduate training along with profesional exams (MRCGP exams). They're also bit of an anomaly compared to other doctors in the UK - consultant salaries are between 75k and 100k according to the official pay bands [2]. The only way that most doctors can make serious money is by having a private practice along with the risks and costs that come with it (for point of reference, my other half is an obs and gynae surgeon and in that field the private insurance is £150k a year).

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/9300823/Most-doctors-are-n... [2] http://www.nhscareers.nhs.uk/explore-by-career/doctors/pay-f...

London (N/NW), UK - Permanent (no remote)

C#/ASP.Net Developer - Help bring the NHS into the 21st Century

Job Description

We're looking for smart self-motivated developers who can bring their own ideas to the table and get excited about the products we're building. You'll be working on a range of different projects - anything from designing and building new features into our products, to working on database optimisations, to building text processing and analysis tools. We're expanding rapidly so there will be plenty of opportunities to take on more responsibilities and grow with the role.

Our core product is a digital transcription platform that includes both desktop components and web components as well as integrating with various data services and voice recognition services. We're pushing to move to a purely web based solution, but there's still some interesting problems to solve around how you use client-side hardware like digital voice recorders from a browser. We're also starting to build a suite of data analysis tools on top of all the data we've got to do thing like automatic document taging and coding - there's plenty of interesting challenges ahead!

Skills & Requirements

Essential

    - C# 3.5/4.0
    - ASP.Net MVC 3/4
    - SQL (SQLServer)
    - WCF

Nice To Have

    - Server Side .Net Development
    - HTML/CSS + JavaScript
    - .Net Web App Deployment
    - SQL Server Query Tuning
    - Refactoring
    - ClickOnce Deployment

    

About The Company

DictateIT are the leading provider of outsourced transcription and Digital Dictation services to the NHS and due to continued growth we're looking to expand our in house development team to build the next version of our dictation platform as well as the suite of tools we're building on top of the platform. We're looking for a mix of junior and more experienced developers to join our team and we'll be looking to hire more than one person. We're a small but friendly company who believe in working sane hours and going out for a drink afterwards.

We're looking to pay fair salaries - up to £30k for Junior Devs (one or two years experience) and up to £50k for more senior developers - and we want to provide an environment that you'll enjoy working in. We're moving to a new office in a few months time that's being designed just for us and which should be a pretty plush working environment!

If you're interested or you've got questions drop me an e-mail at tech.recruitment@dictate.it

It's not so much that they're paying for a C++ developer, they're paying for a C++ developer (or C#/Java/whatever developer) with a certain set of skills.

The sort of developers that get well paid in finance (it should be noted that there's a vast range of dev salaries in banking depending on the sort of roles being worked in with Quants, Quant/Devs and Front Office developers being very much at the top of the pile) are those that have Masters or PhDs in Maths and work on pricing algorithms, those who work on high frequency type applications, those who have enough maths that they can turn algorithms into solid applications that can't fall over during the trading day (i.e. solid, highly optimised software), or those who can interact with the trading desks and build anything which helps the desk make more money. One thing they'll all have in common as well is a large amount of domain knowledge about the (financial) products that they work on, as well as the ability to work in environment which are often noisy and stressful. Anyone who needs their own office and a quiet environment in order to get into the zone and hack on some code is not going to thrive at a bank.

GoF is, in my opinion, about establishing a language to talk about commonly used constructs in languages - especially given it's providence in Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language.

Referring to it as 'a set of tricks' would suggest to me that you've only given it a cursory glance and assumed that it's just about copying out example blocks of code, or that you've not worked in a wide enough set of languages to realize that every language has commonly used patterns for doing particular things, no matter how expressive the language is. Having a way to discuss the architecture of a piece of software without having to explain every implementation detail because there's already a shorthand refer to various parts of it is invaluable when working on larger projects. Being able to call a block of code as a flywheel is no more a trick than being able to refer to an options pricing equation as a 'modified black-scholes' - the important part is that other person knows from that what you're talking about and so you can get to the important part of the conversation.

The same way anyone else does - you spend more than you make.

The three days ago one didn't come up when I first put the URL in, though the 500+ days ago one did. Quite possibly I was simply lucky in that I posted near the start of the UK work day, thus making it likely to get noticed by people in Europe and then the US, also quite possibly there's a bit of extra magic in how HN deals with dupes and how quickly it forgets about submissions that get no love.

Pretty much. I saw it had been submitted before, but that it was over a year and a half ago and the page had been recently updated, so it seemed like it would be an acceptable resubmission. Plus, it's a pretty damn cool project!

Some of his other projects are pretty impressive as well - I'm taken by the FORTH computers myself.

Pretty much every step of USD -> CHF -> USD for large enough denominations is dealt with by firms that have strict requirements regarding recording transactions and verifying the identity of their customers due to anti-money laundering laws.

DictateIT - London (North), UK - Fulltime

We're the UK's largest provider of digital dictation services to the NHS, having processed over 120 million lines of dictated letters and patient notes in the last year over more than two dozen hospitals and NHS Trusts using the platform we've built that covers everything from dictation caption through to voice recognition and outsourced transcription and then to digital signing and distribution. As we go forward we're using our platform as a way to give hospitals better tools to manage their patient information and records and help the NHS work more efficiently, as well as seeing what other services we can build using our large corpus of medical documents as a starting point.

I'm building a small but dedicated team of developers who are excited about what we're trying to do and interested in taking on new challenges while trying to bring innovation and disruption to health care in the UK. We're profitable and at the point where our growth is rapidly accelerating - we've winning tenders left, right and centre and all of our current clients are adding more users and departments to our current deployments.

Our current platform is front to back C# - WCF, ASP.NET MVC, WinForms and WPF, with SQLServer on the backend.

I'm looking for solid C# and ASP.Net developers from Junior to Senior level, though having specific C# experience is secondary to being willing to learn quickly and being passionate about technology as long as you've got other languages you're strong in.

Having experience in DB design and query tuning would be of special interest as we're dealing with high volumes of patient information and 100Gb+ datasets on some of our sites and we want to keep our system running as fast as possible!

We're looking to hire several developers, offering between £25k-£50k depending on skill set and experience. If you're interested or you've got any questions, drop me an e-mail at tech.recruitment@dictate.it and I'll do my best to answer anything you ask!

Yes, that was the point I was making - your original post was implying that people won't use a Bloomberg feature because "other people might work out how they're trading".

I disagree with you and I suspect it will be used by more than a few traders as an indicator of sentiment - they'll use it a way to quickly gauge what people are thinking about particular companies and use that as another variable for their trading/sales decisions.

Your two reasons don't make a lot of sense to me, based on my experience in the industry. Specifically -

(i) If you're using a Bloomberg terminal, it's somewhat implicit that Bloomberg knows what you're using it to look at (as well as who you're emailing via it etc). If people didn't trust them not to tell everyone else what you're looking at, no one would use Bloomberg. Your strategies shouldn't be a secret from the rest of your desk or your own company (assuming you're at a bank/hedge-fund/prop-house rather than a rent-a-desk prop-shop where everyone only works on their own accounts and thus the guy next to you is your competitor). The majority of traders aren't executing their own strategies anyway, but are working within a set of parameters set by their company or clients.

(ii) a) This is becoming less true, more and more banks etc. are allowing access to view Twitter, but not to post to it. b) I think you might have missed the point of the service where Bloomberg is offering a read only Twitter feed to avoid the problem of Twitter being blocked.

It's a nifty idea, but sadly there's some problems either with the data, or how the data is being handled - it's currently showing trains running on parts of a line which are shut down for engineering work this weekend. (Northern Line, Camden to Charing Cross). There's also a train running under Bloomsbury without a line to run on...

So cool but not quite trustworthy!