jmillerinc

Your last sentence: that's exactly what I took to be the point of her post.

Super lame that people upvoted this story. Way off topic for HN.

Probably just a coincidence, but -

http://gantto.com/

http://preceden.com/

What would your strategy be to get that 5%?

That's different. The security is: if a programmer implements the code correctly, but the market turns against the strategy and the strategy loses money, the programmer generally won't lose his job.

"Prove the algorithm correct" - gosh, if only that were true.

Of course, but the traders are taking risks in the sense that they can get fired for losing money. Programmers generally won't. They have a lower-risk, more secure job.

I have a feeling this article confused the creators of the trading algorithms, which is what makes the money, with pure programmers, who are hired to implement someone else's pre-existing algorithms.

Sometimes these are the same person, but in those cases that person almost always has a profit sharing contract, not only a base salary. (And if they don't, they're crazy.) The fact that the programmers in the article only had base salaries leads me to believe that they weren't the actual creators of the trading algorithms, so they don't really deserve a slice of the profits anyway, because someone else a) created the profit machine and b) is taking all the risks of running it.

What really happens is that these programmer guys learn the trading secrets after a few years on the job, then depart to a different firm to recreate the machine themselves. There's no oppression or revolts here.

Yes, you're in the db. :)

Gosh, I had to upvote this just for the crustacean research citation alone.

I just made a bunch of regular expressions that capture phrases like "http://twitter.com/foobar or "I'm @foobar on twitter", etc.

Sure, I'll email it to you.

Agreed, but I don't think there's much to worry about as it stands. PG said newsyc currently gets 60,000 unique visitors per day, and the # of ppl following these twitter feeds is barely 1% of that.

I question whether SVD would yield good recommendations.

In any case, co-voting data is not scrape-able from the public HN site, so I think using keywords and urls is really the only realistic filtering option at this point.

You can implement what you want with simple keyword & url filtering.

Done. @newsyc100 (also have @newsyc50)

More daily-tip twitter feeds from the same author here: http://www.johndcook.com/twitter/

Done.

The Readability parse is a good idea, but implementing that would need more time than I can spare right now. If anyone wants to do the legwork on that, please contact me and I'll be happy to put it in the feed.

Done - http://feeds.feedburner.com/newsyc20

Comments will show up in the rss items (not active yet, should show up within the hour).

Done

Because twitter is unstable, and the api is rate-limited.

Thx. The tweets will also contain an attribution if the submitter lists a twitter handle in their HN profile.

It's a Python script I run every 5 minutes with cron. It uses BeautifulSoup to scrape the newsyc front page, Tweepy to send out out tweets, and sqlite3 to keep track of which stories have already been tweeted.

I'd have to create multiple twitter feeds for different point thresholds. If there's a particular one you have in mind, let me know.

Thanks for catching that. I've changed the code to use square brackets instead of close parens.

Not very actionable feedback for your product, but I love the name ChompStack. I just want to say it over and over again.

Way off topic for HN IMHO.

The whole banking system may not go under, but there's always a risk that an individual firm may go bust, like Lehman. If you happen to have financial assets held in custody by that firm, it might take a while to get them back.

Timber (the actual land).

Blue-chip art. For example, photography by big-name artists with established markets. But art has huge transaction costs, so I wouldn't include it in the easy-to-buy-and-sell category.