rokobobo

I believe RH's revenue is mostly from payment for order flow (as opposed to, say, interest on AUM), so on top of what gets them more users, higher trading activity is what gets them more dollars.

I disagree with the other answers to your question. There's no guarantee that "the masses" would be able to lay claim and ownership on these automated factories. I very much think the world will move in a darker direction, where the owners of these factories ensure their perpetual control over the rest of us. As for what they get from it? The feeling of power and superiority.

As for the forms of control they will exert, I can think of a few options: media, access to healthcare, and employing you to be a useless drone just so you don't rebel--or to stroke their ego by beating you in a video game, like the link below:

https://www.wired.com/2017/02/clive-thompson-future-of-work-...

I'm sorry, but is that true, that Tesla has enough data to unlock autonomous vehicles? My experience is that until you get an ML model to do X, you never know if you have enough data to train it to do X. Or is that just your opinion, that they don't need more data?

I am not defending closed platforms, but technically, you are free to jailbreak your phone, they're just not obligated to provide any support after that, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_jailbreaking#Legality

One could argue that you bought your PC and the Windows license that comes with it because it's general purpose. And you would have paid less money if you knew it was going to lock you in.

Don't get me wrong, I hate the idea of "digital anti-globalism", but if this thing went to court, both sides would have their reasonable arguments. And let's hope that if there's a ruling, it rules in favor of open platforms. At the very least, I think it would be great if the courts rule that a platform that's built open and sold as open cannot be consequently closed. But I doubt that Apple will be forced to open its hardware to non-App Store programs.

Isn’t this just a Markov process, shouldn’t we be able to calculate the exact waiting time?

Seconded. For what it's worth, Harvard's Math 55 uses that as its textbook.

Probably the first place to look would be CRSP (crsp.org) and WRDS (wrds-www.wharton.upenn.edu). You would need a .edu email to set up an account and get the data. (If you don't have one, hopefully you can find a buddy who does.)

In terms of pulling price history on-demand, Yahoo Finance seems to be a popular choice, but I don't think it will allow you to download a large enough dataset for meaningful training--that said, I haven't tried it, so I invite anyone to share their experience.

Additionally, you may want to try searching for the most cited papers for "ML in trading" and see what kind of datasets they use. Be prepared for a lot of gruntwork formatting the data before you feed it into your model: those papers might also give you a lot of context on how to do this gruntwork right from the first time.

A hiring partner at an HFT firm once told me why they had a disproportionate number of people from MIT or Ivy League schools, especially for fresh grads: they selected for intelligence, coding skills etc., but they also needed people who could very quickly focus on the top priority tasks for the firm. (For example, if someone committed buggy code and the firm was losing out on profits because its algorithms weren't running, do you hunt down the bug or do you revert?)

And it turns out that kids from Ivy League schools tend to be very good at constantly being aware of these top-level priorities for the firm. This applied for almost every front and mid office role in that firm: DevOps, algorithm developers, traders, researchers. I can't speak for all the firms out there, but I think at least my friend would happily substitute pedigree for another item on a person's resume that demonstrated experience with running a live system where downtime is very costly.

I agree that the current state of the company is important: if it has just hit traction and there are fairly risk-free payoffs for everyone employed to work 60-80 hours, then the fact that everyone is working so hard might be a good sign--it could mean that everyone believes in the product and are bringing their A+ game. Additionally, if the market they're in is a fast-growing one, and it seems like it may be a winner-take all, then the effort can be justified.

However, if (1) this company is still looking for a product-market fit, or (2) has been pulling this kind of hours for years, I would see that as a red flag. (1) seems to signal a frantic attempt by the founders to hit a milestone before they run out of cash, and (2) means you can expect this kind of culture for a long time ahead, which, as others pointed out, benefits the large stakeholders at the expense of employees.