tazzy531

Feedback on the Developer Auction site:

Why does it insist on me creating a profile for me to navigate around the site? I'd like to figure out how it works before I commit to creating a profile.

Secondly, if a profile is created, why are "Why are you interested in new job opportunities?" and "When are you available to start a new full-time job (if the right opportunity comes along)?" required fields?

There is no indication on the profile creation page who will actually view this data and because of that, I will end up closing the browser and moving on. To raise conversion, it would be more beneficial to allow people to create a profile and then put themselves on the market at a point that they decide.

Just a thought...

Also different teams have slight variations from the official style guide.

I just finished reading the book "Nothing Like It In the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869" (http://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Like-World-Transcontinental-18...). It talks about the building of the transcontinental railroad. The railroad greatly changed the shape of the country due to the fact that within a span of a few years, travel times across the country dropped from months to a week.

What is particularly interesting about this was how similar the methodology that they used was to the Lean Startup methodology. With the way that the Railroad Act was structured, there was significant award for moving fast. While they were in the wilderness, it was rather difficult/expensive getting supplies. They used lower quality cottonwood ties to build out fast knowing that once the railroads were built, higher quality replacements could be brought in for far cheaper.

Anyways, I'd highly recommend this book for those of you in the startup scene.

It seems like every time that a startup gets bought and internalized to some proprietary system or network, it opens up the market for another startup in that same exact space.

Is anyone trying to fill in the hole that instagram will leave?

Most Asian counting systems are similar to the Chinese.

>How does pronouncing numbers help with anything more complex than counting? Majority of the population don't use much beyond very basic math. The ability to do simple arithmetic on a day to day basis for most is an important skill to have.

Off-topic: Is there some js library that handles the Pinterest style look with infinite scroll? I've been seeing this design pop up more and more.

First paragraph is optional.

Check out RidePal: http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/ridepal-to-help-b...

_______________ For employers wishing to reserve a certain number of seats on specific buses at certain times, RidePal plans to sell subscriptions, starting at $250 a month for companies of up to 50 people. That subscription is credited toward fares, which start at $8 a seat for trips within a 10-mile zone and go up to $589 for a monthly pass within the largest travel zone, which extends up to 75 miles from the pickup location. _______________

There's a couple of startups that do exactly this for individuals and startups. Here is one that I did a quick search on: http://www.ridepal.com/

Here's an article on these guys: http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/ridepal-to-help-b...

Also, if there's a market, why doesn't someone on YC solve this problem?

The GBus was started as a 20% project by a single engineer. He got a group of fellow coworkers together and charted a van to commute to work.

When I was working in Finance in NYC, a bunch of the traders got together and chartered a van to drive them to the office in Stamford, CT.

It's really not a hard problem to solve.

Edit: Here's another: http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/business&i...

I don't want to speak on behalf of AdSense, but there are often good reasons for this.

In the project that I did for another product, we required users to re-enter their payment information to revalidate the account and ensure that the user still had access to the instrument. That process was done to protect the user's instrument.

As I said, I don't want to speak on behalf of AdSense and I'm not familiar with their processes to speak with any authority.

In any case, the change and the reason should have been very well documented and messaged to you (we go through a lot of internal user testing even on these mundane processes). If not, please reach out to the consumer operations team, they should be able to resolve your concerns.

When I interviewed, I studied this book cover to cover for 3 months prior to the interview. It definitely came in handy: http://www.amazon.com/Algorithm-Design-Manual-Steve-Skiena/d...

There's also lecture videos here: http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~algorith/video-lectures/

Learning data structures that you don't use often, like bit arrays, come in handy for interviews, especially for when they ask you to optimize your solution. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_array)

My advice is reach out to the team and talk to the engineers on the team. Even meet up with them for a Google lunch.

This is the best way to align everyone's expectations.

When I got the offer, I interviewed the 6 teams from two product areas before I accepted the offer.

This is always good advice whether the offer is from Google or a Big Bank.

Talk to the manager, talk to your coworkers. Once they give you the offer, their job is to market the job to you. Use that as an opportunity to interview your future coworkers. When I was considering finance job, I've even gone as far as asking the future coworkers to implement different algorithms and/or talk about their system architecture. If it was too crazy, it was an immediate sign that I won't be happy there.

Just for some context. I started a couple months after this former Googler and our work backgrounds prior to Google are pretty similar.

In that time, I started out on an underappreciated starter project, did a hackathon for Hangout, filed some patents for that work, did 20% work for an yet to be announced project, and now building out a completely new yet to be announced product.

Google is a place that really allows you to find something that interests you and encourages you to do that. Internally, people are always looking for people to put in 20% work on their projects; so if you come across something that interests you, nobody is there to stop you.

Personally, if I was only to work on one project for my entire tenure, I'd be bored out of my mind and be looking elsewhere for opportunities. At Google, I can feed by project-ADD within.

One thing you learn at Google is that it really humbles you. You really are working with really intelligent people and you need to have some faith in your fellow coworker. Everyone has something to contribute and you can learn even more than you can teach/preach. Much of the issues with this former Googler is that he may have had some good/interesting ideas but he failed at garnering support. It doesn't help when he publicly on a global mailing list dismissed coworkers that have a significant amount of experience and real world accomplishments in the field that he was advocating.

So, wait... If I sell my car using a Facebook ad, I can claim I made $17k in one day?

Sure, but the stock multiple prices in the estimates. If it can't meet the estimates, the stock is overvalued.

Same thing that happens when your leather wallet runs out of juice... ... err.. oh...

Is this a "bug" that is being marketed as a "feature"?

It's great that you can see individual raindrops, but with radar, I'd think you'd want to filter the raindrops out.

Isn't this called cocaine?

How Google handles leap seconds (by lying to the software):

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/time-technology-and-l...

Reminds me of the Seinfeld/MovieFone episode...

"Why don't you just tell me your password..."

Good Guy Startup Founder would cross reference this password list with their own password system and force those that match to reauthenticate and change their passwords.

This wouldn't be difficult to do and your users would appreciate it.

For anyone that is doing CS at Columbia University or considering CU, if you like these types of coding challenges, definitely look into Professor Ross's Programming and Problem Solving class. It was one of the best CS classes I took at Columbia.

Here is his website: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~kar/teaching.html

Each semester consists of 4 different open ended programming problems like these. You work as a team to compete against other members of the class. There's no tests and each class is run as an open seminar where people talk about their strategy and implementation and consider the best approach to solving these problems.

This was my favorite from my year: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~kar/4444f02/node18.html

"Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager" -- could be a kid in a dorm room or PM at SAC... HF Manager is an inflated title...

What's going to be interesting is how long they can hold this support.

Banks can't take on too much risk on their books.. especially in the post Dodd-Franks world.

This would be an extremely expensive way to map the world.

Fine, SPEEDY gets that 200 share trade, now the order book looks like this:

SELL BIG - 1000 $600 ----- Buy SPEEDY - 200 $599 BUY BIG - 1000 $599

Another buy order at $600 comes in and BIG makes the trade.

Now the order book looks like this:

SELL BIG - 800 $600 ----- Buy SPEEDY - 200 $599 BUY BIG - 1000 $599

At this point, SPEEDY wants to get back in so he offers 200 shares @ $600. The Order book now looks like this:

Buy SPEEDY - 200 $600 SELL BIG - 800 $600 ----- Buy SPEEDY - 200 $599 BUY BIG - 1000 $599

So now SPEEDY is sitting behind BIG and has to wait until all 800 shares of his order soaks up the market.

So, where is the problem?

As I previously mentioned, please clarify the terms that you use. You use price as both last trade and order interchangeably, which is not correct and leads to confusion.

Define: Last Trade: amount that the trade last executed. Order: Bid or Ask order on the order books.

So, let's use your example of bid/ask $10.00/$10.05 and last trade of $10.03 You place a buy order at $10.20.

What you are suggesting is that the market sees if there is a sell order at $10.03. If there is, it executes. If there is not, it moves to $10.04. Again, it checks to see if there are any available sell orders at $10.04. If not, it goes to $10.05 and sees if there are any sell orders at $10.05. Since $10.05 is at the top of the order book, the trade executes.

Am I understanding this correctly? We both agree that in this given state, the trade will never execute at any other price other than $10.05.

So, you added that a seller comes along and places an ask order at $9.90. We now have a crossed book (bid greater than ask). So what price does this execute at? You suggest $10.03 because that was the last trade.

I would argue that this would be incorrect.

Let's take the scenario of a low volume security. Let's say it's a far out of the money or far in the money option. If you follow the market, you'll see that often times, the volume of these trades are maybe 1 or 2 trades per day. You will often see that the Last Executed price is often either above the bid/ask spread or below the bid/ask spread.

Take for example, CAT Jan 14 $110 PUT. Last trade is $20.45. Current Bid/Ask Spread is $21.80/$22.15. The last trade is almost 7% discount of current market value.

So, let's use this CAT example. Current order book shows $21.80/$22.15. Last trade is $20.45. A buyer comes in with an order at $25 and a seller comes in with an order at $20. What price gets executed?

>Even if there are buyers and sellers who are willing to trade at a different price right now, the exchange won't allow that trade to complete until the price set by the exchange goes into a range where that trade can happen. Please explain this sentence further. It makes little sense. The only way that buyers and sellers can trade is if they cross the bid-ask spread. If you are saying that two other people are willing to make a trade, that means that they've cross the bid-ask spread. In theory, the "price" that you mention should be in the middle of the bid-ask spread.

Let's use a concrete example: Going back to your $10.00/10.05 - last trade: $10.03 Am I understanding correctly that if someone places a buy order at $10.05 (ie order book $10.05/$10.05; last trade: 10.03) that that trade will not get executed? What happens in that scenario? Does the price rise to $10.04? (ie order book: $10.05/$10.05; "price": $10.04) In this case, the trade does not execute neither, even though two people are willing to trade at $10.05. So the "price" rises to $10.05 and the trade executes. If this is the case, as a trader, I would front run the seller at $10.05 and put a sell order at $10.04. Anyone that sets a long dated limit order will be at an disadvantage; this will encourage speed.

In this type of market mechanism, you'll see more trades move to OTC. If I find another individual that is willing to make a trade, I will do it off the exchange rather than on the exchange.

Lastly, please explain how you would be able to distinguish between an HFT trader and a regular trader? Does it make a difference? Why is it better for individual investors that they only trade with other investors?

>but they have an improved opportunity of making trades in the middle of the range that market makers would be willing to offer. This currently happens as it is. By SEC regulation, brokers are required to find the National Best Bid/Offer (NBBO) when you make a trade. In addition to this, brokers can perform Price Improvement actions and execute trades at better than NBBO (ie buy lower than ask/sell greater than bid). For example, ETrade has an 85.5% rate of price improvement. (https://us.etrade.com/e/t/activetrading/apptemplate?gxml=sca...)

Incidentally, I wrote a post about this market mechanism here: http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/finance/1004723/

Please forgive me if I am not understanding what your are suggesting, but a lot of what you are suggesting seems like it will not work in the real world.

Be careful conflating Order and Price. The Order book is the current stack of buyers and sellers. Price is the last executed price.

So when you say a price drifting upwards, that means that both buyers and sellers meet at that price. A corollary is that there were buyers and sellers at that price. In addition, this also means that the market could have also moved away from that price without a trade being executed (ie after major announcements -- last trade 10.50, next bid/ask 8.75/8.80)

So given that, "If the price reaches $10.05 without finding a seller" this statement does not make much sense and/or is irrelevant.

>then I will trade at $10.05 with the HFT folks. Secondly, there is nothing to differentiate, nor should there be, a HFT trader and an individual trader. A trade is a trade. From a buyer's point of view, it doesn't matter if you buy XYZ from MomPop Co vs UltraHFT Co. A trade is a trade.

>But if a seller who is willing to sell at $9.90 comes along before that happens, we will trade with each other at the current price and leave the HFT folks out of the loop. This is currently true right now. If someone enters a sell order below the bid, the trade is executed at the bid price (or whatever is at the top of the order book). It will knock out all the orders up to the limit price that is set.

Also as I mentioned above, "current price" (ie last executed) has no meaning. In the case of of the major announcement, last executed could be far off from the current order books.

>My suspicion is that, if this were implemented, a large fraction of trades would actually execute in the middle ground between what the HFT traders are willing to offer as a bid/ask. Nothing you suggest is anything different from the current system.

Even fractions of a penny in some cases.