wayn3

shopping at amazon is seamless. even when you order something and then dont want it. i dont have to accept the package and then send it back, i just tell the postal person that i dont want it, they return it, amazon accepts that as a return and ships the money back without asking questions. not probing questions. they just dont ask. they do the thing i expect them to do without even bothering me with an email. it doesnt bother me at all. thats whats so good about it.

i get that thats first world problems. but hackernews IS about spoiled software engineers being spoiled.

amazon has this weird concierge service built in. it just works for me.

i buy a TV at a random retailer. the tv breaks. i need to take the TV there, they send it to the manufacturer for repairs, 6 weeks later i maybe get my tv back.

a tv ordered at amazon breaks, they collect it, bring a replacement and deal with the problem themselves.

for me, and a lot of other people, amazon has quit competing on price. we buy there for the convenience, not because its "cheap".

"Principles of Quantum Mechanics"

its just that someone who is doing environmental physics doesn't necessarily understand papers on string theory. science is specialized, yea. if you want to understand research papers, get an education.

or just do something else. cutting edge research is not for everyone. not everyone is supposed to understand it. whats next? people demanding research papers be dumbed down to adhere to the freedom of information act?

science is hard. big deal. you cant have all the things at the same time. read the hawking books written for casuals if you want a cute little story about science.

If you read a 1000 page textbook on experimental physics, thats just the cliffnotes. The very highest level "here are the results of 400 years of serious research". There can't be any detail.

If you want the details on the stern gerlach experiment, for example, read the research papers. They will contain all the detail necessary to reproduce the experiment.

Lectures are just like those books. They just teach a very broad overview of what has been discovered.

The books you think should exist do exist. They're just not written for casuals.

the majority of people has a problem with rape going unpunished. but criminal justice is a bit fickle, because you cant just make it easier to convict people without having the false conviction rate shoot through the roof. and in a free society, youd rather err a bit on the side of letting some people who did commit crimes go.

your english isnt exactly stellar either.

if you want to make my code better, that doesnt add value. the bad code clearly works. or else I wouldnt be in business. "good code" is irrelevant. if that makes your heart bleed, welcome to the real world.

every tech ipo ever has bad code. twilio has bad code. dropbox has bad code, uber has bad fucking code. maybe google doesnt. mighty google has no bad code. you bet facebook is a load of shitcode. maybe not anymore, but for the first decade? easily.

do you think mark "3 week mvp" zuckerberg gave a shit about code quality? the guy was studying liberal arts.

ask any YC partner. code quality doesnt matter.

if you can get shit done, however, youre going to be the shit.

What they can do is assert that some critical part of technology that uber has access to originated at waymo and was brought to uber by whoever brought it there - in an illegal way.

If that's the case, they can be both forced to pay damages and be forced to turn over (essentially delete) the things they are in possession of that are not "theirs". In that case, anything that uber has developed "on top of" what had been stolen, could be assigned to waymo as well. Practically, this is just all settled with money. they won't run back and forth with data and software. Waymo gets however much they are assigned in damages and Uber will be told to not use these things anymore.

That can easily shut the whole Uber self driving car operation down - or cripple it so much that continuing won't be feasible because they would run out of money first/be unfundable.

The guy who actually stole things from Waymo is obviously going to have a bad time because he did (allegedly) commit a crime. In the "innocent until proven guilty" way. I don't know what he has or has not don, but if he did take trade secrets with him, thats going to be a problem.

was on the news a couple years ago. seems like it was her daddy. my bad.

- We would gain valuable research data

and

- Get rid of a bunch of undesirables

If you're certain something declines in value, all you got to do is buy Put Options

First one I got. The machines have become self-aware.

There are companies that provide liquidity. They do nothing else. They don't take a position in the market. Its their job to quote both a bid and an ask and to trade with anyone who wants to hit those quotes. They are not allowed to not quote a price, unless trading is suspended. Those are called market-makers. They need to be able to change their quotes quickly, because being taken out on one side of the market creates positional risk for them. The only time they make money is when they can trigger a buy and a sell at the same time. If they cant do that, they have to hedge their position. They have to compete on spread with other market makers, which is possible to do in 2 ways - being fastest to quote or having a narrower spread. Trades at the price are executed in the order of submission.

There are companies that engage in statistical arbitrage. They look for opportunities that are statistical in nature. Think of technical analysis but in a way that works. Think stock A and stock B being more correlated than price reflects. They want to execute fast because those opportunities do not exist for long. This kind of trading smoothens out the curve and smooth curves are nice to have, mathematically speaking.

There are HFT firms who scalp dodginess in price by renting colocated servers. Very tiny but almost guaranteed returns if they can get execution. Nothing wrong with that either. Low margin business model.

Then there are companies, or rather teams inside companies, that send buy and sell orders into the exchange that they never want to execute, on millisecond timescales, to disrupt the market. They are trying, in simplified terms, to create signals for other market participants that do not really exist, and then execute trades that they know will be profitable by exploiting other participants for whom they generated buy signals. This is your evil HFT. The T in HFT is a misnomer, because they dont really trade. They abuse stock exchange mechanics to fuck with other market participants and then try to rob them. This is mostly illegal and not allowed by the exchanges themselves. The problem here is to prove that someone didnt play by the rules. Google "optiver the hammer" for an example of a couple years ago. They have counter-intelligence teams whose entire job is to not trade the market for profit but to ruin other companies profits to drive them out of business. But most of this is illegal, its just difficult to prosecute.

The problem with banning folks is that most trading companies engage in all of these things at the same time. There are market making teams at optiver and there are evil HFT teams at optiver and if you ban optiver, you wipe out a major market maker which leaves the stock exchange exposed.

Another problem with "banning HFT" is that where do you draw the line? Market participants can suddenly not try to get their trades executed anymore? Maybe that's beneficial to the market as a whole, but how do you even execute such a rule?

the other does not.

one of them got elected by poor rural people who really need the ACA.

i dont think that political goals have value. theyre about the last thing to have "value". "Exterminate all jews" was a relatively popular political goal just a couple decades ago. As far as "valuable things" go, political goals range relatively low on that totem pole.

this is not just for stocks. the potential loss of a stock is the price of the stock. that is finite. some options, even ordinary options, can generate potentially infinite losses and stock exchanges want for everyone to be able to move their stuff.

as far as you are concerned about "signals", there is something called the order book. as a normal trader you dont see this, but the stock exchange lists every position in the market and you can pay to see that. there is literally no difference between no market makers in the market and market makers having their spread quoted on top of the available market, in terms of signals. market makers just make sure that you get a good, if not fair, price for the stuff you want to move.

illiquid markets are extremely painful, especially for those companies that exist in them, because their value can be extremely misrepresented. to make an example, assume you are tesla, but you are traded on an exchange that only publishes spot once a year, in january. in august, you need to raise money at fair value and youve grown 3x since january, but nobody can give you fair price because you are quoted at januaries value.

liquidity is a good thing for every market participant.

you need to drink 5 liters of water over a period of 30 minutes to kill you potentially. thats not going to happen by accident and you will be in ridiculous amounts of pain long before you hit the lethal dose.

This is obviously not true, because HFT makes money, but you could say that HFT contributes to getting markets closer to being efficient.

Having efficient markets is worthwhile for society because an efficient, liquid market provides a more accurate picture of the "actual" value of things.

If you buy this argument, then HFT would be contributing to finding truth, which is inherently valuable in the eyes of many people.

At the end of the day, HFT is one of those things that people just get jelly about because someone makes money on something they dont understand and gets insanely rich "doing nothing".

What people get mad about is completely arbitrary. Everyone hates google because ads, but without google, their world would barely operate. Everyone hates facebook because fake news but nobody has the balls to actually not use facebook. A social network.

Everyone hates uber because "scandals" and poor drivers not being paid but still uses it because comfortable.

I'm not really in the stock market but when I want to sell stock, I'd rather there be some market maker who is obligated to buy it. Maybe he makes more money off of me than I ever will selling stock to him, but that one time when nobody else wants the falling stock and I potentially use a large chunk of my savings, I really need them.

Consumers sit on some amazingly high horses sometimes.