harryh

I don't really like tumblr much, but all my friends seem to use it so I'm kinda stuck. I miss the era of LiveJournal.

[harryh]

It's not front running; it's getting out of the way

Front-running isn't really a thing that's actually happening. Here's what is actually happening.

The HFTer/liquidity provider wants to sit there all day long buying IBM for 99.99 and selling for 100.00 making his penny a share in return for providing liquidity. But the liquidity provider has a problem. Every now and then Brad Katsuyama (or someone like him) shows up with proprietary information that, say, IBM should really be trading for 101.00. Brad tries to suck up all those shares being sold for 100.00 as fast as possible before the price moves. That's great for Brad but all of a sudden the liquidity provider has lost a bunch of money when IBM moves to 101.00 and he can no longer buy for 99.99.

So the liquidity provider tries to recognize as accurately as he can, and as fast as he can, that Brad has shown up on the scene and get out of the way by canceling all his orders and resubmitting them with a new price. That's why when Brad tries to buy 100,000 shares (from multiple exchanges) in the book he sees a bunch of his orders not get filled because the liquidity provider is running away from him.

So it's not the HFTer jumping in the middle like people think. It's actually the HFTer running out of the way of a big fish.

So how is this good for you when you're buying a small number of shares? The more often the HFTer gets eaten by a big fish the wider his spreads have to be to make an overall profit. If he gets eaten too often he has to buy for 99.95 and sell for 100.00 (5 cent spread) instead of 99.99/100.00 (1 cent spread). Spreads used to be really big: 12.5 cents or 25 cents. They're smaller now because computers can react a lot faster than humans to get out of the way of Brad. They also don't demand really big salaries so they cost less to operate.

To sum up: HFT isn't jumping in the middle. It's jumping out of the way. And because they keep getting better at that they can afford to offer lower prices for liquidity when you show up and want to by 1000 shares of IBM to hold for the next 5 years.

There are other advantages for you as well having to do with faster price discovery by the market, but I'll leave that aside for the moment as a separate issue.

(reprint from https://gist.github.com/harryh/9996284)

[christina-in-arkansas]

[harryh]

What's a save icon?

Seriously. When was the last time you used one? Certainly that kid never has.

[rickwebb]

This fall, a truck dumped eight million coins outside the Parliament building in Bern, one for every Swiss citizen. It was a publicity stunt for advocates of an audacious social policy that just might become reality in the tiny, rich country. Along with the coins, activists delivered 125,000 signatures — enough to trigger a Swiss public referendum, this time on providing a monthly income to every citizen, no strings attached. Every month, every Swiss person would receive a check from the government, no matter how rich or poor, how hardworking or lazy, how old or young. Poverty would disappear. Economists, needless to say, are sharply divided on what would reappear in its place — and whether such a basic-income scheme might have some appeal for other, less socialist countries too.

Switzerland’s Proposal to Pay People for Being Alive - NYTimes.com (via rickwebb)

The problem with this is that they can’t afford it. The Swiss budget is 62.8 CHF. They have 8 million people. That’s only 7,800 CHF each which is clearly not enough to make poverty disappear.

The fact that the Times didn’t bother to present this simple math shows how dumb the story is.

(via harryh)

There’s this part: “Evelyn Forget, a health economist at the University of Manitoba, has done some of the best research on the results. Some of her findings were obvious: Poverty disappeared. But others were more surprising: High-school completion rates went up; hospitalization rates went down. “If you have a social program like this, community values themselves start to change,” Forget said.”

That was $10,000/yr Canadian. 7,800 CHF is about 8,57 USD. Not too far off. 

(via rickwebb)

Not too far off if the Swiss government stops doing everything else they do and spends their whole budget on this program. Presumably they're going to have to spend some money here and there on everything else people want the government to do.

[rickwebb]

This fall, a truck dumped eight million coins outside the Parliament building in Bern, one for every Swiss citizen. It was a publicity stunt for advocates of an audacious social policy that just might become reality in the tiny, rich country. Along with the coins, activists delivered 125,000 signatures — enough to trigger a Swiss public referendum, this time on providing a monthly income to every citizen, no strings attached. Every month, every Swiss person would receive a check from the government, no matter how rich or poor, how hardworking or lazy, how old or young. Poverty would disappear. Economists, needless to say, are sharply divided on what would reappear in its place — and whether such a basic-income scheme might have some appeal for other, less socialist countries too.

Switzerland’s Proposal to Pay People for Being Alive - NYTimes.com (via rickwebb)

The problem with this is that they can't afford it. The Swiss budget is 62.8 CHF. They have 8 million people. That's only 7,800 CHF each which is clearly not enough to make poverty disappear.

The fact that the Times didn't bother to present this simple math shows how dumb the story is.

[harryh]

All My Dodgeball Checkins, September 2005

Tue. Sep. 27

Knitting Factory 10:48 PM

City Hall 7:42 PM

Mon. Sep. 26

Arlene's Grocery 12:42 AM

Verlaine 10:47 PM

Sat. Sep. 24

Punch 10:32 PM

Fri. Sep. 23

The Magician 12:31 AM 

Scenic 11:42 PM 

Duke's 11:25 PM 

Porch Bar 9:59 PM

Thu. Sep. 22

151 12:06 AM

Wed. Sep. 21

Coffee Shop 11:54 PM 

Webster Hall 9:03 PM

Tue. Sep. 20

Pianos 11:07 PM 

151 9:59 PM 

Pianos 9:08 PM 

Belly 8:24 PM

Sat. Sep. 17

Mercury Lounge 1:06 AM 

Pianos 11:30 PM 

Mercury Lounge 10:13 PM

Fri. Sep. 16

Trash 12:24 AM 

Southpaw 10:54 PM 

Planet Thailand 9:07 PM 

Northsix 8:08 PM 

Hiro 6:42 PM

Thu. Sep. 15

Mama's Bar 11:11 PM 

Scenic 8:15 PM 

Fader Room 6:48 PM

Tue. Sep. 13

151 1:40 AM 

Snitch 11:46 PM

Mon. Sep. 12

151 1:01 AM 

151 12:34 AM 

Merc Bar 3:13 PM

Sat. Sep. 10

The Skinny 12:58 AM

Fri. Sep. 9

Porch Bar 12:38 AM 

Micky's Blue Room 10:39 PM 

Lucy's 8:57 PM

Thu. Sep. 8

Simone Espresso & Wine Bar 9:32 PM

Wed. Sep. 7

12" (12 inch) 12:19 AM 

Nolita House 9:08 PM

Fri. Sep. 2

Max Fish 10:08 PM

CMJ Baby! I wish I remembered what bands I saw.

[huggingharoldreynolds]

[harryh]

Eh, I'm perfectly ok with this. The idea that some random dude, just by virtue of being first to the copyright office, should be able to have sole control of a slogan based on someone else's name + accomplishments is pretty absurd on its face.

[heyitsnoah]

This comment pretty much sums it up: “It’s like, how much more metal could this be? And the answer is: none. None more metal.”

(via Compressorhead Ace of Spades - YouTube)

[marksbirch]

For the past decade, I’ve tried every new social media product to come along but I find myself returning to the two giants of the industry most often: Tumblr and Twitter. I’m optimistic and delighted every time I open up Tumblr on my browser, while Twitter is something I only click on once or…

[rickwebb]

How can I not reblog this? 

[harryh]

That post is both stupid as it doesn't support his hate of twitter, and borderline unethical for not linking to @mathowie's original.

[parislemon]

I don’t even know what the ballpark number for a server is — for me, it would be like knowing what the price of a sword is.

Cue co-founder Daniel Gross talking to Quentin Hardy of The New York Times about the brilliance of Amazon’s cloud services. (via parislemon)

FWIW that kinda makes Daniel sound like an idiot. Amazon's big 68gb boxes cost about 1.3k a month on demand. That's the kind of # that a competent tech co-founder should know off the top of their head. Oh wait, he's the CEO, ya forgivable then. I'm sure Dens doesn't know this number.

He's crazy for thinking he'd need 50 extra engineers to run on their own hardware though. That's just retarded.

[abevigoda-deactivated20171012]

[laughingsquid]

Kids Today

[harryh]

Kids today don't know what a save button is.

Seriously, think about it a little. When was the last time you pressed a save button?

[keepyourselfwarm]

[chriskelly]

This really just boils it all down.

[harryh]

What benefits exactly? It's not at all clear that she would be entitled to anything even in the absence of DOMA due to the fact that she (apparently) works full time and is also well under the SS retirement age.  When she does retire she'll be entitled to SS based on her own contributions.

I'm not saying that there isn't injustice being done to gay couples, but it's not at all obvious that there is injustice being done in this specific case.  Complaining about a case where no harm has actually been done only weakens the case of those advocating for change.

More facts, less knee jerk complaining please.

[inothernews]

You know, soothing words are nice, but maybe it’s time that the two people who want to be president of the United States stand up and tell us what they are going to do about it, because this is obviously a problem across the country.

New York City mayor MICHAEL BLOOMBERG, during his weekly radio show, reacting to today’s mass shooting in Aurora, CO.

Well said.

(via the New York Times)

Like.

(via dpstyles)

Mass shootings of middle class white people by the obviously insane are not a real problem. This sort of thing is incredibly rare.  You're more likely to get struck by lightning.

The real problem is socioeconomic.  Despite making up only 13% of the population 50% of the murder victims in the US every year are African American, and the bulk of them are poor.  So let's talk about how much racism is a problem. Let's talk about the underclass.  Let's talk about the drug war.  Let's talk about huge portions of our major cities that are still engulfed by crime on a day-to-day basis. Let's talk about the real broken parts of our culture and what can be done about it.

If we want to call on our politicians to talk about problems let's at least ask them to talk about real problems and not overhyped media panics.

[emmawebbdesign]

Preferential tax treatment is everywhere in the tax code. I’m a renter, I am paying a tax penalty. Quite literally, I pay a penalty every year to the government because I do not own my own home and I can’t take the mortgage deduction. Our tax code literally penalizes people for renting. Up and down the tax code, we incentivize and penalize behavior. This is not some radical new incursion.

- Chris Hayes (via emmawelles)

I'm sympathetic to this as a legal argument but do you really want to be comparing the mandate to the mortgage tax deduction which is a god awful public policy that directly contributed to the recent housing collapse/recession? 

[bijan]

One of the most successful online social drugs is people tagging in Facebook photos. I can’t recall when this feature was first introduced but getting a message saying “you’ve been tagged in a photo” followed by a link was incredibly seductive. It still is.

And it isn’t link bait as the content…

[parislemon]

The Instagram -> Twitter username sync fail seem to come up at least once a week amongst my group of friends. One day, they’ll fix it. One day…

[harryh]

No they won't. If anything they'll sync it with the FB namespace. But even that would be a challenge. How would they deal with conflicts?

[frankchi-deactivated20150601]

[harryh]

Mitt Romney said that corporations are made up of people and that ultimately the corporate income tax is a tax on those people.  People who try to turn this rather straight forward statement into a political point are lowering the standard of debate we see in our elections not raising it.

Politicians that do this do not deserve our support.  This isn't a game where you cheer just because your team does something that makes for a good sounds bite.  It's a conversation about how our country should work.  We should cheer for great additions to that conversation and boo for subtractions no matter which side of the aisle they come from.

That's the only way it gets better.

[rickwebb]

My perspective is that our financial system was in a Cuban Missile Crisis sort of moment. Most normal people were oblivious what was actually going on, but I think we were just minutes away from a financial disaster at least one, possibly two orders of magnitude worse than what actually happened. I don’t see how Sequoia’s efforts to communicate a (somewhat sanitized) version of the knowledge they had to their portfolio CEOs, and to provide actionable tactical instructions to us, could be perceived of as anything but good faith. That being said, I am glad that presentation ended up being wrong, just as I am glad the Cuban Missile Crisis did not turn into a full-blown nuclear war.

“RIP Good Times”: Silicon Valley’s Cuban Missile Crisis by Dalton Caldwell

It’s mind-boggling to me that there are people who don’t realize how close to the brink we were. There was a 48 hour period where the banks and the federal government literally weren’t sure that direct deposit was going to work. Like for anyone. At all. 

(via rickwebb)

Huh? Citation needed! What does direct deposit have to do with anything?

[sexpigeon]

With today’s release of Foursquare 5.0, Foursquare has modified its “dodgeball” icon and cemented it as the solid logo and visual brand for the company.

Starting today, you’ll begin to notice an inspiring new icon for your Foursquare experience. Our new icon grows out of a love for playground games, the kind we all remember from youth, which is the most wondrous part of the human lifetime. Humans naturally crave simple geometry, which is why we’ve removed all squares and angles and rebuilt the icon purely out of four overlapping circles—just as your circles of friends overlap with the circle of life. We are all headed toward the same fate. Circles are a reflection of communities of common purpose, and we see circles in check-ins ranging from the neighborhood pizza parlor (a delicious circle!) to the circle that is the Earth we all share, spinning optimistically through a universe of limitless possibility.

One more change we’ve made: our dodgeball is now pointed upwards, as if being aimed into the face of God Himself.

This is definitely a huge improvement. The new dodgeball feels like it’s flying.