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The $440M software error at Knight Capital (2019)

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Re: The $440M software error at Knight Capital (2019)

#112
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are brackets different in American English? I'd say the Queen should order a second burning down of Washington but, the way things are going, the locals will probably get to it soon.

parens: () brackets: [] braces:{} Versus: brackets: () square brackets: [] curly brackets: {} Still drives me less mad than "inverted commas" though.

As someone who has lived on the West Coast of the US for decades, I have never heard any American call (), brackets.

Re: The $440M software error at Knight Capital (2019)

#113
post #11
post #2

The OP details how poor software engineering practices brought down a 1.4B market marker with 1400 employees in 2012. Some of the issues mentioned include: - Keeping synthetic test data generation as part of a production build. - Keeping dead code for years. - Re-purposing a feature flag. - Refactoring without regression tests. - Manual deployments without peer reviews. They forgot to update one of their servers with…

I worked in algo trading for years, eventually got out because quite frankly the level of risk I was carrying on my shoulders everyday for what I was being paid were just way out of whack, I at least personally never got the huge pay days that people talked about until after I left finance for more pure tech. Interestingly, I worked at Knight and my team pioneered trying to blow up the firm, but that was in 2004, and…

[deleted]

Re: The $440M software error at Knight Capital (2019)

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many traditional finance issues are fixable though, there are many more errors which don’t become big stories because they are reasonably reversed as only minor inconveniences.

like how Credit Suisse is going to reverse their Bill Hwang losses? I guess in this conversation we can't distinguish from irreversible asset value and liquidity issue to misdirected transactions that inherit partial reversibility. similarly, maybe you/they just don't see the headlines of thwarted attacks in DeFi that work specifically due to design considerations. I'll take the permission to fail. The rapid iteratio…

Where is this innovation happening? We’ve had crypto for 13 years now, and just yesterday we had people flat out losing 10k into the ether because their transaction “ran out of gas” without completing. Isn’t that plenty of time to develop systems that avoid basic issues like suddenly burning all your money?

Re: The $440M software error at Knight Capital (2019)

#115
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are brackets different in American English? I'd say the Queen should order a second burning down of Washington but, the way things are going, the locals will probably get to it soon.

parens: () brackets: [] braces:{} Versus: brackets: () square brackets: [] curly brackets: {} Still drives me less mad than "inverted commas" though.

Here is what Clang uses: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/589b9df4e15131348b...

parens: ()

squares: []

braces: {}

basically a mixed of British and American English

Re: The $440M software error at Knight Capital (2019)

#116
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But don’t many (most?) US programmers call () parentheses? I assume non-programmers in the US call them brackets? 1.9M results: lisp "parentheses" -brackets 800k results: lisp "brackets" -parentheses I admit result counts are more similar if lisp is replaced with “python” or “golang”, but square brackets come up more often for those languages. Disclaimer: I am searching from google.co.nz, and I presume search result…

In my lifetime, “parentheses” has been the canonical way to refer to () in the US. “Brackets” is an umbrella term that can describe one or all of (), {}, and []. If you’re in a context where only one of the bracket types would normally be used, you can just call them “brackets.” Since many people never really use [] and {}, “brackets” casually refers to (). To disambiguate, you can call () “open brackets”, [] “square…

> Since many people never really use [] and {}, “brackets” casually refers to ().

I have never heard anyone call () "brackets". Is it more regional than just the US maybe?

Re: The $440M software error at Knight Capital (2019)

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

like how Credit Suisse is going to reverse their Bill Hwang losses? I guess in this conversation we can't distinguish from irreversible asset value and liquidity issue to misdirected transactions that inherit partial reversibility. similarly, maybe you/they just don't see the headlines of thwarted attacks in DeFi that work specifically due to design considerations. I'll take the permission to fail. The rapid iteratio…

Where is this innovation happening? We’ve had crypto for 13 years now, and just yesterday we had people flat out losing 10k into the ether because their transaction “ran out of gas” without completing. Isn’t that plenty of time to develop systems that avoid basic issues like suddenly burning all your money?

It doesn’t really seem to be innovation, just rediscovering 100 year old scams and failures that have to be readdressed.

Re: The $440M software error at Knight Capital (2019)

#118
post #109

at the end .. its just money going from one account to another right? Its not like some physical thing that has perished and cant be brought back. Why is it difficult to reverse the transactions?

Because the people those transactions were with didn’t want them reversed, and there was no rule or law that required it.

Didnt the exchanges cancel the trades during the flash crash in 2010. I am sure the buyers of those transactions which were able to buy shares of good companies for pennies would not want to reverse those transactions.

Knight was not a big player so the exchanges had no reason to keep them happy.

Re: The $440M software error at Knight Capital (2019)

#119
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

parens: () brackets: [] braces:{} Versus: brackets: () square brackets: [] curly brackets: {} Still drives me less mad than "inverted commas" though.

As someone who has lived on the West Coast of the US for decades, I have never heard any American call (), brackets.

Chiming in as someone who has lived decades in both South East US and North East US. I've also never heard () called "brackets" only "parentheses". This includes in and out of programming circles.

I assumed the comment saying "parens: ()" was talking about US, but the replies seem to be interpreting the opposite.

Re: The $440M software error at Knight Capital (2019)

#120
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are brackets different in American English? I'd say the Queen should order a second burning down of Washington but, the way things are going, the locals will probably get to it soon.

parens: () brackets: [] braces:{} Versus: brackets: () square brackets: [] curly brackets: {} Still drives me less mad than "inverted commas" though.

There seems to be some confusion. I am saying the top is American - at least as I was taught it in school. The bottom is the more typically British variant. But I think the reality is the both America and Britain have variations. To an American ear, bracket to mean parenthesis is not just odd, but wrong. But someone already said they consider bracket to be a catchall term, so obviously this is not universal.

Edit: okay, apparently there is just complete bracket anarchy across America and words have no fixed meaning.

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