151–160 of 243 posts
High Frequency Trading seems so abstract. There's no value created, it seems. It's like something in between imperfect systems, scraping off the margin created by that imperfection. It's fascinating, and interesting from an algorithmic point of view (like a computer game), but at the same time I don't feel sympathy for this company going out of business.
I think you'd be surprised at what happens in large companies. I went through four, count em' four major releases with a company and each time the failure was on load balancing and not testing the capacity of the servers we had prior to release.
Even after the second release was an unmitigated disaster, the CTO said we needed more time to do load testing and making sure the servers were configured to handle traffic spikes to the sites we were working on. It happened again, TWICE after he said we needed to do this.
You would think something as basic as load testing would be at the top of the list of "to do's" for a major release, but it wasn't. It wasn't even close.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know how if the first 100 times a dialog box comes up, the correct response is to click 'ok', then people start just clicking 'ok' on every dialog box, and then the 201st one comes up "Destroy everything? [cancel] [ok], and they click 'ok' too, and don't think anything of it?
Sure, you click reflexively, but you should notice the text was bad either after clicking or within a couple more clicks. Letting the first few errors through is reasonable, but letting a wall of them through without noticing anything wrong, when reading them is your job , is inexcusable.
Maybe you have to figure out a way to test people for unusually high aptitude at looking at mind-numbingly dull repetitive things over and over again, but then still being able to notice the aberrant ones. And then only put people in that job with unusually high aptitude there.
Or have people only do pretty short shifts at that task.
I'm pretty confident that this person wasn't unusually negligent, if you have most anyone doing that job hour after hour day after day they will lose the ability to flag the aberant stuff.
Just another reminder of how systems that you'd think are rock solid often aren't. In my previous life working with telcos, I once tried to teach a particularly huge customer how to use CVS how to manage configurations across a 10+ machine cluster of machines. They didn't see any value in it, so they stuck to their good old process of SSHing into each machine individually, "cp config.xml config.xml.20131022", and the…
High Frequency Trading seems so abstract. There's no value created, it seems. It's like something in between imperfect systems, scraping off the margin created by that imperfection. It's fascinating, and interesting from an algorithmic point of view (like a computer game), but at the same time I don't feel sympathy for this company going out of business.
"The best part is the fine: $12m, despite the resulting audit also revealing that the system was systematically sending naked shorts." Cool - all you have to do to get away with financial crimes is create a system with no protections against breaking the law.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looking at systems by considering whether they 'create value' in some generalized utilitarian sense is unproductive. Such systems survive by being able to extract energy somehow, in this case by exploiting properties of the stock trading system. I guess you could say that they create a lot of value—for the people doing it. Very few modern economic activities make sense in a broader perspective, they exist purely beca…
Looking at systems by considering whether they 'create value' in some generalized utilitarian sense is unproductive. Such systems survive by being able to extract energy somehow A perfect description of many forms of organized crime.
Just another reminder of how systems that you'd think are rock solid often aren't. In my previous life working with telcos, I once tried to teach a particularly huge customer how to use CVS how to manage configurations across a 10+ machine cluster of machines. They didn't see any value in it, so they stuck to their good old process of SSHing into each machine individually, "cp config.xml config.xml.20131022", and the…
Ha, probably no one ever got fired for manually SSHing into each machine. It seems like a joke, but it really isn't.
Just another reminder of how systems that you'd think are rock solid often aren't. In my previous life working with telcos, I once tried to teach a particularly huge customer how to use CVS how to manage configurations across a 10+ machine cluster of machines. They didn't see any value in it, so they stuck to their good old process of SSHing into each machine individually, "cp config.xml config.xml.20131022", and the…
Ha, probably no one ever got fired for manually SSHing into each machine. It seems like a joke, but it really isn't.
Of course intelligent, incremental deployment works too, but let's not confuse those poor suits...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who says he tried to interpret the world? He was giving his own value judgement about it. Also, I do think that knowing whether something actually creates value or not (is a positive-sum, negative-sum or zero-sum game) is definitely helpful in understanding large systems. i.e: It helps predicting whether a society will succeed or fail, by seeing how much of it is wasted on negative/zero sum games.
Societies will always succeed for a while and then fail. It is the cycle of life and energy in the economy. There is "value" created by HFTs that is used by HFTs and their families. It helps them survive and reproduce. This does not mean value is created for society overall, but it certainly makes society more complex. The more complex an ecosystem/economy is, the more likely it will be able to adapt to future enviro…
Societies will succeed more or less based on various parameters, one of which is whether they generate value to sustain themselves or not.