401–410 of 456 posts
Move what is leapsecond independent to UT1, the atomic clock basis -- google, finance, etc now happy
Keep UTC etc as is, since offests happen all the time to every other human clock anyway for political or summer time or country boundary changes anyway -- everyone else happy
And calculating UTC as offests from the consistent base of UT1 sounds like the way to do it
It seems odd to me that they decision was to not solve it this way, but not how it will be solved going forward. Like, doesn't that effectively make everything more complicated/difficult?
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Most HFTs primarily engage in market making (matching buyers and sellers) which absolutely is a very useful and necessary function to society unless your position is that markets should not exist. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_maker
You could hold the position that markets are good but not everything should have a market. For example you can forbid futures and derivatives without forbidding good old stock trading.
However, it might be much more interesting, and societally more beneficial, to require that anyone trading in commodities futures must have, at all times, the facility to take delivery of the contracts. The upper limit of exposure for a trading desk would therefore be bound by the capacity of their physical infrastructure.
In 2015 I was working at a "fintech" company and a leap second was announced. It was scheduled for a Wednesday, unlike all others before which had happened on the weekend, when markets were closed. When the previous leap second was applied, a bunch of our Linux servers had kernel panics for some reason, so needless to say everyone was really concerned about a leap second happening during trading hours. So I was assig…
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I think that's the only reasonable way to handle this kind of thing, though I bet that accurate time matters enough in fintech that you'd still have some cases where you'd need access to the "true" wall time in order to stamp logs for auditing or whatever.
Has anyone ever heard about audits concerned with subsecond timestamp resolution?
Quite common in real-time sports betting world.
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You could hold the position that markets are good but not everything should have a market. For example you can forbid futures and derivatives without forbidding good old stock trading.
I'm against pure speculation, but forbidding futures outright would feel ... wrong. Locking prices for contracts up front is a useful thing. However, it might be much more interesting, and societally more beneficial, to require that anyone trading in commodities futures must have, at all times, the facility to take delivery of the contracts. The upper limit of exposure for a trading desk would therefore be bound by t…
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The moral of the story is that laziness is a virtue. Think of all the time that could have been saved, had you had no plans like your partners ;)
Think of all the time that could be better appropriated than on fintech in general. Seems like such a waste of resources siccing a bunch of computers against each other in a zero sum game of stock arbitrage. I will admit some of the stuff tech comes out of it is cool on its own at least.
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Reminds me of the story of the computer engineer at Data General in Traccy Kidder's nonficion book, "The Soul of a New Machine" [0], who quit after spending weeks toiling away on sub-second timing concerns: > He went away from the basement and left this note on his terminal: "I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season." [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_…
Maybe he should get Stephen Colbert's second-by-second day planner.
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Making time less accurate just for the sake of testing in production doesn't seem great.
From 2035 it's going to be less accurate in exactly the same way. I'd argue bombcar's method is more robust. I don't know of anything that actually requires UTC to be within 1 second of average rotation-based time; having it within 2 or 3 seconds is extremely unlikely to actually break anything. But we do generally want to have measured time roughly in line with Earth time in the medium to long term.
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Not sure what you mean by that but nanosecond precise timing across cpu cores have been reliable for quite a while now. Key words: constant TSC, invariant TSC, TSC clocksource
The hardware providing those nanoseconds is not nanosecond accurate (unless using atomic clock) However they may be more accurate than 1ms. The guy is saying the timeslice given by the OS for a program to run in has at best a 1ms slot because the OS is switching between threads on a 1ms timeslice basis So unless you're polling, the timing at which you ask the hardware for nanoseconds will jitter with 1ms offsets
The guy is overgeneralizing IMO. You can delve deep within the sub millisecond world even as a regular dude with a regular computer and a regular OS by just doing everything in an interrupt context