Shameless plug:
I intentionally went in this direction when I made a website for my band. I think it's high time this aesthetic came back into fashion.
Readit Newsmichaelwsherman commented on Show HN: My embarrassing personal website from the 90s boglin.iwarp.com/... · Posted by u/rpeden
michaelwsherman commented on Wall Street Profits by Putting Investors in the Slow Lane nytimes.com/2017/07/18/op... · Posted by u/chollida1
Heh. My second project at my first employer out of college (back in 2006) was building a system to detect violations of this rule (Reg NMS, if you're curious). We found that there were trade-throughs happening on a daily basis, it was so common that it appeared to be just how the markets worked.
Tried to sell it to the SEC and they weren't interested.
Then we pivoted to try to sell to traders, so they could prove to clients that they were getting the best execution possible (or occasionally better than the best possible, but that gets washed out of the aggregate stats). They were very interested, until the data showed that most of the ones who don't already have a proprietary version of this were actually doing terribly on their trade executions. Then they weren't interested at all.
I ended up leaving the company - and the financial industry - at that point. My take-away from the whole experience is that the game really is rigged. I remember reading a non-mainstream economics paper in college that modeled the world not in terms of price equilibria or value-add, but assumed that all actors were basically bandits who would try to take whatever they could by force or deceit. It was horribly depressing at the time, but it actually seems like a more accurate model of how the world really works, the remarkable part being that democratic capitalism has managed to channel the impulses of those bandits (while still being utterly crooked) into a system that on a macro-level basically kinda/sorta works.
I did some regulatory work as well, for an upcoming regulation called Reg CAT. CAT will require all brokers, traders, exchanges, etc. to report essentially everything that happens--orders, cancellations, trade executions, etc. Right now the SEC really has no way to catch the majority of regulatory hijinx (look at the years-long attempt to track down the cause of the 2010 "flash crash").
Hopefully this will improve the ability to regulate in the future. But it probably won't result in significantly more enforcement--the regulation is written in such a way that the exchanges and FINRA will carry the primary regulatory burden rather the SEC itself. This means that despite there soon being a system that could, say, give you every reg NMS violation via a database query matched to a log of historical latencies, very little will likely change.
I just stared an internship at Bell Labs Murray Hill. Growing up in Holmdel, I've been a fan of Bell Labs since childhood and feel so happy to be working here. The atmosphere and energy from all the amazing achievements is really palpable.
Word is the acquisition of Alcatel Lucent by Nokia has really put Bell Labs back into the public spotlight. Excited to see what the future holds and I hope I can still be a part of it!
Make sure you try the pizza at Coppola's at the bottom of Murray Hill on Central Ave.
michaelwsherman commented on Helping a Million Developers Exit Vim stackoverflow.blog/2017/0... · Posted by u/var_explained
I spent almost 10 years doing IT for a company whose backend was based entirely on as/400. If you've ever used a system like that, I'm sure you know where this is going...
The console's that the front-desk or clerical users used every day had a steep learning curve. It was something that you would definitely not be able to walk up to and just intuit.
However, once you figured it out, there is never going to be a faster UI that you are ever going to experience in your life until we figure out direct BCI stuff.
It was funny watching the new people come on board and insist that we should change the UI to something with a mouse (probably web based). They had no idea that more immediately intuitive was actually a step backwards.
My point is that just because something has a steep learning curve, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's a bad design.
A bit late to the convo here, but one of the things that really impressed me about the Bloomberg (my employer) Terminal is how they manage this old user vs. new user problem well.
The terminal looks like this now: https://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/economics/images/bloomberg...
You can still do everything with the same keyboard shortcuts that have worked for 30+ years (pretty much everything with a number in front of it), and the layout of the screens generally don't change. But now everything on the mostly text-based view is clickable as well--everywhere you see a number you can click with a mouse.
Additional shortcuts are hidden behind menus, like "Settings" in the photo. But if you know the shortcut, no need to look at "Settings" first (which itself can be opened by typing 97 or clicking it).
michaelwsherman commented on Early Macintosh Emulation Comes to the Archive blog.archive.org/2017/04/... · Posted by u/jf
Awesome. Mac Plus was my first real computer as a kid, played a lot of games. World Builder scripting was the first programming I ever did.
michaelwsherman commented on 17 years of government contracts on BigQuery github.com/antontarasenko... · Posted by u/anton_tarasenko
Is there an open source equivalent of the software-part of BigQuery?
I'm a bit late here, but maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Drill ?
michaelwsherman commented on Nanex Gets $700k Whistleblower Award from SEC nanex.net/aqck2/4712.html... · Posted by u/theandycamps
Yikes. Lots of misinformation here.
First of all, this has nothing to do with High-Frequency Trading. It's about the NYSE not delivering a product (SIP real-time data) while collecting $100M a year for that service. This was happening for at least 3 years.
I am a champion of free markets. The term "High-Frequency Trading critic" is a label others use when they either can't understand and/or refute solid evidence.
I'm happy to answer questions.
Hey, a bit late to the game here, but I just want to say I'm a huge fan of your work.
At my last job I worked on one of the Reg CAT bids, and I spent a lot of time looking at Nanex Research--totally mind blowing. The markets would be a better place if the regulators were doing Nanex-style analysis. Keep up the good work!
michaelwsherman commented on Google Picks Diane Greene to Expand Its Cloud Business nytimes.com/2015/11/20/te... · Posted by u/scommab
Bigtable is best thought of as an "event database". High reads, high writes, single index, accessible through the Hbase API. Cassandra and Hbase are similar technologies that are inspired by the original Bigtable paper.
One big benefit of Bigtable is its scalability. To scale up, you turn the 'scale' knob. By contrast, Cassandra and Hbase are headaches to scale (Apple has acquired Cassandra companies to aid in operation and scale).
Here's a couple of guys from Sungard, who scaled to about 3,000,000 writes per second with a couple weekends' worth of effort (something only few beyond the likes of Facebook, Netflix, and Apple can achieve) https://cloud.google.com/bigtable/pdf/SunGardCATCaseStudy.pd...
Hey. I'm one of the "guys from SunGard", although I'm no longer there. The longer version is this: https://cloud.google.com/bigtable/pdf/ConsolidatedAuditTrail... . A lot of it is related to the use case, but yeah, Bigtable handled pretty much whatever we wanted to throw at it. No other cloud provider can offer this sort of scale and performance right now without a ton of manual management or significant compromises, something that seems to have yet to sink in (although few companies need the scale we went up to).
It did take a lot more work than "a couple weekends" though :).
Would be cool if you could rotate the charts in all 3 axes, especially the scatterplot.
Yay.
I would welcome a toaster that let me say "too burnt" or "too raw" or "just right" after each toasting, adjusted the cooking time and temperature accordingly, and generalized well to new kinds of bread and such.