offlineguy (u/offlineguy)

offlineguy commented on DNS alias mode (2020) github.com/acmesh-officia... · Posted by u/throw0101a

rualca · 4 years ago

Does anyone know of a good resource on how to ramp up onto DNS? I'm afraid DNS is one of those things that everyone learns what's an A record and CNAME record, but once that's set it's just abandoned and forgotten.

offlineguy · 4 years ago

I like this one, written by a former colleague: https://www.amazon.com/Concise-Guide-DNS-BIND/dp/0789722739/

offlineguy commented on 1M Cell Minesweeper bl.ocks.org/texodus/96a9e... · Posted by u/texodus

codetrotter · 5 years ago

Impossible, because the first move in any game of minesweeper will always be a guess :^)

offlineguy · 5 years ago

Original minesweeper ensures that the first move is never a mine.

offlineguy commented on Show HN: Trade stocks from the command line with no commission gitlab.com/aenegri/toro... · Posted by u/anegri

srazzaque · 5 years ago

(Disclaimer that I'm working on an open source FIX engine in Lisp.)

This is a really cool project! But alas I couldn't use it as I'm not in the US, and I don't trade with Alpaca. And I feel like this plays into a negative trend I'm seeing.

The retail brokerage market right now is treading on similar 'mistakes' in institutional markets 15ish years ago. Proprietary APIs were prolific, and therefore increased switching costs and lock-in (looking at you, Reuters and Bloomberg).

On the one hand, retail brokers need to support popular programming languages and paradigms to gain traction. So, they are releasing http-based APIs, or popular language-specific libraries/bindings for their proprietary APIs. But, they are doing this instead of pushing well-publicised battle-tested standards such as FIX[1], that would normalise the playing field across brokers. So my gut feel is that they are banking on users coding against their APIs and having some lock-in effects. Notable exception is that any broker that supports cTrader will have a FIX API, because cTrader provides that for them.

The problem is: if I write a bunch of code to work against Alpaca, TD Ameritrade, or whoever, that code will likely need to be revisited for some other broker like Robinhood. Granted, market connectivity code _should_ be well abstracted from my model if I'm following good design principles. But at least with FIX, the core concepts, fields, and messages remain the same across most FIX endpoints (NOS, ExecRpt, etc), allowing for a more uniform code holistically.

[1] https://www.fixtrading.org

offlineguy · 5 years ago

I wrote a FIX engine in Common Lisp once, working for a Norwegian retail broker. Worked like a charm for many years, connected to multiple market places and brokerages. Adapting to new counterparties was certainly a bit of work, but generally far less than implementing their binary protocols. (We tried that too from time to time, usually if FIX was not an option from the exchange. Admittedly rare i later years.)

Unfortunately I wasn’t allowed to open source it, and it’s now lost in the void after a takeover. :(

Good luck to you. It’s not an impossible project. :)

offlineguy commented on Just what does “code as data” mean anyway? (2014) adambard.com/blog/what-is... · Posted by u/jxub

skybrian · 8 years ago

In Lisp, my understanding is that while you can manipulate the AST directly, you will likely introduce a bug unless you use the special functions for handling hygienic macros? And each flavor of Lisp has its own way of doing hygienic macros.

offlineguy · 8 years ago

If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can introduce bugs regardless of programming language.