Barclays Not Smart - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-06-26/barclays-not-smart <comment><USER2> To sum this up:

A "dark pool" is simply a trading exchange where orders aren't published (trades, of course, are). Huge investment banks run dark pools as a service for clients. The premise behind a dark pool is that institutional buy-side investors would use them instead of a lit exchange because they want to trade against other buy-side investors, without market-makers and aggressive, automated sell-side firms to skim off their profits. Barclays LX is a dark pool set up by Lehman.

It turns out that the idea that big buy-side investors can trade with each other without middlemen in a dark pool is probably a fiction. The premise probably doesn't hold. There are at least two big reasons for this:

1\. Giant institutional investors tend to take similar positions. If one giant firm is gobbling up FCOJ, the others probably want to trade in the same direction. So when you restrict your trading partners to similarly structured and sized firms, you tend not to have counterparties to take the opposing sides of trades.

2\. The timing of decisionmaking at giant firms is slow, and there aren't all that many of them relative to the market as a whole. So even if there are counterparties to match for trades, that match probably doesn't happen within the window of time that the traders actually want to trade (you want to move a block of stock in minutes or hours, but if you can only trade with other giant mutual funds, it might take days to find a match; think about the difference between filling a market order on ETrade versus trying to sell your house).

So for Barclays to make LX actually do something, rather than just acting like a frustratingly inert list of big firms, they needed to get sell-side firms to trade there too. Which they did.

The subtext of the Bloomberg post is that getting the sell-side into the LX dark pool was probably a necessity, because when you look at the revenue numbers, Barclays was making its real money from the buy-side; the HFT traders paid it a pittance compared to the mutual funds. All things being equal, it was economically irrational for Barclays to court HFT firms. Of course, in reality it was entirely rational, because without the automated traders, no trades would have happened at all.

<comment><USER3> This is a good summary of a typically rational article by Matt Levine. His entire commentary on the industry post-"Flash Boys" is similarly enlightening and balanced.

There is a striking parallel in the futures markets: Their original role was to help farmers hedge their risk of bad harvests by setting a fixed price for future delivery of foodstuffs. That market overtly and explicitly requires that there be hedgers and speculators, otherwise - no trade. Dark pools are no different, for the reasons you nicely outline above.

You could argue that what Barclays really should have done was channel some retail flow into LX, but sources of that kind of unlimited, innocent liquidity get snapped up pretty quickly.

<comment><USER4> I've been quite impressed with Matt Levine's articles. Also, while I realize that Bloomberg probably exerts zero editorial control over View, I've been quite happy with Bloomberg's Wall Street coverage as of late.

<comment><USER5> He's intelligent, well educated (Harvard, Yale Law), worked at the top firms in M&A law and derivatives sales (Wachtell, Goldman) and then left to write articles about finance.

You can't ask for much more than an intelligent former insider with excellent writing skills who wants to explain financial news to others. He makes other journalists look as uninformed as they are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Dark pools didn't start off as a bad idea.

Their purpose was to allow big institutions to "hide" their block orders. Previously if an institution wanted to trade a big block, it had to break it up via a VWAP or POV algo and trade it over the day or to go to a sell side institution to find a buyer, in which case the broker would take a commission that is often 10x what the regular DMA commission would be.

To be fair, this is still what most buy side firms do these days. Dark pools really haven't helped much in this regard as many funds now just bypass them when they can.

> Meanwhile, Barclays was advertising LX to high-frequency traders by offering > them more information, lower fees, and faster connections than it gave to > institutional investors.

This is the basis of problem here.

A dark pool doesn't publish a bid/ask like other exchanges do. The idea was that everyone would be on equal footing wrt the information present. It appears as though Barclay's has been giving HFTs additional information, including the bid/ask spread in some cases, which totally defeats the purpose of having a dark pool to begin with.

The reason they did thsi is that there probably only needs to be one dark pool for the entire US, but each bank realized that it could make some serious money running their own, the only problem is that now you have the same problem as any web 2.0 market place startup does.

"How do you get the buyers and sellers"?

The HFTs started offering the banks boat loads of money to have access to the order flow in their dark pools if the bank reached certain thresholds of flow. To get to the required flow the banks started routing as many orders as the could, keeping RegNMS in mind, to their dark pools first before settling the orders on other exchanges.

I've been told with a straight face by some sell side brokers that I could not tell their SMART order routers to skip dark pools when trying to send my order to the market, again RegNMS excepted. It wasn't until we stopped trading through them that they relented and allowed us to by pass their dark pool.

<comment><USER2> Wait, you had me until the last 2 paragraphs.

The whole point of Levine's article is that HFTs _did not_ offer the dark pool operators "boat loads of money". The dark pool operators gave the HFTs sweetheart deals to induce them to trade in their pools. They didn't do that because the HFTs paid them. They did it because without the automated traders, the dark pools wouldn't have worked at all.

By the numbers, if the big institutional investors wanted HFTs out of the dark pools, Barclays should have kicked them to the curve. Not ethically, but simply from a practical business perspective. But Barclays couldn't do that... or, they could, but then the institutional clients would have stopped trading in the LX pool, because they'd never get filled.

<comment><USER6> Ok, a few points.

1) most institutional clients don't necessarily want to trade in a dark pool, their orders are just routed there by the broker's smart order routers. You would be very surprised how many huge funds don't do post trade analysis.

2) the dark pool operators make money from the HFT's not in terms of the commission, but in terms of collocating fees, market data fees, and the right to be one of only a few HFTs allowed in the dark pool via collocating, ie exclusivity.

The boat loads of money was maybe an akward of stating it. To match a trade you need people on both sides of the trade. The HFTs were the missing piece the other side of the trade. WIthout them no trades, hence no money. With them, you trade more... alot more, which leads to the boat load of money that starts following when the HFTs come in.

I may have a biased view as I'm on the buy side but not on the HFT end of things:)

<comment><USER7> Sorry, you are mixing and matching concepts from reading too many articles on HFT.

> the dark pool operators make money from the HFT's not in terms of the > commission, but in terms of collocating fees,

No. Dark pool don't really charge collocation fees. Barclays LX didn't. Most dark pools are in Weehawken and it's just a simple $500 cross-connect from your existing trading system.

> market data fees

It's a dark pool. There is no market data to charge a fee from.

> , and the right to be one of only a few HFTs allowed in the dark pool via > collocating, ie exclusivity.

Not in the case of Barclays LX. They let every HFT in at very low rates which is the entire point of the article.

<comment><USER8> From the article:

> Barclays was advertising LX to high-frequency traders by offering them more > information, lower fees, and faster connections than it gave to > institutional investors.

The "more information" being the key part - it sounds like the pools weren't as dark as their customers were led to believe. Your other points are spot on, though.

<comment><USER9> If Barclays was displaying resting orders to HFTs in LX, the AG wouldn't beat around the bush about it in the complaint. It would have been the headline issue. Doesn't seem likely that was the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Let's ignore the fact that Barclays manipulated the data underlying the chart in Figure 1. Think about what the chart is intended to convey.

One-second alpha, on the vertical axis, measures an "excess return" certain market participants earned over a 1-second trading interval. It represents skill in trade execution. What Barclays is saying, by pointing giddily at the bubbles in the lower-left quadrant, is that it has collected a fruitful variety of institutions particularly rotten at competently executing their trades. The customer being pitched is being told that it, being smarter than all those clowns, can now take advantage of their naïveté.

If I were an existing customer, I'd be insulted to be so portrayed. Or maybe not. Maybe I'd assume I was the lone smart bugger in the top-right. I guess that's what this chart counts on to generate, not lose, business.

<comment><USER11> If you're buy-side you know you're a clown on the execution side - it's not your core competency, it's just a cost center that you vaguely want to keep as low as possible while you make your real money through long-term value investing or serving your fundamentals-trading clients. You'd rather trade in the pool full of clowns, where the sharks get kicked out, and execution will be basically a wash rather than a transfer of money from you to the HFTs whose core competency is execution.

<comment><USER2> Yes, you would rather trade in the clown pool. But isn't the problem that the sell-side doesn't just fleece the clowns, but also enables the clowns to trade at the rate they expect to trade at?

<comment><USER11> Well yeah. My point is simply that if Barclays had really managed to achieve what the chart appears to show without compromising execution rate (probably impossible), their clients would have been happy rather than insulted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> From the article:

 _The complaint is long on evidence of false advertising, but shorter on evidence that the "predatory trading" was actually predatory. There's a certain amount of foamy fulmination at "predatory trading," but nowhere is there any evidence suggesting that Barclays's institutional clients were actually harmed by it._

He then goes on to suggest that the lawsuit is therefore essentially frivolous (in his words, "a self-referential argument.")

His reasoning is flawed, of course. For one thing, commercial fraud is _always_ harmful, even if you can't always prove that someone suffered specific losses for it. For another, the banks agreed explicitly agreed to comply with all pertinent legislation (including the Martin Act) in exchange for the privilege of obtaining a charter which allowed them to become banks in the first place. Whether one thinks the Martin Act is overly broad or gives too much leeway to prosecutors is of secondary importance.

<comment><USER13> Yes, I had the same problem with the article. The lawsuit just seems to be cherry picking which part of Barclay's paradoxical claims to trust, not creating its own self referential problems.

If Barclay's could get HFTs out of their products then their situation wouldn't be much different from diet cola and they could raise a fair amount of FUD against the competition irregardless of quality of evidence. But you can't sell the same product yet claim you have removed the "harmful" component. Claiming you know it is not really harmful just means you were up to 2 fraudulent activities to deprive the market and your customers of a better arrangement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't know enough to have an opinion on HFTs and whether they actually provide liquidity. However, creating sub-markets that are illiquid if you remove them, but become liquid if you add them back in, strikes me as a pretty powerful bit of evidence in HFT's favor. Rebuttals? (Serious question.)

<comment><USER15> The whole point of this article is to present a pro-HFT viewpoint. I don't have an opinion either way (yet), but this is clearly written by someone with an HFT bias.

<comment><USER14> I like to look at the objective facts that are very hard to spin. There aren't many of them, but you can make a lot of hay with them. "We tried not including this thing, and it didn't work, and then we put them in, and it did work" is a very powerful argument, since I value reality and real things over any amount of handwaving and theory. That's something that can't so much be spun as rebutted, hence my phrasing. (For instance, perhaps it's simply a lie. I don't know.)

(The Great (Psuedo-)Intellectual Temptation is to privilege theory over facts. It is not a path that leads to anything useful, but it sure is a popular one.)

<comment><USER16> Just to throw it out there (I don't have the answers here), but "We made a private dark pool, tiny relative to the size of the overall market, and it was illiquid without HFT" isn't really the same thing as "the stock market would be illiquid without HFT".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Matt Levine is awesome. Thanks for sharing. He's also the world kingpin of footnotes. It's almost as if he's a frustrated academic who needs to hide his humor in citations.

<comment><USER18> Personally I find an abundance of footnotes to be bad style. If it's important enough to say it then say it in the main text, otherwise don't bother.

<comment><USER17> It's part of his personal style.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have a couple of questions for the people on here who actually understand all this stuff.

The argument, as I understand it, for why it is useful to have HFTs in markets like the one in the article, is that they provide extra liquidity. My understanding of liquidity is that it is some kind of measure of how quickly an asset can be sold. I'm sure there are some formal definitions, but that has to be something like [asset value/sale time], where larger is more liquid.

It seems to me, though, that liquidity is necessarily very time-scale dependent. For example, there is basically no liquidity in any market at the picosecond (or whatever is faster than current trading) timescale, because (by definition) no-one trades that fast. So really, although liquidity can be calculated as a rate, it is more appropriate to look at the distribution of available liquidity over different time scales. In other words, being able to sell $10 of assets in 10 days is not really the same as being able to sell $1 of assets every day for 10 days.

My questions are:

1) is my understanding of liquidity as being timescale dependent correct, and if not, why not?

2) if yes, what is the social value of "faster" liquidity?

3) if "faster" liquidity has greater social value, is there any point at which the cost of maintaining that liquidity (which is what I understand HFT profits to be) exceeds the value of having liquidity at that timescale?

edit: spacing for visual clarity

<comment><USER20> Liquidity is a measure of how much you can execute/trade immediately at any one moment in time. You can think of the fair price as the midpoint of the best bid and best offer -- but nobody can trade at this, so if you want to buy or sell, you have to buy slightly above the fair price or sell slightly below the fair price. And if you want to buy or sell a lot, you have to buy or sell standing bids/offers at prices worse than the best bid/offer, e.g. MSFT has best bid at 36.60 and best offer at 36.61 with 30,000 shares at every price. If you wanted to buy 100k shares immediately, you'd have to buy 30k at 36.61, 36.62, 36.63, and 10k at 36.64, for some average price slightly higher than 36.62.

So I would say that liquidity is _not_ timescale dependent -- its a measure of the quality of your execution (relative to the fair price) if you executed everything you needed to _right_ now. Personally, I would say no to (3) -- HFT offers liquidity at all times and only transacts when their counterparty decides to cross bid-ask spread, so if they didn't want the price HFT was offering than they wouldn't hit their bid/offer. The cost of all the ancillary infrastructure (wireless connections, backspace, hiring harvard/mit quants) is independent of the direct cost (crossing bid-ask spread) a consumer pays to the HFT, so the actual cost paid by the customer is a fraction of what the HFT has to pay to be able to display the quotes it does.

<comment><USER19> Ok, I think I understand what you're saying in principle, but I still don't really understand how HFT, or indeed anyone who is only trading on prices, adds liquidity as you have defined it, beyond the addition of their initial capital: it's not having quick trades that makes a market liquid, just having available trading partners with enough capital to complete the trade you want. It strikes me that, if you roughly assume that price-based trading is random, then all that fast trading "really" does is speed up the process by which some people randomly lose their money and others are randomly given that money (those people generally being the price-based traders themselves, presumably, because they will be the ones involved in the majority of the trades).

So my follow-up question is: what is the particular benefit of being able to trade as quickly as possible?

And a related, more specific, question that might be easier to target and explain: I'm sure I've heard people suggesting capping trading frequency (which might be a ridiculous idea, I don't know); how would doing so harm liquidity?

Also, just to clarify my previous question about cost, I was trying to refer to the "cost to the system", rather than direct costs. I'm not sure I can properly define what I mean by that, but I suppose it would be something like if the total revenue going to the HFT firms or similar people was greater than the return to the rest of the system of having their services. I'm not really convinced by market arguments against such cost/benefit inversions taking place, because inertia and changing circumstances can move institutions from being helpful to being unhelpful without markets being in a position to compensate.

If I've made any other bad assumptions, please point them out as well.

<comment><USER20> The benefit of being able to trade as quickly as possible (as an HFT) is you are able to put more shares/contracts up at each price, ie. provide more liquidity -- this is because anytime the price is going to move against you, you get hit for 100% of your standing bid or offer, and the faster you to cancel those orders are the fewer times this happens. This lets you post more liquidity on average and pull it when the price is no longer good.

Capping trading frequency would lower liquidity. Simply put, the less up-to- date your view of the market is (if orders are only matched every T milliseconds, you could have a view of the market thats up to T milliseconds behind), the more uncertainty there is in your prediction, which will result in you quoting a wider bid-ask spread or quoting smaller amounts at each price. I'd say for T very small (say, T < 5ms), it will make zero difference to liquidity or HFT profits.

I suppose its tough to answer your final question. I'd say liquidity is very useful, and tighter bid-ask spreads help price discovery and help portfolio allocation (the wider the bid-ask spread, the less likely a given portfolio will be allocated in the desired way, since you can only replicate a portfolio modulo transaction costs). Anytime a transaction tax or other regulation is implemented that targets only HFT, liquidity drops, often drastically (e.g. Swedish equity markets in 90s had a relatively high transaction tax that essentially dropped all trading volume on their exchanges to zero, and trading moved to other European exchanges trading equivalent derivatives on Swedish stocks). In addition, HFT industry profits are low -- I'd be surprised if it breaks 5 billion/yr.

<comment><USER19> Thanks for replying. I like your time averaged argument, that seems to be a good explanation of why it is useful, both to the trading entity and to the market, to be able to change orders quickly.

I think my final question about the balance between total costs and benefits is motivated by the fact that discussion about HFT and similar price-based trading always makes it sound like a lot of effort is being invested in the competition to find profit-making trades, and my wondering whether all that effort could be more productively used elsewhere.

I understand the market motivation behind doing it, which I think yours and others' explanations justify well, however, as I mentioned previously, I remain unconvinced by the allocative efficiency of markets in all situations, and these 'arms race' situations seem like good candidates for market failure (to stress, I mean failure only in terms of the societally-efficient allocation of resources, I don't doubt the local efficiency).

Your note about HFT profits obviously goes some way to addressing this by suggesting that the level of resource allocation isn't that high - I have to confess I didn't realise the profits were quite so low. I do, however, think that revenue is the more important figure, because that will capture the productive effort that we, as a society, are investing in this activity, which we can then usefully compare to the liquidity benefit we get from it.

In case you are interested, I think I have been spurred down this line of thinking by having recently read 'The Collapse of Complex Societies', by Joseph A Tainter, which I can heartily recommend if you haven't already read it. My argument is really his, just applied to the frontier of our times - finance.

And as a personal aside, if you don't mind my asking, you seem to have a good understanding of the realities of this situation, were or are you involved professionally?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I struggle to feel bad for these institutional investors. These investors are mostly fund managers who make on the order of 1% of assets under management yearly... Arguably, their jobs are composed of two functions: decide on investment decisions, and execute on those decisions. Yet - they are unable to do their own analysis of execution quality.

A simple determination of execution quality does not require a PhD in math - it requires comparing the price of execution to the market shortly after the execution occured (If it moved against you, you could argue there was "adverse selection"). I am not saying what Barclay's did is right. I just feel it says more about the inept behavior of institutional investors that they were not able to smell a rat earlier on.

The article rightly points out that HFT drives dark pools. If an institutional investor didn't know that, I am very confused why we pay them so much money...

<comment><USER3> Who's money do you think they are managing?

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure how the answer to that question is relevant to the comment you're replying to.

<comment><USER3> Parent "Struggle[s] to feel bad for institutional investors" as if this was a class of whiney rich people who's money was under threat. It's not of course; it's mutual funds and pension money - our money.

Let me expand a bit: dark pools exist because of an asymmetry in the public markets caused by their fragmented structure. Those money mangers recognized that, so they sent flow to a place which was explicitly marketed as a tool to mitigate that asymmetry.

Contrary to the parent's post, transaction cost analysis is not an especially exact science and the tools available to fund managers are not particularly helpful or well-integrated. Their sell-side partners are not overly invested in helping them either, since they have their own issues (intense cost pressure, declining flow, regulators everywhere...)

<comment><USER2> No, that's a bit of spin you put on it. His point is that the people running money for the institutional investors are themselves highly sophisticated, and if a point so simple as "you need sell-side financial entities to make a stock trading exchange work" eluded them, there is a bigger problem than Barclays marketing; those firms are being run by incompetents.

 _Later_

Sure! It's not controversial that Barclays marketing of the LX exchange was misleading. Nobody is sticking up for Barclays. But the important, subtle point is that the LX pool _probably couldn 't have worked_ the way Barclays claimed it could. It doesn't matter how they marketed it. Without market makers, with a collection of like-minded investors, it's hard to get action.

So it's not that Barclays was somehow corrupted by HFT traders. It's that they were trying to lead-to-gold alchemy to sophisticated clients, who should have known that Barclays can't turn lead into gold.

<comment><USER3> You are right, I responded to my interpretation.

That being said, the trading desks on the buy side are, for the most part, not very sophisticated at all. They are dealing with the same evaporating liquidity as the sell side, but they have far less ability to manage it. They are utterly reliant on the tools their brokers offer - tools which are generally very good (algos, and dark pools). In this case they are guilty of naivety perhaps, but it's nativity born of desperation. Barclays did directly say, "no predatory flow." At some point, even on the street, you have to believe direct statements made by your counter parties.

 _Later_ I'm enjoying this; I have to run to a meeting unfortunately. Sorry :)

<comment><USER22> The idea that the buy side is less sophisticated than the sell side (or the new breed of participant the HFTs) is plain false. Their whole value proposition (how they justify that 2 & 20 they charge) is that they are sophisticated players in the market that can deal with these complexities. For instance, I've written HFT software for a buy side firm.

To put this into prospective, there are single buy side firms that are bigger than the entire HFT market making industry.

<comment><USER3> 2 & 20 is exclusively the preserve of hedge funds, an entirely different animal to large-scale institutional asset managers who make up the bulk of the buy side.

There's no arguing with the sophistication of the portfolio management side of institutional AM's - these are smart, well-compensated people with excellent tools and first-class support from their own companies and the street's research. Once you get to the buy side trading desk - the people responsible for implementing the decisions of the PMs, and the people who are dealing with this rapidly-changing, fragmented market - things become different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I dug up the original chart, before Tradebot was removed: [http://jackgavigan.com/2014/06/30/barclays-smoking- chart/](http://jackgavigan.com/2014/06/30/barclays-smoking-chart/)

</comment><comment><USER24> There seems to be a false dichotomy here - free-for-all or no automated traders. Automated firms are included in the diagram, so Barclays wasn't hiding them. It was, however, claiming to remove those it considered bad actors, and then wasn't actually doing so. Surely allowing HFT firms but removing those (specifically, Tradebot) that didn't follow the rules would still have left enough trade flow to enable the buy-side to get value? If it's bad enough to warrant removal from the diagram, it's bad enough to be removed from the pool, leaving every other participant to continue as before.

</comment><comment><USER25> Amazing info and article.

In the end, Barclays created the LX dark pool to get more fees from individual investors and smaller investors. They used HFT firms as the carrot and stick to extract more revenue from the suckers using HFT and the volatility/liquidity that it can provide.

> Meanwhile, Barclays was advertising LX to high-frequency traders by offering > them more information, lower fees, and faster connections than it gave to > institutional investors.

Seen from an investor who bought the marketing, this is dishonest. But seen from the Barclay's boardroom, if they make all their money off of non HFTs, they need to increase buying/selling on their smalls and institutional investors. So of course Barclays would make it really cheap for the HFTs, all the more action to extract fees and commissions from the clients/suckers that pay.

</comment><comment><USER26> Are there any services out there that allow automated trading, but as a game? There are many services that let you do manual trades as a game, but I've never seen automated ones.

<comment><USER27> Interactive Brokers also offer a paper trading account that can be traded via their API just like a regular account, although you need to have an account with them.

There are some limitations on specific order type/venue combinations, but most things are supported.

[https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=tws&p=pape...](https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=tws&p=papertrader)

<comment><USER26> I've looked at them before, but I don't have $10k to tie up on what is just me playing around.

<comment><USER28> Nah bro. You can try their demo account. The login is 'edemo/demouser' and you can use it via their API as well. The only issue is that the demo account is not persistent, so you'll lose your positions the next trading day lol. Plus there are tons of peeps sharing the account trying to test their trading bot as well after-hours. But if you're just doing daytrading QA, it's pretty good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Some thoughts on this as the former head of electronic trading product management at Deutsche Bank

[http://dave-hunter.com/why-barclays-lied](http://dave-hunter.com/why- barclays-lied)

</comment><comment><USER30> Is this not a clear case of Fraud & Mis-representation? If a person had pulled this kind of stunt you would see criminal chrges flying all over the place ..Why are bank executives at Barclays not going to jail over this?

<comment><USER31> Because money _is_ power.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I resent the title of this article.

<comment><USER33> I believe it's a pun on the "U smart" comment made by one of the VPs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> "Meanwhile, Barclays was advertising LX to high-frequency traders by offering them more information, lower fees, and faster connections than it gave to institutional investors."

Whether intentional or not, it sounds like they built a combination public swimming pool / alligator farm.

Marc Andressen recently penned a screed that made the rounds about how Sarbox and friends have killed the IPO. He's not wrong there. IPOs are happening much later and less frequently because of regulation.

Where he's wrong is... well... he's basically like a resident in a high crime neighborhood asking why all the shops have bars on their windows. It's driving away business after all! Let's take those bars off the windows...

But as soon as you do that, you get a smash and grab the next night. Sorry Marc, but there's bars on the windows because the neighborhood is full of thugs.

The ultimate problem -- and the ultimate thing that has killed the IPO -- is that the financial system is full of glorified white collar street hustlers who look at markets as something to bust out for short term profits.

Like the proverbial bad neighborhood I think the only solution might be to move out. I can see technologies like Bitcoin and systems like crowd funding as the embryonic beginnings of a new financial system with greater intrinsic transparency and with cryptographic authentication baked in from the get-go. Perhaps, with that added transparency, it'll be possible to engineer in a fundamentally better security model to discourage predation.

<comment><USER35> With the correction that the only way the "public" can swim is by riding the "alligators".

>>> Let's take those bars off the windows...

Or maybe let's fight the actual crime instead of installing thicker and thicker bars on the windows of businesses which aren't actually criminal. I'm not sure there was ever a high-crime neighborhood which was fixed and turned into a flourishing community by increasing the thickness of bars and putting more metal doors and barbed wire.</comment></comment>


Wal-Mart charges more for some products online than in stores - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/now-featured-on-wal-marts-website-higher-prices-1510517219 <comment><USER3> Back in college, a friend of mine wanted to buy an expensive SLR camera. He researched the prices diligently, and found a place in LA with the best price. So we all piled into his car, and went to buy it.

Once there, he naturally bought a lense, flash, case, carrying strap, film, filter, etc. Back in the dorm, he ruefully added things up and compared again and found out he'd paid, in aggregate, top dollar!

An awful lot of analysis and variables go into setting prices, and whether an item is in-store or online is just one factor.

<comment><USER4> > he naturally bought..

Is it not well know that addons have the greatest markup?

<comment><USER3> We were kids. And so we learned :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Shouldn't this be ok? Sometimes they want loss leaders for you to come in person. Also, they may not have 100% accuracy on your location until you check out. This is no different than having prices change by geography. You wouldn't expect to pay the same in Mountain View as you would in Albequerque.

<comment><USER6> > You wouldn't expect to pay the same in Mountain View as you would in > Albequerque.

If this isn't the appeal of walmart, what is?

<comment><USER5> Low prices, yes. But real estate and labor costs are lower in New Mexico than California. Perhaps taxes too. So they have different prices by region. (Otherwise they couldn't be profitable everywhere, and then they lose economies of scale) Not that different on pricing differences between countries.

<comment><USER6> Right, but then why buy from walmart if the competitive price is gone (as shown in the original example of online vs retail price)? If it's just a single region agnostic price plus some location sensitive fee, they're just another branded ecommerce store beholden to their sellers and distribution for pricing determination. Amazon wins with price, quality, inventory, and selection.

<comment><USER7> > Amazon wins with price, quality, inventory, and selection.

Not always... I bought something on Amazon last week and the 3rd party seller drop shipped it from Sam's Club (wal-mart). I saw the packing slip, looked it up on samsclub.com and realized I had paid 20%/$4 more at Amazon than they paid at Sam's Club.

Amazon has a great price on a lot of things, which has taught us to think they have a great price on everything. Amazon also takes at least one day to get something to your house. If you need something immediately, that's where retail wins every time... it doesn't even matter what the price difference is.

<comment><USER6> Right, but we're discussing walmart.com vs amazon.com because walmart.com doesn't have the crazy low prices that the retail store does. You're absolutely right you can easily undercut amazon at sam's club, so (eg) why can't walmart.com match that undercut?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Isn't this... obvious?

Experimenting with offline prices and measuring its impact on sales is hard. Doing it online is very easy. You can even show different prices to different users and gather information about their shopping throughput.

Thinking that a company's ultimate goal is to increase profits, it's easy to see why they would want to do this.

</comment><comment><USER9> This isn't exactly surprising to me. On Amazon especially, some common items like school supplies are priced way higher than equivalent items in brick and mortar stores. I always figured it had to do with the cost of shipping and supply chain logistics.

<comment><USER10> You can look up the costs - and even sign up for the seller programs - <USER2> easily. For small items, it looks like FBA (Fulfillment By Amazon) costs $2.50 a pop to handle prime shipping/customer service/returns/etc. And I think you have to pay for shipping to their warehouses, too. Plus warehouse space, but that looks very cheap for small volumes at a glance.

So if you see something that costs $5 with multipack options of 3-4/$10...well, there you go.

And you too can make any product available to a huge audience with 2-(ish)-day shipping...no wonder they're going like gangbusters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I thought everyone knew this... a lot of retail stores do this.. sometimes it's more expensive in the store than online. I know target and walgreens like to charge more in the store than online.

<comment><USER12> Also, some stores, like Target, will not price-match their own website. The operations are apparently far enough apart that they won't sell that item on the same sale schedule or price ever.

<comment><USER13> I've had them price-match their own website. Your mileage may vary.

<comment><USER12> Interesting; this could also be a newer thing. The only time I tried and failed at two Targets was probably a couple years ago by now.

<comment><USER14> I did this successfully at a completely different store - a Media Markt in Berlin - using the approach: "Look, I want to buy this and I could order it online to this store, which would be silly: I have to wait, and you don't make a sale" in a slightly amused, non-confrontational tone. Now I don't think it is likely that the result depended on the approach, but inofficial store policy. Media Markt is expensive except for special offers.

It was about two Logitech gamepads for ~15€ less overall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is known as "Price Discrimination" and is perfectly fine: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination)

<comment><USER16> As are articles that point out that price discrimination is happening. Free markets function best with well informed consumers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wal-Mart is a corporation right? They can set prices as they see fit. The market set's the prices of everybody's startup here on HN, why would it be any different for them?

<comment><USER18> Because their slogan is "Always Lower Prices. Always." So when it's obvious they are lying, it's nice to point it out to others who may not have noticed.

<comment><USER19> That sounds like a generic corporate slogan, not a contractual obligation

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Amazon sets their prices to match prices of online retailers automatically. Others do too. WM would defeat this by setting online prices higher, making their in store the lowest price.

</comment><comment><USER21> Without tax and wages cheating everything would be more expensive online than in (large) stores. Amazon shouldn't be able to match Walmart in prices at all. Nor should any other online store.

I get that that doesn't match your experience after 15 years of Amazon.com being cheaper than stores, but there are clear reasons for that and those reasons have been going away.

Tax treatment has been equalizing, Amazon is now charging VAT in a different (much more fair) way, and there has been action against the abuse of international and interstate postal agreements to get free or absurdly cheap deliveries.

<comment><USER22> Because Walmart physical store employees get paid a lot, right?

I don't find it hard to believe that there's plenty of cheating going on, but I'd bet online will still win in the future. Workers are being replaced, while well located real estate is only getting more expensive.

<comment><USER21> [http://gothamist.com/2015/08/15/life_inside_the_nightmare_am...](http://gothamist.com/2015/08/15/life_inside_the_nightmare_amazon_wo.php)

Point taken, although I do think Walmart still wins in terms of labour conditions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I used to order everything from them online - it was great, then I checked receipts and realized they were ripping me off.

No more orders from me.

No idea why they would do this - aren't they trying to compete with Amazon? They are only hurting themselves now.

I do still go to their stores every other month and try to stock up. Maybe that's what they want.

But they are no longer an internet company to me. And long-term I think that is foolish.

I wish Amazon grocery prices were competitive. But they like brand names too much, and I avoid those usually.

<comment><USER24> > I used to order everything from them online - it was great, then I checked > receipts and realized they were ripping me off.

What I usually do is go through their website for things I want to order, note their prices, and then go to the store. Anything on the list that's cheaper in the store I'll buy. I'll then purchase the remaining items from their website.

Given Discover's promotion of 5% back on online purchases from Walmart.com, it works out for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> They also include free shipping, so, maybe it's not that much more in the end?

<comment><USER26> Free shipping if your order is over a certain amount (I think $25). And it's really not free shipping if you pay for it indirectly. In my opinion it's actually worse because they use "free shipping" as a selling point, even though it's not free at all.

In fact, if they add x% to most products, requiring it to be over $25 is just a way of guaranteeing that you are actually paying for shipping in full, just not as an itemized option.

<comment><USER27> Isn't that obvious? How else would they pay for the "free shipping" if not in the profit they make on purchases?

<comment><USER26> The free shipping isn't from the profit they make from their products, it's from the extra cost added to all their products that are listed online. Their pre-shipping profit is greater than the profit of the items in the store. Once they spend the money to ship the items, it's roughly the same.

For example, let's say a widget costs $10 in Walmart stores and will cost $1 for walmart ship with their negotiated contracts. If I go to the store, I can pay $10 and buy the widget. However, if I go online, Walmart.com will say the item costs $11 with "free shipping", or I can pick it up in store for a $1 "discount" (so now I pay $10 for a "$11" item). So even though they get all the positive PR and subconscious biases associated with free shipping, they are not paying for it at all. They even pretend like you're getting a great deal by going and picking it up yourself, even though you're just paying what you otherwise would have if you skipped walmart.com entirely.

<comment><USER27> _The free shipping isn 't from the profit they make from their products, it's from the extra cost added to all their products that are listed online_

What's the difference between the profit they make from the products, and money they make from extra cost added to the products? Isn't that just another way to define profit?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Weird trends here lately. A friend of mine recently bought a jacket at REI online and saw it cheaper at the REI store. They wouldn't refund the difference and said "we don't price match our own products".

</comment><comment><USER29> My understanding is that Walmart's store managers have significant latitude in regard to merchandising and pricing. This conforms to my anecdotal experience regarding variations between stores within the same metropolitan statistical area and across states.

Somehow the fact that Amazon and Ebay have different prices for the same items in their online listings seems to shed some light here, but I'm not really sure exactly how or why.

</comment><comment><USER30> Prices and selection differ between what Alexa quotes and Amazon.com[1]. This kind of stuff is very common, but specifically highlighting Wal-Mart seems odd.

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/Frugal/comments/6evffg/alexa_prices...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Frugal/comments/6evffg/alexa_prices_items_higher_than_amazon_webstore/)

</comment><comment><USER31> Walmart literally advertises lower prices on select items if you drive to the store and pick it up. Right on the website.

[http://help.walmart.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1698/~/picku...](http://help.walmart.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1698/~/pickup- discount)

<comment><USER32> Amazon gets many of their prices by scraping competitors websites. Higher prices on walmart.com might mean higher prices on Amazon too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Yeah, no kidding. I have always worn just typical Levis work jeans for most of my adult life just like my grandpa, and the price for Levis has _always_ been "Holy smokes" cheap in Walmart stores and actually fairly expensive online.

</comment><comment><USER34> Some Kindle e-books are costlier than hard copies..</comment>


How should hacker parents protect their kids online? - <AUTHOR>

I have a two year old son and bunch of three-to-seven year old niblings. Recently my sister asked me what should she do to protect her seven year old online, and I realised I don't have a good answer. I gave my sister the typical sensible advice (talk to him about his online experiences, don't let him use Internet devices in an overly private setting like a closed room, etc), but I wasn't happy with the answer I gave. I realised that like so many other things about parenting, I don't know the answer.
I'm not overly conservative, I don't think I'm overly porn-protective or predator-hysteric or whatever, heck, I might've leeched a naked lady or two myself as a teen (at 2400 baud!) and don't think I became a Fox newsesque freak. That said, I don't think it's a good idea to let a seven year old roam the Internet freely (I cringe just thinking about my niblings reddit.com/r/wtf , and I know there's much much worse online). I think it's probably a very bad idea to let the government/an ISP protect the said seven year old, but I don't think s/he should be left alone on the Internet. I'm not even sure what are reasonable cutoff parameters by which to decide when and how give your child more freedom as they approach online adulthood.
What should a sensible, liberal and caring parent do to protect a child online over various ages? I'm interested in answers protecting toddlers to late teenagers, in answers targeting the whole range of tech-savvy to tech-clueless parents, including 'tech clueless but with a tech savvy friend/sibling who'll help set things up' and finally I'd definitely appreciate pointers to good, techie-oriented, not tawdry and not disgustingly commercialised information/opinion sources. <comment><USER2> This is a good question. We have the same problem at my house, with a 14 year old and a 12 year old. A couple years ago we thought about doing a product around it, controlling and monitoring access to our wifi in an unobtrusive and (reasonably) privacy- respecting way.

Our biggest problem is how engrossing the network is. It competes with homework and invariably wins. The only thing that works for us here are rigid rules that keep the computer unavailable during any time in which it is even possible that they might theoretically have homework that they could have forgotten about.

What clearly doesn't work is the "net nanny" stuff; it turns you into an (obnoxious) sysadmin for your kids. And, honestly: I don't want to know.

My general belief here is that the approach that will work here is to create the understanding that Internet usage is watched, that the kids are accountable for how they use it, but that in "the normal course of business" that capability isn't used; we don't actually want to see their chats or read their history.

I won't let my kids near Reddit. Not because I hate Reddit (Reddit's highs are higher than HN's highs), but because, like high-proof alcohol or cannabis, I think it's something you need a degree of emotional maturity and self- awareness to properly metabolize.

</comment><comment><USER3> First: I'm a teenager, if that matters.

I agree with you that ISP protection wouldn't be a good way, I secretly think Cameron just uses this as an excuse for something else (who knows).

\- I think the parents should decide what is good and bad for their children. My parents are very liberal at this because they know that I have more knowledge about that field than they would ever acquire (voluntary ;).

It's clear that nowadays you're not able to forbid the online world to a socially normal teenager or even some kids. So you have to show them what the risks are and you should escort your kid while playing online games, introducing them to the www.

You should also be aware that teenagers are able to evaluate the situation properly (most of the time). if your children are well-bred they know how to behave, even in the online world. You should just remind them sometimes that the online world is not a extralegal or completely mindless room, they have to maintain their manners.

If you cannot escort your kids (I'm not talking about the teenagers yet) it's better to install some blocking mechanisms, so the kids won't accidentally view 4chan's wired subsites or the like, but there's the thing with parenting: you cannot prevent it 100%, so your children should learn how to handle that stuff, too.

The WWW is a great invention, but it contains some dangerous things for kids. You cannot prevent that your kid will see porn or other nasty things, so the only way to handle this is to prepare your child. - it's hard to do good parenting in the 21st century, everything's changing so fast.

hope your kids turn to lovely parents :)

</comment><comment><USER4> I have had an internet connection since I was 11, and a computer a few year prior to that. Int he beginning the only way my parents let me use the internet/computer was in a public room (in our case it was the study)...as I got older my parents bought me my own laptop and allowed me more privacy to browse...as long as I did my homework, and didn't spend all day on the computer all was well.

No automated parental controls at all...being realistic I was always better at using the computer than my parents, I would have got around them anyway.

These days I would go one step further and say make sure the browser they are using has a good ad blocker etc. Begin with a public setting so you can keep an eye on them, then as they get older, just leave them be.

</comment><comment><USER5> Talk to them about browsing responsibly. The last thing you want to do is create a relationship of distrust between the parent and child. Once you cut off a communication channel, chances you aren't going to get it back.

I don't think censoring the internet or preventing the child from browsing in private is the way to go. It's going to happen, so might as well embrace it.

</comment><comment><USER6> A while ago, I read a comment by a parent who said they only let their child use the internet on the Wii. The advantage is that the content is displayed on a large screen in a shared family space, so they can keep a tab on it without restricting internet access.</comment>


Ask HN: do you use the 'format code' feature of your IDE? - <AUTHOR>

I am using PhpStorm and sometimes I hit the 'Reformat Code' command. The outcome is good, but eventually I am writing some WordPress-related code and it doesn't comply with the formatting guidelines of WordPress [1].<p>Do you use any formatting feature of your IDE, or do you format the code manually?<p>[1] http://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/coding-standards/ <comment><USER2> I'm currently programming in Go, and Google provides very strict constrains for its syntax (e.g. no braces on a new line, etc.). To take this a step further, my editors automatically runs the go fmt tool on saved files, which formats the code according to the guidelines for the style. That means indenting with tabs, aligning with spaces...

That's very pleasing that a language in an early stage has this kind of tools, because if I need to copy a code snippet from the web, it will almost everytime be formatted exactly like my own code. Same when I work with somebody else: no discussion over code formatting.

<comment><AUTHOR> I can see something similar exists for PHP/WordPress [https://github.com/squizlabs/PHP_CodeSniffer](https://github.com/squizlabs/PHP_CodeSniffer)</comment></comment>


Exxon Misled the Public on Climate Change, Study Says - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/23/climate/exxon-global-warming-science-study.html <comment><USER2> Also discussed yesterday, on a Bloomberg instead of NYTimes article about the study:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15084351](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15084351)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for letting me know...avoiding dupes...tragic that I failed this time. Timely study on an existentially important topic.</comment></comment>


A Look at the Internal Memos of Twitch and Periscope - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/18/can-the-past-help-a-vc-predict-the-future/ <comment><USER2> anyone else notice that the blurring of that 5th memo about their advertising/monetization efforts wasn't so good? Looks like CBS Interactive was twitch's advertising partner. Additionally their 'premium' CPMs were as high as $40. And the non-premium CPM were single digits. I couldn't quite make out the percentage breakdown between premium vs non-premium ads. They were both 2 figures. Once you have the percentages, it should be easy to deconstruct an educated estimate of the revenue of twitch based on traffic numbers from elsewhere.

Not sure it matters if this data is public or not, but it was interesting to see such an easily guessable blurring.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if Periscope is an effective social site for businesses to interact with customers.

<comment><USER4> It's made some headway, but it's not specifically designed for that.

A "Periscope for Business" is exactly what my team is building, we applied to Y Combinator with that idea :) , so far we've had fantastic response with our early prototype.

I'm a bit worried about all the emphasis investors make on founders' public archievments, I hope we can overcome that.</comment></comment>


List of pioneers in computer science - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pioneers_in_computer_science <comment><AUTHOR> Posted with a view to reading any interesting comments/anecdotes about them, by HNers who know/knew them or about them.</comment>


Show HN: Book Summaries written by a human, delivered to your Inbox - <AUTHOR> http://summa-rise.com <comment><USER2> Reading through the example email given, and perhaps reading on mobile spurs this idea, summary structure had a lot of headings and bullet points, which makes for a really long list of a summary. Would it be possible to instead make it a mind map of concepts and cross reference related ideas, instead or as well as a one dimensional list?

</comment><comment><USER3> Throwaway accounts since I don't have any info with me. I thought of something similar, but for news. Basically, a summary attempting to make everything as neutral as possible. I am not sure I would see a use case for a book -- but I am just a random person on the internet.</comment>


Jack Dorsey (Square/Twitter): "It's Really Complex To Make Something Simple." - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/11/jack-dorsey-charlie-rose/

<comment><USER2> One of the hardest things I've found is putting limits on things and getting others to understand that they are better than not having limits. If you're your own boss, it's pretty easy to dictate these things, but if you have to answer to others... Ugh.

From a programmer's point of voice, one of the best things about (sane) limits is that it's much, much easier to program for. Non-programmers tend to think that not having limits would be easier, but that's rarely the case.

From a user's point of view, limits help them make decisions faster. You aren't going to post a recipe on Twitter. You're going to use it for 1 thing: Quick status updates to your friends. It isn't an address book or a calendar or a webpage host. It could be, but they wisely chose not to be.

</comment><comment><USER3> There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult. -- Tony Hoare

</comment><comment><USER4> "Easy reading is damn hard writing."

-Nathaniel Hawthorne

<comment><USER5> Clever and true, but no 19th century American writer would ever have written in that way. Even Mark Twain, surely the closest in spirit to such a style, was an order of magnitude more grandiloquent than that in his published writing. And don't forget that "damn" was a swear word then ([http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=damn&year_sta...](http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=damn&year_start=1700&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3)). No, this is very much a 20th century aphorism. A quick look at Wikiquote reveals that the earliest validated citation is... Maya Angelou! In an interview from 1989. But they trace it back to Sheridan (1819):

      You write with ease, to show your breeding,
      But easy writing's curst hard reading.

Now here's how Americans really wrote in the 19th century (chosen at random from Hawthorne, <http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Hawthorne>):

 _There is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghostlike, the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime; and still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it._

Rather different! I can't resist another:

 _The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human countenance, bearing the traces not merely of outward storm and sunshine, but expressive also, of the long lapse of mortal life, and accompanying vicissitudes that have passed within._

<comment><USER4> Thanks. It did seem rather odd. Regardless, the sentiment is true. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Couldn't agree more: that's been the driving force behind our new startup, and our greatest challenge by far, i.e., how to keep it as simple as practicable.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you fail tell your audience you don't have the time to be brief.

<comment><USER8> "I have made it longer because I have not had time to make it shorter." ("Je N'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parceque je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.") -- Blaise Pascal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> why not post original interview (including transcript, copy-pasted verbatim by TC):

<http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11404>

what's with this TC/AOL loyalty on HN? I think those two outlets are loathsome.

<comment><USER10> Well the formatting on the transcript for the official site is pretty disgusting.</comment></comment>


Show HN: I created an iPhone app for my wild nights out - <AUTHOR>

The skinny: Katy Perry, Very Bad Trip, How I Met Your Mother and maybe a couple personal experiences... Many of us have experimented wild nights and tried to piece together what happened the next morning. Well, this is over. Last Night...? records your location automatically so that you can check out your route the next morning.
If you want to have a look: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/last-night.../id466239544?ls=1&mt=8
I think many of us have had this experience already: when you go out, have a great night, a bit too many drinks too, and wake up the next morning wondering what happened exactly. Where did you go? Did you stay at the same bar all night long? What time did you come back? How?
I have been developing iPhone apps as a freelance developer for a year now and thought it was high time I tackled this problem with a personal app. After 3 weeks of intense work and testing I give you: Last Night...?
What does it do? Once launched, it records your location in the background every 60 seconds/70 meters and a bunch of details such as the time, speed, accuracy, battery level and exact latitude and longitude. These different locations are then displayed in a table view. Each of the elements are clickable and let you see: the location you selected on a map, the whole route you followed that day, and details on the location you selected.
And because people usually stay a long time at the same bar, I implemented a pause mode that is triggered automatically after staying 10 minutes at the same location and which uses radio towers to detect when you start moving again. This mode allows battery power saving, and the active mode restarts automatically after you move a few hundred meters. Of course if you want to stop monitoring your location for some reason or another and then start monitoring again, you can do so manually. As for your data, you can back it up by emailing it to yourself as an XML file.
Is it only for nights out? Of course not! If you're bad with directions this app can help you rediscover the brilliant hidden restaurant you stumbled upon, or show a friend where the shortcut you take is to get to the office, or check that you were respecting the speed limit if you're learning to drive. Possibilities are endless!
Did you test it? Of course! I can tell you it was very "interesting" to monitor where I went, stopped, and what time I came back from my night out in Nice's old city centre! I also used it to monitor at what time I left home, arrived at work, and where I hit the slowest traffic.
What's next? The next big step will be to include an option to let people turn off the pause mode. This way, they can monitor their movements more accurately if they don't mind using a bit more battery power. The next update will also include translations in Spanish, Catalan and German.
And if I have time I will also include an option to change the speed from km/h to miles/h, as well as a bunch of other improvements I'm thinking about. <comment><USER2> Hey, I wrote one of these apps too .. its called "Fall Detector" and you can find it here:

[https://market.android.com/details?id=at.spantec.securemotio...](https://market.android.com/details?id=at.spantec.securemotion.falldetector)

You can use it to create a 'breadcrumb' trail as you wander around (hitting the green square at any time creates a 'user alert') and you can set it up to alert anyone you need to when the time comes, that you've fallen down and are utterly inactive.

;)

</comment><comment><USER3> What kind of accuracy are you seeing with the background location check? Does the app accurately pinpoint you at Joe's Bar, or the dry cleaners next door? I think it's a neat concept and remedying your black out is only scratching the surface of possibilities. Nice work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! :) When you're on the move accuracy is typically of 5-10m (it doesn't matter if the app is in background or foreground), so yes the app accurately pinpoints where you are.

Now, not to overwhelm the user with a multitude of entries the app only records your location every 70 meters if at least 60 seconds have passed. That means that the dry cleaners would have to be 70 meters away from Joe's bar to have an event recorded. I'm planning on making it more flexible by adapting the minimum number of meters / minimum time elapsed depending on your speed (if you're walking, cruising, driving fast etc.)</comment></comment>


I quit Instagram - <AUTHOR> https://inbound.org/discuss/i-quit-instagram <comment><USER2> uh. maybe twitter is planning on releasing their own auto-tagger based on computer vision?</comment>


America's Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor's Degree - <AUTHOR> http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=wWwv6kBkcTbYktwbjrJkskjtdhknjqvf

<comment><USER2> This article mainly seems to focus on the outcome for the bottom tier of high school students going to college. Top tier students may do much better.

A top student who goes to a top law, med, or business school is probably getting a trememdous ROI on education.

Interestingly, neither category describes the startup crowd. Hackers represents an unusual group - people who are able to study the hardest subjects in college and grad school, but who choose to work in such an unregulated and loose culture that nobody strictly needs a degree at all.

Law or Medicine require a grad degree - and as a result, the grad degree is very valuable (it's a gateway into the cartel that controls these services). Nursing also requires a degree.

Programming doesn't require a degree, but can't be done in any innovative way by someone who isn't smart enough to get a math/science/or engineering degree. It leads to an interesting kind of distain for formal education in a group that often has impressive formal credentials.

<comment><USER3> I think the disdain for academia comes from having to participate in the cesspool which 'liberal arts' have become. The words 'liberal arts' _used_ to describe someone who was skilled in both the sciences and the humanities; now it just identifies people who hated real work so much that they opted for the degree program that had 'Finger Painting' listed as an upper-division course.

Ok, maybe I'm being a bit hard on the Liberal Arts people, but when you busting your tail to finish classes that are actually hard, watching people coast through in easy degree programs can be very, very demoralizing; in fact, I was quite bitter towards academia for a few years because of it.

This almost caused me to give up on wanting to get a graduate degree, even though I love the subject, because I never wanted to become one of 'those' people, and the only thing that kept me going is that grad school is a really, really good time to try and start a company.

<comment><USER4> I went to a liberal arts college. "Liberal arts" still describes someone skilled in both sciences and humanites...sort of. What tends to happen is that the folks who major in hard sciences at liberal arts colleges become those people, while those who major in the liberal arts become basically unemployable. My fellow math/physics/CS majors (there were only about 10 of us per department per year, so we all sorta combined socially...) used to comment ironically that 50% of Amherst students never take _any_ math or hard science course, yet it is impossible for a science major to avoid taking any humanities or social science courses.

Two things you need to remember about this:

1.) The folks who major in English and take only easy courses will get their comeuppance in the job market, which now basically _requires_ quantitative skills.

2.) Many of those folks go to liberal arts colleges because they have a particular career track they _know_ they want to do, and they're fully willing to make the financial sacrifices for that. For example, one of my friends wanted to be a professor of English, specializing in poetry, from the day he got to college. Another wanted to be a librarian. They're willing to live like grad students until they're in their 40s to do so, and to take the financial hit afterwards that comes with their chosen professions. I can respect that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article boggles my mind. If you don't think the degree is worth the money then don't go to college. The worst thing that can happen is schools start teaching students to pass some government mandated generic career readiness test.

<comment><USER6> I think the point is that thanks to deceptive marketing, most people don't properly evaluate whether it is worthwhile to go.

As for a "generic career readiness test", that's probably pointless. On the other hand, some sort of standardized testing would be useful.

Take a student who got a B in calculus at Rutgers, and a similar student who got a B in calculus at NYU. Are they equally skilled at calculus (Hint: definitely not)? Given a standardized calculus test we could tell the difference.

<comment><USER7> There already are exams if you want to go on (e.g. that GRE link). But having all graduates take it regardless is quite useless, especially as a method to determine how "good" one program/class/graduate is to another.

We've already had to deal with standardized testing BS thanks to NCLB before college, and look at the mess now. Teachers only teach to the exam and that is really not a good thing.

<comment><USER6> I'm aware of the GRE math test (I took it many years ago). And if everyone took it and appropriate breakdowns were provided (e.g. "Students with SAT between 1300 and 1400 did scored 6 on the national"), that would be a good thing (at least to evaluate math majors). You look for your interval, and find a college that will do well by people like you.

Also, teaching to the test is fine _if the test is good_. If the test accurately measures knowledge of the subject (1), then teaching to the test means teaching the material. It's very rare for one of my students to do well on a test without knowing the material.

Regarding NCLB, the current mess is the same as the old mess. NCLB just gave teachers someone else to blame.

(1) Most calculus/physics/chemistry tests do a decent job of this for skill levels not too high. Most tests make good students indistinguishable from great ones, but that can be remedied by putting harder questions on. If someone gets a perfect score, the test is too easy.

<comment><USER8> > Also, teaching to the test is fine if the test is good. If the test > accurately measures knowledge of the subject (1), then teaching to the test > means teaching the material. It's very rare for one of my students to do > well on a test without knowing the material.

Sure, but do you really want the federal government to decide the appropriate curriculum across all colleges? "Sorry, we're dropping topology because it's not on the federal recommended list, and we're focusing on test readiness." Um, I'll pass on that.

<comment><USER6> The government wouldn't be deciding the appropriate curriculum. They would be creating a measuring stick to compare curricula. If, as you suggest, advanced courses were not on it, then it would simply be useless at the top: 80'th and 99'th percentile students would have the same score.

As for colleges cutting advanced classes, I just can't see it happening (1). If they can find students willing to take it, someone will teach topology (it's better than doing Calc 2 again).

Colleges don't suffer from the same institutional failings as public schools (they have their own unique institutional failings).

(1) Note: I have a few years of experience teaching in college, and a few more working in college math depts.

<comment><USER8> Your view of how this works wouldn't be all bad.

However, the original article was talking about standardized testing modeled after the test used in primary and secondary schools. This includes the government setting minimal, uniform standards, and has often led to cutting "advanced" or "peripheral" material to concentrate on teaching "fundamentals" (i.e. the stuff that bores the smart kids to tears). Schools that don't pull resources from other areas to concentrate on teaching to the test may see their funding cut, because their students don't do well enough on the tests.

When you talk about the positives of having standard tests, be careful what you wish for, because what shows up may not be what you had in mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Having read the article, I think the problem isn't that having a college degree is overrated, just that some people aren't cut out for school, and that this is okay, because there are plenty of good jobs that don't (or shouldn't) require a college education.

What boggles my mind is the guy in the article who spent eight years and over a hundred grand, all to end up forty-five units (three semesters) short of a degree? I can understand taking eight years -- that's how long it took me to finish up both of my degrees, because I worked, so that I could finish school with no debt.

Mr. Sob Story wasn't going to college. He partied for eight years, washed out, and now wishes he had made better use of his time. Rather than admitting this and learning from it, he makes the university system the scapegoat for his own lack of self-discipline.

</comment><comment><USER9> It was an easy choice for me. I got _paid_ to go to college. In Georgia, the HOPE scholarship paid for 100% of my tuition and fees, and the Pell grant paid for a decent portion of my living costs.

That said, education is one of the most valuable things in the world. If you're thinking of it as a risk/reward based on how much you pay versus how much you could earn, you're doing it wrong.

</comment><comment><USER10> In IT, I've found that the degree only has any influence on your first job. After that, future employers only care about your work history - no one cares anymore about your degree, your GPA, or the school. So if instead of going to college, you can find an employer who's willing to hire a high school grad, you may be 4 years (and many $$$) ahead of the game.

Does anyone know if this is the case in other industries? Does the degree make a difference to a prospective accounting clerk if she already has 5 years of work experience?

<comment><USER11> It's amazing what doors having attended a good university can open. I'm on my second job after graduation, and I could obviously tell that the university I attended had a much larger impact on my hiring than the last years' worth of work experience.

<comment><USER12> Have you been applying to large financial institutions because they seem to be the only ones who care anymore these days.

10 or 15 years into your career no one is going to care if you went to Harvard, MIT, Carnegie Mellon or any other school.

You reach a point where the general studies that you took are just assumed and people will begin to want to know the particular niche skills that you have experience with (e.g., you've worked developing an automated trading system or you've worked developing some sort of image processing app).

If I'm interviewing an engineer of 10 years and he mentions more than once where he went to school I am going to hammer him with technical questions. "OK Mr. MIT, let's see if that education really paid off."

<comment><USER11> I work at a small software development shop of about fifteen employees.

Though, I agree in 10 to 15 years, I'd be concerned if anyone even asked me what school I went to. I'd start to think it's not a place I want to be working.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


That square QR barcode on the poster? Check it's not a sticker - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/10/qr_code_sticker_scam/

<comment><USER2> Does anyone have metrics on how many people actually scan QR codes? I'd count my self as pretty technical and except for a few attempts years ago for novelty value I've never scanned one. I can't imagine non-technical people even knowing what these are but their recent proliferation makes me wonder if maybe I'm wrong.

<comment><USER3> I did an experiment in my town, placing my own qr codes over everything i could find. running for a month, with putting 80 or so qr codes through out town.

the number of scans i got was around 10. no one scans QR codes

I have been thinking about printing up my own posters, like "Scan the code below to donate to Toys for Tots", but i still don't think I'd get many scans. here's an article [http://www.veracode.com/blog/2012/06/dangers-of-scanning- qr-...](http://www.veracode.com/blog/2012/06/dangers-of-scanning-qr-codes- interview-with-eric-mikulas/)

<comment><USER4> If you got 10 scans after distributing 80 stickers I would not conclude that "no one scans QR codes". This is, instead, an impressive proportion of responses, unless I misunderstand.

<comment><USER3> To be fair, I'm more disappointed, that i didn't track each scan a little further, and I'm also disappointed no one flamed me when their scan took them to a web page telling them they shouldn't go around just scanning random things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I actually did do this once to a particular area of advertising. I took the time to make unique codes for each one replaced, and routed the requests past my own server to record each hit. The idea was simply to find out how much they get used, as a lot of clients seem to insist on having them as the only call to action on their advertising.

In the end there were about 20 proxied URL on an extremely high traffic footpath.Either people noticed the edges of the sticker (unlikely), or absolutely nobody in my area wanted to scan any of those suckers.

</comment><comment><USER6> well, it seems a very un-economic strategy, because

you need to invest in

      a) physical items (paper, glue)
      b) human workforce
      c) transportation (you need to get around town)

and also

      I) nobody uses QR codes

      see http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=qr%20code%2C%20qr%2C%20&cmpt=q and
      http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=qr%20code%2C%20qr%2C%20mail&cmpt=q

i run a quite popular create and read QR code website <http://miniqr.com>, and well let's say i won't get rich (for this sideproject)

mail spam works because it's cheap to distribute, physical QR-codes - not so much.

<comment><USER7> _nobody uses QR codes_

<http://picturesofpeoplescanningqrcodes.tumblr.com/>

(this has been posted on other QR code threads before, but is always relevant)

<comment><USER8> it's empty. Did they mean it to be this way?

<comment><USER9> thatsthejoke.jpg

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Another thing is that most apps show the Unicode URL:

      * User confirms he likes to open the url https://www.gооgle.cоm ('о' != 'o')
      * https://www.xn--ggle-55da.xn--cm-fmc/ is opened

<comment><USER11> Did you check xn--ggle-55da.com? Google's already registered it :). Some TLDs have restrictions on which IDNs can be registered, specifically to avoid this kind of spoofing...

<comment><AUTHOR> And in fact all new gTLDs will be required to have a policy to limit this kind of thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It'd be really interesting to scan codes in the wild, print replacements that forward it through a tracking service, and replace the originals. Information on when and where people scan QR codes across different markets (e.g. which products are most scanned) could be quite valuable.

<comment><USER6> i.e.: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4898851>

<comment><USER12> Completely missed that -- thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Google Glasses (and the competitors) might make QR codes very popular soon. Your camera will always be on and picking up any codes it happens to cross. This obviously eliminates the first friction point which is taking out your phone and pulling up your QR app.

But, the more I think about this the more I'm afraid for this. They could essentially act as real world cookies. They could track everything you've glanced at and be used to bombard you with ads or other things. I'm sure there will be resistance and then QR scanning features might be turned off by default. Then we're back to no one scanning QR codes.

</comment><comment><USER14> Spam is a best case scenario -- unexpected porn would be a more eye-searing experience. I remember this trick from the good ol' days of Slashdot.

<comment><USER15> Yes in London we've had Goatse QR codes deployed, much to the amusement of the deployer I imagine :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if there is a possible system where google goggles could replace QR codes, like a physical adwords. The advertiser submits their ad, google slaps a 'official google ad' watermark in the corner for orientation, and pairs the image with the desired url. QR codes already assume that the user has internet access. Users are much more friendly to the idea of holding their phones up to a billboard because it asked them to. Hijackers would need to run a card through goggle payment processing to get a dirty url to work in the system. And what does the advertiser get out of the whole thing? Analytics.

</comment><comment><USER17> I was chatting to a friend recently about how if QR Codes had taken off a bit more than they have (in terms of general population penetration, so your 50 year old parents would know what they are), that they'd become a pretty decent way to use for miscellaneous hijinks/spamming/attack vectors. Especially when that Samsung Android bug was discovered that could trigger the reset code, that in the wild would have been something crazy.

</comment><comment><USER18> I wrote about this a year ago <http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2011/12/how-to-prevent- qr-hijacking/>

It's already happening - on a small scale. QR codes are really popular in the UK, but I've only seen this sort of "sticker attack" once.

<comment><USER19> > QR codes are really popular in the UK,

I don't think that's accurate, at least for values of "really popular" that I understand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> That's funny, because I made such stickers that I put in Paris subway on top of ads: [http://emotion.inrialpes.fr/people/synnaeve/index_files/qr_w...](http://emotion.inrialpes.fr/people/synnaeve/index_files/qr_wiki_rdm_en.png) that redirect to a random Wikipedia page...

</comment><comment><USER21> I have the solution!

Rather than putting a QR code on the poster, put the actual URL there, so it's obvious when it's a spam URL.

And then let phones use OCR to visit the URL!

Then both the human and their phone can read it.

<comment><USER22> QR has error correction and stuff built in, OCR does not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Guerilla Marketing possibility by hijacking other people's ads?

<comment><USER24> Maybe, but a company doing this could probably look forward to some strongly worded letters from the lawyers of the company who bought the poster space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> How about not scanning robot barf in the first place?

</comment><comment><USER22> Good argument for customizing your QR code a little bit. Likely anyone who's going to do this will just print off a big pile of black and white perfect squares. If you design your media so that looks weird to people that's a single passive thing that will help protect your customers.</comment>