Researchers "see" through walls using ambient Wi-Fi signals and a smartphone - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612375/using-wi-fi-to-see-behind-closed-doors-is-easier-than-anyone-thought/ <comment><USER3> 2016: [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/08/keystroke_rec...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/08/keystroke_recog.html)

It's not much of a stretch to imagine that intelligence agencies have been heavily invested in this area and are far ahead of public research, given signals intelligence has basically been their bread and butter since forever. Moreover, Stuxnet was so advanced for the time that its existence stunned the world.

Keystrokes can be captured indirectly via audio analysis, electromagnetic emissions from wiring, and now RF imaging techniques looking at finger movements. Wouldn't be surprised if they can create multi-modal composite models to attain higher accuracy, or if RF imaging is able to capture lip/jaw movements these days.

The really sexy part is probably what they're able to do with fixed wing airborne platforms, where you can afford to pack ridiculously high-end sensors and local computing power on board.

It still weirds me out to think that a gimmick from 2008's _The Dark Knight_ is more or less a reality now, or will be soon if it already isn't.

<comment><USER4> Who cares?

They were busy snoring when it came to 9/11\. Fake WMDs, never ending wars against goat herders, snowden, not to mention 13 Russians who apparently swung an election.

If someone is busy triggering mail bombers and lunatic shooters just by targeting and upvoting their posts on social media what's all this sci-fi stuff good for? The more complex the world gets the more pointless all this superficial gimmickry looks.

Just look at the budgets thrown at these agencies. Its frankly sickening.

<comment><USER5> > They were busy snoring when it came to 9/11.

They weren't snoring of course, there's no shortage of evidence showing foreknowledge about 9/11 that was consciously ignored by the Bush administration and the intelligence services prior to the event and then (only half-successfully) covered up afterwards.

<comment><USER6> Hindsight bias at its finest.

The real issue was identified in the first few years after 9/11 - <USER2> patchwork of teams overzealously enforcing moats around their intel/data.

<comment><USER7> [https://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf](https://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf)

Actually read the report, or at least skim it starting from page 254. What you're saying is just not true.

<comment><USER8> Since we're speculating about spies, politics and secrecy to begin with, is it really in the spirit of the game to just trust a report published by the government that says the government was doing things right?

<comment><USER7> I'm not playing a game.

Specifically, which part(s) of the report are you refuting? Please provide pages and paragraphs #s or quotes.

<comment><USER9> How's he going to refute anything specific without himself being privy to government knowledge?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My first job in tech as a teenager (2007 or so) was doing blueprint analysis and WiFi Access Point placement for a US Defense contractor in the Midwest.

While working on one of the buildings with some missile guidance programs, I found a small room in the center of the building that had twelve inch thick concrete walls and a thick steel door. Determined to do my job, I experimented with placing several access points near this room until I found a combination that would force enough signal to connect through those walls. I had the telecom team pull wires, a month later I threw some WAPs in my backpack and installed them.

A week later I got an email marked urgent demanding that my team turn off these access points immediately. I complied, but asked what exactly the concern was. They mentioned that by bouncing WiFi signals, a van parked in the parking lot could monitor the activity in any room they wanted.

At the time I thought they were crazy, and at times I've told this story to demonstrate how paranoid that company was. Looks like there was some real basis to their concern.

<comment><USER11> It's called an active emanation attack. Passive attacks interpret the electromagnetic signals that electronic devices naturally emanate. They try to reconstruct what the original information was. The active attacks work by doing the equivalent how you see trees at night with a flashlight: they hit the target with a signal, it is affected by what's there, it bounces back, and you get a distorted version of whatever that was. EMSEC standards, esp TEMPEST shielding, were invented to mitigate as much of that as possible. Although it's classified, there's been a number of sites talking about public and some declassified info.

I don't have the link to old site everyone in hacking community used. Here's one provider that describes it nicely plus illustrates what the products look like. They used to be way bulkier.

[http://sst.ws/what-is-tempest.php](http://sst.ws/what-is-tempest.php)

Some more links. Elovici's lab is at the forefront of new attacks.

[http://www.elastic.org/~fche/mirrors/www.cryptome.org/nsa- te...](http://www.elastic.org/~fche/mirrors/www.cryptome.org/nsa-tempest.htm)

[http://tempest-inc.com/](http://tempest-inc.com/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuval_Elovici](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuval_Elovici)

Here's the quote that first taught me about the risk you described:

"A STU-III is a highly sophisticated digital device; however, they suffer from a particular nasty vulnerability to strong RF signals that if not properly addressed can cause the accidental disclosure of classified information, and recovery of the keys by an eavesdropper. While the unit itself is well shielded, the power line feeding the unit may not have a clean ground (thus negating the shielding)... The best way to deal with this is to never have a cellular telephone or pager on your person when using a STU, or within a radius of at least thirty feet (in any direction) from an operational STU (even with a good ground). If the STU is being used in a SCIF or secure facility a cell phone is supposed to be an excluded item, but it is simply amazing how many government people (who know better) forget to turn off their phone before entering controlled areas and thus cause classified materials to be compromised."

These are also another piece of evidence for two claims I often make: mainstream security folks don't produce devices that are actually secure; NSA/DOD are opponents of securing American infrastructure. On the first, high- assurance security and NSA certifications for TS/SCI demanded EMSEC since they were known attacks, esp by US and Russia. Mainstream ignored them mostly for "secure" products with only a handful trying to do something.

The second claim is from fact that security agencies misled U.S. companies and individuals about these risks specifically so they could use the attacks on them if needed. Although I don't recall if current, they also refused to sell TEMPEST-certified systems outside Defense in the past. So, NSA and pals were known to keep us vulnerable on purpose long before Snowden leaks. I've been griping about and trying to raise awareness of it for some time. Examples:

[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/08/business_week...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/08/business_week_o_1.html#c568363)

[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/03/friday_squid_...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/03/friday_squid_bl_420.html#c5226750)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> BTW you don't need rocket science to find out who is back home in your neighborhood, or the other room etc. As most people carry phones in pockets/bags so it is enough to just log clients' MAC addresses in WiFi promiscuous mode and then correlate them.

<comment><USER13> At least with iPhones if they are not joining the networks but just scanning the MAC addresses are random.

<comment><USER14> Use a directional antenna and aim it at various houses looking for an uptick random MAC addresses.

<comment><USER15> Why not just ye old triangulation?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Presumably, the techniques for lens-less cameras will still apply in the microwave spectrum - [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.02134.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.02134.pdf)

By moving a wifi adapter in a 2d scan pattern, you could presumably create a virtual 2d sensor and then treat anything between you and where you are wanting to image as the diffuser.

<comment><USER12> I guess SDR receiver dongle would do a better job.

<comment><USER16> You just sent me down yet another rabbithole. Well done.

edit - [https://www.essexham.co.uk/news/realtek-sdr- dongle-10-pounds...](https://www.essexham.co.uk/news/realtek-sdr- dongle-10-pounds.html)

<comment><USER12> Then get even deeper, as we are at thru wall-stuff here is some research: _Tan, B; Woodbridge, K. and Chetty, K. (2016) A wireless passive radar system for real-time through-wall movement detection._ [https://pureportal.coventry.ac.uk/files/7646003/tancomb.pdf](https://pureportal.coventry.ac.uk/files/7646003/tancomb.pdf)

<comment><USER17> It's a bit more expensive, and requires buying extra antennas.. But this is a coherent SDR built on 4 realtek chips:

[https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/kerberossdr-4x-coherent-r...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/kerberossdr-4x-coherent- rtl-sdr#/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is new, the arxiv page says "Submitted on 23 Oct 2018".

(There has been previous research published from MIT on the same topic[1], so this was not ovious)

[1] [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/415539/wireless- network-m...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/415539/wireless-network- modded-to-see-through-walls/)

</comment><comment><USER19> I was curious how they measure WiFi signals in Android. It seems surprisingly easy with:

\- [https://developer.android.com/reference/android/net/wifi/Wif...](https://developer.android.com/reference/android/net/wifi/WifiManager.html#getScanResults\(\))

and

[https://developer.android.com/reference/android/net/wifi/Sca...](https://developer.android.com/reference/android/net/wifi/ScanResult.html)

which seems to give very fine grained information about WiFi strength of any network in the vicinity.

</comment><comment><USER20> Quite an awesome usecase would be to use this for perimeter security, like securing your house and cars. In my locality camera's are in a legal grey zone: the police applauds them for use in case of crime, but because of privacy laws you're not supposed to film other peoples houses and whereabouts. This would enable you to track movements without camera's. Software would make it easy to only give you signals when somebody or something moves on your property at night. All I would need is some machine learning to learn about rabbits, cats and foxes. Or you could have cameras that only turn on in case of movement on your property, hence triggering (I would hope) the legitimate interest provision in the GDPR.

<comment><USER21> It doesn't matter whether you track people using a camera, ultrasound, WiFi signals or even manually by watching them from your window and keeping book about their coming and goings, what matters is that you process "their" data. So using a different technology to perform the surveillance doesn't free you from privacy laws.

<comment><USER22> "their data" has a special meaning. It means personal data, that is data linked to an identified or identifiable individual.

Merely using wifi signals to sense the presence of human beings is therefore not covered by GDPR.

Now, using the technology to track what's going on in your neighbour's house probably is.

On the other hand, using CCTV on your property is legal (in the UK and countries covered by GDPR).

<comment><USER21> OP asked about filming/watching other peoples houses and the area sourrounding your own home though, hence my answer. You can film on your own property as you like, but if your surveillance system captures the movement of your neighbor it is possible to link the data to them as well (with high enough probability) so it becomes personal data. If you somehow manage to only capture potential trespassers and do that in a way that does not allow any linking to a specific individual (e.g. by only recording metadata) you can argue that it's anonymous data, if you routinely capture all people moving through a given area you can't though as it's possible to attribute the data back to individuals using context information and statistics.

<comment><USER22> Minimal filming of foot paths and streets adjacent to your property happens all the time, e.g. to film your front garden and/or your car.

To be perfectly legal there are a few steps to take, but in reality as long as it's minimal and legitimate nothing is going to happen to you.

Of course, that's not the same as pointing your CCTV camera straight into your neighbour's garden...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> A whole article about seeing through walls, without a single photo?

<comment><USER24> Yeah definitely frustrating. It's always seemed more talk than reality for years. Here is one photo I found of a claimed wifi spy:

[https://cdn0.tnwcdn.com/wp- content/blogs.dir/1/files/2015/10...](https://cdn0.tnwcdn.com/wp- content/blogs.dir/1/files/2015/10/Screen-Shot-2015-10-29-at-14.17.05.jpg)

In reality a thermal camera might give better results, maybe even from further away too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This article implies that WiFi is a privacy concern, but wouldn't any other RF signal work just as well? A bad actor could just create their own signal if you somehow protect your WiFi. That would probably be more effective anyway because they would know exactly where the signal was coming from and could choose a frequency for this application.

<comment><USER26> Of course it would. And yes, "bring your own emitter" would make things easier, but the point of using Wi-Fi is that it's already there, and you can use it passively. Any RF in reasonable range would work too, including visible light.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> HF motion sensors are now used in a lot of lights. They are 5.8 Ghz radars that detect motion even through walls.

So high frequency motion detection is already used in a wide range of applications.

But I think 'seeing' should be taken with a grain of salt. Yes you can detect motion behind a wall but creating an image is some steps away.

</comment><comment><USER28> Cue military applications, where snipers can now kill you in the safety of your own home with a wall piercing bullet and a scope with a wifi based image overlay.

<comment><USER19> It's still difficult to identify persons with this technology. So, only valuable if you don't care about collateral damage.

<comment><USER29> It might work in a hostage situation where they detect many people crouched / staying still, and one individual pacing around.

<comment><USER30> It will work even better in "silence dissident" situation. Collateral damage is just a bonus, you want other people to fear being associated with your target.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> 2015: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGZzNZnYIHo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGZzNZnYIHo)

</comment><comment><USER32> Time to put the wifi router on my kids' train set.

</comment><comment><USER33> In [https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=18398475&goto=item%3Fi...](https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=18398475&goto=item%3Fid%3D18397489%2318398475), foreigner quite reasonably asks, "Won't any RF signal work just as well?"

Any RF signal will work, but some work better than others. Wi-Fi is awesome for this for several reasons.

1\. Having a source inside the house instead of outside is better because you lose, say, 15dB when you go through the wall; this is comparable to what a two-way mirror does to visible light. If you have to illuminate the house from outside using RF energy, you have to deal with much stronger reflections from things outside the house.

2\. RF wavelengths that are too short will be badly attenuated by things like walls and doors. You can already notice this with 5GHz 802.11a Wi-Fi; if you have a few walls between you and the AP, the 2.4GHz signal usually works better. The problem gets worse at higher frequencies. (You may have noticed that many walls attenuate visible light, which is RF in the 500THz band, rather strongly.)

3\. RF wavelengths that are too long provide much poorer spatial resolution. Outside the near field, your imaging resolution is limited by diffraction to about the wavelength. So you can see a person who's illuminated by the 99.5MHz emissions from your favorite heavy metal station only if their diameter is on the order of 3 m or more, and you can see their movements when they move on the order of 3 m or more. By contrast, 2.4 GHz gives you 120-mm resolution, and 5 GHz gives you 60-mm resolution. For typical humans, these are more useful.

(However, my friend Florian has done good work on passively detecting airplanes using radio illuminations from TV stations, which could be super helpful the next time the US comes to bomb your country, even if he _does_ use Lagrange interpolation instead of B-splines like any normal person would; check it out: [https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8115293.](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8115293.))

Also! Having walls be super transparent, as they are at these longer wavelengths, is not entirely an advantage. It makes it harder to distinguish between signals from things in one building and signals from things in another.

If you want to listen to Wi-Fi signal strength changes in real time — including when someone moves around — try [https://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/wifiscan.py](https://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/wifiscan.py). It depends only on Python (3 or recent 2) and PulseAudio. (MacOS hackers, consider upgrading to Linux. Apple's removal of your Esc key shows that they hate you and want you to die.)

<comment><USER34> Your last link is behind an authorization prompt, and the site uses a self- signed certificate, which throws an error in Firefox.

<comment><USER33> Oops, sorry, I meant [http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/wifiscan.py](http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/wifiscan.py). We should fix that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I would imagine adding one or more friendly WiFi transmitters as illuminating sources even on the outside would greatly help the accuracy.

</comment><comment><USER36> Anyone know of a code sample or available project that implements this? Would be a lot of fun to try at home and the office.

</comment><comment><USER29> I wonder if using Bluetooth is messing with the detection rate. Or maybe tracking the BT emitter makes things even easier.

</comment><comment><USER37> Modern day Van Eck phreaking!

</comment><comment><USER38> Does this mean I can finally have a studfinder that works?

<comment><USER39> You already do, it's called your knuckles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> didn't everyone see batman?

</comment><comment><USER41> So, is "magnetic paint" actually a thing, or do we need drywall with Faraday cages?

<comment><USER36> You'll stand out if you do that....don't stand out. Just add more noise to the signal(more transmitters, that randomly beam shape and increase/decrease gain). Better to appear neurotic than suspicious, IMHO.

<comment><USER42> Standing out can do altruistic good if you really have nothing assailable (everyone has something to hide but returns diminish rapidly with their image). Surveying someone and finding heinous crimes makes them look justified. Surveiling and finding minor lawn violations and jaywalking makes them look like wasteful totalitarian bueracrats.

The more people using secure approaches the less suspicious it is to be secure. Especially if there is a sensationalist justification - fight dirty in turn and use their weapons of fear as a pretext against them.

Which reminds me of resistance to a minor driver tagging law in New Jersey. Parents were outright defying it and refusing to pay for the stickers and just covering the fine in full if it came up. Technically the risk of pedophiles tracking them is negligible statistically but there are many valid civil rights perspective complaints it helps get people on board when they would otherwise roll their eyes at the complaints of teenagers a priori.</comment></comment></comment>


Email Gains Popularity As A Direct Marketing Tool  - <AUTHOR> http://internetrack.blogspot.com/2008/06/email-gains-popularity-as-direct.html "E-mail has become the top medium for direct marketers. 72% send e-mail to customers, a 10% increase over 2007, and 50% to prospects, a 9% hike." <comment><USER2> Ric Romero on the case.</comment>


Perl is Free Software's COBOL, and That's Ok - <AUTHOR> http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2012/12/18/perl-cobol.html

<comment><USER2> This again? Perl is actively used (by choice) by a good portion of the competent developers of this world. See Dancer and Catalyst for good examples of active web development. Perl being free software's COBOL makes sense if one is talking about shell scripts, but even then, those are necessary items, not just relics of a system with no incentive to change.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the best resources for learning about algorithmic trading? - <AUTHOR> I'm a CS student looking to get into Quantative Finance, and would appreciate if anyone could point me in the right direction. <comment><USER3> Broadly speaking I think that you are speaking about two things: derivatives pricing (this is what people think when thy talk about quantitative finance) and algorithmic trading (which can be either pure market making or alpha seeking speculation ;).

To better understand the difference between the different branches of QF world, visit this site:[https://www.quantstart.com/articles/Quantitative- Finance-Rea...](https://www.quantstart.com/articles/Quantitative-Finance- Reading-List)

It has a comprehensive list of references and articles describing in details what to expect in different jobs.

It won't harm if you occasionally visit [https://forum.wilmott.com/](https://forum.wilmott.com/).

And finally, for shit'n'giggles: [http://www.zerohedge.com/](http://www.zerohedge.com/) ;)

<comment><USER4> >> _Broadly speaking I think that you are speaking about two things: derivatives pricing (this is what people think when thy talk about quantitative finance) and algorithmic trading (which can be either pure market making or alpha seeking speculation ;)._

"Quantitative finance" was mostly associated with derivatives pricing in the mid-late aughts, but nowadays I see a pretty loose classification tossed around that essentially makes it shorthand for "we're doing something data science-y to forecast things." It's more of a marketing/cultural term, and has sort of lost a lot of the meaning and precision it used to have. Handy to sort of succinctly sum up where on the Street you vaguely work (or at least which ingroup you'd like to signal therein), but not so handy for trying to e.g. Google around for what to learn. QuantStart is probably helpful there though.

Not a criticism of your point, just wanted to add some color to it for other readers. I agree with Wilmott forums being a great starting point at the very least, though it's going to be a little esoteric for someone totally new to finance.

To the OP: pick up _Heard on the Street: Quantitative Questions From Wall Street Job Interviews._ It's not perfect, but it's a good start. There aren't any textbooks that will take you all of the way in algorithmic trading (from finding alpha, to strategy implementation, to risk management, to portfolio theory, etc). If you're a CS student and looking for quantitative finance, core computer science (not just programming) is what you want to drill down on. You'll want to invest in your math skills quite a bit too, and especially statistics.

Research firms like Two Sigma, RenTec (good luck), AQR, D.E. Shaw and Bridgewater, which are wholly or in part devoted to what you might call "financial engineering." Learn about their processes and talk to as many people in the industry as you can to learn about what they do and network.

Finally, chollida1 does this better than I can, but please don't trade with your own money. It's an expensive tuition :)

<comment><USER5> Also Man AHL.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Depends what your goals are.

If you want to get a job at an HFT e.g. Jump: as a student you're not expected to know much about finance or trading, the prerequisite knowledge is similar to getting hired at eg Google. I work at one of these firms, when we hire people we have them come in and code in an IDE of their choice on a problem of our choice for about 2 hours, and we watch them do it and discuss it after. We also do algorithm interviews, and try to find people who are demonstrably smart and also excited to work with us (note this is for dev roles. If you want to work on trading roles you need to have a strong intuitive grasp of probability, games and asymmetric payoff situations, these will come up in interviews).

If you want to get a job as a quant: other comments here have addressed this.

If you want to learn about algorithmic trading from a tech perspective: go read some exchange specs (BATS, CME, Eurex tech specs and market model). That's the nitty gritty and you'll learn more about trading from that than anything else you can do if you're not employed in trading.

If you want to learn about machine learning in the context of finance: get a job at one of the quant hedge funds like Two Sigma. You do not have access to the data you would need to learn on your own, and you cannot afford to get it yourself.

In general to learn about modern algorithmic trading you have to work in the industry, there is almost no public information of any value (maybe read the Sniper in Mahwah blog if you haven't, he's pretty smart).

If you want to get a job you do not need to learn about this, you just need to be worth teaching it to.

<comment><USER7> is this the right link to the blog? I can't imagine more than one blogger using that name:

[https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/](https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/)

edit: this blog needs to be organized: best post, recommended posts, etc for new readers. What a waste of writing if your new readers can't find good articles.

double edit: interesting investigation into HFT companies building microwave towers to cut transmission times to milliseconds from chicago to japan [https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2016/09/23/once- upon-a-...](https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2016/09/23/once-upon-a-time- in-the-west/)

<comment><USER8> Yeah, that's the right one. He talks about HFT microwave towers and things

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Quantopian is home to 120,000 people learning algorithmic trading, including students, data scientists, academic researchers, developers, and finance professionals.

We provide a research platform, market simulation, and data for free. We also provide tutorials, community, and lectures to teach you how to get good at it. I recommend you take a look at the Getting Started Guide ([https://www.quantopian.com/tutorials/getting- started](https://www.quantopian.com/tutorials/getting-started)) and then start going through the Lectures ([https://www.quantopian.com/lectures](https://www.quantopian.com/lectures)). The lectures cover some important statistical topics, and they get into how to apply those concepts to algorithmic trading.

disclosure: I work for Quantopian.

<comment><USER10> I recently started to explore quantopian. Do you plan on integrating R lang?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a CS student, I'd really make sure your stats knowledge is solid. Perhaps take a class that covers stochastic finance (Black-Scholes, etc.) if available.

I learned the hard way that it is quite difficult to break into finance as a non-student, so do everything you can now to land that first gig. Good luck!

Some starting resources:

-Ernie Chan's books and blog ([https://epchan.blogspot.com/](https://epchan.blogspot.com/))

-QuantStart has great starter material and a new book, although I haven't read it ([https://www.quantstart.com/](https://www.quantstart.com/))

-"Inside the Black Box" (Narang) I've seen referenced a good bit but felt as though it leaned toward order execution and rather boring

-"Dark Pools" (Scott Patterson) a great story about the rise of algorithmic trading

-"Flash Boys' (Michael Lewis) offers a nice follow up (HFT), but considered a bit sensationalist

EDIT: If you're planning on using Python (a solid bet)...

-Python for Data Analysis (Wes McKinney) - Great, quick book for Pandas by former AQR (and now Two Sigma?) guy.

-Yves Hilpisch books: "Python for Finance" is introductory while "Derivative Analytics in Python" is quite math heavy.

</comment><comment><USER11> Check out [https://www.quantopian.com](https://www.quantopian.com) and in particular their community forums.

</comment><comment><USER12> Related question: after creating a successful quant trading strategy - <USER2> would you publicize it?

I've created a fund that tracks my strategy at motifinvesting.com and am posting the trades at instavest.com. Where else should I go? Are there any contests I can enter? (Quantopian requires too much turnover I only do 50 trades/yr)

</comment><comment><USER13> The first company that comes to mind in terms of publicly discussing its programming and computer science type engineering is JaneStreet. There are episodes of Software Engineering Daily and YouTube talks and blog posts. Many of them related to the OCaml language and system design.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'd recommend that you get good at stochastic processes and time series analysis, machine learning, and neural networking on the tech side, and managed futures and commodities trading as opposed to stocks.

Quantiacs is the best place to learn. They are the world's 1st and only crowdsourced hedge fund actively trading with institutional capital, you can contribute your algo to their marketplace and get matched with millions in investment allocations and you keep 10% of the profits and retain 100% of your IP, and they also run the world's largest quantitative finance competitions -- giving out $2.2M in allocations per Quarter.

Unlike Quantopian, Quantiacs focuses on managed futures as opposed to equities. This is important because managed futures are uncorrelated with the stock market and are the most liquid markets in the world -- it's where the professional quants play. So if you want to be successful with quantitative finance and algorithmic trading -- you should focus on managed futures more than equities. So even though there are more users on Quantopian, the best quants in the world are on Quantiacs.

Also on Quantiacs you can use either Python or Matlab so it's more flexible, and the learning curve is not as steep as with Quantopian.

I'd recommend that you take a look here for tutorials: [https://quantiacs.com/GetStarted](https://quantiacs.com/GetStarted)

And see what others have said about it here: [https://www.quora.com/What-do- you-think-about-Quantiacs-com-...](https://www.quora.com/What-do-you-think- about-Quantiacs-com-for-quantitative-finance-algorithmic-trading-and- quantitative-managed-futures)

<comment><USER4> Any affiliations you'd like to disclose?</comment></comment>


Why you should (or shouldn't) trust a startup - <AUTHOR> http://blog.compile.com/post/75681943440/why-you-should-or-shouldnt-trust-a-start-up

<comment><USER2> How these objections work depend very strongly on the nature of the startup. It's something I'm very concerned about. My own work is going to be chock full of sensitive customer data about their system configurations (it could be described as a DevOps analytics tool). Privacy and security will be huge concerns for customers. I'm starting with SaaS, but I fully expect pressure from some customers to provide a COTS version for internal deployment, due to "security".

I don't want to do COTS at first because I want the ability to iterate quickly for new features and bug fixing. I can do that with SaaS, but enterprise COTS is the land of programs that haven't been updated in _years_. I don't want to put myself in a position of supporting antique versions of the code, even if it comes with lucrative support contracts, because it's a drag in other ways. So my answer to customers who can't deal with SaaS security in the short run is probably going to be "Sorry", and my efforts focused on pleasing the customers who are comfortable with a SaaS solution.

On the other hand, I'm not even in beta yet. I may well have to eat those words in fairly short order, if that's what it takes for survival and growth a year from now.

That all said, I've put a lot of thought into addressing customer objections about their data, and a lot of it is baked right into the architecture.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've also heard, "How do we know you won't sell the company and have the product wither on the vine."

This is why startups tend to deal with startups, and Crossing the Chasm [0] is so difficult.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm)

</comment><comment><USER4> It's a great set of questions, and a set we hear constantly.

To slightly extend, there's also the question of "Will you raise your pricing for the same offering at any point?".

Plus, in addition to can I get my data back, "will it be of any use to me when I do get it back?". i.e. is it exported to some standard format, will I get enough source code to run it long enough to build (either myself or collectively) some way to get the information (as opposed to the data) out?

"Can I get my data back" actually figured in our architecture prior to building, that's why we went for bring-your-own-storage. Google Drive and Dropbox both now provide direct JavaScript on the client to their servers functionality, the data doesn't need to go your servers any more for storage (only for processing, should you need that).

Our SaaS isn't our main, or even a pay-for, product, we heard this constantly. We do now have a set of answers, but it's taken a good couple of years to put them together in a way that satisfies people.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm unsure what to make of this post.

> Your data stays with you: It is scary enough to hand over your company's > most precious data - your customer database - to a large company with all > the data break-ins today. But with a start-up, the risks magnify, as there > is the added worry that the start-up will fail, or will be acquired. What > happens to your data then?

> We never ask our customers to provide us with their data. We ask our > customers for descriptions of their products and descriptions of their > customer's pain points. That information is enough to provide a continuous > stream of targeted leads to our customers.

Considering that the "data" being collected & sold by Compile doesn't belong to its "customers", where is the question of trust? Also, why would any customers who are _buying_ leads from you ever share _their_ customer data with you?

Or maybe I'm missing something here?

[0]: [https://www.compile.com/technology/](https://www.compile.com/technology/)

<comment><USER6> I am the author of the post. The actual intention of my comment was that some companies ask their Customers for their Customer List, such that they can mine that data. At Compile, we do NOT look at our Customer's Customer Lists. We find the right information that our Customer can immediately use, and provide it to them. So we never ask our Customer to share their Customer data as you so rightly suggest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Clicking on your logo in the blog should go to your main site. If not, please add a link to your main site. It's very difficult to navigate as most in-app browsers don't have a url bar.

<comment><USER8> Clicking the house rather than the name seems to go to the main website.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> As a startup, you should also use this information to help decide your company's own risk/reward ratio of pursuing a customer. I worked in a B2B startup, and when we tried to engage larger businesses we ran up against this "trust" issue. Every time, we spent lots of time and money talking with them and came away with nothing.

</comment><comment><USER10> The questions are setup for a generic situation which I like, but the answer for #2 seems to be a single solution. What do you do in the case that you need customer data as part of your product (Say the product was more traditional CRM).

Could have been a good post but they cut to the commercial message too soon.

<comment><USER6> from the author: thanks for valid criticism, I'll keep it in mind for my next post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I clicked through to compile.com; what do they actually do?

</comment><comment><USER12> What does compile.com buy me for lead generation over a good data feed (bloomberg for my use case) + getto data mining/machine learning?

<comment><USER12> From the website:

> Uses natural language processing based algorithm to find leads from the deep > public web

How good's this? Y'all need to get your hands on a bloomberg terminal.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Republics.us - Integrate your Internet - <AUTHOR>

This is a side project I have been working on while at college to help make it easier to have my favorite web apps, rss feeds, videos, and search engine wherever I go and whatever computer is available.
Right now, I am just looking for feedback on the concept, bugs, etc. I also will apologize for it is still being a little buggy so be gentle and it prefers Webkit browsers.
Also, I am about to graduate in three weeks in a major I don't  care for(Business Administration). So am asking for advice on if I get nowhere on this, could this site help me get a job being a web programmer so I don't have to look for a non-tech job?
http://www.republics.us <comment><USER2> You should look at redesigning the home page. I have zero understanding of what your site does from the home page. You have a little content with "features" but it doesn't explain anything. I'm assuming it's some sort of dashboard?

What does your application do that I can't do with my safari or chrome top sites, and a good set of bookmarks/plugins?

Is the site actually functional? or is this more of a coming soon landing page? I can't find anywhere to actually use the application.

Here's a suggestion for trying to land a job from this site. Have a good designer redesign the site and the whole user experience. At the very least buy a theme somewhere and hire someone to implement it. Even if you don't want a job as a front-end developer, you still need to know how to make things work across the major browsers.

Is the site open source?

</comment><comment><USER3> It would be great if there were a demo account so I could see it without signing up.

Also, I really don't like the typography. <http://awesome-fontstacks.com/> might help build a killer set of fonts, or you could pick and choose yourself from <http://www.google.com/webfonts> or <http://typekit.com/>.

</comment><comment><USER4> How bad are the compatibility issues with Opera (/FF/IE) that you can't just tell us it may not work perfectly?

It's a mix of browser-window-sized designs, iframes, 800x600 designs and popups. Seems very odd. In Chrome, as you said it should be, the pops for Hulu/fb/etc are barely shown, and the main window says it couldn't do what I wanted it to do.

I still have no idea what you were trying to do.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you're not a designer - just buy a layout: <http://themeforest.net/>, <http://www.woothemes.com/> or whatever.

<comment><USER6> Are there any sites similar to ThemeForest that have designs better suited to content heavy, non Wordpress sites? I haven't come across anything that is even close to the quality level yet.

<comment><USER7> Depends on your requirement but Themeforest has some pretty good Drupal themes too, which I believe can serve content heavy stuff too. I would not recommend Woothemes for Drupal based on my experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> <http://www.republics.us></comment>


USS Pueblo - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Pueblo_(AGER-2) <comment><USER2> As interesting as the vessel is the noncompliance of the crew in being used as propaganda:

> This treatment turned worse when the North Koreans realized that crewmen > were secretly giving them "the finger" in staged propaganda photos.

and

> Eventually the North Koreans threatened to execute his men in front of him, > and Bucher relented and agreed to "confess to his and the crew's > transgression." Bucher wrote the confession since a "confession" by > definition needed to be written by the confessor himself. They verified the > meaning of what he wrote, but failed to catch the pun when he said "We paean > the DPRK [North Korea]. We paean their great leader Kim Il Sung". (Bucher > pronounced "paean" as "pee on.")

I wasn't even familiar with the verb "paean", brilliant of the commander to know that non-native speakers wouldn't catch on to the idiosynchronies of using an uncommon homophone as an insult.

<comment><USER3> I find tales of POWs resisting where they can fascinating.

One of my favourites is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Hegdahl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Hegdahl):

He got blown overboard by a gun turret's blast, a story which his interrogators found so unbelievable they assumed he was an idiot and gave him free run of the POW camp, which he used to gather intel and sabotage vehicles.

</comment></comment><comment> Warwick-P I have been on the USS Pueblo. When I was in North Korea, this was one of the many military monuments that foreign visitors were required to tour when visiting the country. The guides who took us on this boat made sure to emphasize how this was an armed warship that was committing an act of international aggression and violating a sovereign nation's borders, and which was captured by an heroic North Korean military mission. A couple of extra photos: [https://imgur.com/a/8DDBrz1](https://imgur.com/a/8DDBrz1)

<comment><USER4> What nationality are you and when did you visit N. Korea?

<comment> Warwick-P I visited in 2011 as a South African citizen. I'm now an American citizen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hah, fun! Visited this a few years back. It's in great condition, particularly memorable things were the bullet holes (all highlighted in red paint) and the intro video[0], which is worth watching if only to experience the extremely distinct North Korean English accent.

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95qtd2Mwnpg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95qtd2Mwnpg)

<comment><USER6> How were you able to visit it, honest question? As an American myself, I wouldn't dare set foot in that country. Was a visit there an easy experience? Would you go back?

<comment><USER7> There's a school called the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology ([https://pust.co](https://pust.co)) that invites foreigners to come teach North Korean citizens.

I spent 2 semesters teaching computer science at PUST and it was a wonderful experience. You really get to know the locals (both students and staff) much better than on a short tourist trip. Some highlights include teaching Dijkstra's algorithm by showing them google maps images of Pyongyang (which they hadn't seen from space before), talking about Snowden and how he used encryption to hide from the NSA, and having North Korean citizens contribute to open source machine learning projects (vowpal wabbit and mlpack). All the students I met with were also surprisingly well informed about both events in the US and American history.

You also get to do as much touristy stuff as you'd like. Two highlights for me were, visiting the Pueblo and the subway system. As a former naval nuclear officer, it was quite surreal to visit these places. The subway system is one of the few places in the world that US nuclear weapons cannot effectively target because it is buried so far underground (>100m). You have to spend about 5 minutes riding the longest escalator I've ever seen to get from the surface to the trains. It's a daily reminder to North Korean citizens that they've been targeted by US nuclear weapons for decades.

Educational exchanges have a long history of improving relations between countries, and so I'm a huge advocate for the PUST exchanges. Unfortunately, I had to stop going because President Trump no longer allows Americans to visit North Korea. If any non-Americans are interested in going, however, shoot me an email (firstname.lastname@example.com) and I'm happy to chat more with you about the experience.

<comment><USER8> Considering the students were allowed contact with an American and allowed the free access to the Internet and software you describe, I conclude they were children of the elites of the country.

Probably they were given this education so they could learn to deal with westerners and potentially to improve their training for cyber warfare and intelligence gathering in the west.

I'd bet within a few miles of the experience you enjoyed that there were families starving in substandard housing.

<comment><USER7> > Considering the students were allowed contact with an American and allowed > the free access to the Internet and software you describe, I conclude they > were children of the elites of the country.

My assessment is different.

I currently teach at an "elite" US college (liberal arts college ranked top-5 nationally with more than 20% of students having parents in the top 1% income bracket) and previously taught at a mid-ranked UC school. My impression is that the student demographics at PUST more closely resemble the mid-ranked UC school than the elite liberal arts school. The elite students in the DPRK tend to prefer their version of elite colleges like Kim Il Sung and Kim Chaek universities. For example, students from these other universities are regularly lauded in national newspapers for their achievements (which exceed those of PUST students), but PUST students have never been mentioned in a national newspaper as far as I am aware. My understanding is that students at these other universities have similar levels of internet access as students at PUST, but they do not have regular in person contact with westerners.

> Probably they were given this education so they could learn to deal with > westerners and potentially to improve their training for cyber warfare and > intelligence gathering in the west.

As someone who has professional experience running/developing cyberwarfare and nuclear military operations with the US military, I can unequivocally state that the work I did at PUST was not developing these capabilities for North Korea.

Western experts who study the DPRK largely agree with me that educational exchanges are a great way to improve relations between the US and DPRK building on the model of how educational exchanges improved relations between the US and USSR. See for example [https://www.38north.org/2010/11/pyongyang- university-and-nk-...](https://www.38north.org/2010/11/pyongyang-university- and-nk-just-do-it/)

> I'd bet within a few miles of the experience you enjoyed that there were > families starving in substandard housing.

One of the major goals of the PUST project is to help improve and internationalize the North Korean economy. The longterm effect will be to improve the standard of living of all North Koreans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Another interesting spy ship saga is: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident)

</comment><comment><USER10> I always wonder about claims like this where one nation says a ship was within their borders and the other nation says it was in international waters. This USS Pueblo is one incident. Israel attacked a Turkish ship in international waters. Iran attacked oil tankers in international waters.

All these incidents ... I can't help but think we never grow up as human beings all the way until becoming international super powers.

It's like a geopolitical "I'm not touching you." [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgXDYiHhp5Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgXDYiHhp5Y)

It's bullying behavior. It's an aggressive provocation.

Will we _ever_ grow up?

<comment><USER11> My favorite in particular in this line of "geopolitical I'm not touching you" is what we call "freedom of navigation exercises". The US runs through the South China Sea on them all the time.

Basically, China says it's their territory, the US says it is international waters. And so we "prove" it by regularly traveling through it with US warships for no other purpose then to prove we can.

<comment><USER12> _> China says it's their territory, the US says it is international waters. And so we "prove" it by regularly traveling through it with US warships for no other purpose then to prove we can._

Suppose the US claimed that the entire Gulf of Mexico was US territory. Would people be as sympathetic to that as they appear to be to China claiming that the entire South China Sea is Chinese territory? (Note that the South China Sea is more than twice as large as the Gulf of Mexico, and less of its coastline is part of China as compared with the amount of Gulf of Mexico coastline that is part of the US.)

<comment><USER13> > Suppose the US claimed that the entire Gulf of Mexico was US territory

Since China is a long way from the Gulf of Mexico, and has no need to sail there, I'm confident that China couldn't care less about this.

On the other hand, The South China Sea is very important to China, and very far away from USA -- why does USA care so much about it?

Perhaps you could also comment of USA claims over the Northern Sea Route (which lies within Russia's Exclusive Economic Zone) ? [0], [1]

[0] [https://www.rt.com/business/423913-northern-sea-route- us/](https://www.rt.com/business/423913-northern-sea-route-us/)?

[1] [https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/geopolitical- conse...](https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/geopolitical-consequences- of-melting-arctic-ice-russia-canada-us-northern-sea-route-shipping- natural-a8229306.html)?

<comment><USER12> _> Since China is a long way from the Gulf of Mexico, and has no need to sail there, I'm confident that China couldn't care less about this._

First, many Chinese flag ships sail through the Gulf of Mexico, so I think China does care.

Second, even if China didn't care, many other countries do. And the US, unlike China, respects the rights of other countries to freedom of the seas.

 _> The South China Sea is very important to China, and very far away from USA -- why does USA care so much about it?_

First, because many US flag ships sail through the South China Sea. We trade with many countries other than China that have coastlines on that sea. You know that, right?

Second, because, just as with the Gulf of Mexico, many other countries have ships that sail through the South China Sea, and there are internationally agreed rules about international waters and freedom of the seas, which, as noted above, China does not respect the way the US does. The only way to enforce such rules is for countries that uphold them to take action against countries that do not.

 _> Perhaps you could also comment of USA claims over the Northern Sea Route (which lies within Russia's Exclusive Economic Zone) ?_

This case is an excellent illustration of the proper way to negotiate rules regarding freedom of the seas: to notify other countries of something you would like to see happen, and then have a diplomatic dialogue with them. As opposed to, oh, say, just asserting that a huge chunk of ocean is your territorial waters, in contravention of international law and treaties.

Also, since you mentioned Exclusive Economic Zones, you will note that the US is _not_ saying it wants to exploit resources in this zone; it is only saying it wants it to be a transport corridor. Which, according to current international agreements, it already is everywhere outside 12 nautical miles from Russia's coast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >the U.S. government has publicly stated on several occasions that the return of the still commissioned Navy vessel is a priority

Is this just to save face or is there some other reason we would want the ship back?

<comment><USER15> I imagine it's an esprit de corps goal related to the 'no man left behind' sentiment in the armed forces.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> A foolhardy idea would be to surreptitiously go there while some other action is happening elsewhere and tug it out.

Now, it'd be difficult to pull off and offers no upside and lots of downside, but it'd be very intrepid to pull off.

<comment><USER17> Might be an interesting technology demonstration for robotics. Sail a robot submarine across the Pacific, surface in the Potong River, release a few drones to cut the mooring lines and slip a tow onto it, and tow it out to international waters.

They shoot at you? Honey badger don't care, there ain't no people there.

<comment><USER18> MM a high tech cutting out - in the old day they used ships boats and sailors and marines to do that

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Ten years ago two guys managed to enter in Noth Korea by train from Russia spending 36 hours without a guide.

[https://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/](https://vienna- pyongyang.blogspot.com/)

They obviously went to see the USS Pueblo as well... It's kind of a long read, but very interesting, imho.

<comment><USER20> a nice video of the trip: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1mzXFAzUjQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1mzXFAzUjQ)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Another interesting incident, this one involving a North Korean spy ship:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Amami- Ōshima](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Amami-Ōshima)

The wreckage is worth a visit if you find yourself in Tokyo with a day to spare for a trip to Yokohama. (Half a day will do easily if that's literally all you go to Yokohama for, but you can spend a pleasant few hours there, so may as well make a day of it.)

</comment><comment><USER22> >While thousands of American prisoners of war were awarded medals, the crew members of Pueblo did not receive them. Instead, they were classified as "detainees". It was not until Congress passed a law overturning this decision that the medals were awarded; the crew finally received the medals at San Diego in May 1990.

Any thoughts on why this was so? Why would the crew not be classified PoWs? Did the US not want to admit they were in a war with PRK or what?

<comment><USER23> There was considerable controversy surrounding the events and the actions of the crew and leadership. There was a Navy court of inquiry, conflicting accusations of dereliction of duty, cover-ups, whitewashing, official reprimands, etc. Google up 'Pueblo court of inquiry' but keep in mind it's a massive, contentious and inconclusive clickhole.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Visited this last year, remarkably good condition. The Koreans were very keen to point out the size of the armoury and guns on board the ship.

<comment><USER25> I suppose that's to be expected from the North Koreans, but it's rather funny, since the ship is actually very lightly armed. Wikipedia says it only has 2 M2 Brownings aboard, does the North Korean museum claim it was armed with more, or do they claim that's heavily armed?

<comment><USER26> I think they emphasized the weaponry because the US billed it as the capture of an environmental research ship in international waters, while the DPRK preferred to position it as a thwarted military incursion into sovereign Korean waters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Google Maps: [https://firstname.lastname@example.com,125...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,125.7395677,225m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m12!1m6!3m5!1s0x357e1b5b97dd3049:0x7e4295d5012fa42a!2sUSS+Pueblo!8m2!3d39.0404785!4d125.739788!3m4!1s0x357e1b5b97dd3049:0x7e4295d5012fa42a!8m2!3d39.0404785!4d125.739788)

</comment><comment><USER28> I went there with YPT last year. Highly recommended: [https://www.youngpioneertours.com/](https://www.youngpioneertours.com/)

</comment><comment><USER29> Edward R. Murphy (XO), personal history of the incident:

[https://invidio.us/watch?v=FQg6yJnW6tQ](https://invidio.us/watch?v=FQg6yJnW6tQ)

</comment><comment><USER30> That would make a good movie.

<comment><USER31> That's exactly what I was thinking. This would make a great movie/book.</comment></comment>


Yet another plea against using public WiFi - <AUTHOR> https://habr.com/en/post/438860/ <comment><USER2> this is why you spoof your MAC. not so you can blackhat, but so you can hide your PII from abuse.</comment>


Russian bots rigged Voice Kids TV talent show result - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48293196 <comment><USER2> FTA: Channel One said the voting scam on 26 April "must be the first and last time that anyone tries to control the audience's choice".

Yeah. Right.</comment>


The Dark Side of the iPhone 5s Lines [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRwcIumf-mI

<comment><USER2> The guy sleeping inside a garbage bag... why?!!</comment>


Can We Become Immortal? - <AUTHOR> https://www.utne.com/science-and-technology/can-we-become-immortal-ze0z1801zhee <comment><USER2> Immortal maybe but never indestructable.</comment>


'Flash Boys' IEX stock exchange opens for business - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-capital-group-iex-20160815-snap-story.html <comment><USER2> If you're wondering what IEX becoming a full blown exchange means to you, well it probably doesn't matter at all.

They have been operating for some time already as an ATS, today they are now part of the RegNMS protected quote, meaning that up until today, brokers did not have to route orders to them.

it also allows them to have companies "list" on their exchange, though I don't know of any companies that are planning on listing with IEX currently.

They bring 4 unique things to the market

\- their built in delay of 350 micro seconds on each incoming and out going message, ie they delay order's coming in and they delay fill notifications going out.

\- they have a patented dynamic peg algo that will allow a user to place an order that the exchange will dynamically price. This order type was a bit contentious as the exchange doesn't delay quote changes when updating these orders, ie these orders are blessed in the sense that they don't obey the 350 microsecond delay.

[https://www.iextrading.com/trading/dpeg/](https://www.iextrading.com/trading/dpeg/)

\- they aren't currently allowing co-location

\- they don't participate in the maker taker model. They charge, I think, 9 cents on dark orders and nothing for lit orders.

Maybe the most interesting thing that IEX has brought to the US market is that the NYSE is now filing to add their own discretionary PEG order.

[https://www.nyse.com/network/article/nyse-order- types](https://www.nyse.com/network/article/nyse-order-types)

<comment> tuna-piano This is the thing when I see wall street, and specifically high frequency trading vilified. Income inequality, the plight of the middle class, etc has almost nothing to do with that kind of financial maneuvering. Getting rid of high speed trading won't affect the average person really at all - but yet it's constantly vilified.

<comment><USER3> As a mostly lay person, for me it's vilified because my understanding of it is that HFT has a significant advantage over my own personal trading, and that through this advantage HFTs are able to make "more" profits than would be possible without HFT. My brain tells me that some of these profits are likely at my own trades' expense, and that while markets and economies rise and fall, my own profits are negatively impacted by HFT.

That may not be accurate, but that's why I personally feel uncomfortable with HFT.

<comment><USER4> You don't do the kind of trading HFTs do. No matter whether trading is done with hand signals or in FPGAs, you were never going to be making markets.

Meanwhile, cost of trading for normal people like us has gone through the floor. And we're only really looking at the last 15 years when we think about trading costs, but even steeper reductions precede that, and it was all brought about by replacing human market makers --- who are crooked as a barrel of fishhooks --- with automated systems.

Respectfully --- I don't know you, and this isn't a personal comment --- but my guess is that you distrust HFT because you've been told to distrust it. If you do even the most superficial _cui bono_ analysis, you'll see the people most interested in making you believe that are themselves major financial institutions, all of them far larger than the HFTs.

It wasn't HFTs that brought down the economy in '07-'08\. It was their adversaries.

<comment><USER5> The only disagreement I have with Thomas here is the last line. Securitization groups at the large banks and HFTs aren't adversaries -- they don't interact in any meaningful fashion. Large banks, taken as a whole, have some groups which are in competition with HFTs but have other groups which are their happy customers. (If you're a large bank, and you're taking liquidity, you are either astoundingly bad at your job or you _actually desire to be buying what HFTs are selling_.)

The industry standard for buying/selling mortgage-backed securities or collateralized debt obligations isn't HFT. It isn't even automated. It is one sweating jock yelling at another sweating jock over a recorded telephone call. You can see this dramatized in The Big Short, where to unwind the shorts that the "good guys" have made they have to get their own not-quite-sweating not- quite-jock played-by-Brad-Pitt to do the phone calls on their behalf.

<comment><USER6> > It isn't even automated.

Yes. No. Maybe. There's a massive push towards exchange trading the more liquid products: traders are expensive, and if you can get a robot to do basic inventory management and market making for you (even with a human in the loop), that's savings for a desk manager looking to cut costs in a highly straightened FI environment.

The highly distressed and/or exotic stuff that people are talking about in the Big Short are still slung by salespeople, with the connivance/approval of traders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fun trivia from Flash Boys they originally were going to use the full name Investor's Exchange, but the url was unfortunate:

www.investorsexchange.com

Hence they use the short form IEX.

<comment><USER8> Ah yes bringing back memories of expertsexchange.com

I'm so happy Stack Overflow won that battle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've read both sides of the argument about the IEX delay, and my common sense tells me you cannot try and put the genie back in the bottle.

If technology exists, has been discovered, you cannot thwart it by trying to mask it by retarding it.

It think it is ironic that an exchange, IEX, founded with one of its aims being to level the playing field by calling out HFT as 'wrong' or 'unfair', and yet allow for their dynamic trades to bypass their 350 us delay is an example of we don't need it/we do need it.

People cry out about HFT being a game for the super players only, but out of it comes innovation - faster switches, well-honed programming tricks, hardware and software that eventually make their way to other uses. Sort of how the military and porn industry pushed a lot of tech we take for granted today.

<comment><USER10> In what way could this comment possibly be worthy of a down vote? It's complete and thought-provoking.

<comment><USER11> Called HFT innovative. Can't say that here.

<comment><USER12> I think it's inaccurate to put hft in the future tech division with darpa or porn. Maybe it will lead to fpga's/c++/microwaves being widely used for ML, but it seems unlikely that the low latency and minimal cross country transmission has has much value. If you're building a system to process lots of data quickly transmitting a few bytes between the UK and Belgium slightly faster than a wire won't be a constraint. Maybe it will lead to real time instance based learning, but I'm not aware of anyone going in that direction

<comment><USER9> Algorithms are also worked on, not just transmission or switching. And speed is always needed by some field or another, so I would argue it has its fruits beyond what you may have posited.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In terms of reducing the ability of speedy traders to gain an advantage in a continuous time market, how does IEX's fixed time delay compare to discretizing the timesteps, so all the trades within some finite interval [t, t+e] are treated as if they came at the same time?

This talk presents compares discretization to standard continuous-time bidding, but doesn't go into a lot of detail about how it compares to IEX- style delays: [https://simons.berkeley.edu/talks/eric- budish-2015-11-19](https://simons.berkeley.edu/talks/eric-budish-2015-11-19)

<comment><USER2> The IEX delay and batch auctions are really two completely different things.

IEX delays almost all messages in and out by a small amount.

They don't delay messages for orders that their own router modifies, their discretionary peg order. This lets their peg orders update before any one, ie HFTs, can update their own resting orders on IEX or at other exchanges in the case of a fill at IEX.

It's important to note that even with the IEX design, speed is still very important as its still a price time priority queue for order placement and cancelling. An analogy would be if all 100 meter sprinters reaction times were delayed by 1 second from hearing the starters pistol. The fastest runner still wins, its just that all reactions times are delayed evenly.

Batch auctions are a whole different animal, and to be honest, one I'm not very familiar with. Their greatest weakness is that they don't operate in a stand alone environment, ie the rest of the world continues to trade around them which eliminates most of their advantage.

<comment><USER14> Do you mind expanding on that last point? I'm interested in your take on how/why a batch auction's advantage is eliminated by the rest of the world trading around them.

<comment><USER15> Largely because the entirety of latency arb has to do with taking advantage of price differences between exchanges. How those differences are created is largely immaterial.

As long as you have multiple exchanges that are not perfectly syncd (a distributed systems problem!) There will be time based arbitrage opportunities.

<comment><USER12> Not exactly in all products. US equities exchanges have to comply with the nbbo (national best bid offer), so they're required to forward an order to the exchange with the best price. This isn't true for futures, but there aren't any fungible futures in the US. This means that latency arb in US equities isn't true arbitrage. If you see a price level get sweeped at one exchange, you may guess that the others will follow, but it's no guarantee and most sophisticated traders who trade the volume to do this will trade in a dark pool or block trade, so the opportunities are close to non existent. The intent for equities market making is to trade retail orders with the assumption that they they're placed with no knowledge of a true price and won't move the market. The true arb opportunities today are reserved to minis vs futures or cross exchange futures vs indexes

<comment><USER4> I think the point Kasey is hinting at is that the functionality you claim RegNMS requires exchanges to implement is not, due to the CAP theorem, actually possible to do reliably.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> An interesting data point in the hft rigged market debate I never see is, what do the insiders do with their money? I work at an electronic market maker that trades on colocated servers with fpgas and rents bandwidth on microwaves, so we without a doubt fall under the hft umbrella. My 401k is 100% invested in index funds and my personal brokerage account is split between 80% vanguard index etfs and a few stocks (that I probably shouldn't have invested in, but I didn't know what I was doing when I got started). This is similar to my coworkers and people I know at other firms. Why would we do this if we were knowingly rigging the market against retail investors? To answer my own question, if you're an investor, the microstructure of the exchanges is irrelevant. When I put in an order to by 100 shares of VTI, I'll put in a limit order after the close a half percent above the closing price knowing that it will be sold to citadel or another internalizer who will fill the order at a good price (nbbo, debatable since they're being investigated currently) and take the penny or two spread. I could put in a limit for the close, but either I wouldn't get filled or if I did, it would only be due to the market moving against me and honestly the difference doesn't matter. I have no intent to sell at a particular profit point or watch a screen all day to find some imagined perfect entry point which I wouldn't even know if I saw it. I'm interested to hear if opponents of hft have considered this or think insiders are behaving differently. I won't make the argument that we're looking out for the little guy or we have some mission to benefit society through price discovery. We basically print money when the market goes down, but we're so far removed from the average person that I can only assume that the hatred is based on marketing and false perception.

</comment><comment><USER16> For those who haven't read "Flash Boys", this a synopsis of the book:

Canadian banker Brad Katsuyama notices prices for stocks he is buying change price almost the instant he places his order to purchase them.

Turns out that this happens when he places a larger order than can be filled at a single exchange. After some investigation he determines that HFT traders "see" his trade on the local NJ exchange and buy up stock at other (further away) exchanges before said banker can fill his order at the original (lower) price.

His solution: Send orders to multiple exchanges but delay the orders to the closest ones so orders arrive at exchanges more or less simultaneously thus defeating that particular HFT strategy. The coil of fiber is the method used to achieve that delay.

<comment><USER17> My understanding was that they had a software called Thor to generate the artificial delay in sending their trades to the different exchanges.

This new exchange uses the long coil of fiber to enable all traders from around the world to benefit from that protection. I'm wondering if they really had to go to that extent to get the speed bump. But hey since shame has yet to force formally verified software on anyone's radar, the long coil will certainly do.

<comment><USER18> The long coil is a hardware solution that keeps everyone honest. I have a suspicion that the financial incentives offered to the exchange to bypass a software delay would be too great to turn down -- especially years from now if the original players are gone.

Edit: Oops. Maybe they can bypass the coil for certain orders. Well that doesn't make sense...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> -> Lewis declined an interview request because he is on deadline for another book project.

For those interested it looks like his next book will be about Behavioral Economics.

[http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/06/michael-lewiss-next- boo...](http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/06/michael-lewiss-next-book-will-be- about-the-godfathers-of-behavioral-economics.html)

</comment><comment><USER20> Was the 30 mile cable necessary to create a speed bump. Seems to me a few lines of code would have worked.

<comment><USER21> 30 miles of cable gives your customers proof the speed bump will not go away with a software change.

<comment><USER22> As long as they don't install a second shorter cable, and have the software route to the second cable. The entire thing is a dog and pony show for retail investors who are even bigger suckers than the idiots running IEX. If the speed bump is for everyone and can't be removed then how do PEG orders bypass it? Are PEG orders some kind of magic that travels faster than light?

Pro Tip: If a large financial institution tells you they are protecting you, they are bald faced lying to you and you are about to get a serious lesson in business.

The same idiots who tell you that IEX is a good thing will also sell you actively managed mutual funds that A) under perform vanguard and B) seriously under perform once you subtract fees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder if they're using some kind of EDFA or other amplifier for that delay spool. For 350µsec we're talking at least 14.3dB of loss going through that thing, in other words, only 3.7% of the signal is coming out the end in the best case scenario.

</comment><comment><USER24> On the same topic, I've actually set aside a down payment for a house, but I probably won't be buying for another year or so. I'm wondering what is a good way to invest this money since leaving it in the bank at less than 1% interest really isn't doing much.

<comment><USER25> My recommendation is to put it in something like the Vanguard REIT ETF. So if real estate is up by the time you are ready to buy your house your investment will likely be up proportionally. In the event you get a negative return it is very likely your down payment might be lower as well.

Alternatively if you want to lower your risk (which also lowers your expected reward) you may invest half in REIT ETFs and the other half in an uncorrelated sector. Think of what sector goes up when real estate goes down.

DISCLAIMERS of course: This is not professional advice. Invest at your own risk.

<comment><USER26> This is an interesting idea!

It might even be better to think about an investment vehicle more closely correlated with housing costs. The main Vanguard REIT is mostly commercial property I believe which could be somewhat uncorrelated with residential property.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> An infinitely more interesting question is who owns Capital Group Companies

</comment><comment><USER28> I wish them the best of luck.

It's easy to become resigned to finance being an insiders game. But the efficient allocation of capital is to important to leave to "the professionals."

<comment><USER29> Markets do not allocate capital, they provide liquidity for investors making them more likely to invest during stock offerings in the first place.

<comment><USER30> Those are just different faces of the same coin.

<comment><USER29> No, well functioning exchanges affect the amount of capital that gets invested in ventures not how well it is allocated.

<comment><USER30> People are looking forward. How much money individual startups can raise (or established companies when increasing capital) depends on their expectations of future prices on the exchanges.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> How appropriate, the Flash Boys book just showed up from Amazon this morning.

<comment><USER26> Be sure to pair the read with the critique:

Flash Boys: Not So Fast

[https://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Insiders-Perspective- High-...](https://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Insiders-Perspective-High- Frequency-ebook/dp/B00P0QI2M2)

<comment><USER31> Excellent, thank you!</comment></comment></comment>


Infineon chip solves Rubik's Cube in 637 milliseconds - <AUTHOR> http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/7723.html <comment><USER2> "It takes tremendous computing power to solve such a highly complex puzzle with a machine."

It doesn't. I can be done quickly on any conventional computer: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_solutions_for_Rubik%27...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_solutions_for_Rubik%27s_Cube)

The time is still impressive, but this doesn't showcase any real improvements to any technology.

<comment><USER3> The article seem to be referring to the problem of manipulating a _physical_ Rubik's cube. In that case, the bottleneck is the mechanical interaction, not the computation of the necessary steps, right? The real achievement here is the speed of robotic manipulation?

It's kind of misleading to phrase it as the _chip_ solving it, when the focus is on the _actuators_.

<comment><USER4> They didn't even improve actuation. Instead, they appear to have used a specially-constructed cube (no doubt designed to be suited for their machine) and literally bolted their actuators to the center caps. I'd like to see them do this with an unmodified vanilla cube like the other cube-solving machines I've seen.

If you want impressive actuators, check out modern pick-and-place machines [1].

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8qkaTsr2_o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8qkaTsr2_o)

<comment><USER5> Luc suggests that it looks like an off-the-shelf cube: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12935104](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12935104)

<comment><USER4> Hmm, I guess that that's not a factor, then.

Bolting the caps to the actuators was the bigger trick anyway. Compared to cages or grippers, dramatically reduced inertia and much stiffer, so less damping required and it's easier to dump energy back into the actuators. I'm half-tempted to call that "cheating", but I don't know what the actual rules are - I doubt that this robot can "put down" or "pick up" the cube in less than a minute or two. The older version had the cube actually soldered in.

<comment><USER6> It is not a new idea and now need to bolt anything, just drill some holes: [http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/watch-worlds-fastest-rubiks-cube- ro...](http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/watch-worlds-fastest-rubiks-cube-robot-solve- puzzle-just-one-second-1539934)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fast stepper motor control was solved a long time ago, and takes little computer power. Watch this daisy wheel printer, a technology from the 1970s.[1] The print wheel is driven by a stepper motor, and for each character, it must be spun to the correct position, brought to a precision stop, and held while the hammer hits the selected letter tine.

Daisy wheel printers were the first mass-market device with multiple powered mechanical moving parts coordinated entirely in software. The four actuators (daisy wheel stepper, hammer actuator, carriage stepper, and platen stepper) were connected only by electronics and software. Invented by David S. Lee.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTBM9JELUYQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTBM9JELUYQ)

</comment><comment><USER8> I think the achievement of building a cube that can withstand such quick moves should also be mentioned.

<comment><USER9> Oh, wow, this is solving a _physical_ cube.

<comment><USER10> I guess this mimics human competition settings: you're allowed to examine the whole cube beforehand. Figuring out _any_ valid solution is really trivial, esp. on a computer, it's just not hard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "The microcontroller AURIX™, one of the world's most powerful minicomputers, also contributed to the record-breaking effort: It is one of the essential elements that enable autonomous driving."

I do not think the term 'minicomputer' was intended to mean... a microcontroller.

</comment><comment><USER12> Sub1 not reloaded solved in 0.887 seconds in Jan 2016

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVF_XUccMuo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVF_XUccMuo)

</comment><comment><USER13> Sooooo this is a hardware problem.

Rubiks cubes are solved.

So it doesn't have to do the 'minimum' moves as they say, might waste time working it out.

But even so it probably does the minimum moves.

Since I think that's mostly easy, just hard to prove.

But either way, even if you add 5 moves to use a lookup table, back to hardware.

For humans rubiks cubes are very easy, just memorise the instructions. Books have been out for decades.

[Edit] it's interesting that they imply it might take more moves for physical reasons. Not sure if it's about destroying the cube or speed of turning.

<comment><USER14> >So it doesn't have to do the 'minimum' moves as they say, might waste time working it out.

Maybe they're counting moving the top and bottom at the same time as two separate moves? I don't know why it wouldn't just be considered moving the middle but that might be what they're talking about. They mentioned that it doesn't do it in the minimal amount of moves on the basis that it would take longer so I'm assuming that's it.

As far as the computational time needed to do so, it's absolutely trivial. This thing is built around a single microcontroller and it can handle 6 stepper motors, solving the cube, vision processing, and state tracking all by itself. The only thing impressive about this is how fast the cube is being manipulated but even that might not be too impressive considering the fact that they just attached stepper motors directly to the center piece of each face as opposed to using an unmodified Rubik's cube.

<comment><USER15> >They mentioned that it doesn't do it in the minimal amount of moves on the basis that it would take longer so I'm assuming that's it.

It might often be useful to spin opposite faces in different directions. Two moves by normal counting, but done in the time of one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> They use rubber gripper to spin each side and known algorithms to solve. The hard part is the speed of the visual recognition.

<comment><USER17> Even then, this seems like a poor choice of demonstration of visual recognition capabilities since you only need to read the initial state and then adjust it when you make a move. They've used stepper motors which normally don't need feedback too, do movements can probably be done open loop.

Perhaps they do only use visual feedback for determining the state, which would be a better demo, but I doubt anyone would be able know from that article!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This story is a testament to the poor quality of current journalism.

</comment><comment><USER19> 'The computing chip, or the "brain" of the machine...'

Well, that's some serious 1983 Omni Magazine shit right there.

(Sorry to point it out, but it just seems like maybe the sort of thing we're past having to ELI5 nowadays.)

</comment><comment><USER20> Two popups within 10 seconds. Ban that site from HN!

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm kind of surprised that the fastest machine is less than 10x faster than the best human.</comment>


Coding Machines (2009) - <AUTHOR> https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/coding-machines/ <comment><USER2> Don't want to ruin it, but I didn't expect this to be a narrative. Chilling and extremely hacker-oriented!

<comment><USER3> Oh boy I thought the same. I had a sinking feeling until I realized it's a story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This was a great read. The first part reminded me of "On Trusting Trust" but obviously it's just one part of the narrative. This and I, Rowboat are probably one of the few sci-fi pieces I've ever read that didn't feel overly abstract or vague. I hope hard "computer science fiction" like this will become a genre of its own in the future.

<comment><USER5> Shh, don't spoil it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great story. Only hiccup I saw was that he mentioned the patio was always usable due to their location but towards the end he said it was "enclosed". Are there enclosed patios still susceptible to weather?

<comment><USER7> Enclosed patios provide some protection from the weather, but they are not the same as the insulated interior of a modern house. I've been to a house in Texas that had an enclosed patio that was unusable in the heat of summer. It acted like a hothouse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> In his Turing talk Dennis Richey discusses similar issues. It is a great read. Here's a link to it: [https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER9> I like the minimalist design of the website :)

</comment><comment><USER10> This is someone advertising their ebook they are selling on Amazon. You probably didn't know that from the title, because it doesn't tell you anything.

<comment><USER5> And you can read it on the website too. The title doesn't tell you anything because if I linked the paper it's referencing it'd spoil the story too.

<comment><USER4> Is the ebook the same as TFA or is there more in the ebook?

<comment><USER5> Based on the number of pages I'd guess that they're the same.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ultra-thin e-skin could lead to advances in medicine, cool wearable computing - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2013/07/26/e-skin-tokyo-university/?a_dgi=aolshare_reddit

<comment><USER2> Amazing tech, but the "lighter than a feather" bit dropping the circuit and a feather to show how light it is in comparison fails so hard. Oh dear.</comment>


"Phones are being blocked from taking videos or pictures" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/DeMarko/status/1268014539880235010 <comment><USER2> Could it just be they can't _post_ pics/videos because either the cell tower is jammed with too many signals (possible) or that the authorities have disabled the cell tower (also possible I'd think)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I posted this mostly in case anyone could corroborate it! Either the report that cameras on the bridge are being disabled, or that phone manufacturers have actually implemented a technology like this.

</comment><comment><USER3> This doesn't pass the sniff test.

\- Apple doesn't volunteer device unlocking to the government. Why would they help them reach into random people's phones to disable their cameras? This sounds like a pizzagate conspiracy theory.

\- Apple patents everything they possibly can, even if they never intend to use it and for a variety of reasons.

\- Cell phone jamming would be unsafe.

\- Phones with cameras will still take pictures with cell, wifi, and bluetooth turned off.

\- There's nothing preventing people from taking pictures using the previous method of whatever was happening, or supposedly happening, and then posting them later.

Something else happened like a stinger MITM blocking certain sites, cell tower issues/overload, or it's a fabrication.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd like to see some evidence of this, it seems surprising that a company like Apple or Google would do this for the government without some fight back.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd also like to see some evidence of this. But my understanding is that the purported mechanism is some sort of infrared beacon shone into the camera (like the eurion constellation, but live); it's something that could be activated without Apple or Google's involvement in the moment.

<comment><USER4> My point is more that this seems like a feature that no phone company would install without a law requiring it, if it's really in there, this feature would be really, really dangerous because any criminal could then just use the same equipment to disable cameras. It's also pretty bad to be depriving people of the use of their property against the 4th amendment and probably the 1st as well considering it's limiting photography and free expression as such.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Perfect advertisement for Librem 5 and PinePhone.</comment>


TikTok security flaws left personal data, videos vulnerable to hackers – Busine - <AUTHOR> http://uk.businessinsider.com/tiktok-security-flaws-hackers-could-access-personal-user-data-videos-2020-1 <comment><USER2> Here's the report by Check Point Research, a lot more information and specifics.

[https://research.checkpoint.com/2020/tik-or-tok-is-tiktok- se...](https://research.checkpoint.com/2020/tik-or-tok-is-tiktok-secure- enough/)</comment>


Why change is hard for any open source community - <AUTHOR> https://opensource.com/business/14/12/why-change-hard-for-open-source-community

<comment><USER2> what's the takeaway? i read the article twice and came away with yes... tradition, keeping things the way they are and have been, together with slow decision making, all good? but got to the end and thought, okay. where's the controversy? i agree with all of the above, particularly when you are building systems, oss or not, that other users have to, choose to, want to depend on. so the author's grip is with what? the newcomers??? please explain cuz i feel like i am missing something here.</comment>


Why India's bureaucracy is a hurdle to Internet Freedom? This is why ... - <AUTHOR> http://brajeshwar.com/2011/cloud-computing-and-phone-security/

<comment><USER2> Are you sure that the guy in the video is an 'Indian top brass'? From what I know he is a retired bureaucrat who is just looking for his 15 minutes of fame. He is not relevant for anyone today except for third grade news channels.</comment>


ChatOps at VividCortex - <AUTHOR> https://vividcortex.com/blog/2014/06/02/chatops-at-vividcortex/

<comment><USER2> Neat idea. By the way, I was looking over your offerings. I started working on a program that uses machine learning to optimize mysql config files (customized them per machine/install)

I'm also working on a product where users can upload their config files and system stats and get feedback regarding how to optimize them.

Drop me an email if you're interested in partnering. (I need lots of help in the reaching customers department)</comment>


My Life Pouring Concrete - <AUTHOR> https://quillette.com/2020/08/02/my-life-pouring-concrete/ <comment><USER2> I worked on a construction crew one summer in 1966 building concrete structures for a sewage treatment plant. Based on this article, not much has changed.

It was interesting to see the hierarchy of the various trades. The rodbusters (rebar workers) were cocky, fast, and had no body-fat. The carpenters that built the forms for the concrete were fat, slow, and drank vodka all day. And the laborers (e.g. me) were there mainly to entertain everyone else, lol.

</comment><comment><USER3> What a very weird article. My father spent most of his working years as a mason, it basically destroyed his body.

The article briefly mentions poor working conditions, extrapolates to the casual drug use to manage pain, then launches into Zionism somehow?

While also dismissing the worship of manual labor under the Soviet system.

> The revival of Zionism in the 19th century provides one notable cultural > genre in which the common labourer received heroic treatment in a way that > transcended merely socialist tropes. This included the so-called Muscular > Judaism movement presented by Zionist leader Max Nordau as an answer to > caricature of Jews as meek and cowardly parasites who got by on guile > instead of effort.</comment>