baberuth

Brutal title (Not OP's fault).

The article basically suggests that algos are reducing market volatility.

Algos don't try really hard to get VWAP. VWAP is REALLY easy to achieve, _beating_ VWAP is what most banks are trying to do when they trade large blocks.

A lot of the stories about warring algos and detecting each other are just that: stories. Yes, it has happened, but by and large thats not the game thats going on.

Great idea, awful name.

Grope + People = Grople ?

Obligatory Grapist video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fqq051BU2MY

Sort of reminds me of zaarly.com

sorry, I wasn't clear. I wasn't asking WHAT velocity of money is, I was asking someone to explain the author's velocity of money argument. i.e. transfering wealth out of btc accelerates the velocity.

q, m, v, and p remain relatively constant in that transaction unless the liquidity event causes a persistent decrease in the price level (no evidence that the current BTC market could support it, but also c.f. above my comments about immature markets and liquidity).

About 25k BTC trade daily on MtGox, and that is thought to represent roughly 1/3 of USD-BTC FX transactions daily.

Keep in mind thats BTC-USD trades, not "notional value spent".

Apparent largest transaction was 400k bitcoins: http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1346.0

It would be difficult to transact 100k BTC with one counterparty, but could be reasonably accomplished in a few days via electronic exchanges (mtgox).

Can someone explain the velocity of money argument to me?

The blog post seems to be: 1. If btc are liquid, everyone will want to move btc wealth out to some other store of wealth and btc will fail. 2. If btc are illiquid, then it fails by definition. Currently btc are at this stage.

Here's why I don't get it: 1. If they ARE liquid and its easy to convert btc value to other value, why would everyone want to move value out of btc? seems like people would want to move value IN to btc because of the other benefits (anonymity, instantaneous transaction). Regardless, it doesn't follow that easy value conversion predicates value drain. 2. "Bitcoin seems to be at this stage [of being unable to convert Bitcoin assets into other, non-Bitcoin assets easily now]" -- this seems to be false. There's a highly liquid market for BTC-USD (21k btc have traded so far today). Yes, its not easy to transact 500k, but thats true for most new assets including exchange listed backed equities.

nothing. anyone can. right now its mostly inefficient to allocate cpus for mining. its just not worth it for them. as more bitcoins are mined they get harder to mine.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2265491

something like that. This morning I had this thought for 2 things:

1. a python filtering function I wrote 2. how to restructure an entire django project.

Both (esp #2) are a little big for posting a code snippet. Bigger architecture problems probably only make sense within the context of the larger scope, so I'd pretty much want someone to check out the whole repository.

The SO thing would be great because SO has built in reputations so it'd help people feel more comfortable with giving away the entire project. I personally don't care, but I can imagine that being a barrier to code reviews by strangers.

Obviously, that sort of code review is a much more time-expensive request, so finding reviewers might also be hard without some sort of compensation.

I'm not super concerned about confidentiality for my code, but then again I'm not doing anything groundbreaking.

Mostly, if I cared about confidentiality, it'd be so I don't get publicly embarassed for crappy code.

Rating systems for reviewers would also let people build reputations so that reviewee's could feel more comfortable about code confidentiality.

Stack overflow already has reputations built in, so as I mentioned, it might just be awesome as a feature for SO. And another revenue stream, if they weren't already swimming in cash.

Lissn is blowing up with HN users right now. Its quite nice. Sort of like 2-3 person IRC chat rooms.

Not sure what the real value is, but its fun for the moment.

Chill out guys.

There's a balance between deliberately writing garbage and trying to start with perfection, and you choose some middle ground.

Yes, write maintainable code. No, don't accrue technical debt just for the fun of it. The post is titled as if all other things equal I would prefer paths that result in more technical debt, but that's clearly moronic.

But you have to start with step 1 (or I guess you can start with step 2...). The point for me is that I end up a lot more long term productive if I get my ass in gear on "get it done" first, because it helps me get to "test" and "refactor" a lot sooner.

That doesn't have to be true for everyone, but it seems to be true for me... this week anyways.

"My co founder can father a small child just by looking at a woman"

Hilarious.

With great power comes great responsibility...

Entrepreneurs Unpluggd was great, Tim. As far as I'm concerned, you're leading the push to put Chicago on the map as a great startup city.

to be clear, i mean a space that is heavily geared towards web based startup/technology hackers.

noble tree is a coffee shop and chicago jelly meets there, but it is not a space where you can expect to go meet random hackers

pumpingstationone is nice but last i checked it didn't appear to have a strong technology startup type vibe.

i understand that curating the "vibe" of a "hackerspace" (whatever that means) isn't an easy thing to do, but i've been INCREDIBLY IMPRESSED by general assembly and hacker dojo. pumping station one is a great space, its just not quite the same. I'd consider:

nycresistor:generalassembly::pumpingstationone:"what i'm asking for" -- basically "general hacker types" (macguyver, picking locks and being generally crafty) vs "programmer hacker mindset" (hey, i wrote a really cool thing in node.js which i learned over the last 48 redbull fueled hours).

Chicago is an amazing town and there are tons of great people for it: birthplace of RoR, cofoudners of django live there, plenty of YC startups, groupon, beyond the pedway (woot, @timjahn, calling you out -- attended your "Entrepreneurs Unpluggd" event in Feb and I think that may be the best event I've attended in Chi), grubwhub, grubwithus, i think restaurant.com, etc.

However, the tech community isn't quite as unified and its a lot harder to get in touch with likeminded folk. At hacker dojo, you could turn to almost anyone to get feedback on a web app or ask for javascript advice, which I am not aware exists in Chicago.

grubwithus (current YC class)

inkling markets (first YC class i believe)

Why is there no General Assembly/Hacker Dojo in Chicago? Is there a demand for it at all?

The culture in Chicago seems totally different, would there even be a demand for that sort of thing?

you didn't leave a way to get in touch

Not sure if this is supposed to be an april fools joke, but the post title statement is false, in mandarin and in cantonese.

穀歌; pinyin: Gǔgē

Don't do it.

Might be a way to encourage them to pay you, but to your prospective clients who don't know the backstory behind nonpayment, you will seem petty and vindictive. Maybe you didn't deliver as promised, or the bill just slipped through the cracks by accident by ending up in the engineering department instead of accounts payable.

The facebook/twitter route is a public record, not only for the client but for you.

Do what's right for you, not what's wrong for them.

The "in another life I could have been a spy" part of me LOVES that this can be done.

I've read that with zoom lenses and consumer level dslr you can get high enough quality images to be able to copy someone elses keys without getting within 100 feet of the key.

malicious code as revenge is petty and immature.

life's short. don't be a jerk.

To be a little more helpful: Basically for ACH you get charged per transaction.

http://www.achq.com/lz/ach-processing-solutions.php says $.25/transaction, though I've heard that you can find as low as $0.04/transaction.

relevant: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2211928

ACH if you don't want to get ripped up on transaction fees.

Do it. Create interesting material and we will read it.

The problem isn't the number of startup blogs, its the number of startup blogs that are started and then languish with no content of value.

Good luck with your blog.

Recommendation: Your h1 tag font renders poorly for me -- http://i.imgur.com/WEtKP.png

Too much has already been written about how easy it is to get some sort of MVP out there, but the real gem in steveblank's article is this:

"until you actually commit to them by choosing one idea, quitting your day job and committing yourself 24/7 it’s not clear that the word “founder or entrepreneur” even applies"

Many hackers fail because they spread themselves too thin, firing at multiple projects until finally realizing that they're performing suboptimally for all of them.

Here's my major beef with what's happening. The real metric of business success is whether you have a positive impact — on your industry, on your community, on (in a small way) the world at large. That doesn't always mean starting your own company. Most of the time, in fact, it means becoming part of a company that you love, with a purpose you believe in, and people who you can't imagine not working with.

Might be true at large, but my FAVORITE thing about communities of hackers is that hackers are principally CREATORS. The reason I left a 9-5 to spend more time with hackers in the startup community because this community self selects the flavor of person who sees problems with the status quo, wants to fix them, and has the power to exact change (usually through code).

In contrast, most of the general populace is in "cover your ass" mode, which is why the author is probably generally right when he says, "Most of the time [business success] means becoming part of a company that you love" -- but not right for most HN readers.

Amazon seems to be quietly sniping markets from what are largely considered Apple/Google territory.

I've been very happy with buying TV episodes and renting movies on Amazon for a while now and it didn't strike me as odd until I read this post that Amazon might be emerge as the big media vendor as well, without trumpets of techcrunch posts to announce it.

stu, i got it when trying to click through the HN link.

8:07am: tried it again because i saw your response and it worked. the upside: nice tight 3 min window to check your apache logs?

8:04am EST:

Slight problem...

Something is wrong with the database, please bear with us.

Unable to connect to your database server using the provided settings.

A great email indeed, but 500 perfect emails would be overwhelming.

If its the perfect email for him, great, but for most busy people the perfect email is something like 3 sentences long.