ot1138

Can't wait for 3 weeks from now when the Bluesky media blitz putters out.

My dad subscribed to these for many years from the 50s-70s. I used to sit in our attic reading old issues, with projects based around vacuum tubes, transistors, lasers (!) and even surveillance. It seriously ignited my love of engineering.

I came across new issues in the 90s as an adult and the articles seemed to be quite dumbed down. It had lost the magic of those old issues.

As pretty much any professional trader or quant knows, there are degrees of efficiency. Ex-US markets are significantly less efficient than the US. Some US securities are less efficient than others. Certain instruments and exchanges are less efficient than others.

Markets become more efficient as a result of entities who make them so. It is possible to make a very good living by being one of these entities.

I loved this retell. Brings back the old days, especially the Google and Yahoo parties of the late 2000's. Those were crazy. They literally carried one of my employees out of a basement rave who had passed out from drinking too much.

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Plato was in fact real... I used it many times! Looking back, it was pretty impressive technology for its day but was quickly becoming obsolete. I hated having to walk all the way to campus to get some physics units in that I missed.

I vaguely seemed to recall that sometime around the Gulf war, I was able to modem in and connect remotely. Shortly after, I stopped getting Plato assignments!

Banks would actually be of primary concern after a nuclear war. Without them, there would be little economy to speak of.

My guess is that something that important was protected by reinforced ceilings/floors.

Interesting story but I have a bit of anecdotal evidence to share. Back when I was a Freshman at UIUC in 1989, I was given a campus tour and told that one of the buildings there was designed to collapse outwardly in order to protect the equipment in the basement. That equipment was a national computer network (not yet called the internet!)

So at the very least, the origin of this story predates 1991 by at least two years.

I don't recall the name of the building but here it is on Google maps.

https://www.google.com/maps/@40.106201,-88.2268272,3a,75y,91...

Edit: It's not clear from my original comment but the reason for collapse would presumably be a nuclear strike. I remember this because this was a time when we grew up with a constant fear of a Russian nuclear strike and I couldn't help but wonder why anyone on earth would want to nuke Champaign.

Edit: Ah, here we go! It is the Foreign Languages Building (FLB), later renamed. I remember having to trudge here at 7ams on snowy winter days to listen to Japanese language cassettes.

https://uihistories.library.illinois.edu/virtualtour/maincam...

Edit: And here's a contemporary article about the FLB, which also cited some of the crazy rumors about this building.

https://imgur.com/HXenjnt.png

Valley View Trading | Developer/Trader | Onsite, Chicago IL

Calling all elite developers who are ready to make their mark in the markets: Valley View trading is not your typical trading firm. We're a small team of successful trader/engineers looking for an inventive, entrepreneurial and detail-oriented developer who wants to master the equity options markets.

If you're a self-starter with serious C++ chops, a track record of moving fast and a hunger to excel in the ultra-competitive world of options trading - let's talk. This is a unique chance to reap the rewards of your talent.

The right candidate thrives as an individual contributor, has 5+ years of experience creating high-octane, low latency code and a clean background. You'll hit the ground running and have 60 days to ace the Series 57 exam on us.

If you're ready to trade Silicon Valley politics for the chance at Silicon Valley paydays, this is your opportunity. Show us what you've got - reach out with cover letter and resume at valleyviewoptions <AT> gmail.

Please do so! This would be a fascinating experiment and perhaps a famous one, given that similar answers are the knee jerk reaction of armchair skeptics the world over.

Yes, that's what people typically use a calendar for. So you agree that this trick isn't useful for anything?

Neat but what is this useful for?

I have a recent OnePlus and it's been excellent. I like it even more than the older ones I had, which is directionally quite different than my experience with Apple and Samsung.

Pahole is a related utility for high performance programmers. I've been able to attain orders-of-magnitude performance improvements in trading applications using it.

I don't know what caused it but I suspected at the time, and still do, that it was simply business people getting more involved in order to drive growth.

The hostility was simply this. One day we had a dedicated high level Google engineer helping us out and giving us guidance (and even special tags) to get the data we needed in a cost effective manner for both Google and us. The next day, he was gone and we received demands to know exactly what we were doing, why and even sensitive information about our business. After several months of such probing, we were summarily told that the access we had was revoked and that there was no recourse.

We circumvented by setting up thousands of unique IP addresses in 50+ countries throughout the world and pointing our spiders at Google through them (same as they do to everyone else). These were throttled to maintain very low usage rates and stay off the radar. We continually refilled our queues with untouched IPs in case any were ever blacklisted (which happened occasionally).

As for what we did, we sampled ads for every keyword under the sun, aggregated and analyzed them to find out what was working and what wasn't. This even led to methods for estimating advertiser budgets. At one point, we had virtually every Google advertiser and their ongoing monthly spend, keywords and ad copy in our database. Highly valuable to smart marketers who were looking for an edge.

Phenomenal article, very entertaining and aligns with my experience as a prominent search "outsider" (I founded the first search intelligence service back in 2004, which was later acquired by WPP. Do I have some stories).

The engineers at Google were wonderful to work with up to 2010. It was like a switch flipped mid-2011 and they became actively hostile to any third party efforts to monitor what they were doing. To put it another way, this would like NBC trying to sue Nielsen from gathering ratings data. Absurd.

Fortunately, the roadblocks thrown up against us were half-hearted ones and easily circumvented. Nevertheless, I had learned an important lesson about placing reliance for one's life work on a faceless mega tech corporation.

It was not soon after when Google eliminated "Don't Be Evil" from the mission statement. At least they were somewhat self aware, I suppose.

I don't do much C++, but I have definitely found that engineers will just assert that something is "faster" without any evidence to back that up.

Very true, though there is one case where one can be highly confident that this is the case: code elimination.

You can't get any faster than not doing something in the first place.

I had a section of code which incurred ~20 clock cycles to make a function call to a virtual function in a critical loop. That's over and above potential delays resulting from cache misses and the need to place multiple parameters on the stack.

I was going to eliminate polymorphism altogether for this object but later figured out how to refactor so that this particular call could be called once a millisecond. Then if more work was needed, it would dispatch a task to a dedicated CPU.

This was an incredibly performant improvement which made a significant difference to my P&L.

Is this really efficient or practical? My understanding is that the latency required to copy memory from CPU or RAM to GPU negates any performance benefits (much less running over a network!)

This is out of the question for real time apps. Co-routines are an elegant solution to implement cooperative multitasking in such cases.

Ha, we used to do this in the 90s with double pipes || and triple pipes |||.

I created an over-the-top Catan game. I started off with a faux treasure chest from HomeGoods. Then replaced the generic board and tiles with laser cut wood ones. The robber was replaced with a hand painted one from Etsy. Everyone has custom dice of their own choosing (some made from stainless steel) and custom colors for their pieces. I also shelled out for a "Longest turn" card to add to the fun.

It's a huge hit.

I like where this is going. Keep it up.

However, I wonder if it wouldn't reach a far greater audience in C++?

This was one of the main lessons they hammered into us at UIUC in the early 90's.

That's an unusual and excellent outcome! But congratulations for your success!

I've published three non-fiction books. The first was self published and got noticed by Entrepreneur press. They published the second two.

Despite being a bestseller in the business category, I've made probably only about $30,000 from them. I've been told that mine is also an atypical result as most authors make next to nothing.

Despite having plenty of things to write about, I've since decided there are much better uses for my time.

Agreed. Twitter used to be terrible and now it's actually gotten pretty good as I appreciate having different viewpoints on a single platform. You do have to block the conspiracy spam but I don't see how that's any different than having to block the fanatically woke posts that used to crowd the conversation.

I implied nothing. This is literally what happened. A woman who knew next to nothing about search strung us along for weeks. She couldn't answer even the simplest questions or provide any insight whatsoever. She made it clear she had no authority. Yet after making request after request to us for sensitive data, she simply shut off our access.

Wow. Yes, there's absolutely zero criticism of white males these days.

there aren't a lot of other white men in leadership at Google. Makes this targeted attack feel worse.

Reverse racism is just racism.