LEDs are hard in most places, but it is getting better.

I'm a fan of CREE can lights. High CRI, a good coating, and built-in trim makes them look better than the previous lights. I haven't had them very long, but so far they are handling brownouts better than anything with a ballast. The remaining CFLs tend to discolor (toward pink???) and dim significantly if they are not fed exactly the right voltage. The biggest downside is that the LEDs cost about 10s the cheapo "pink" CFLs, which adds up quickly. It will take years to see any cost savings even with 100% survival rate of the LEDs.

sampling at 50 times a second

Using quantum entanglement to achieve zero transmission delay, and then only looking at it once every 20 milliseconds? You may as well just use fiber, as half of the time you will still receive information ahead of a polling-based QE system. Now, the benefit for the QE system increases as the fiber distance increases, so your idea still makes sense for mutli-planetary HFT. Just... not between Chicago and New York.

There's no point ot a "high speed link", with all the insanity involved in [FPGAs]

Do that for a day, and then come back and tell us how you fared. Local silicon in New York doesn't do squat when the best information is coming from Chicago, London, or Tokyo.

or even a view from the space station

Holy shit, I would love to have a live feed from the ISS on a 120" TV! That could be good for showrooms, too, to show off fine detail of the Earth's geography from space.

2160 pees

Estimates from my wife place that at approximately one half of a pregnancy, which is not very difficult to achieve. You may want to set your pee-standards higher!

Now profits jump as production triples and the bonuses take his pay to 20 times that of the janitors.

The hot shot CEO will know to take enough to put him to the 12x limit, and then distribute the remainder evenly across the entire company. That is, give everyone a single percentage of his/her salary as a bonus, preserving the 12x ratio. He could conceivably only give the bonus to the lowest-paid employees to maximize his own bonus, but that would alienate the overwhelming majority of the company.

There's no need to raise salaries or wages in order to comply with a relative cap on total compensation. In fact, I think it's pretty irresponsible to raise anyone's salaries based on a windfall year for the company as a whole; precisely for the reasons you specified.

As long as you escape them properly

Friends don't let friends generate dynamic SQL. Please use prepared statements!

If the compiler decides it can delete a conditional because it's always true or always false, I most certainly do want a warning!

What if the conditional is based on a macro that is user-defined, to enable or disable functionality at compile-time? Or what if the conditional is based on template parameters, for C++? I see those use-cases on a regular basis, and the relevant code depends upon the compiler to properly optimize out the conditional and dead code for performance.

I basically distrust pointers, but especially any pointers on which the user does arithmetic. Some people think that's a snazzy way to move through an array.

In C and C++, all array iteration is pointer arithmetic, so your "some people" is really everyone. Always remember that foo[n] is equivalent to n[foo] is equivalent to *(foo+n).

In the lingo of the stock market this is not HFT.

You're right—I was thinking about Knight's market-making activities (which are HFT), and not their customer execution activities. It's definitely the customer execution activities at fault here.

let's do a one day cycle.

Hey, that's a great idea. It already exists, but it takes place twice daily: the opening auction and the closing auction on NASDAQ or NYSE. You're welcome to restrict your trading to those auctions.

This is not HFT

At this point, almost all market-making is HFT.

doesn't it follow that it's not really worth getting vaccinated because it's not that common?

There is quite a large tail risk in a flu outbreak. three to five percent of the world dead? I'll take my chances with the shot.

Tax these millisecond trades and they'd go away or, at least, the volume would drop significantly.

I recommend against that. The profit margin on these "news" style trades is so high that a tax would not impact them. A new tax will reduce volume, but it won't do diddly-squat about this particular issue.

Instead of the paltry fines that the SEC levies on the cheaters, they ought to take the entire transaction away from the guilty party.

Busted trades can hurt the cheaters' counterparties, so you are effectively punishing all market participants by doing this. Better to just force the cheating company to disgorge all profits from the trade. They can keep the position they acquired, but fraudulent proceeds go to the regulatory agency instead.

10x the productivity, 10x the bugs.

I wholly disagree. If someone cranks out a lot of buggy code, it's arguable that the functional value of the code is also bundled with a lot of technical debt. So, if you are measuring 10x the functional value, then yes you may have many bugs. But a real productivity metric should account for technical debt, and therefore the hypothetical 10x developers are probably both producing more functional value and fewer bugs. In fact, maybe your best 10x developers are the ones who produce the same functional value as everyone else, but find and preemptively fix bugs like a well-oiled machine.