Cheetah 3D is like 70 bucks and I've used it to create models for 3D printing.

It's not free, but if you're into 3D printing then 70 bucks is nothing as everything else involved costs you a lot more.

No he doesn't. That's what is what makes this a mental health issue. Validation is a basic human drive and he is probably desperate for others to acknowledge his existence. There's an ob-xkcd on that but I couldn't find it with a quick search.

In mentally unstable people, who rely on others for validation, this can get to the point of Existenzangst. Basically, he doesn't want to win an argument, he just really, really needs to have an argument. Because it means that others acknowledge he exists, which he isn't really certain about all by himself.

So by the effort he invests alone you can see that this really is quite important to him. It's self-destructive, but it matters. It's much like some mentally ill people who cut or hurt themselves, because the pain gives them assurance that life is real and that they exist and things.

Zontar, we should compare notes. I'll send you a mail.

But same here. I've had real-life shit that I would have instantly traded for this troll.

His replies won't cause a rollover if you don't reply to them. See my update above about how he reacts to being completely ignored.

It's not an act. I've had to deal with mentally damaged persons in real life. Faking a mental illness convincingly is not as easy as the movies make it. And unless it's a commercial or art project, the sheer perseverance is a strong indicator.

I'll just keep this updated.

It appears frustration is beginning to set in with our mentally challenged friend. First, he has considerably reduced the amount of effort he invests into each reply, down to posting the same reply over and over. Second, as he apparently craves for attention and requires validation through replies (no matter which kind, see above), he has now begun to reply to himself, of course in such a way as to make it appear as if he were someone else. Or at least he might think that, anyone with a tiny bit of linguistics training quickly spots the recognizable patterns. Third, he has a few cases of double-postings, a signature for either hurry or distress.

Meanwhile, he's completely oblivious that I'm having great conversations on this site with one of my alias accounts, and that him spamming me on this one has absolutely zero effect except amusement. :-)

Yes. Flash crashes are basically positive feedback loops at 10,000 rpm.

One thing I can guarantee is that if exhausting the capacity would give a trader any kind of advantage in any way, then it will be done.

The computer systems these people have put up are incredibly. They can easily bring your trading system to a halt if they are determined to do that.

No, because HFT works by exploiting the tiniest of price differences and they are likely to vanish in those 500 ms.

That would work as well, but is more complicated and you could run into trouble when your slots reach capacity.

This.

Anything predictable will just be gamed. These people have made a multi-billion dollar business out of gaming the system. You'd have to be insane to assume they'll just pack up and leave on the first sign of resistance.

Introduce randomness into the system and put a tiny tax (one professor of the field recommended 0.01%) on trades even if they don't complete. Because HFT also does a lot of trade-ohwaitIdidntmeanit-cancel abuse. Sometimes thousands of orders per second that they never had any intention to actually completing. Their margins on each trade are tiny, so even the smallest transaction tax will drive them out of business. Meanwhile, honest traders won't care. If you buy stock for 5k and pay 50cents additional tax on that, you're highly unlikely to be the slightest bit bothered.

Teaching kids programming is a total and complete waste of money.

Those who are interested will learn by themselves. Those who aren't, won't even if you make it mandatory. But the unintended consequences are what's going to get you: Everyone will think that programming is easy because it's something the kids learn.

School should teach basic skills that can then be applied to programming, but also to a long list of other skills. Teach critical thinking, logic, math. Teach people how to learn, not what. Teach them reading comprehension so they can study on their own. Teach them trial-and-error and that failure is an option because it teaches you what you did wrong.

Most of all, don't solve a shortage of programmers by creating a million bad and counterproductive ones. You don't solve a shortage of doctors by giving random people scalpels and a license to cut open bellies, do you?

Good programmers are a lot more difficult to find than any programmer. I'd rather hire one good guy then five students for the same price.

Not sure if you were being sarcastic or not, but consider this: At least you can still run those older systems. If they weren't contained in a VM, you'd have to keep not an outdated VM, but an entire outdated system - hardware, software, everything, around.

A company I worked for once had an ancient AIX system around because it was running some crucial thing they had long forgotten how to migrate elsewhere...

I disagree on that. I've seen plenty of management and business types "do programming" with their excel and access scripts and word macros, or with SQL or javascript or whatever else they have available. Because their first mistake is taking what they have available, and not what's the proper tool for the job.
The problem with teaching non-techie people programming is that you end up with software that I would've ripped you a new one for back in university when I was the assistant for the C programming course.

Basically, this ultra-low level of programming will be lacking exactly the parts that you really, really want in a business application. Exception handling, input validation, that kind of stuff that makes sure a user error doesn't blow up your accounting system.

Programming is not about being able to write:

$pay = $wage - $taxes;
sendToPaymentHandler($employee, $pay);

It's about making sure that $taxes can't be negative, $employee is properly set, the input field for $wage only accepts numbers, the payment handler returns a success code and your money still arrives if the connection is down at that second and the call needs to be repeated, everything is logged properly so in case one of the "impossible" failures does happen you can trace where the money went and a thousand other things that aren't half as sexy as that.

Technical and business people both live under the same illusion of thinking that with a bit of training they could do each others job. Few people think that about brain surgeons. But studying computer science, or business economics, or medicine is really quite comparable. (I only personally studied the first two, but I have plenty of friends in the 3rd field, which is why I think I can make the comparison.)

I know that I can't do the job of a marketing or sales person, because I lack the knowledge and experience to do it. I can't do a callcenter job, either. Or a firefighters duty. So don't tell me that someone with no prior experience in my field can be brought up to speed with a bit of training.

Plenty of it on github, lots more in older Free Software projects and another 150,000 or so lines of code in closed-source applications, including several commercial ones. Before you troll me, make sure you're not running any of my code on your Linux machine right now, because it could be. :-)

There's a difference between writing a language streamlined for a specific purpose and writing a language where a = 1+1; is expressed as ADD 1 TO 1 GIVING A.

I'm fairly sure I've heard every argument pro-COBOL. I studied this stuff. I've had this discussion a dozen times. I remain unconvinced. :-)

That's because the software is largely crap. I say that as someone who still learned COBOL and yes, on a mainframe, in university.

Seldom have I been so glad to forget everything about a programming language as quickly as possible after passing the exam.

The thing about old systems is that there are some that got lots of things right - Multics ACL and security still runs circles around Unix and giggles about Windows - and some of them were just horribly misguided (like COBOL, the programming language invented specifically so the business types had the wrong impression they could understand it).

Computing is this strange discipline where people either take the old and with it everything that sucked about it, or reinvent the wheel even though there was nothing wrong with the old one. Only rarely do people leave the good unchanged and improve only the bad.

I don't mean inventing a new programming language with all the best features from all the other programming languages you like - you still create a new language that needs to be learnt, will have implementation bugs early on, etc. etc.

A mixture of experimental falsification and better theories. We know that rain dances don't cause rain because we know what does. We can also do them 20 times on days where no rain is projected and notice that - surprise - it doesn't start raining.

We do know that certain types of meditation, for example, do cause measurable changes in brain waves. We also know that this has nothing to do with Shiva or your guardian angel whatever the esoteric explanation may be, because the results remain the same if someone who doesn't believe in that simply follows the steps.

We know that certain substances cause certain effects, but not because of nature spirits or the shaman humming over them while slowly stirring them in a pot over a fire of elm wood that was quenched with baby blood because we know which chemicals are responsible for the effect.

And yes, science does discover that its theory was wrong every now and then, but there's one important detail that all the anti-science fanatics always conveniently forget to mention: When science throws out a theory as "wrong", what it really means is "it only had a 99% match with reality, and now we have a better theory with a 99.9% match".

Newton's laws are "wrong" by todays scientific standards, but for anything that's not rocket science or quantum physics, it's still very useable because it's close enough.

So when you say "even science is sometimes wrong" then strictly speaking yes, but not in the same sense that, say, your navigation system leading you to the wrong city because it had the same name was wrong. More like the GPS being miscalibrated and you arrive at Bullshit Avenue 11 instead of Bullshit Avenue 13 like you wanted to. Yeah, it's technically speaking wrong, but it's a totally different kind of wrong than Homeopathy or Astrology.

Funny that you should mention that. As a martial artist, I've done some reading on that and in fact there are a couple of books attempting to do exactly that, including a spinal nerve path theory to explain some pressure point attacks and several scientific studies on meridians (all of which except one chinese one sponsored by some accupuncture society coming to the conclusion that no such thing exists).

When an esoteric system makes predictions, it can be tested. You don't even have to bother discussing its system or theories at all, you can go straight to testing the predictions.

I think the main mistake that the various anti-science conspiracy theories make is assuming that scientists hate challenges to their world-view as much as they themselves do. Religious and esoteric people loathe criticism. Scientists think differently, because nobody has ever gotten a noble price for confirming an established theory for the 50th time. But proving it wrong - that's a good start.

There is bias in science - Kuhn was right about paradigm changes. But it's not a directed bias the way a conspiracy theory presumes.

So yes, if you can repeatedly create a phenomenon that science cannot explain, you will almost certainly find scientists quite interested. In fact, Randis million dollar challenge still awaits a taker, so there's money on the table.