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Comment Missing new replacement technology: GPU (Score 1) 236

There's another technology that reduces the need for analog engineers: GPU. Three years ago, I demonstrated real-time band-pass filtering on incoming digitized sensor input that previously required a custom $20k signal conditioning unit. Except in the GPU rolloffs could be steeper, and cutoffs could be adjusted through the GUI instead of calling up one of the retired original designers to compute new resistor & cap values.

Comment Problem with public companies, not HFT (Score 4, Interesting) 382

The HBR article notes two issues:

1. HF traders don't participate in stockholder meetings and thus their trades are divorced from steering company direction.

2. CEOs are focused on next quarter profits and, aside from a few corporate founder CEOs, are not able to have their company innovate.

The first problem is not specific to HFT. Even buy-and-hold mom and pop cannot influence a stockholder meeting because they don't own enough shares to meaningfully do so. The exception proves the rule: a bunch of Palestinian human rights defenders got together, bought some Caterpillar stock, and got a human rights issue on the agenda. Even with all that effort, the measure did not pass. And it was a large effort in coordinating. Individual stockholders usually do not organize, coordinate and campaign. (The "transaction cost" is too high.)

The second problem is caused by SEC, SOX and CEO compensation structure, not by HFT. The HBR article suggests without actually accusing that HFT is the cause.

HFT serves little purpose other than providing market liquidity (and even at that arguably harms it given the flash crash), but it's not to blame for the above two pre-existing problems of today's markets of publicly traded companies.

Comment Horizontal scalability? (Score 2, Interesting) 162

A hallmark of NoSQL is horizontal scalability. The lack of schema in NoSQL was a brief rebellion against ivory tower DBAs that has since been regretted once it was realized that merely transferred the schema and schema versioning implicitly into the source code, and spread throughout it. Sounds like PostgreSQL got the bad part of NoSQL but not the good part.

Comment Re:I disagree with the article's author (Score 5, Informative) 62

clicking Like shares anything you watched and what you are watching, not just the original video, essentially making your history available without your consent

Indeed, this shows why we still need the now-amended VPPA.

The blog author is wrong on this one. The original GigaOm article the blog author was commenting on was much more factual.

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