Comment: This is how the industry works (Score 0) 465
Comment: Interplanetary Internet (Score 4, Interesting) 109
Comment: Details? (Score 2) 160
Comment: Re:Sorry but.... (Score 4, Informative) 162
Comment: Re:Horrible change in Wall Street culture (Score 1) 331
The stock market is actually a secondary market. The entrepreneur who needs capital can get it through private investment or through an IPO. The stock market provides liquidity to those who already own (either initial founders or later investors) shares in the company; by liquidity I mean it allows those shareholders to turn the wealth represented by ownership in a company into cash by selling shares. On the other side buyers in the stock market hope that the wealth represented by owning shares in a company will go up as the company grows, or hope that the company will make profit and pay some of that back in the form of dividends to all part owners.
So if we can agree that there's a societal need for entrepreneurs to raise capital through giving up equity, we can agree that there's a societal need for the stock market to contribute to liquidity of such equity. And if we can agree to that, we might agree that any way inefficiencies can be weeded out of such a market is a boon to society. That last sentence is fundamentally the question that people are trying to investigate: is HFT contributing more to the stability of the stock market than the value it extracts? A free markets proponent might say that if they're still in business, that must be the case, but a counter point would be that the market is not constructed (regulated) in such a way that allows the true worth of an action to shine through. I think that's a question everyone's been trying to answer.
Comment: Re:Goals? (Score 1) 329
Comment: Goals? (Score 1) 329
Why do you want to do this? Are you just curious or trying to get something on your resume? This is an important question because a diversity of advice can be given without knowing the answer to this.
I'm not an expert and probably not qualified enough to answer this question, but in my experience, you can't just start looking at a large project on your own and expect to get anywhere. As an example, any undergrad level OS course will only dig you skin-deep into the Linux kernel. The way I imagine things to work is, someone with more experience in the project you want to work on will help you get started contributing and learning the code base. Alternatively if you use a product extensively and know exactly what you want to contribute and why, you go in with surgical precision and try not to screw it up.