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Someone said something similar about a lot of people in the startup community. That we were sending our best and brightest out to create products that ultimate

Someone said something similar about a lot of people in the startup community. That we were sending our best and brightest out to create products that ultimately only served the purpose of pushing ads (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc). I don't know how true this is. There are a lot of very smart people in the world. The luxury of having that many smart people is that we can have a lot dedicated to designing amazing infrastructure that sends satellites into orbit and we can also have Twitter and HFT.

31reasons 13y ago
Then why we haven't cured cancer yet or malaria or global warming or psychological disorders ? There are a lot of smart people in the world but we really can't afford to work on silly things.
- kylebrown 13y ago
  Price discovery in markets, and economic boom-bust cycles are a societal/tech problem going back hundreds if not thousands of years. HFT is only part of the solution (or should be), and I don't think its silly. And even if it were, sometimes there's just no getting around the silly/thorny issues (makefiles anyone?) before you work on the important stuff directly.
- SkyMarshal 13y ago
  Some of those problems are "Nine women can't make a baby in one month" type problems. Sometimes the solutions are stumbled upon by accident, rather than by concerted effort, especially in medicine. In fact it wouldn't surprise me if some sophisticated neural net algorithm developed for HFT was repurposed and used successfully for other things - medical research, climate modelling, brain research - basically anything involving non-linear dynamic systems. Only problem of course is that all those HFT algorithms aren't FOSS, but the incentive to develop them in the first place would be greatly diminished since they'd lose whatever edge they had almost immediately after publishing. The markets are a pretty decent lab for experimentation and learning about complex systems, which we're still not so great with, as long as systemic risk can be prevented and every player forced to take their losses instead of passing them off to governments. I personally don't think HFT is remotely as much a problem as what caused the financial crisis - a few flash crashes here and there plus an "HFT tax" on asset prices, vs the arguably-fraudulent origination and dissemination of trillions of dollars of bad debt resulting in the near total annihilation of the global economy. I think we'll gain a lot more (or at least lose a lot less) as a society by prioritizing the latter problem.
- javert 13y ago
  > There are a lot of smart people in the world but we really can't afford to work on silly things. Well, smart people's labor isn't your property to allocate. Nor is it the property of "us." It belongs to those individuals. So it's not a question of what "we" can or cannot afford.
SkyMarshal 13y ago
Jeff Hammerbacher, CTO of Facebook, now CEO of Cloudera. That said, actual product companies are making a comeback in Silicon Valley, and are using innovative new tech like 3D Printing, and there's some amazing work going on in Virtual/Augmented Reality as well (Occulus Rift, CastAR, Google Glass), - all physical products. And lets not forget Tesla upending the world's perception of the economics of producing and owning electric vehicles. While I agree with the sentiment about smart people wasting their potential chasing cash, I think it's only an intermediary phase before the next wave of "insanely great", life-changing products hits critical mass.
- 001sky 13y ago
  Lets not forget Tesla upending the world's perception of the economics of producing and owning electric vehicles. Citation? The world's perception of Tesla is arguably: expensive, unaffordable, impractcle plaything for rich people. But yeah I would drive it if you paid for it...
kazagistar 13y ago
Theoretically, people would pay for the things they value and problems they want solved, and the market would do the rest. Practically, most people don't actually have that many major problems that need solving, and it is pretty simple to invent something that isn't what someone needs, and convince them that they need it, then to come up with novel ideas. Industry and free enterprise does not solve problems much anymore. It sells the process of convincing people they have problems.

31reasons 13y ago

Then why we haven't cured cancer yet or malaria or global warming or psychological disorders ? There are a lot of smart people in the world but we really can't afford to work on silly things.

kylebrown 13y ago
Price discovery in markets, and economic boom-bust cycles are a societal/tech problem going back hundreds if not thousands of years. HFT is only part of the solution (or should be), and I don't think its silly. And even if it were, sometimes there's just no getting around the silly/thorny issues (makefiles anyone?) before you work on the important stuff directly.
SkyMarshal 13y ago
Some of those problems are "Nine women can't make a baby in one month" type problems. Sometimes the solutions are stumbled upon by accident, rather than by concerted effort, especially in medicine. In fact it wouldn't surprise me if some sophisticated neural net algorithm developed for HFT was repurposed and used successfully for other things - medical research, climate modelling, brain research - basically anything involving non-linear dynamic systems. Only problem of course is that all those HFT algorithms aren't FOSS, but the incentive to develop them in the first place would be greatly diminished since they'd lose whatever edge they had almost immediately after publishing. The markets are a pretty decent lab for experimentation and learning about complex systems, which we're still not so great with, as long as systemic risk can be prevented and every player forced to take their losses instead of passing them off to governments. I personally don't think HFT is remotely as much a problem as what caused the financial crisis - a few flash crashes here and there plus an "HFT tax" on asset prices, vs the arguably-fraudulent origination and dissemination of trillions of dollars of bad debt resulting in the near total annihilation of the global economy. I think we'll gain a lot more (or at least lose a lot less) as a society by prioritizing the latter problem.
javert 13y ago
> There are a lot of smart people in the world but we really can't afford to work on silly things. Well, smart people's labor isn't your property to allocate. Nor is it the property of "us." It belongs to those individuals. So it's not a question of what "we" can or cannot afford.

SkyMarshal 13y ago

Jeff Hammerbacher, CTO of Facebook, now CEO of Cloudera. That said, actual product companies are making a comeback in Silicon Valley, and are using innovative new tech like 3D Printing, and there's some amazing work going on in Virtual/Augmented Reality as well (Occulus Rift, CastAR, Google Glass), - all physical products. And lets not forget Tesla upending the world's perception of the economics of producing and owning electric vehicles. While I agree with the sentiment about smart people wasting their potential chasing cash, I think it's only an intermediary phase before the next wave of "insanely great", life-changing products hits critical mass.

001sky 13y ago
Lets not forget Tesla upending the world's perception of the economics of producing and owning electric vehicles. Citation? The world's perception of Tesla is arguably: expensive, unaffordable, impractcle plaything for rich people. But yeah I would drive it if you paid for it...

kazagistar 13y ago

Theoretically, people would pay for the things they value and problems they want solved, and the market would do the rest. Practically, most people don't actually have that many major problems that need solving, and it is pretty simple to invent something that isn't what someone needs, and convince them that they need it, then to come up with novel ideas. Industry and free enterprise does not solve problems much anymore. It sells the process of convincing people they have problems.