I'm sorry, but making a desktop app look like a phone app doesn't really "improve the user experience" by default. I've been using itunes for 6 or 7 years now, and i literally stood there for 5 minutes trying to figure out what the hell i was looking at when it first started up.

It looks and works nothing like the sucky Music app on iOS. I wish that app would work that way!

Your missing the point that owning part of a company for 10 seconds brings zero social value to the economy. Which I also tend to agree with. Slightly off-topic from the point of the article, which was that he achieved it without backing of a fairly large institution.

I didn't miss that point - I just chose not to address it. Lots of things add zero (or negative) social value to the economy including Farmville or the gazillionth Instagram clone. That doesn't mean they're not worth doing.

And HFT or day-trading does bring some value to the world. It enables companies to go to the public markets and raise capital. And investors to sell their shares without having to wait too long for a buyer. But those positives come along with negatives as well.

True it adds no social value, but it is arguably the ultimate hacker's game :) You can actually add a little social value by placing only orders that increase liquidity; those where someone else "takes out" your standing offer or bid. That and the fact that your profits are taxed as ordinary income in the US for equities at least.

This is not even close to an accurate summary. He never stated that he had any employer backing, and he wasn't collecting market making fees. In fact he was paying brokerage fees which is the exact opposite.

He used his own money to test his algos? Come on.

Taking a Machine Learning and Statistics course does not make you a trader. You need something else - access to the system.

This is why my guess is that he was an employee.

An employee of what? He states above that he was paying roughly $200/month for a server and $1800/month for the software/data connections to his broker.

Prior to setting up my automated trading program I’d had 2 years experience as a “manual” day trader. - mom's and pap's 401k?

No, he said he backtested them against data he collected from the feeds. He paid for the feeds just like everyone else does with his own money.

For me it all looks like a bad-written fiction, and the source is just a blog post.

And that's the beauty of it - take it or leave it.

I get tired of the "Don't hate the player, hate the game" mantra after a certain point though. We make the damn game. And if the players are assholes, the game is going to suck.

Except for Zuck, he'll steal the shit outta your Hipster Coffee Shop Wifi app.

Ha ha ... Too good as an example. I also agree that it better be safe than sorry.

Of course it's a marketing play. Why else would a company willingly commit large sums of money to a completely unrelated business venture. And anyone who was watching the feed before and after the jump will know they did do plenty of back-story on Joe Kittinger and his original mission.

This is cool. But anybody else having just a blank screen when they try a different url other than google analytics?

"Step into my office" "Why?" "Cuz you're fuckin fired!"

So maybe they should have called it. "3 problems that raytracing can't solve, and 4 other ones that just suck about modeling real life in 3d(on a 2d surface)".