I love the double standards on display at HN. In this whole thread, not a single mention of the opportunity cost of smart people wasting resources on things not productive to society or how it is an unfair market because someone is taking advantage of the other participants by being more sophisticated than them.
What would the discussion be like if the headline was "Briefly profitable HFT FX trading through better code"?
I think of research into virtual currencies as at least as beneficial as GIMPS, SETI, Folding@Home. All of these have progressed CS in significant, measurable ways. And if someday one of the many alt-coins or one of their descendants becomes well established, all of this research would be worth it.
Also, while I am still unsure of the benefits of HFTs despite trying really hard to understand how they bring liquidity by front-running etc., I still think the technology invented to make HFT possible is a net-good for humankind - GPUs that can perform trade in nanoseconds, processing happening on the same layer as network traffic, entire CPU/GPUs living an inch from the ethernet port. All of this stuff is really neat and even though the practice of HFT is morally questionable, the fact that it pushes our capabilities further is not something we can ignore.
The future world will be a much better place if I can wire $2k to my dad in India without going through multiple banks, wire-transfer fees, proof of citizenships etc. Better that we work for a world where money is not controlled by the powerful than make better shiny reports for sales and traffic analysis for mobile.
"I think of research into virtual currencies as at least as beneficial as GIMPS, SETI, Folding@Home."
LOL. The cognitive dissonance is strong with this one. Also, mining bitcoins or squeezing a few extra cycles out of a VM is not 'research into virtual currencies'. Look people, let's just call a spade a spade here - us nerds are quite happy with our new-found economic powers (not just BC, in general), and we're all too happy to flex it when new tech (like BC) gives us an early mover advantage. Yeah I'm bitter I'm no BC millionaire because I had other things on my hands 2 years ago than running some software, while I did run SETI@HOME on a largish network for a long time a decade ago for no gain at all; but 200 years ago I would have been a peasant, now I was catapulted into upper middle class just because I was born in the right decade and with that twist in my mind that makes me grok computers better than most people. That's just how it is, why do feel we need to make moral justifications about it (or worse, whack job 'I deserve it because I worked harder' delusions like in that article yesterday about the Google dude).
You speak as though the process of continually training/learning is not valuable to society. This is someone spending their free time learning optimization. You wouldn't criticize them if they wrote "I practiced code optimization methods in a Coursera class." This is someone's free time.
I don't spend 24/7 attempting to make your life better.
Source: Top comment on the blog
>This is apparently what happens when computer scientists spend four weeks sick and have to keep themselves from going stir crazy. +Emin Gün Sirer , I blame you for inspiring this, and I'll buy you a beverage at NSDI with some of the proceeds. Thanks for the fun! And thanks to my online-and-offline friends who put up with me babbling about bitcoin entirely too much recently. I'm done. I think. :-)
What would the discussion be like if the headline was "Briefly profitable HFT FX trading through better code"?