#5 of 12-Oct '15 ___ _ ___ _ | _ \___ __ ___ _____(_)___ _ _ / __|___ _ __ (_)_ _ __ _ | / -_) _/ -_|_-<_-< / _ \ ' \ | (__/ _ \ ' \| | ' \/ _` | |_|_\___\__\___/__/__/_\___/_||_| \___\___/_|_|_|_|_||_\__, | |___/ Global “Powerhouses” Germany and UK Slow “Dramatically” Shocks may originate in advanced or emerging markets and, combined with unaddressed system vulnerabilities, could lead to a global asset market disruption and a sudden drying up of market liquidity in many asset classes. – IMF warn of “fresh financial crisis” – German exports fall 5.2%, largest slump since recession of 2009 – German imports also fall 3.1% – Many sectors across German economy see unexpected declines in factory orders and industrial production – UK Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) report sharp rise in uncertainty – UK PMI has fallen to lowest level since April 2013 – Hope for the best but be prepared for less benign scenarios http://prsm.tc/o5pFJd _ _ ___ _____ | || | __|_ _| | __ | _| | | |_||_|_| |_| Why Do High-Frequency Traders Cancel So Many Orders? I think to understand most HFT market makers you have to understand how the markets pay. Most work on a maker taker model. Which means the trader who initiates the trade pays a small fee and the trader who is the passive side, the one who had their order in the market already, gets paid a small fee. as a side note there are inverted markets but lets leave those aside for now. This means to get paid you want to be at the top of the book, which means you are the first order to get filled when someone crosses the spread to get their order filled. the way priority is determined is first by price and second by time. So you have a very vested interest in being the first to cancel and move your order to the newest price level. Exchanges have tried introducing some order types to alleviate this constant send/cancel routine such as the order type "Hide not Slide" but people tend to get upset at these order types. Once you understand this, you start to realize that almost all HFT firms aren't quote stuffing, they are just jockeying for position at the top of the order book. I've never really understood quote stuffing, the same firm that quote stuffs still has to deal with those quotes coming back, its not like the market data has a flag saying ignore this quote change as its caused by your own quote stuffing. The way most markets are setup is that quotes come from gateways and multiple symbols all share a single gateway, usually assigned alphabetically, so A-F tickers all share the same gateway. This means that if someone is actually slowing down market data for say AAPL then they are also slowing down quotes for AMZN as well but again, the same firm that is quote stuffing also has to deal with their own mess so I can't see the benefit. Another comment complains that HFT firms don't like the fragmented market. That is true to a point, but keep in mind most HFT strategies only work due to the fragmented markets and RegNMS. So while they may not like 11 venues, they certainly want atleast 3 or 4, and many of hte top HFT firms run their own dark pools, adding to the problem:) As far as Hillary Clinton introducing legislation to curb HFT trading, she was the senator for New York. I'm dubious of her coming down hard on Wall Street. http://prsm.tc/LSU1pv ___ ___ ___ _ ___ ___ _ _ _ _____ _ _ | __| _ \/ __| /_\ | _ \_ _| | || | /_\_ _| | |__ ___ __ _ _ _ __| | | _|| _/ (_ |/ _ \ | _/| | | __ |/ _ \| | | '_ \/ _ \/ _` | '_/ _` | |_| |_| \___/_/ \_\ |_| |___| |_||_/_/ \_\_| |_.__/\___/\__,_|_| \__,_| A Raspberry Pi daughterboard hat that features a Lattice FPGA, 32 MB of RAM, EEPROM, and a few Grove and PMOD connectors The CAT takes advantage of the open source tool chain available for Lattice including the Python-based MyHDL (although, you could just use Verilog directly, if you prefer) and Icestorm. One interesting point: you can run the tool chain on the Raspberry Pi, resulting in a self-contained and largely portable FPGA development environment. The design files are actually on Github. You may notice the SATA connectors. However, [Dave] doesn’t know if you could really use SATA drives with them–they are there for general purpose differential I/O. It is great to have an open source board and tool chain for FPGA development. We’ve talked about the open source Icestorm toolchain before and MyHDL, too. If you prefer, most of the vendor FPGA tools are free to use for many common devices and uses. The Lattice tools should work just as well with this board, even if it does offend your open source sensibilities. The video below introduces the CAT board, but be warned: it does contain actual cat pictures. It does not, however, contain any apologies to Dr. Seuss http://prsm.tc/6WU5ed ____ ___ ___ ___ _ _ _ |_ / _ _ _ __ _ | __| _ \/ __| /_\ | |__ ___ __ _ _ _ __| | / / || | ' \/ _` | | _|| _/ (_ |/ _ \ | '_ \/ _ \/ _` | '_/ _` | /___\_, |_||_\__, | |_| |_| \___/_/ \_\ |_.__/\___/\__,_|_| \__,_| |__/ |_| with BT and WiFi :-) Aptiva’s Zynq-based Parallella and MYIR’s Z-Turn Board each starts at $99, the Snickerdoodle starts at $55, or $60 with free shipping in the U.S. Not surprisingly, with 45 days still to go, Krtkl has already won over a fifth of its 50K goal for the Snickerdoodle on the Crowd Supply crowdfunding site. With its extensive I/O enabled by the FPGA, the 89 x 51mm Snickerdoodle is aimed primarily at projects like drones and robots that require motor control and a variety of sensors. Computer vision systems can also benefit, says San Francisco startup Krtkl. The company lists potential applications like building an Arduino clone, a wireless pattern generator and logic analyzer, a cycle-accurate NES emulator, a cat-tracking robot, or even a custom-architecture microcontroller. The base configuration uses a Zynq-7010, with the pair of Cortex-A9 cores clocked to 667MHz and a relatively low, 430-gate FPGA. Add $60 for a Zynq-7020 with an 866MHz clock rate, a 1.3M-gate FPGA, and 179 GPIOs, up from the standard 154. A heat sink is tossed in to cool this faster processor. There’s an on-board STM32 microcontroller that functions as a USB-to-serial bridge, power supply manager, Bluetooth integration bridge, boot source controller, USB boot flash mass storage device bridge, LED and button controller, and I2C auto-configuration manager. With either Zynq option, the base configuration is 512MB of RAM, upgradeable to 1GB ($10). The board comes standard with a TI Wilink 8 wireless module with 2.4GHz, 802.11n WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0 (both classic and LE). A $15 upgrade boosts the WiFi to 2.4GHz/5GHz, 2×2 MIMO operation, and a $10 option orients the GPIO downward instead of up, which the company recommends when using its “MicroShield” expansion boards. Standard features include a lockable microSD slot, a microUSB 2.0 port with serial console and storage support, and a wide-range 3.7 to 17V power supply. Options include a $25 enclosure, a $5 set of pin housings, and a $10 pack of 50 19cm jumpers with Samtec pins on one end to plug into the pin housings, and 0.1-inch female pins and housing on the other for “Frankensteining” projects breadboard style. If that’s not enough, you can move up to a $25 BreakyBreaky breakout baseboard, also using 0.1-inch headers. This is one of a variety of expansion MicroShield boards that will be ready when the Snickerdoodle ships in March 2016, says the company. http://prsm.tc/lME3Nz _ _ ___ _ _ ___ _ | | || _ \ __| |_(_)_ __ ___ | _ \___ __ _ __| |_ __ __ _ _ __ |_ _| / (_-< / / | '_ (_-< | / _ \/ _` / _` | ' \/ _` | '_ \ |_||_|_\ /__/_\_\_| .__/__/ |_|_\___/\__,_\__,_|_|_|_\__,_| .__/ |_| |_| Four Rs that for today's software-defined businesses. The core of IT is now DevOps, and the name of the game is speed to market -- turning technology around as fast as the business needs it. There isn't time for long deliberative processes and roadmaps, Arbuckle argues. Roadmaps quickly become outdated in today's digital businesses. In a compelling post, he outlines the four Rs that need to define today's EA: Review: Arbuckle recommends having an architecture review body to keep everyone on the same page. "Much of the change we need to drive, whether as engineers or architects, needs to be prefaced with great gobs of education. Rather than coming from on high, open discussions between people working on important projects is the most effective way of seeing the change in thinking occurring as well as to seed it." Renew: Always be open to new approaches and technologies, Arbuckle recommends. "Everyone has their favorite language. Enterprise architects again can facilitate a useful conversation on alternatives.... Today's successful EAs lead projects that produce an MVP using new technology." Refactor. "Traditionally if we want to deploy a large HR system implementation, we would spend a great deal of time collecting requirements, arguing with the vendor about how much those customization would cost, waiting for the changes to be delivered and then hoping it all works as advertised on the infrastructure you ordered 18 months ago," Arbuckle says. "What is possible and preferable is instead deploying even this behemoth in small batches... The EA needs to evangelize, promote, and drive this process of changing how we practice the evolution of technology in our business." Resilience. "What kind of organization do we want to create? The EA needs to define what resilience both technically and culturally means for the technology organization." Good examples of resilient organization are emergency rooms and airline flight decks, he points out. Hallmarks of resilience include tracking small failures, resisting oversimplification, being sensitive to operations, and deferring to expertise http://prsm.tc/yMXvrA ___ _ _ _ _ ___ ___ _ _____ / __|___ ___ __ _| |___ (_)_ ___ _____ __| |_ ___ __| | | \| __| |/ /_ _| | (_ / _ \/ _ \/ _` | / -_) | | ' \ V / -_|_-< _/ -_) _` | | |) | _|| ' < | | \___\___/\___/\__, |_\___| |_|_||_\_/\___/__/\__\___\__,_| |___/|_| |_|\_\___| |___/ An Artificial Intelligence Research Center In Germany Google has been putting serious investment into building out its artificial intelligence, deep learning and robotics capabilities, and this week the company made its latest move to tap into some of the more cutting edge work going on in the field, specifically in Europe. The search giant, through its German division Google Germany, has made an investment in the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (the DFKI), a nonprofit institute where some 450 scientists, academics and others work on projects in areas like language technology, embedded intelligence and augmented reality; and occasionally spin out businesses based on those projects. It’s one of the largest research centers of its kind. Google is not disclosing the amount of its investment but confirms that the stake will give Google a seat on the DFKI’s board. http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/07/google-invests-in-dfki-an-artificial-intelligence-research-center-in-germany/ http://www.dfki.de/web https://www.solveforx.com ___ _ _ | _ \___ _ __ ___| |_ ___ __ __ _____ _ _| |__ | / -_) ' \/ _ \ _/ -_) \ V V / _ \ '_| / / |_|_\___|_|_|_\___/\__\___| \_/\_/\___/_| |_\_\ secret to successful remote software engineering Finding good engineers is hard, no doubt. However using good engineers remotely requires the remote team or remote lead person on that team to have additional skills in order to make it work. Be Proactive & Driven – This is the single most important quality for any remote engineer / remote team manager. The reason is that when someone is sitting in the office, you can instantly see if someone is not engaged, or stuck. You can just tap him on the shoulder and ask what’s up buddy? Is there anything I can do to help? What are you working on? etc. In remote teams that is not possible, so you need to ensure the person on the other side, and possibly in the other time-zone, is proactive. He will get on call at strange local times, he will email you that something isn’t working. He will flag that he finished his tasks and needs more work, or even let you know that while you’ve planned it before, seems he is finishing early. He will be the type of person tapping himself on the shoulder and not requiring anyone to chase him. EVER! This type of person will make or break your remote / outsource / not in the office work environment. Resourceful – Resourcefulness goes hand in hand with being pro-active. When working in a remote team, many times you will be faced with integration issues. Integration issues are the ones that take up a lot of time. The back-end RESTAPI that is suppose to return X returns Y. Break. Your mobile app / front-end app cannot read / write the data and the work cannot continue, or perhaps it can? While the proactive perosn would raise the issue, a resourceful one would also find a creative way to continue his work. For example, many times I will create mock data / a mock server when I can’t get the back-end to work. This can mean the difference between 24-48 hours delay in the work, to zero down time, or just 1-2 hours to fix a bug. A resourceful person will find an alternate path to continue his work, create solution to a problem or just move to another task. Resourcefulness is highly important for any engineer, but in remote teams it is vital as it can be the difference between making the remote team work, and reaching the conclusion that remote teams do not work. Understand Product – Finding a good engineer that can also understand product is very difficult. However when working remotely this not only becomes a nice to have, it becomes vital. Understanding product means thinking in terms of user experience, and what is the easiest and most intuitive way to use the application. Many talented engineers can produce great code per requirements or spec, but do not think in terms of what the user needs. When this happens in house, the product lead can very quickly do a course adjustment: “Hey, I thought that would work, but on second thought let’s scratch that and move this button over here.” With remote teams these iterations might take more time, and so it’s important to have someone you trust that would adjust the course himself. Someone who would understand what the “real requirements are” or what the functional requirements are, and build the right usability for the user. Even if not perfect, then the product person would have a much smaller adjustment to make. Understanding product is not simple, but once you find the right person that can do that, you’re setting yourself up for success with remote teams / engineers. Result Oriented – Most people hate micromanagement, and while sometimes management does need to intervene in the remote environment, this becomes almost impossible. That is why in remote environments, your engineer / lead must be result oriented. He is not focused on completing a feature, or getting his “workload” ticked off. He should be focused on making sure your business goals are achieved, and that his part is playing it’s role in the global scheme of things. A result oriented person would ask about your business deadlines, when do things need to be done by, and why. This means that person is not about just counting the hours worked, but about making sure he is helping you get to where you need to be. http://prsm.tc/8sreAX _ _ __| |_ __ _| |_ ___ / _| ' \/ _` | _(_-< \__|_||_\__,_|\__/__/ When hackers talk, this research team listens If you're a hacker, you gather as much data as you can on your targets, in search of something valuable. If you're researcher Hsinchun Chen, you gather as much data as you can on the hackers. Chen, a professor of management information systems at the University of Arizona, works in a little-explored, but hugely important area of cybersecurity: Exploring the motivations of hackers and other cyberattackers, and trying to predict how they might act, based on their behaviors. With support from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences directorate and the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering under the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program, Chen and his collaborators have generated findings that shed light on how hacker communities interact and share information—and even created actionable intelligence for criminal investigations by federal agencies. http://prsm.tc/b2oV1e