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kurumo | 16 years ago | on: AI That Picks Stocks Better Than the Pros

I work in this field. That is not the first paper written about this system; the previous was "Sentiment Analysis of Financial News Articles", Schumaker et. al. This is not the only academic project describing something like this, see papers by Mittermayer and Lavrenko for other examples. Short summary of the results is basically this: you would have to be insane to trade purely on output of a system like this. There are multiple issues with this, the primary being that most of these systems do not and cannot distinguish documents leading the trend from those lagging the trend. Furthermore, to actually be able to trade on the indicators derived from news you need to encode the market expectation into your model, which is a separate (and difficult) problem. The margins these systems produce in simulated trading are small, and for some reason nobody takes transaction costs into account. This is not to say that systems like this do not exist in the real world - they certainly do, but the people that build and/or use them generally will not discuss the details, for obvious reasons.

kurumo | 16 years ago | on: Ask HN: What's missing in a CS degree?

Generally speaking, CS programs out there seem to lack both depth and breadth, be out of touch/time with "the desert of the real", and suffer from what Dijkstra called "the infantilization of curriculum". Too often do I see people who are proficient (for some value of "proficiency") in one (1) language, usually the wrong one. I believe that a CS program ought to introduce you to several languages, to a level where you can read and write programs of small to medium size (~1 kloc). At a minimum, in this day and age I would expect C, your least favorite mainstream language (though I personally would avoid Java, due to combination of a lack of an explicit reference type and a misguided OO fetish), something from the Lisp family (Scheme), and Javascript. Something from the ML family would be a bonus, though I would skip type theory altogether. Having been exposed to several radically different languages helps. I would ask everyone to write an interpreter for a simple language (in a language of your choice): something with variables, conditionals and function calls. A compiler for the same would be a nice next step. As projects go, this would be sufficiently involved to address Dijkstra's complaint part of the way.

A few people said something to the effect "the real world is missing". It's true. Majority of CS programs appear to be years out of date with respect to the industry practice, whatever "the industry" happens to mean for you personally. To some extent this is inevitable, though we could be doing a lot more to address the issue - say, as someone suggested, via a separate course, one that is updated biannually. A course like this could and should include a discussion of things like source control tools, build tools, etc. Things like resource management idioms in languages of the day should be discussed explicitly: too often graduates of CS programs assume infinite resources or automagical cleanup, especially if they come from a background in languages that are garbage collected. A course in parallel programming presented via different languages and their approaches to parallelism would be fantastically useful; I would pay money to see it on OCW or similar.

Somewhat related to Dijkstra's complaint is the following concern: people are terribly bad at thinking about complexity, at all levels - from a single source file to a system composed of hundreds of separate processes. We would do well to discuss managing complexity explicitly in CS curriculum: to make people think about difficulty of maintenance, changes to a working system, rollout procedures for uptime, etc. A seminar on the subject of complexity management, from small to large scale, with examples, would be very useful.

Incidentally, this is something I have been thinking a lot about over the last two years, in part due to conducting a metric shitload of interviews for intro positions. There are things that my CS program was missing, and things that a majority of programs out there seem to be missing; understandably, what I can say mostly applies to the former.

kurumo | 16 years ago | on: Steve Jobs' Prescience (Or: Who Wants A Stylus?)

I have the Pogo stylus. The problem with it, or rather with ArtStudio, Sketchpad, Brushes and all the stylus note-taking apps is the same: you cannot rest your hand on the screen. It registers touches from the hand instead of the stylus. That makes all of these apps pretty much useless as far as I am concerned: it is quite inconvenient to draw or write using these applications, even though some of them are extremely impressive otherwise. This, frankly, boggles my mind - granted the screen sensor API is closed, but is it not possible to do velocity distribution thresholding on different touch events, or maybe something more sophisticated, a Kalman filter or something, to distinguish these touches and ignore the 'stationary' ones?

kurumo | 16 years ago | on: China drops Dropbox

I guess Chinese Newspeak doesn't have "freedom" in it. And I thought 1984 was bad :(

kurumo | 16 years ago | on: Today the Dow dropped 1000 points in about ten minutes.

This is actually very interesting. It may have been led by China. Chinese market fell on Monday due to reserve requirements change (though the slow decline actually started quite a bit earlier), and it was widely reported on Monday night. Commodities followed on Chinese news and European debt on Tuesday; Europe continued falling on Wednesday on Greece and Portugal speculation, then this went around the world one more time and was reported at about 3am today (emerging markets decline), and then later in the day as decline continued. Speculation on European state debt compounded the issue (witness the Spain rumours). Then at 13:10pm El Erian was reported to have said that there is a possibility that European banks will stop lending, at which point the US markets hiccuped and went into accelerating decline (look at Russel, SPX and Dow from noon onward).

I will try to add links when I get home later. Clearly it was much more complicated than this, but this pattern of falling dominoes going around the world is at least suggestive.

Update:

China reserve requirements:

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-04/china-s-stocks-d...

Commodities, etc.:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jpti0ArQEl...

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/markets/global-mark...

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-06/corn-soybeans-wh...

Emerging markets:

http://www.livemint.com/2010/05/04214121/The-Chinese-contagi...

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20100505-713490.html?mod...

El Erian - the best I can find is this. The lending comment was attributed to him when I saw it, but here it is a "trader speaking on condition of anonimity".

http://www.cnbc.com/id/36992469

kurumo | 16 years ago | on: Google's unorthodox press release raises questions

That would actually make some twisted kind of sense, I guess. These guys are using an HTML generator that produces things like this:

.g { MARGIN: 72pt 90pt; size: 595.3pt 841.9pt }

P.a { FONT-SIZE: 10pt; MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt; FONT-FAMILY: "Arial","sans-serif"; LETTER-SPACING: 0.5pt }

TABLE.t { BORDER-RIGHT: medium none; BORDER-TOP: medium none; MARGIN-LEFT: -5.4pt; BORDER-LEFT: medium none; BORDER-BOTTOM: medium none; BORDER-COLLAPSE: collapse }

... oodles of it.

kurumo | 16 years ago | on: Google's unorthodox press release raises questions

+1. Most of them have a rather hazy idea of what they are doing and are stuck in the last century technology-wise. Example: at least one wire releases time-critical information in HTML with multimegabyte (yes, megabyte) stylesheets which are delivered inline. And they won't change the format.
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