functional_test

Did you actually read the article? Here's the most relevant quote:

> The reality, however, is that China has struggled to create enough white-collar jobs for its soaring population of college graduates. In mid-2013, the Chinese government revealed that only about half of the country’s current crop of college graduates had been able to find jobs, while more than 20 percent of the previous year’s graduates remained unemployed.

> The bottom line is that when two parties enter into a contract voluntarily, that should be the end of the matter.

That is a very black and white view; real life has a certain nuance that just isn't captured by blanket statements like this.

You'll miss things if you limit yourself to a single level of abstraction: while it makes sense to the two parties to look at it like that, there is also a larger-scale, societal interest that certain sorts of contracts not be allowed. Thus, society makes rules about contracts and employment. For example, we ban slavery, indentured servitude, and child labor because as a society, we've determined that those are exploitive (even if you can get children who would willingly work for you, or people who would sell themselves to you).

These sorts of laws are what make us a society. For an example of a what happens without them, take a look at Somalia.

Find an employment attorney. Pay that person for an hour or two to read the contract for you. They will be able to offer much better advice than HN.

Thank you for posting this (it was quite a surprise to see his name here).

I was a close friend of Emil for a long time. Before he passed, I had gotten busy with work and hadn't spoken to him in a while. I saw some of our mutual friends the weekend before it happened and had planned to call him. Really wish I had made that call sooner.

Exactly. It's so general that he's on base this time, but it's dubious if he actually has the experience to go into more detail.

Take what Jonathan Kinlay says about HFT with a grain of salt. He worked at a friend's firm briefly before leaving without making a single profitable strategy (although his excel models were profitable of course). While what he says in this article is in the ballpark of correct, he is not the best source of information on modern HFT.

I did not. I described canceling orders as no big deal. Spoofing is illegal and very much a big deal. Spoofing implies canceling but canceling does not imply spoofing.

In the example I gave, the spoofer's intent is to encourage people to cross the spread into their resting order to avoid paying the spread themselves.

On the other hand, say someone has been resting an order for a long time, for example to buy at 9 because they think that's a good price. Until the bid is at that price, they are unlikely to get executed so they'll keep the order regardless of their position. But maybe they have a large long position on when the bid reaches 9, so they decide to cancel their order to prudently manage their risk by not buying more. This is obviously important in a healthy market -- firms that fail to manage their risk run the risk of cascading failures (if their clearing firm can't cover their losses.

It's pretty easy to tell one from the other most of the time, especially for regulators with access to account tagged data.

This is blatant misinformation. Please stop spreading it.

Canceling orders is something _all_ participants do. It's a vital part of risk management and a healthy market. Some markets do have minimum quote lives, but they typically fail as market makers cannot manage risk there, so trading moves elsewhere. The only time I've seen a market place survive adding MQL's is when they were on the order of milliseconds, not minutes.

There are certainly strategies that are manipulative. For example, having a hidden order on the ask and posting an inflated bid then pulling it once your ask gets filled. Since you posted it with no intention to get filled and with the intention of manipulating the price, that's spoofing, and illegal.

But the fact that someone placed an order and then canceled it when the price got close means exactly nothing -- everyone does it as a part of normal business.

Ah yes, downvotes outnumbering real responses. Classic HN.

I did miss that actually. Thank you for responding to me with something real. I'll reply again once I've had the opportunity to take a look.

That is not a valid comparison, and as someone who has been affected by drunk drivers, I take great issue with your trivialization of a serious issue.

But I'd expect nothing less from HN.

I only brought that up to counter his claim that data loss is inevitable. Of course my anecdote doesn't mean it's not common =) But anecdotes are all anyone else has, and every time I've read one about someone losing data, they either hadn't read the documentation, or just didn't understand the semantics of what they were doing. Very very rarely, especially these days, has it been an actual DB bug (though I will admit I got Mongo to core one time on 2.4 doing a compaction).

And it's a little disingenuous to point at the issue tracker -- as you say, everyone has open issues. The specific things that are mentioned though have been fixed: writes are checked by default now, the global lock has been broken up into per table locks, etc. There may still be common issues that aren't being addressed, but if there are, I'm not aware of them.