physguy1123

> When there's a stopped vehicle in the lane you're in, you can simply check for traffic in the next lane and switch lanes.

> You're not restricted to the bike lane if there's an obstruction.

These comments proves my whole second point. If a car were to just park in the car lane because it felt like it, there would be outrage, tickets, and the car would get towed immediately. Nobody would say "no big deal, just change lanes". But when a biker says "I don't like using the street because it's dangerous", it's just dismissed like this.

You also ignore that bikers DO just change lanes into the street, which can be quite dangerous somewhere like New York. I don't know if you've ever ridden a bike in New York, but drivers, especially taxis, are at best ignorant of you and often antagonistic. There's a reason bike lanes exist in the first place, and it's because the car lanes are dangerous.

> It's far easier to take responsibility for your own safety than to rely on others to do it for you

Imagine somebody saying this when a car driver complains about somebody else running a red light, or cutting them off in a lane - you would get laughed out of the room. But when drivers act dangerously towards a biker it's the biker who should be taking responsibility.

When bikers do all the terrible biker things like roll through stop signs, or "act like pedestrians", or roll to the front of the line, that IS taking our own safety into our hands by doing legally dubious things that make biking much safer, yet everybody hates that as well.

> There's a reason why drivers of motor vehicles don't typically drive in the door zone.

Have you ever been in New York? Plenty of car lanes themselves are near the door zone, not to mention bike lanes themselves ARE the door zone usually.

I don't mean to be aggressive, but the endless victim blaming towards bicyclists gets really tiresome. I really wish that people who just dismiss these complaints out of hand would bike to work in NYC for just a week.

This doesn’t do anything when cars decide to park in your bike lane anyways, and your bike lane has maybe a foot clearance to traffic in the other side.

It’s also an interesting attitude, that cars are so much more important than bikes that it’s not car drivers who should check the road when opening their door, but bikers who should lose the 6 feet of street space near parked cars which is the only semi-safe place for bikes in New York

I can attest to the basic lock-free spsc queues being far faster than a basic spinlocking version of the same queue, on xeon-class X86 at least.

LOCK'ed instructions (one might use lock xchg or lock cmpxchg) perform a full memory barrier, which has quite a few performance implications if there are any outbound loads/stores. Further, if the cache line containing the spinlock is in anything except an exclusively-held state on the writing core (it will usually be on a different core or in a shared state), simply acquiring the lock will stall for ~25-30ns+.

On the other hand, a simply spsc lock-free queue can hit <10ns per message with a latency about equal to the core-core communication latency.

I'm not sure if I'm the target audience for this (low-latency trading), but here's my thought - code which would allocate in a fast path is a strict no-go for me, and this runs fairly close to that in a few regards:

> It seems easy to accidentally make allocating code allocate by changing some variable names (b = fnc(a) - oops, allocation)

> I would be extremely wary of trusting a compiler to realize what sort of allocations are optimizable and not - I already have problems with inlining decisions, poor code layout, etc in fairly optimized c++/rust code compiled by gcc+llvm.

Replace allocation with any other expensive work that duplicating a datastructure would result in, and you have the same story. I suspect many of the people that would be evaluating this compared to C/C++/Rust have similar performance concerns.

If you are in an environment where you can guarantee that a piece of code runs in bounded time (no interrupts, no faults, etc), then locks can actually be used in lock-free algorithms since code inside the lock will always be making forward progress and will exit in or before some deterministic time. If the lock is fair and there's a bounded number of threads accessing the lock, then it technically becomes wait-free under these conditions since time to completion is bounded by n_threads * task_time;

This environment only happens to exist in very specific and uncommon settings, so it's not a generally useful concept for lock-free programming. It's common in the linux kernel to see spinlocks taken in sections which have disabled all interrupts, for example, but this is not an environment that normal programs can live in.

In New York at least, constructions unions extract large amounts of money from the government. Some examples that come to mind:

  * Lots of construction employees are mandated by unions to stay around (crane greasers I believe are an example) even though these employees do no work, and then managers have to be hired to manage more employees, etc.
  * Sometimes employees are hired to do no work at all
  * Highly experienced employees will be given menial jobs like coffee-fetcher sort of deal, but get paid very highly for it due to their experience.
  * The MTA has no negotiating power, the unions and the construction contractors agree on a price and then give it to the MTA

Why is it like this? I don't know, one could imagine all sorts of corruption, political plays to get the construction vote, political games to avoid seeming anti-union, who knows.

It is strictly not internalization, in fact, and as far as I know from friends working on retail at the new owner of Timber Hill IB and Timber Hill didn't ever cooperate on optimal routing strategies since Thomas Pterfry didn't want people loosing faith in IB routing. There are plenty of reasons why Timber Hill might win the trade:

  * They might be first in the queue on a price-time exchange, and so naturally get the order

  * They might be on a price-size exchange, and so get some of the fill simply by being present.

  * They probably participate in the auction process, and will naturally get some portion of orders that IB initiates

For what it's worth, Timber Hill USA was bought by Two Sigma ~1 year ago. It wasn't actually unprofitable as shown by public filings, but wasn't making much and Thomas Pterfry didn't want an illusion of conflict of interest.

The downside of setting a limit order is that you only get executed when the market moves against you, OR just don't get filled.

For retail order sizes and holding periods, that's probably fine as long as you place orders close to the current price.

If you're an HFT, you would much rather just pay for the order flow and not deal with all the shit that is retail (government, customers, all that shit). If you're some big retail firm, you're probably run by suits, way to beauracratic to run a difficult high-tech trading team, and any talent you got would get siphoned off to a good trading firm.

IEX's speed bump in the end simply allowed their special internal dpeg order type to pull slightly back when they saw adverse movements incoming, for many normal trades it's essentially an exchange that acts like it's a little farther away (longer latency) than it actually is with some dark order types which move weird.

This trade is theoretically possible, but customers don't frequently trade enough volume to move all the lit markets that much, and it's extremely dubious from a legal perspective anyways.

It might simply just be that's the terms that Robinhood reached with the firms? Paying 0.2c/share and giving 0.2c/share price improvement is fairly similar from the perspective of a market maker as just paying 0.4c/share, and Robinhood might be funding themselves by having firms only compete on payment for orders and not on price improvement.

On a more meta level, my firm suspects that Citadel is trying very hard to price other players out of the market even if it's at the cost of their current profitability, so they might be driving up the terms of newly minted deals. I don't work on the retail desk so I don't know.

Timber Hill did not participate in the retail business to avoid conflict of interests with IB.

For what it's worth, one can't internalize options orders in the same way one can equity orders, purchased options flow must make it to the market. I'm not familiar with the history of this decision but I suspect it's since options are less liquid and have higher spreads, so internalization would get a much worse deal than say auctions. You can rebates from certain exchanges for initiating auctions on them, and can selectively initiate auctions on exchanges which benefit you more, but options orders themselves make it to the market

In this specific case, it means that retail flow is much less likely to immediately move the market than flow from an informed (knows the market will move soon) or large (will trade so much that it will move the market) player, and is much more valuable to market makers who try to capture the spread on that order (and usually improve it) and hedge/trade out of that risk relatively soon.