I have done HFT, played heads up semi professionally, and for my bachelors thesis wrote a paper on a PLO playing bot. I studied Alberta's research and it is phenomenal. The parallels that emerge between HFT and a pokerbot is essentially that the architectures of both systems are kind of same and the details are kind of orthogonal. The edge in Hold'em is kind of gone. The 1/2 games right now are as tough as the 25/50 games 5 years ago. PLO is still pretty exploitable though. The same is true with HFT. Most strategies in HFT no longer work but there are definitely ones that still give you a lot of edge-you just have to think harder : )(just like three betting preflop and cbetting the flop doesnt work anymroe).
I don't get you haters. sure the title is a bit misleading because he never really discusses what his alphas were. But its a pretty good high level description of the architecture of a hft system. I was a quant at GS and these are not the retail investors you pick off. You have your own set of alphas and most of them are meant to pick on mom and pops clicking away at home. This guy didn't reveal his strategy but nevertheless the graph shows his strategy had a significant edge. The lifetime of a strategy also looks like that. It is another thing that his title for the post is kind of off.
it is amazing you think of it as cheating. if these guys really wanted to cheat we would just max out the extra 25 gigs and get it. We had already gotten 15 gigs legitimately. We aren't insulting the goodwill of Dropbox, we just think its fun to be atop the list despite having a student body of a 5th of what the other universities have. It is also classic tongue in cheek that Ben Bitdiddle and Alyssa Hacker were atop the list. This was a benign prank and was done mostly to amuse. More than the hack itself it was just the timing that makes this hack memorable. It was hardly a non-trivial hack. MIT was leading the space race a few days ago, and then we exhausted our student body and i find it more amusing than desperate to come back in the lead like this. And you know what, somewhere in the offices of dropbox drew and arash are probably smiling profusely and proud of their alma mater.