That's different. The security is: if a programmer implements the code correctly, but the market turns against the strategy and the strategy loses money, the programmer generally won't lose his job.
Of course, but the traders are taking risks in the sense that they can get fired for losing money. Programmers generally won't. They have a lower-risk, more secure job.
I have a feeling this article confused the creators of the trading algorithms, which is what makes the money, with pure programmers, who are hired to implement someone else's pre-existing algorithms.
Sometimes these are the same person, but in those cases that person almost always has a profit sharing contract, not only a base salary. (And if they don't, they're crazy.) The fact that the programmers in the article only had base salaries leads me to believe that they weren't the actual creators of the trading algorithms, so they don't really deserve a slice of the profits anyway, because someone else a) created the profit machine and b) is taking all the risks of running it.
What really happens is that these programmer guys learn the trading secrets after a few years on the job, then depart to a different firm to recreate the machine themselves. There's no oppression or revolts here.
Agreed, but I don't think there's much to worry about as it stands. PG said newsyc currently gets 60,000 unique visitors per day, and the # of ppl following these twitter feeds is barely 1% of that.
I question whether SVD would yield good recommendations.
In any case, co-voting data is not scrape-able from the public HN site, so I think using keywords and urls is really the only realistic filtering option at this point.
The Readability parse is a good idea, but implementing that would need more time than I can spare right now. If anyone wants to do the legwork on that, please contact me and I'll be happy to put it in the feed.