I worked on Windows back in 2014, probably the most surprising thing joining there out of college was looking through the bug database. Every issue that gets complained about online -- and many more -- are in there, and have been for a long time, marked WONTFIX due to a potential compatibility break, lack of priority, or some other policy reason.
I don't know if anyone even owned Notepad or any other older inbox apps like the command prompt, but the issues were pretty well understood and WONTFIXed. Single undo, unicode support, unix LF support, etc, etc.
For Notepad a frustrated engineer had produced a change-set to fix all of them, and it had sat there attached to the bug for some time. It would surface on internal mail threads from time to time as a joke or a bitter reflection on bureaucracy, and if I recall a VP once chimed in to say they had looked at it, and sadly none of it could be committed due to backwards compatibility issues.
Of course the compat issues were real (you could view reports on which obscure apps hooked into this or that internal code of cmd.exe or Notepad and would break), but I always though they served as a nice justification for whichever investments were being made at the time: certainly not Notepad.
It's nice to see the wind change on that, even if it took a decade or two.
> For Notepad a frustrated engineer had produced a change-set to fix all of them
Hey, that was me (JeffMill). I was a dev lead for the Windows shell team at the time, and I got frustrated with notepad not getting any attention, so I spent a weekend and made the changes you describe and more, and had one of my reports code review it. I checked the changes in, and that week, some of the members of test team (remember those?) had a cow and my lead pulled out all of the changes.
I'm still at MSFT, now as an architect, so it turned out not to be a career limiting move, but I certainly should have discussed my plans more broadly rather than just "cowboying" those changes in.
Small world, I worked with you on the Windows Update team. Hope you are doing well. Good to see you here on the HN forum. I also remember the notepad incident!
Why not releasing it as NewNotepad or something? This way it keeps the old one working but provides a newer alternative. Like Paint and 3DPaint or whatever it is called.
I would be have been pretty sad to hear that so much enthusiasm to improve the product resulted in problems regarding your career. That's promotion material, in my book. Glad it worked out.
First thing I do on any windows machine is replace notepad with notepad2 [0], there are installs of it that hides original notepad and uses notepad2 in all the "Edit" context menus etc.
I have an app that has run on every version of Windows from 2000 through Windows 10. It now doesn't work in Windows 11 because they didn't reimplement the IDeskBand interface for the taskbar that my app uses to show remaining battery time.
My app is even part of their compatibility test suite (they asked me for permission and a license).
I understand the need to move forward and that BW compatibility can be hinder that, but it's really frustrating for me to 1) respond to thousands of people asking why it doesn't work after they upgrade, and 2) lose income because there's nothing I can do to make it work the same in Windows 11.
>I have an app that has run on every version of Windows from 2000 through Windows 10
Well, it had a good run. Should such compatibility forever hold Windows back from making breaking changes to those APIs though? 20 years is an eternity in computing...
Tell your users to vote with their money and stay on Windows 10. If enough people do so and get enough of a "Windows 11 breaks all your software" sentiment going, MS may start to reconsider.
It's not in Windows 11. That seems to be even more evidence that 11 was quite rushed for some reason. They rewrote the taskbar but didn't finish reimplementing much of the existing functionality.
Years ago I reported a bug in a VB function, something to do with date calculations. I spent quite a while on the phone with them, feeling like I was banging my head against a wall. They readily admitted that the output of their function was wrong, yet steadfastly maintained that they would not fix it because other programs might depend on that incorrect output.
If the answer to any bug report is that the buggy behavior is now the baseline standard, what's the point in reporting any bugs?
This all can be worked around given enough will. Excel files do have a format version number in them somewhere, right? I'm sure they do. So support the old behavior for older files, and the new one for the newer ones. All files created with the new version of Excel won't be affected by that bug, but the older ones, that might rely on it, won't break either.
I suspect it's a mindset change. Not heeding demand and staying stuck in the past was how Windows became a punchline, although I'm sure enterprise customers loved it. At some point it did begin to change -- I suspect it hasn't changed enough for HN readers.
For instance, Unix LF support was added to Notepad back in 2018 (at last!) with a few registry switches for compatibility.[1]
I'm not entirely clear whether the "current" API set called "WinRT" is the continuation of "Windows RT". It sounds plausible but it could just be Microsoft being terrible at naming.
Patching other people's binaries, turning off features if the app making the request is "problematic-app", re-introducing bugs, fixing should-be-impossible-to-happen calls from programs that were written by hand, it's all there!
> one useful shim is known as HeapPadAllocation; it is applied to programs that have heap buffer overrun bugs. The shim intercepts calls to the HeapAllocate function and adds a specified amount to the requested size. That way, when the program overruns a buffer, it merely corrupts the padding rather than corrupting the next heap block.
It was different when your typical application came on ten floppy disks. Not being able to use it on the next version of Windows might hinder the adoption of Windows.
Going to have to buy this book now. Enjoyed this extract. I wonder what font was used? whatthefont thinks it might be Adobe Jenson Display, and I don't currently have any PDF tools to inspect the document. The 'y' looks so pretty, with it's rightward curve.
> Wait what, external software calls into notepad?
External software calls into everything. Welcome to Windows development.
It's extremely difficult to implement even "obvious" changes like a dark-mode Notepad when it could potentially break customers who have been depending on specific behavior for decades.
This is why they've had to write shim-specific code for certain vendors. The desire to move forward versus the awful prospect of having to keep those shims in place.
Surprisingly I actually deal with a fairly hefty integration that does some horrible win32 shit I don’t understand after opening notepad to integrate it into their app. There’s so much of that out there it’s unreal.
I imagine then at least 80% of Excel's bug tracker must have WONTFIX as a designation, cause I tell you, the same fucking bugs seem to come with every release.
I've always liked Apple's approach more. There are public APIs that are mostly guaranteed to work across system versions. Then there are private ones. You can reverse engineer them. You can use them in your apps. They might even do what you wanted. But you're on your own with them, as Apple rightfully considers itself free to break anything that isn't part of the public SDK.
Microsoft, on the other hand, sees that some app calls an undocumented internal function, or has a bug that causes it to misuse an API call that just happens to still work correctly, or even worse, hooks into a system library or something, and considers that now to be a part of the public SDK that is to be maintained and made compatible with everything that might use it, forever.
I worked on macOS for many years. Apple's policy is more like Microsoft's than you describe. It was commonplace to have to revert changes that broke a "must-not-break" application that was dependent on undocumented APIs or behavior, and the source of certain projects is littered with app-specific workarounds.
I've never understood this desire to run everything 100% natively all the time AND keep your system up to date. Just put a Windows 95/98/2000/XP VM into Windows 11, integrate its window manager with the host desktop, and be done with it forever. Start it transparently for apps that need it. IIRC Apple did a similar thing when transitioning from classic Mac OS to OS X, and it worked pretty well.
I did a bit of cross-platform development in C++, and I'm glad to report that Linux is an API clusterfuck in regard to anything going beyond system calls. None of the desktop-related stuff is part of the system and there's always more than one way to do something, and you have to support all of them because else someone would complain that your thing doesn't work on their particular configuration.
Exchanges do not receive or handle GTC or GTD orders, see for example the NYSE pillar spec.[1]
Broker-dealers handle stock splits and the behavior varies according to your broker. Some brokers will request the broker-dealer cancel all orders back, but most brokers allow limit prices to be adjusted for orders "below the market" (buy limit orders and sell stop orders). The Fidelity FAQ is an illustrative one.[2]
I'm not sure what a "vendor" is here, but brokers send GTC orders to broker-dealers, who forward them to the exchange every day as a day order. This behavior is industry standard and certainly not bush league.
I work for a large wholesaler and wrote the code that handles client GTC orders for on behalf of pretty much every brokerage in the US. Whatever your experience is, it's no longer correct. NASDAQ stopped accepting GTC orders in 2015, before NYSE.
The fund would not have such a simple construction - but you can build a simple tail risk strategy with options. Buy deeply out of the money puts on SPX and periodically roll them. You are now betting on a tail risk wiping out the market (although paying a continuous premium to do so).
In your written testimony, the goals for privacy regulation seem quite watered down from past proposals of yours like prohibiting behavioral ad targeting, or eliminating data brokers altogether.
Does this represent a shift in what you think is reasonable, or achievable, or just language tailored for the audience?
I wanted to stay within the parameters of the hearing, and also talk about stuff that I thought had a fair chance at getting bipartisan support (like regulation for making binding voluntary commitments about privacy).
I don't think I've watered down my proposals, but I think choosing winnable battles is important now that the legislative wheels are turning. For example, I think a good way to get rid of behavioral ad targeting is to give publishers a way to demonstrate that they make more money by not doing it (like we saw with the NYT in Europe).
Of course, if this technology was able to price securities better than the market (the fundamental job of almost every market participant), it would be printing money and they would not release it.
This is not the secret sauce, but probably an implementation of a set of standard well known pricing and risk models. That's still useful, and can be expensive to develop, so thanks Goldman.
> the fundamental job of almost every market participant
Not true. You might make an argument that this is the effect of having them together in a market, but that's not their job:
- Market maker: hang around the market offering to trade with anyone (pref retail) at a spread. Doesn't care whether TSLA is gonna be able to make all those Model 3s.
- Pension fund: make sure they can pay the liabilities that are coming due. If that can be locked in, happy to pay a bit more than fair value to do so.
- Hedge fund: make absolute returns. Buy before it goes up, sell before it goes down. Whatever form of voodoo (or skill) fulfills this is fine. This doesn't have to mean finding the right price (could just mean you guess which way it's going), though of course often it is part of the objective.
- Broker: finds people on both sides of a trade. Doesn't care terribly much except to create excitement.
- Banks: lend money/securities and offer services to all of the above. Create research to make people trade. Securitise stuff so people can trade it. Often do a bit of everything.
Hope you dont mind me asking a slightly unrelated and possibly dumb question.
Im a programmer, but on the side have made on average 150% profit in share dealing over the passed 5 years, but more importantly, a much higher return in other assets to 2 orders of magnitude higher.
My question is - would experience / gains like this - if i had proof etc - get me an interview in a fund as some type of well paid (6 figure atleast) analyst?
Yes, go on LinkedIn, there's a bunch of recruiters hawking jobs at funds. Generally they want a Sharpe ratio above 2.5, $10M profits a year.
And you need to know what machinery you'll need too. Capital requirements, counterparty agreements, access to stock lending, cost requirements, IT requirements, everything.
Some of the newer shops say you can keep your own IP. Haven't checked whether it's true, but most people I know are sceptical.
Say I set up a fund holding a low cost s&p500 index ETF, but at the end of each year sold naked puts with a ~1/25 risk of ruin to earn ~4% return. Therefore my fund consistently makes 4% over the market index, except for 1/25 years when it explodes and loses everything. Because the volatility is low, my sharpe ratio is good (until it explodes), correct?
Assuming it can stay in business >10-15 years won't I be a billionaire hedge fund manager by then and then change to a low risk strategy that only makes 1-2% more than market index with very low risk of ruin and just let my investors lose interest and quit the fund over the next decade while I continue to earn fees from them?
Investors will ask you what you're up to, and if you're just doing that they won't invest. They also keep an eye on whether you're doing what you say.
Anything that's both simple and mechanical is gonna have problems attracting investment. The guys you're talking to are gonna have problems justifying giving you 2/20 for buying a fund and selling options.
Or should. I've met a lot of investors who didn't ask the right questions.
Regarding the Sharpe, if they know what they're doing they're not just using the textbook version either. There's a paper by Andrew Lo about it, well worth a read, not terribly complex math.
But it would be pretty easy to obfuscate the whole thing behind a few layers of "We've got 50 PhDs working here, we run black box algorithms" etc etc, the strategy could be artificially made a couple of orders of magnitude more complex while still producing the exact same outcome.
Do hedge fund investors keep an eye on whether you do what you say? How did Bernie Madoff go for so long if that's the case?
Of course the mechanism is simple and mechanical, but that isn't how you'd market it to investors.
The 50 phds thing is exactly what certain large firms are doing. The emperor's new hedge fund. I know people who've worked at major firms, and they've told me what they do. But you are going to have a hard time doing a startup with 50 phds.
Madoff was the cause of all the due diligence, though I'd say Europe was a bit different from the US at the time.
If [0] those returns are accurate, can be proven, and your strategy can be scaled up to multi-million dollar positions, you should take it to a hedge fund/prop shop/etc. and be able to make 7 or 8 figures. Your bonus should be dependent on performance; you may be able to negotiate a % of the profit. Those companies don't care about your background if at the end of the day you make them money.
Short of spending a million dollars right then and there, you can use historical market data. Or datasets provided by the person you're trying to prove it to. Keep in mind that after a certain volume, your model would start influencing the market itself.
Either way, it's insignificant and you're actually losing money. The stock of all the big companies went up tremendously in the past 5 years. Anybody who invested in large US equities made just as much if not more.
I think you're missing the gist of his statement and also overlooking the word "almost"?
That being said, most of your definitions are still dependent on competitively pricing securities. A market maker who can't calculate reasonable theos won't be a market maker for long.
I think it depends a whole lot on what exactly you are market making and how you're trying to profit. Of course many desks take views as well, but mixing in prop positions doesn't change the essence of it: the MM is trying to make money off being available for other participants.
You can of course also learn some things about where to market is going in the course of this business, and many desks are able to piggy back on some flow information for their advantage.
Hedge Fund: Convince customers to invest their money in the fund. Extract as much of it as possible through fees. Doesn't care much where the market goes, charge a fee either way, a bit more if it goes up.
Thanks for being so concise. Getting license to sell estates (life insurance), hope to make $$$, worm my way into FINRA to take series 7, then try operate under reg crowdfunding to raise $1 million capital for new biz. What you do now?
It's akin to Facebook open sourcing their social network framework, rather than the entire personal information of all their users. Of course it's useful to some people, but it's not what makes them money.
It's probably not a download it and run it piece of software, there are probably lots of configurations and likely requires the user to provide their own models and trading rules.
> Goldman was routinely at the top of the NYSE rankings with regard to programmatic trading volume.
I took 'secret sauce' in GP's comment to mean 'profitable strategies'. Don't confuse volume with profitability. It's conceivable that a BB would deliberately lose money in some activities to have clients give them other, more profitable flow/business.
GS used to be nicknamed “the worlds largest hedge fund”. They have plenty of world class proprietary tech, but the OP is right: this is not likely to be secret sauce at all.
Right. They have tons of trading activities that are non-proprietary. I’m sure they can always hide some positions that are truly proprietary but largely they are not supposed to put on positions for their own gain.
It's very disappointing. I wrote a fun app for my friends which would find the nearest bar serving picklebacks in New York City on top of Foursquare. These API changes effectively killed it.
This is the same company that regularly hosts hackathons and talks about wanting "to inspire young developers to dream up the next generation of amazing products and services, and provide them with the tools to make them a reality."[1]
How about if you want to do that, don't take your users data and hold it hostage to developers who want to provide them a free service?
The only viable solution is #4. So long as Facebook can make money by targeting specific groups or behavioral features, their algorithms and advertisers will find facsimiles for protected groups, the vulnerable, children, or Nazis since this optimizes revenue and engagement in dramatic ways. Even the most well-intentioned actor -- and Facebook is very far from that -- could not win this self-imposed game a whack-a-mole.
One alternative to shutting off targeting altogether would be switching from a blacklist to a whitelist approach, where regulators provide the set of features or groups that are allowed to be targeted.
This is largely due to Amazon stock appreciation. Amazon does not pay senior engineers $400K, let alone $500K. In FAANG, a typical non-promotion raise is 5-8%.
The author could probably have been a bit more specific and noted that his income was actually quite likely to go down for the next several years, but it wouldn't have made for such a compelling post.
Amazon adjusted my comp to ~$380K in 2016 after I got a similar competing offer. It's true that I would have made a bit less if I stayed, but it was still going to be around $500K assuming the stock price remained the same.
This is standard practice, the system compositor has a fast path for video decoding and rendering. The fast path will not be taken when software composition is needed (eg, something is overlaid or blended).
If you’re asking why they didn’t think to design the fast path to deal with Byzantine faults, it’s probably because why the hell should they?
Yes, I understand that. However, empty divs are not an edge case, and I can imagine a lot of not-insane reasons an empty div might be on top of a <video>. The entire player chrome is within the video nowadays, and it often intersected in the past (the old seek bar for example.) If there is more to this story than an empty div, I would be interested to hear. Today's YouTube seems to put display: none on almost all of the overlays when the user is not hovered, and if that isn't good enough, I think that is a bit absurd. (Actually, there are some empty divs, but they're really just empty... Some contain display: none'd divs.)
I graduated six years ago, have worked at Microsoft and Dropbox, and anecdotally around a quarter of my friends at either of them wouldn't work at Facebook now. Parent comment is not obviously wrong, and you shouldn't assume bad faith.
Your last submission was titled "We're lucky Mark Zuckerberg is in charge" and around half your comment history is devoted to defending Facebook. At least if you're going to question someones motives, you should state yours.
Did you actually do a poll of your coworkers on this topic? :)
I think it's pretty reasonable to assume an investment banker isn't going to be much help to FB employees in finding a new job. Claiming that "Facebook will be known for having hired mediocre sell-outs a few years from now." is at best a baseless slander. How in the world is that not in bad faith?
Spreading misinformation to aid one's short position is a much worse case of bias, in my mind, than what I've said in defense of the company.
1. No, it's not reasonable to assume a technology-sector investor isn't going to be able to help techie friends find jobs.
2. The "slander" was supported by an anecdote. And this is a comment section -- opinionated statements will be found.
3. What might be closer to slander is the fantastic assumption that the other commenter is shilling for a short position in Facebook. That's a mind-boggling assumption to make on the flimsiest of evidence. Even setting aside that trying to promote your short in a random HN comment is laughable
4. You're curiously silent on your own bias, well noted by pantaloons
I'm not "curiously silent" on my own bias. What do you want me to say exactly? You're trying really hard to paint the same picture you're criticizing, namely that I'm some sort of shill.
I think the idea that everyone at FB who doesn't leave immediately is a "mediocre sell-out" is very far from the truth, and contrary to my own experience. Thus I'm suspicious of people who claim such.
There's already enough people on HN that will type out a borderline vitriolic four point list of why anyone who defends FB is wrong.
Why don't you look at JumpCrisscross' post history? This isn't the only anti-FB article he's submitted. Or are you a bit biased here? :) He has even commented on FB's stock price and predicted it will go down more in the future.
My bias is that I think there's another side to the story.
> I think the idea that everyone at FB who doesn't leave immediately is a "mediocre sell-out" is very far from the truth, and contrary to my own experience. Thus I'm suspicious of people who claim such.
You are so self-assured about your position that you immediately take the contrary assertion to be in _bad faith_? This seems silly to me, but perhaps we'll have to agree to disagree.
I don't know if anyone even owned Notepad or any other older inbox apps like the command prompt, but the issues were pretty well understood and WONTFIXed. Single undo, unicode support, unix LF support, etc, etc.
For Notepad a frustrated engineer had produced a change-set to fix all of them, and it had sat there attached to the bug for some time. It would surface on internal mail threads from time to time as a joke or a bitter reflection on bureaucracy, and if I recall a VP once chimed in to say they had looked at it, and sadly none of it could be committed due to backwards compatibility issues.
Of course the compat issues were real (you could view reports on which obscure apps hooked into this or that internal code of cmd.exe or Notepad and would break), but I always though they served as a nice justification for whichever investments were being made at the time: certainly not Notepad.
It's nice to see the wind change on that, even if it took a decade or two.