I came across new issues in the 90s as an adult and the articles seemed to be quite dumbed down. It had lost the magic of those old issues.

Markets become more efficient as a result of entities who make them so. It is possible to make a very good living by being one of these entities.

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I vaguely seemed to recall that sometime around the Gulf war, I was able to modem in and connect remotely. Shortly after, I stopped getting Plato assignments!

So at the very least, the origin of this story predates 1991 by at least two years.

I don't recall the name of the building but here it is on Google maps.

https://www.google.com/maps/@40.106201,-88.2268272,3a,75y,91...

Edit: It's not clear from my original comment but the reason for collapse would presumably be a nuclear strike. I remember this because this was a time when we grew up with a constant fear of a Russian nuclear strike and I couldn't help but wonder why anyone on earth would want to nuke Champaign.

Edit: Ah, here we go! It is the Foreign Languages Building (FLB), later renamed. I remember having to trudge here at 7ams on snowy winter days to listen to Japanese language cassettes.

https://uihistories.library.illinois.edu/virtualtour/maincam...

Edit: And here's a contemporary article about the FLB, which also cited some of the crazy rumors about this building.

https://imgur.com/HXenjnt.png

Calling all elite developers who are ready to make their mark in the markets: Valley View trading is not your typical trading firm. We're a small team of successful trader/engineers looking for an inventive, entrepreneurial and detail-oriented developer who wants to master the equity options markets.

If you're a self-starter with serious C++ chops, a track record of moving fast and a hunger to excel in the ultra-competitive world of options trading - let's talk. This is a unique chance to reap the rewards of your talent.

The right candidate thrives as an individual contributor, has 5+ years of experience creating high-octane, low latency code and a clean background. You'll hit the ground running and have 60 days to ace the Series 57 exam on us.

If you're ready to trade Silicon Valley politics for the chance at Silicon Valley paydays, this is your opportunity. Show us what you've got - reach out with cover letter and resume at valleyviewoptions gmail.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40608693

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The hostility was simply this. One day we had a dedicated high level Google engineer helping us out and giving us guidance (and even special tags) to get the data we needed in a cost effective manner for both Google and us. The next day, he was gone and we received demands to know exactly what we were doing, why and even sensitive information about our business. After several months of such probing, we were summarily told that the access we had was revoked and that there was no recourse.

We circumvented by setting up thousands of unique IP addresses in 50+ countries throughout the world and pointing our spiders at Google through them (same as they do to everyone else). These were throttled to maintain very low usage rates and stay off the radar. We continually refilled our queues with untouched IPs in case any were ever blacklisted (which happened occasionally).

As for what we did, we sampled ads for every keyword under the sun, aggregated and analyzed them to find out what was working and what wasn't. This even led to methods for estimating advertiser budgets. At one point, we had virtually every Google advertiser and their ongoing monthly spend, keywords and ad copy in our database. Highly valuable to smart marketers who were looking for an edge.

The engineers at Google were wonderful to work with up to 2010. It was like a switch flipped mid-2011 and they became actively hostile to any third party efforts to monitor what they were doing. To put it another way, this would like NBC trying to sue Nielsen from gathering ratings data. Absurd.

Fortunately, the roadblocks thrown up against us were half-hearted ones and easily circumvented. Nevertheless, I had learned an important lesson about placing reliance for one's life work on a faceless mega tech corporation.

It was not soon after when Google eliminated "Don't Be Evil" from the mission statement. At least they were somewhat self aware, I suppose.

Very true, though there is one case where one can be highly confident that this is the case: code elimination.

You can't get any faster than not doing something in the first place.

I was going to eliminate polymorphism altogether for this object but later figured out how to refactor so that this particular call could be called once a millisecond. Then if more work was needed, it would dispatch a task to a dedicated CPU.

This was an incredibly performant improvement which made a significant difference to my P&L.