Item — HN Reader

HFT profits have fallen, and will probably continue to do so. If at one point some of the hardware becomes superfluous because it is too expensive to maintain, what is a good use of a low-latency 100MBit link? Tele-medicine?

People are lamenting the ill-directed use of capital to build all this stuff, but maybe that becomes one day a valuable by-product.

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The towers have been repurposed once and the same can be done again. Use them for BASE jumping as one in the article already is.

But think of the network equipment--how many advancements in the Ethernet, TCP, and UDP that we all know and love have been partially funded or prompted by people willing to pay to ride the bleeding edge? Several years ago, UDP multicast in Linux suffered a very serious performance regression. Who pushed to get it fixed? An HFT firm. Now everyone has well-performing UDP multicast in Linux.

Or how about Arista Networks? Back when they were called Arastra they got their start largely by selling US $25K switches to HFT folks. Now they're selling for "the cloud," and lots of people can benefit from higher performance networking.

it's almost as if capitalism works...

Indeed. If you look at the advances in technology, HFT industry is one of very few that can afford to engage in long-payoff expensive projects. For example, things that we've worked on (balloons) are similar to what military has been trying to do for 20+ years, and what Google is doing with Project Loon. see our PR: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/innovator-windy-appl...

Anything related to wireless modulation/demodulation also has implications for 5G networks and satellite broadcasting (most of 'delay' of satellite video signal actually is from encoding/decoding buffering, and is reducible).