[redanddead]

I might get some hate for this, but Google seems to be doing some really cool things, like in fintech as well as this silicon project. Google Finance is one of the only players I've seen with an interest of opening things up when so much of the industry is about pushing others out and restricting access. Like for example the CME deal, to open source live, low latency stock market data. Bloomberg might let you rent it for 25k a year if you're lucky. Google? Yeah just hook into the websocket bro, it's free.

Someone's gotta do it

Most of the stock market data the avg person sees is 15 minutes delayed by request of the NYSE, and in a world where trades are reaching the 3 millisecond and below mark, that's a very long time. So Google opening up what could be <20ms data might be able to help some applications. Not saying it's a silver bullet either.

I wish they would take on even more big projects that need to be tackled. Like I want to see a google branded remote controlled barge out in the pacific garbage patch that the public is controlling through a google web app or some other insane, good projects. Idk when you deal with finance companies all day, even google seems moral.

However, it's not looking good this quarter for all tech cos

[zizee]

> remote controlled barge out in the pacific garbage patch

Whilst I like the thought behind idea, these ocean garbage patches aren't easy to clean up with a barge.

> For many people, the idea of a “garbage patch” conjures up images of an island of trash floating on the ocean. In reality, these patches are almost entirely made up of tiny bits of plastic, called microplastics. Microplastics can’t always be seen by the naked eye. Even satellite imagery doesn’t show a giant patch of garbage. The microplastics of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch can simply make the water look like a cloudy soup. This soup is intermixed with larger items, such as fishing gear and shoes.

Better to clean things up at the source. It is estimated that 90% of all plastic waste in our oceans come from just 10 rivers in Asia.

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/great-paci...

https://m.dw.com/en/almost-all-plastic-in-the-ocean-comes-fr...

[ZeroGravitas]

There is actually already a (very nerdy, HN appropriate) project cleaning up the garbage patch.

And yes, they also started building river interceptors as that is more bang per buck. They still seem to think they can clean the existing stuff economically too.

https://theoceancleanup.com/dashboard/

[zizee]

Thanks for the link, it looks like an interesting project, and fun engineering challenge.

It would be interesting to see $ spent per tonne of garbage removed from the rivers vs ocean. Like you said, far more economical to focus on the source. Given no project has unlimited funds, why spend resources on the"garbage patch"? I suspect that they still work on the ocean part because:

1. Is better for fundraising;

2. Is a fun engineering challenge;

3. fun to work on big boats;

4. Helps with recruitment;

[solarengineer]

They do work on cleaning up rivers as well!

Check their Interceptors.

https://theoceancleanup.com/rivers/

Also, the ocean garbage does need cleaning up too

[xbmcuser]

Google main objective for many years was to get as many people online and using digital services as possible so that they can make money of them. I think it is quite under appreciated how much of todays web systems is because of Google using and promoting opensource as well as open sourcing its older tech stack.

[mszcz]

> Like for example the CME deal, to open source live, low latency stock market data. Bloomberg might let you rent it for 25k a year if you're lucky. Google? Yeah just hook into the websocket bro, it's free.

Cursory search turned up nothing for me. Can you point me in the direction where I can find free (or low cost) market data that you mentioned?

[redanddead]

https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/financial-services/buil...

This link has more info

[geph2021]

That seems really cool, thanks for posting. However, I did notice that their demo does not seem to have any live prices right now (the demo is a couple years old, so maybe no longer live): https://showcase.withgoogle.com/marketdata

Also, to the point about Bloomberg's high subscription fees, they provide all imaginable financial data under the sun. This google demo with CME is just CME data, which is a small, albeit important, part of market data, let alone the broader financial data. Furthermore, in many cases the data itself is owned by the exchanges, so Bloomberg's fees reflect passing on the (at times exorbitant) exchange fees. NYSE, NASDAQ, CME, etc.. are historically the ones that are the gatekeepers of the data and putting up financial barriers.

[nly]

Pretty sure a Bloomberg terminal subscription doesn't get you unlimited data at all the venues. You still have to pay extra to subscribe to individual feeds.

And yes, you're right on these costs. Some exchanges will charge large 5 figure sums annually just to give you a port so you can subscribe to some unreliable (UDP), poorly thought out, over-engineered-in-the-early-2000s, market data protocol that requires you to spend weeks of engineering effort to debug and normalize because hey... every exchange wants to use a different tech stack and none of their customers want to use a vendor library, so they don't exist.

The irony is a lot of organisations that are used to dealing with these feeds struggle when it comes to crypto, because they're not used to a world of websockets and public facing IPs, or the risk of exposing their machines to the internet.

One company I know pays a small 5 figure annual sum to a shitty "cloud solutions provider" for what is essentially just a dual NIC reverse proxy providing access to Coinbase via a stable IP. The is provider of course charges thousands per IP. Managing public cloud infrastructure is just outside of its comfort zone.

[redanddead]

Yeah the bloomberg terminal is still good value if you're going to be using that data, and a relatively good price. Good point about the exchanges

[gregsadetsky]

I see that CME is using GCP to offer its data stream, but it doesn't seem free.

"This innovative collaboration with Google Cloud will not only make it easier for our clients to access the data [...] CME Group customers will be able to access all real-time CME Group data [...]" (emphasis mine) [0]

As for [1], it has a Contact Us form and a link to [2] which talks about onboarding and an "On-demand, pay as you go model".

Could you point to the free market data pub/sub and/or specific steps to recreate the demo? Thanks!

[0] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cme-group-to-offer-...

[1] https://www.cmegroup.com/market-data/connect-data/cloud-mdp....

[2] https://dataservices.cmegroup.com/Data-Products

[SEJeff]

The Pyth Network is exclusively HFT and TradFi big money traders or exchanges and they give it away for free to break the market data monopoly.

https://pyth.network

[bergenty]

I’m going to pile on the good times here because I think Google is doing an amazing job with YouTube, their search always seems to return what I’m looking for, I like the Google workspace suite, I love Google earth and maps, I’m totally for their approach with self driving with Waymo, I appreciate their ethical stances, like Google chrome, always loved gmail, love that they try so many moonshots and am grateful for android. I hope they make their own silicon soon. All of these seem to be unpopular opinions now but there it is.

[mnahkies]

Ibkr gives me close to real time data for about $6 a month - I've not read the fine print closely but I'd be shocked if it is 15min stale. It's localized to certain exchanges but covers most bases. Ultimately any retail investor is unlikely to be able to capitalise on millisecond data without developing their own hft bots

[spitfire]

Last time I was heavily playing with IB's API they were 250ms rollups of the market. So not useful for HFT or anything, but plenty fast enough for prosumer trading.

[mgraczyk]

Even without a plan you can get snapshots for about $0.01 each that I believe are less than 15s old

[dogleash]

I ain't hating but "commoditizing your complement" is just pushing others out and restricting access with extra steps.

Admittedly, the bones they'll throw us in the process do look like they'll be cool, tho.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

As a consumer, you want everything to be a commodity (i.e. and abundance of choice). This means you'll have more options at every price point.

[dogleash]

>As a consumer, you want everything to be a commodity

True. But I'm also guessing that in 5 years I'll be more frustrated at the level of control they're exercising with thing they're currently building next to it. More so than I am with the market they're commoditising today.

[redanddead]

That never actually happens though, what ends up happening is that people realize it's better to be a literal cartel and MONOPOLY!

And you get the worst of all deals, see Shrinkflation

My point is we shouldn't trust businesses to be moral, and I don't. I'm just angry at the NYSE

[bee_rider]

I would expect a commodity to be produced with pretty low margins (since the competition is pretty fierce), but not for free. If Google is giving away the information for free, is that really a commodity? I mean either they are giving it away for some strategic reason, they are taking their cut in some more byzantine way, or they have decided to act as a charity for at-home traders for some reason.

[Dracophoenix]

Information itself is a commodity. An encyclopedia doesn't have value have because it costs money but the vice versa. Wikipedia is free, yet it has done more for the world in 20 years than the Brittanica has in 250.

I'm not suggesting Google gives away information as a purely altruistic endeavor. However, Google's ulterior motives, should they have any, are irrelevant to the value of the information itself so long as it hasn't been edited or tampered with.

[konschubert]

When things get commoditised, it's good for consumers.

Competition is good.

[gurjeet]

> ... data the avg person sees is 15 minutes delayed ..., that may as well be a light year.

Nit pick: you've got your units mixed up; minute is a unit of time, and light-year is a unit of distance.

[skybrian]

In astronomy, aren't they in some sense equivalent? Andromeda galaxy is 2.5 million light years way, so we are seeing it as it was 2.5 million years in the past.

[unethical_ban]

No. Light year is the distance.

Distance/time * time = distance

Waiting a "light year" would be a year.

Yes, you are correct that astronomers talk about seeing into the past by X number of years when we look at a galaxy X light years away.

[sitkack]

I blame George Lucas for this.

[mkl]

Star Wars confused parsecs with a unit of time, not light years.

[slater]

FYI there's apparently some retcon stuff about that, e.g. maybe the Kessel run is around a particularly dangerous area of space (black holes or w/e), so accomplishing it in LESS parsecs is something to brag about ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[zem]

an earlier retcon was "that was Lucas's subtle way of showing that han solo talked a lot without necessarily knowing what he was taking about"

[Thorrez]

1 parsec ~= 3.26 light years

[sitkack]

> you've got your units mixed up; minute is a unit of time, and light-year is a unit of distance.

[redanddead]

fixed, thank you

[Teodolfo]

In some unit systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometrized_unit_system) they are both units of length.

[guipsp]

They are not both units of length on that system either.

[beambot]

It's "free" until it's sunset with no notice. Google is notorious for doing this. RIP Reader.

[rajman187]

Indeed, the list is incredible

https://killedbygoogle.com

https://gcemetery.co

[nly]

> in a world where trades are reaching the 3 millisecond and below mark

Industry average for those colocated and trading using software is going to be closer to something like 20-30 microseconds

[scarface74]

Don’t be too impressed. Every company is interested in “opening things up” when it’s to their competitive advantage.

You notice that “open” Android is increasingly dependent on closed source “Google Play Services” and Google uses the closed source parts to beat OEMs into submission?

[matheusmoreira]

Not to mention the fact they provide hardware attestation to apps which will enable them to lock out rooted phones.

[api]

Wow, how things have changed. I've been here since back when Google could do no wrong. Now they're a poster child for shady surveillance capitalism.

Same with Elon Musk. I remember him being compared to a comic book hero. Now he's an alt-right racist (if you are a leftist) or an evil globalist technocrat (if you are a rightist).

[scarface74]

From day one Google’s business plan was ads - except for the brief time where they were selling “Google Search Appliances”.

Every company whose business model isn’t “I give them money and they give me stuff” is shady.

[ZeroGravitas]

It may be hard to recall now, but their big thing was actually less intrusive and less scammy ads than the state of the art at the time.

It's also worth mentioning that lots of businesses that you pay money to, track you in similar ways. The origin of it was probably supermarket loyalty cards in the pre-internet era.

The association with no-cost products is not really appropriate, and mostly seems to be progaganda from people with other business models. It was the web scale and pure digital products that let the cost drop to near zero, which synergises with ad-supported offerings, (just as "free" ad-supported TV and radio were a thing for decades). However, it also allows other business models, such as non-profits like Wikipedia, netflix subscriptions, or subsidized by necessary hardware purchases.

Similarly, just because you pay money for various Google services, doesn't really gave them any motivation to not track you.

[scarface_74]

I also don't watch ad supported TV. T-Mobile has a promotion where you can get free Paramount+ with ads. I tried the free offering for 2 hours and I said forget it and upgraded to the ad free tier.

The only time that ads don't really bother me are the rare occasions I watch sports. The breaks are more natural.

[kranke155]

If you’re Ukrainian he’s a National hero.

[mlindner]

> Same with Elon Musk. I remember him being compared to a comic book hero. Now he's an alt-right racist (if you are a leftist) or an evil globalist technocrat (if you are a rightist).

He hasn't changed though, and little has changed in what he's actually doing too. If anything, he's more mellow now than he was when he was younger. People's impressions of him have been highly twisted IMO.

[api]

Yeah, he's neither a comic book hero nor a monster. He's a rich dude who's pretty smart and decided to risk a bunch of his helping build up companies working in important innovative fields, but unfortunately he also trolls and overshares on Twitter like a 13 year old.

[mistrial9]

> poster child for shady surveillance capitalism

as well they should be, they carried it forward like Atlas carrying the globe.. in the beginning it was competition, then, we could not stop..