Los Angeles Hacker News Meetup

2/26 Talks/Speakers

“Build Your Own Hedge Fund With High-Frequency Algorithmic Trading” by Max Mednik “Sproutcore: Mixing Web and Desktop Development” by Jerry Cheung “Hacking Art: New Media, Film, and Graphics Programming” by Josh Nimoy

Details:

Building Your Own Hedge Fund With High-Frequency Algorithmic Trading

By Max Mednik

Max Mednik will present many of the lessons he learned in starting a high-frequency trading hedge fund in the currency market.

Topics to be covered:

How hedge funds work SpeakerWhat high-frequency trading means (myth vs. reality) How to build algorithmic trading systems and start your own fund

Speaker Bio:

Max Mednik graduated from Stanford with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and a Master of Science in Management Science and Engineering. After graduating from Stanford, he founded AMA Capital, a quickly growing quantitative hedge fund headquartered in Los Angeles that develops proprietary software for algorithmic trading in the world's financial markets. He is also currently pursuing a Master of Business Administration from the UCLA Anderson School of Management, with a focus on entrepreneurship and technology management.

Sproutcore: Mixing Web and Desktop Development

By Jerry Cheung

The web is an awesome playground. It's truly cross platform, it's well understood, and even with the Internet Explorer headache, browsers are becoming more standards compliant and there's a bajillion tools for building web apps. With HTML5 and CSS3, the web's future is looking brighter than ever. But it's still not enough. Even the newest and slickest web apps still lack the capabilities and user experience of their desktop counterparts. Instantaneous UI feedback, offline capabilities, and extra OS and hardware capabilities are still crude or hacky in web land. Unfortunately, getting that final bit of desktop polish would be a real pain if one built native clients on every platform. What if we could use web technologies like HTML5 and javascript to desktop-grade apps with cloud backed storage? This talk will give a 25,000 feet view of Sproutcore's attempt to solve this problem. We'll cover the framework by building a Beer catalog that has the best of both the web and the desktop.

Speaker Bio:

Jerry loves creating software. He started experimenting with Ruby on Rails in 2007 and got hooked on it after creating several personal projects. Upon graduating from Berkeley, he joined Coupa and later went on to start his own company Outspokes with several friends from Berkley. When he’s not furiously typing, Jerry might be out running, brewing beer, or enjoying a BBQ and getting a serious sunburn.

Hacking Art: New Media, Film, and Graphics Programming

By Josh Nimoy

Josh Nimoy will present his work from the past and discuss highlights of being a hacker artist working as a graphics programmer - the tech savvy new media arts community and its awkward relationship to the motion picture industry.

Speaker Bio:

Josh Nimoy (@jtnimoy) is a new media artist, creative technologist, web prankster, and experimental musician best known in Los Angeles for his generative software for film and television. Josh recently did a handful of randomness and particle based elements for Tron Legacy, also recording his own terminal commands for use on the characters' computer screens. Nimoy's most widespread web meme is "Balldroppings," a minimal, musical ball bouncing toy first released in 2003. In his spare time, Josh plays with new programming languages, cloud computing, new graphics algorithms, hunts for juicy software exploits, and dreams of getting back into embedded circuitry. Nimoy studied at UCLA Design | Media Arts for undergrad (2002), and did his thesis in robotic typography at NYU ITP (2004).