We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters crashing the markets

I much prefer Wikipedia, Linux, Google, Github, Twitter, smartphones and other modern wonders to flying cars. Flying cars would be annoying and noisy and dangerous. Whereas having most of the worlds knowledge and people instantly accessible in the palm of my hand is really rather useful.

<i>Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage have developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped.</i> -- George Orwell, "Nineteen-Eightyfour"

It's kind of silly. Fake news reports move markets...it happens [1]. This wasn't a crash...it was a 1% drop with an almost immediate recovery. There are definitely problems related to liquidity providers exiting the market too fast and not being subject to enough regulations, but twitter is a great news distribution platform.<p>Also, why do we want flying cars? Is it just because they're cool or because we want a faster commute and less traffic. Maybe we can get those effects from ground based robotic cars. I think that might not be that far off.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/08/business/worldbusiness/08iht-09air.15988245.html?_r=0" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/08/business/worldbusiness/08i...</a>

The title is overly pessimistic. We may have wanted flying cars, but the mobile internet is far more empowering/revolutionary than moving cars to the air.<p>The problem the article highlights will self-correct. Twitter is a good additional news source because it is unfiltered and because of the multiplicity of sources, although we need to adapt to taking news in this form. I wouldn't buy or sell stock, or do anything drastic based on one source. Logic dictates that if the White House were bombed, lots of people on the ground in Washington DC should also be tweeting about it. As we become more savvy, Twitter's influence (the problem according to the OP) will actually be more of an asset. It probably already is.

While the author has a point, he is basing it on some improper assumptions. First, a significant attack on the White House, the seat of the Presidency of the United States, the single most powerful political office in the world would not be "trivial". Regardless of who reported the event, it would be a massive event that would send shock waves around the world for both economic and diplomatic reasons. Until the President's safety was verified, would North Korea attempt to exploit chaos and attack South Korea or would Pakistan see an opportunity to invade Kashmir? So, any reliable source of news -- AP, CNN, heck even FoxNews -- stating that the White House has been attacked would send shockwaves through the world.<p>To me the real observation is how a relatively small act can have a massive impact on the world. The tweet is a small glimpse of the devastation such an attack could have on us. It was a 150 points for a 140 characters, what would live video of the aftermath on CNBC done? It demonstrates the power of asymmetric warfare, and explains a bit of the concern that folks have around "cyber" threats. Hopefully, this incident is a wake up call to Twitter and AP to improve their security.

I am sure somebody in Washington can authoritatively convince people that these attacks are terrorist attacks (attack on our financial system, designed to cripple American economy etc. etc.), and try to gain public support for laws that will allow greater government control in the working of the Internet (something like TSA for the Internet).

I really want to hear the opinions of HN community on the following:<p>1. Does this incident indicate the influence of Associated Press on markets?<p>or<p>2. Does this incident indicate the influence of Twitter on markets?<p>How did we end up using such easy to manipulate sources of information to have so much influence in our high frequency trading algorithms?

I think flying cars in science fiction of the 50's were a result of the exploding aerospace industry. We went from the very first powered flight in 1903 to the <i>moon</i> in 1969. Airplanes and rockets must have felt very much like computers do now -- subject to boundless, inevitable, mind-bogglingly rapid progress. Flying cars and starships must have seemed like reasonable extrapolations.<p>On the other hand, one of the things I'm constantly surprised at, when I look at old sci fi, is how very little of the way the internet has changed society was anticipated. Even in stories where they clearly have instant point to point communication and powerful computers, they don't <i>use</i> it like we do. We have instant access to the <i>sum of human knowledge</i>. Forums, chats, wikis, teleconference meetings with arbitrarily bright experts! And it seems to be accelerating.<p>Sometimes when our internet goes down, I complain about being cut off from the hivemind. I'm only half joking.

This event is even less deserving of being called a "crash" than the so-called "Flash Crash". The markets did not crash; they blipped. Average investors should not have been affected at all.<p>(Some probably were affected due to stop-loss orders, but those simply should not be used-- index mutual funds are a perfectly good way to gain equities exposure.)

Let's look at this world we live in, briefly.<p>I have one of the best encyclopedias in history at my fingertips. Not only is it free and translated into numerous languages it is also searchable and interlinked. If I want to read about Aaron Burr, or the Second Congo War, or spherical harmonics it takes a fraction of a second to bring up an article. And that's been my habit for the last several years, to look stuff up, to find out facts when curiosity strikes. No doubt many other people have developed the same habit, how has it changed the nature of the world?<p>Meanwhile, I can discuss topics of endless variety and depth with people from all over the world. I have personal friends who live all over the US and other countries. When a friend of mine went to Australia for business recently the biggest problem in keeping in touch was merely the time difference.<p>I can loan money to people all over the world through microfinance sites like kiva.org. I can directly support the advancement of the developing world in a very personal, very concrete way.<p>The internet makes direct support of artists and artisans not just practical but downright advantageous for most creators. Whether it's amazon or a personal webstore or etsy or kickstarter or indiegogo, I can find people whose work I enjoy and I can put money directly in their pockets with much less overhead and intervening red tape than has ever been possible before. And this has led to many artists and creators being able to live off of their work and spend more time on their work who would never have been able to before the internet.<p>In the next 2 or 3 decades something quite remarkable and unprecedented will happen in our world. Our world will become connected. All of it. Not just the 1-2 billion people who have access to the internet today. Everyone. The developing world, people living in backwater failed states, everyone. From the arid depths of Mali to the mountains of Tajikistan to the hustle and bustle of Mumbai to the slums of Manila, access to computers and to the internet will be nearly universal. This may seem unlikely from the perspective of today but it's right smack on the path of technology and economics, it's pretty much inevitable. This alone will lead to a significant inflection point in the development of the poorest parts of the world, likely accelerating development in ways we can't even imagine today. But it will also lead to a profound change in character of the world, in the information that people have available, etc.<p>And it will happen not because of the diligent work of NGOs or of UN special offices or of foreign aid. It will happen because things like twitter, facebook, google maps, and so forth created an overall smartphone landscape which was enticing enough to cause the wealthiest people in the world to spend considerable amounts of money buying smartphones. And in the process subsidizing the development of the core technology of the most easily mass-produced and most intuitive to use computing devices in history. Smartphones and tablets are just a handful of chips, a battery, and a screen, they have fewer components than any other computing device and each component is immanently vulnerable to amortization of fixed development and manufacturing costs. The chips and screens of today that go into a several hundred dollar device will over the next few years and decades drop by an order of magnitude or more in cost, putting such devices within the grasp of even the poorest people in the world.<p>And we are only now at the very earliest stages of this revolution in computing and its impact on the world. This is a monumental event on the scale of the invention of agriculture, it is a turning point in human civilization. And even though it is happening right in front of our eyes many people are incapable of noticing.

What does this have to do with HFT? If I had someone (man or machine) managing my money and a credible source had reported two explosions at the White House, and there is some chance it could be true, I would like them to incorporate and react to that information and the likely outcomes as quickly as possible. And then if it turns out to be false, I'd like them to react to that as quickly as possible as well.<p>Which is exactly what happened. No different to a rumour rippling around an old school trading floor and then being discredited. Just faster and more efficient.

This is dumb. Of course when specific sources say something, people react. This is just as true now as it has ever been. Hell, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(radio_drama)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(radio_dr...</a>

The flying car gripe really needs to be retired. It just screams "I'm a lazy writer!" at this point, to me at least.

Traders are on a hair-trigger - some of them were probably shouting "Sell" down their phones before their eyes had even scanned to the fourth word of the rogue Tweet. You can't really do much to eliminate false-alarms when people are primed for alarm like that. So apart from the unavoidable market-blip, what is there to worry about? Its a one-off event. Lets come back and talk about it if/when major news organisations are getting their Twitters hacked once every six months or something.

"flying car" is just the modern version of "faster horse"

Twitter is pretty amazing, even if it's not a flying car.<p>I think it's worse that we don't have flying cars, but we do still have "fat finger trades".<p>If anything, they're worse now because algorithms aren't built to defend against them.<p>(<a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2012/09/19/fat-finger-error-caused-oil-stock-price-swings/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2012/09/19/fat-finger-error-...</a>)

Flying cars are ridiculously inefficient and dangerous.<p>And so what about the tweet? You can not only act on information you are 100% certain about or the markets wouldn't work at all. If using tweets to make predictions wasn't more accurate than not people wouldn't do it or lose money.

Twitter, like email, as a form of communication is basically worthless due to the lack of authentication and strong identity. At least with email there is enough (semi)publicly visible infrastructure that I can verify more of the message flow (SPF, DKIM, IP addresses), even though all of these are a poor proxies for identity.<p>Perhaps Twitter should add more metadata like originating IP, network, country, device ...<p>A public/private key system to sign messages might add something. At least it might make people think a little more carefully about protecting those credentials if it meant the onus of responsibility (and blame) for malicious messages fell on them if they fail to do so.

The article is plain wrong. Nowadays is easier to distribute false information but dissemination of false information is part of the human history. You can go further and think about political propaganda that is happening all the time.

I have never been to a webpage with more html pieces showing and hiding as you scroll down the page. I honestly am not even sure what i read. I was too busy closing slide in x or cookie alert y or wishing fancy fixed pos nav z would stop moving around.

<i>“When news is received, Verify its source &#38; authenticity. Only then should the news be passed on to another.”</i><p>I guess someone wanted to act as fast as possible, without wasting any second; hence the reason not to check source or authenticity.

I wanted the utopia of "Star Trek", I ended up with the dystopia of William Gibson.

Actually, we are pretty close to having flying cars: <a href="http://www.terrafugia.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.terrafugia.com/</a>

The real story here is that Twitter, and other digital outlets of major "trusted" news sources, need two factor authentication.

Humans do things in exchange for money, the low hanging fruit is gathered before the hard to reach fruit up top. Given a choice to make a million dollars making a website or making a million dollars building automated self-flying cars, rational beings will always choose the former.<p>It's cost benefit analysis and if you think that can be changed you are delusional.

Napoleon had won the war!

waiting for an introvert non islamist nerd to go all out adolf hitler on the US in 3, 2, 1...