The price has to go up anyway, that's what happens when demand increases, it's nothing to do with HFT. Large block trades like this will often be arrange over the counter (OTC) or on dark pools, so the fund purchasing the shares will get a fixed price and it's up to the market maker to deal with the execution risk in the open market.
> (This is kinda funny b/c they were sorta conceived to emulate Oxford and Cambridge - which as I understand are all about he well-rounded "liberal arts eduction")
Undergrad programs at Oxford and Cambridge are actually very specialized compared to American degrees. Students typically don't take any classes from outside their primary course. While some courses are broader than a typical major at an American university (e.g "Natural Sciences" at Cambridge or "Philosophy, Politics and Economics" at Oxford) only a small number mix the sciences and humanities, and even then only in certain approved combinations (e.g. at Oxford you can do {Mathematics,CS,Physics} with Philosophy, but not {Chemistry,Biology} with Philosophy).
> What I am questioning is the extreme prevalence of travel in off-time for some people for whom travel seems to be the only way to spend holidays.
For myself, it's simply that vacation days are too scarce to waste on anything I could feasibly do during the evening or on weekends. It might be nice to take time off for the activities you mentioned, but it's not essential, I could do them at the weekend. Each year I have 240 working, 100 weekend, 10 public holidays and 15 vacation days. I have some "required travel" that uses vacation days too (e.g. I'm taking three days off next week to go to a friend's wedding and visit family), so I make sure I maximise my "pure travel" with the remaining days.
Beyond that the differentiators are working hours/flexibility and healthcare. A household in Texas might have quite a good life in many respects with an income of 60k/year, but do they get 6 weeks off, flexible working hours (useful if you have kids), and paid maternity/paternity leave that lasts more than a few weeks? In the US if you want/need that extra time away from work you might need to take time of work or go part time, causing a drop in income and perhaps company sponsored healthcare, but in many European these things are available by default to fulltime employees.
Python is currently making inroads in finance, both Bank of America and JP Morgan have large projects involving it. I've worked on one of them, and like you I'm unusure if it's a good long-term plan, though I don't have experience with large codebases in other languages. Performance is an issue and navigating a large Python codebase is tricky. One thing that doesn't help is that many of the developers come from Java/C#/C++ and pick up Python quickly but with "unpythonic" habits, the code ends up being almost as verbose as Java but with none of the type safety.
Their FAQ (http://www.codenameone.com/faq.html) claims that it is possible, though a little complicated (and they'll only provide support if you're on their enterprise plan).
A few years ago I heard a story from an acquaintance working at an online spread betting company. One senior figure suggested that they should actively bet against their worst performing customers rather than hedging, they discovered pretty quickly that this wasn't a good idea!
That's definitely not the case in the UK. For example, the guidelines for applying for Economics at Cambridge state:
"The Faculty does not have standard requirements for subjects other than Maths: in particular A level Economics, though useful, is not a prerequisite."
(FWIW I did mathematics as an undergrad but I considered CS and spoke to CS faculty at various university open days, from what I remember they all considered maths to be the only essential A level for admission.)
I recently started reading http://www.learnprolognow.org/ and the first few chapters have been excellent. There are exercises and practical sections at the end of each chapter too (unfortunately I haven't had time to look at them in detail yet).
My understanding was that Julia gives you the option to write loops explicitly but it doesn't stop you using vector and matrix operations when appropriate, so I'm curious if there are any particular operations that its array implementation are missing?
I think this comment is referencing the fact that as of right now, slicing a julia array creates a copy and not a lightweight "view" of the sliced data. This makes vectorized operations on slices of arrays sometimes faster in numpy than in julia. See https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/3701.
Note that you already can make view slices, it just isn't the default. As per the issue you linked to, the default will change to views in version 0.3.
Edit: As Harryh said, large mutual fund managers believe that HFT allows them to get better prices for their customers: http://www.cnbc.com/2014/04/25/vanguard-chief-defends-high-f...