I really wish people would mention their stack when they have these curl install scripts. I'd rather use a real package manager, but I'm not totally against installing a compiled binary this way. I am, 100%, not going to install some Java/Type-script nightmare like this though. How is it resolving the dependencies? Is it installing some version of node, bun... on my machine? How's that working with other versions I have installed?
Related: please don't write command line tools in non-compiled languages! Don't make the runtime your user's problem.
This is how I found out it's a javascript project and didn't install it. I only even bothered to do that because I actually wanted to try it. I'm just saying it would be awesome to have that right there next to the curl command.
> Around 40% of Linux CLI tools are written in interpreted languages.
And I prefer not to use those. Everything I said for Javascript holds for Python, Perl, Ruby... as well.
I know where you're coming from. I've been worried about all the supply chain attacks on npm too. And I'm far from a security expert. However, if you're okay with installing binary packages via `curl somesite.com | sh` I don't think you are in a better position with regards to security.
Security is just one of my concerns. I'm actually more worried about borking my system because it's doing some out of band stuff with various javascript pieces that already exist on my system (not by my choice!).
100% agree. It's a fun name, but it ends up begging the comparison. The look and feel of it was an instant download for me. It's actually exactly what I want and even tried / failed to build on my own for years. I'll be supporting this project.
Yeah, I think a few of the widgets here are neat and useful. It's not a Bloomberg replacement, but it might be a good replacement for a few tabs? You could get the info elsewhere, but I like this presentation more.
Edit: Ah, they're offering a pro subscription. While I appreciate that cloud services aren't free, I'm not sure that I'm willing to pay to replace a few browser tabs. Not for me, but maybe for someone!
Yeah... people aren't paying Bloomberg $31,980 per year for a TUI. They're paying for the data source... and I don't think you have Bloomberg's connections.
Asked a dear friend in the finance industry what he thought about Bloomberg. He's the type of guy who uses these systems daily. Mostly paraphrasing:
1) Bloomberg was lightyears ahead of anything else in the pre-internet days, so there's a lot of UI familiarity.
2) Bloomberg's chat is important because, as a hedge fund or investment bank, the chat is how you buy and sell bonds. You agree to the trade in the chat, then tell the back office folks to execute the trade. Direct quote: "I'd wager 90% of the ~400 trillion in annual bond trading value happens over Bloomberg DM"
3) Bloomberg is the biggest and best aggregator
This is fascinating to be because I always assumed latency was the key. After all, the only Bloomberg terminal I've ever seen in person was hooked up to its own dedicated fiber drop. It seems like the chat and sheer breadth of data are the differentiators.
I've heard the same thing about Bloomberg's chat many years ago. Since everyone you're chatting to also has to fork over ~$30k/yr to use it, there's the implicit assumption that you're talking to a serious person.
I find it a bit less funny. There is this perception that what finance people do is super important and grown up but following a brief stint in the industry I realised it literally is just a game. We used to trade bits of stationery and trading cards for fun at school. They never stopped. The only difference is people who never consented to any of this are paying for it all, especially when it all goes wrong.
I assumed they were referring to market crashes caused by irresponsible levels of risks and deceptive practices like we saw in 2008, and/or government-funded bailouts
really it's about quality of the data. it's like apple but for price data. it's correct, it just works. sure it has the goofy teletext interface, but if you need to pull accurate prices and historical market data that you can trust you will find it there and it will just work with a stable and learnable interface. moreover, network effects ensure quality.
It's really only a specific subset of traders that need close to zero latency. Many other finance professionals deal on larger timescales so it's not that big a deal. I am more "finance-adjacent" so I don't use Bloomberg personally but have worked on plenty of deals where "time sensitive" means "it has to get done this week. Oh wait, the bank hasn't finished its KYC checks yet. Okay, it definitely has to get done next week. Unless the KYC checks are still ongoing, in which case, for sure gotta get it done by the end of the month".
Bloomberg Terminal is for humans. It takes about 10 clicks to do a stock BUY. your average retail stock trading platform is much quicker, many have 1 click trading.
The dedicated fiber drop was most likely for reliability, not for latency.
There is a marketplace on Bloomberg where you can buy and sell interesting stuff you don’t really find anywhere else. Some of it stored in freeports and delivered to your freeport, etc. top tier escorts, etc.
If you want fixed-income data, Bloomberg is the only shop on the street data-wise.
If you want other financial data, Bloomberg's fixed entry-point pricing tends to make more sense in terms of bang for buck than its competitors modular price sheets.
People saying Bloomberg is just about the chat are simply embarrassing themselves.
Look at the price sheets of Eikon, Factset, CapIQ etc. There is no such thing as a cheap "Bloomberg killer".
Quality data is expensive. So are the leased-lines it arrives at Bloomberg on. So is the data wrangling architecture.
Seriously. I see a cool product that someone built and is sharing with the community, and the top comment is basically a criticism that it's not a $31k terminal.
Well yes, but a lot of people immediately jump to conclusions based on name alone, it's human nature. Definitely something to consider when you're picking a name for a project.
An example that comes to mind is JSON5. People have a visceral reaction to the name, it sounds like it's trying to be HTML4.01 -> 5 but for JSON. In reality, it has its uses but doesn't supersede JSON whatsoever. The name itself has given it a bad rap though.
If you pick a name like "Gloomberb" the most obvious interpretation is that it's a Bloomberg alternative.
Financial companies are cutting down on the amount associates can bill the firm for a $30 dinner, and the time before they can have the firm pay for a $30 car ride home. They definitely wouldn't pay for Bloomberg if it could be easily replaced.
Bloomberg terminal is only $133/day (assuming 240 work days per year). So, while $32k/yr seems expensive at first glance, given the total annual cost of an analyst or trader, it's not huge. Of course, they'd rather not spend the $32k/yr if they could avoid it, if bloomberg can give you an edge on just one or two trades a year, you come out ahead. So...
I can say companies with less than 20 mil arr pay around $150k a year for saas and others (sometimes the same) also pay 50k a year for a niche agent harness.
Making a bad trade or missing a good one due to delaying data or bad data can pay for several years worth of bloombergs for everyone in your firm in one moment.
Also, and in addition, the value of the Bloomberg Terminal is not the UI, it is the consistency. You don't pay for an accelerator and a break pedal, you pay for the 100% guarantee to find them in the place >100k people have been trained to find them.
Can't you just use a bunch of agents to extract financial statements from company websites the moment they are published? OK, no insider info but you can still do quick agentic fundamental analysis and decide which companies are interesting.
It's really useful to have a chat app that is gatekept behind a 20k/year+ subscription. It's a particularly useful signal if someone is offering you a million+ dollar asset for sale.
I get that, was more curious if you knew how much that is used for signaling and the traffic there. I sort of expected these communities to exist in other sources (like regular SMS / Slack / private back channels etc).
I'm going to copy-paste one of the comments from ryukoposting higher up in the thread because I think it's relevant here:
> 2) Bloomberg's chat is important because, as a hedge fund or investment bank, the chat is how you buy and sell bonds. You agree to the trade in the chat, then tell the back office folks to execute the trade. Direct quote: "I'd wager 90% of the ~400 trillion in annual bond trading value happens over Bloomberg DM"
You may discuss trades via SMS or Slack; maybe you're important enough that you have a broker, and you send them your idea. But the broker at the investment bank is probably handling those trades via Blomberg terminal. That's the network effect: all the bankers are in Bloomberg chat, and it is therefore the easiest place to find who owns an asset and negotiate a trade.
> They're paying for the data source... and I don't think you have Bloomberg's connections.
We keep seeing hundreds of Bloomberg competitors mimicking the interface and they always forget that the chat (with the connections), data and the newsroom are the reasons why Bloomberg's network effect is close to impossible to break.
Using the Bloomberg Terminal is taught very early at colleges for any finance professional, which is how they get them as well.
Are they trading bonds, equities, credit default swaps, options,
, etc in large dollar amounts? “Finance” is pretty broad, Bloomberg is for traders and I-bankers afaict.
actually a lot of data is not included in the standard bloomberg license and you have to pay extra (mostly passing through to the data vendors) to get access to it.
There is not a single reason for Bloomberg’s dominance but the one feature that keeps people on it is the chat.
I don't think the finance field needs a better bloomberg, I think the whole interface and everything needs to be rethought. Part of the moat is the data, and data access. But I think we need to completely reimagine the terminal interface and interactions with the introduction of AI. The finance industry probably will be slow to adapt, but I genuinely think someone could completely disrupt 99% of the wall street businesses with an original idea.
My observation is that finance and banking and corporate functions high enough up the ladder operate more like a clubhouse than cutthroat businesses. You’d think all you need to do is make a better interface, but if you’re not part of the club, you’re not doing the business (or even getting shot at it).
People repeat this rhetoric all the time, but I promise you, finance professionals can and do easily migrate to other messaging platforms such as ICE chat. This isn't a moat for BBG
Evidence for this being that BlackBerry Messenger and even AOL Instant Messenger had various amounts of traction during the lifetime of Instant Bloomberg.
Here's an article. Basically if your trading stocks no. If you are trading different instruments or want interaction with the money folks (connections) yes.
https://financetracked.com/bloomberg-terminal
From it:
"Bonds and Fixed Income: It provides the best data for interest rates and debt markets.
Global Economics: It easily connects data from different countries, such as currency rates and government debt.
The Chat Room: The messaging system is the industry standard. If you want to talk to the biggest players in the market, you often need to be on Bloomberg."
Bloomberg Terminal costs ~$24K per user per year, so the fact that people are paying for it implies it offers at least that much value. As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, most of that value lies in the data sources.
> The download button doesn't even work properly. Clicking download in the top right gives me a .dmg, the other download button in the hero gives me the .exe, the one in the footer gives me a .dmg
I mean, it works for me?
The site is clearly not ready and maybe they didn't expect people to find it, but that doesn't mean the site is bad.
It is just a work in progress.
I'm not even interested in the site anyway the software and the source interests me more.
When I see new software now, my first thought is an LLM wrote it and it makes me not want to use it. I also assume there are bugs and it’s not particularly feature-rich.
It is becoming very hard not to use an LLM. I have been working on a project all this year. I started doing everything by hand, and I am using LLMs a little bit more every day.
I suppose we want to use projects that were crafted with care, whether or not LLMs were used. But it is not easy to figure that out. It reminds me. 30 years ago, before code formatters were popular, you could tell good code just by looking at how carefully formatted it was.
Related: please don't write command line tools in non-compiled languages! Don't make the runtime your user's problem.
> please don't write command line tools in non-compiled languages!
Around 40% of Linux CLI tools are written in interpreted languages.
This is how I found out it's a javascript project and didn't install it. I only even bothered to do that because I actually wanted to try it. I'm just saying it would be awesome to have that right there next to the curl command.
> Around 40% of Linux CLI tools are written in interpreted languages.
And I prefer not to use those. Everything I said for Javascript holds for Python, Perl, Ruby... as well.
[0] https://bun.com/docs/bundler/executables
Everybody who's distracted by the name and can't get past it, there's a thread developing here somewhere, where they're comparing it to Bloomberg.
Edit: Ah, they're offering a pro subscription. While I appreciate that cloud services aren't free, I'm not sure that I'm willing to pay to replace a few browser tabs. Not for me, but maybe for someone!
What's the equivalent of hacker news for financial folk?
I am not making this up.
There were custom frontends that would enrich things like cusips.
The dedicated fiber drop was most likely for reliability, not for latency.
Yup.
If you want fixed-income data, Bloomberg is the only shop on the street data-wise.
If you want other financial data, Bloomberg's fixed entry-point pricing tends to make more sense in terms of bang for buck than its competitors modular price sheets.
People saying Bloomberg is just about the chat are simply embarrassing themselves.
Look at the price sheets of Eikon, Factset, CapIQ etc. There is no such thing as a cheap "Bloomberg killer".
Quality data is expensive. So are the leased-lines it arrives at Bloomberg on. So is the data wrangling architecture.
Financial information should be free for everyone.
An example that comes to mind is JSON5. People have a visceral reaction to the name, it sounds like it's trying to be HTML4.01 -> 5 but for JSON. In reality, it has its uses but doesn't supersede JSON whatsoever. The name itself has given it a bad rap though.
If you pick a name like "Gloomberb" the most obvious interpretation is that it's a Bloomberg alternative.
Making a bad trade or missing a good one due to delaying data or bad data can pay for several years worth of bloombergs for everyone in your firm in one moment.
> 2) Bloomberg's chat is important because, as a hedge fund or investment bank, the chat is how you buy and sell bonds. You agree to the trade in the chat, then tell the back office folks to execute the trade. Direct quote: "I'd wager 90% of the ~400 trillion in annual bond trading value happens over Bloomberg DM"
You may discuss trades via SMS or Slack; maybe you're important enough that you have a broker, and you send them your idea. But the broker at the investment bank is probably handling those trades via Blomberg terminal. That's the network effect: all the bankers are in Bloomberg chat, and it is therefore the easiest place to find who owns an asset and negotiate a trade.
We keep seeing hundreds of Bloomberg competitors mimicking the interface and they always forget that the chat (with the connections), data and the newsroom are the reasons why Bloomberg's network effect is close to impossible to break.
Using the Bloomberg Terminal is taught very early at colleges for any finance professional, which is how they get them as well.
(I’d especially love to see some federated social feature built in!)
There is not a single reason for Bloomberg’s dominance but the one feature that keeps people on it is the chat.
You pretty much need $30/m subscriptions for historical data. Not that it couldn't be worked into this.
From it: "Bonds and Fixed Income: It provides the best data for interest rates and debt markets. Global Economics: It easily connects data from different countries, such as currency rates and government debt. The Chat Room: The messaging system is the industry standard. If you want to talk to the biggest players in the market, you often need to be on Bloomberg."
Because I'm starting to see the word 'slop' as a synonym for:
"This person may or may not have used AI to build software and I don't like it"
https://imgur.com/a/ssiKckF
Hopefully it's not intentional
Your website is literally down.
https://i.postimg.cc/YCdkwZZq/image.png
And I don't think their website is that bad.
The download button doesn't even work properly.
Clicking download in the top right gives me a .dmg, the other download button in the hero gives me the .exe, the one in the footer gives me a .dmg
Docs give me a 404, blog is empty
I mean, it works for me?
The site is clearly not ready and maybe they didn't expect people to find it, but that doesn't mean the site is bad.
It is just a work in progress.
I'm not even interested in the site anyway the software and the source interests me more.
https://github.com/gloom-sh/gloomberb
Doesn't invalidate my experience.
> and maybe they didn't expect people to find it
What do you mean? It's linked on the Github repo.
> but that doesn't mean the site is bad.
I think a site that doesn't work properly is a bad one. That's just my opinion.
I mean isn't this the point of open source?
You can fork the repo and fix the problem instead of complaining?
If you fail at a webpage in 2026, you have no chance at doing anything complex or innovative.