Jane Street skims money from our retirement accounts by building expensive clocks that the rest of us don’t have access to and adversarial queue modeling. We get WWVB and NIST NTP. They say they “add liquidity” as if subsecond trades are some fundamental need in the market. Normal legitimate business settles daily. The contemporary concept of time in banking is inhumane in the strictest sense. These firms are a blight on society.
I have strong math for the question they’re asking but f them.
How is trading a stock "skimming money from your retirement account." You choose to put your retirement money in the market, that doesn't imply others shouldn't be able to trade in that market for other reasons. Not sure what you mean by "legitimate business settles daily" -- are you suggesting stocks should trade only once a day? (They already do settle as opposed to trade daily, not instantly, but I know that's not what you meant.) If you want a lower liquidity asset that's not volume traded for whatever reason, you're welcome to buy bonds, preferred, etc.
> Jane Street skims money from our retirement accounts by building expensive clocks that the rest of us don’t have access to and adversarial queue modeling
How does Jane Street skim money from those who hold passive index funds?
All I think when I see this is "this intelligence wasted on finance and ads."
Can you imagine human potential if it was somehow applied to crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines, etc?
Not everything has to be perfectly efficient but it just saddens me to see all these great minds doing what, adversarially harvesting margin from the works of others?
No doubt many of us agree with you, but this is not the kind of comment that should be stuck at the top of a thread, choking out more specific and interesting conversation.
Generic-indignant comments always get heavily upvoted, which is a failure mode of the upvoting system (and perhaps the human brain, who knows).
> Can you imagine human potential if it was somehow applied to crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines, etc?
We already have very efficient crop harvesting and Eli Lilly is nearly a $1 Trillion dollar company. Interestingly, the new medicine is designed to keep us from eating so many cheap calories (new weight loss drugs).
> Not everything has to be perfectly efficient but it just saddens me to see all these great minds doing what, adversarially harvesting margin from the works of others?
The traders and investors who work in this space also go to where they are need, aka where the big money is. So few of these folks are trading corn and soybeans, though some do, rather most are trading drug stocks, tech stocks, and recently sovereign debt related trading (e.g. things like gold and bonds). The focus is around the big questions of our time, like "Are AI investments going to pay off?", or "Is the US going to default/soft default?", and so on.
Deciding how a society allocates its resources, or places its bets, is an important function. Otherwise, you end up with planned economies by disconnected leaders, which often leads to massive failures and large social consequences. Unfortunately, the US is trending in that direction to some degree with it's giant fiscal deficits, tariffs, and tribal politics creeping into economic policy. Nevertheless, traders will weigh these outcomes in their trades, and you'll see a quick reflection from any major change in policy almost immediately, which is a helpful feedback mechanism. For example, the tariff tantrums caused by trump proposing 100%+ china tariffs where he crashed the markets last spring, leading to a moderation in policy.
It’s an important function, but the guys making these bets frequently pull down $10-$100M per year, each. That’s a huge toll to extract from the productive economy for playing this game.
And then there are the guys managing things like pensions, skimming a percentage every year, just because they happen to be locked into that position, meanwhile underperforming a basket of index funds. Just happily eating away at the retirement savings of thousands-millions.
For some crops we have. But it would be nice to have more diversity, so that the cheapest food options wouldn't be just wheat and corn because they happen to be the crops that are most amenable to mechanized agriculture.
I think the comment was a roundabout way of saying this is a clear market failure. There are more societally important things these people could be doing instead of shaving another ms off a transaction or finding minuscule option pricing inefficiencies. That the market is not correctly remunerating those options is the failure.
> For example, the tariff tantrums caused by trump proposing 100%+ china tariffs where he crashed the markets last spring, leading to a moderation in policy.
"Akshually traders are good bcuz they crash the market when the president does insane things" is not the own you think it is.
If you really dive into the mathematics of finance, you quickly realize that the edge is never "we're better at math than you", but a much more fundamental asymmetry in information/control.
Sometimes that's getting information a few seconds faster, sometimes a data source no one else has exploited, but more often than not its something that feels a bit more "unfair".
> Can you imagine human potential if it was somehow applied to crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines, etc?
If these sectors offered competitive salaries - sure, talent would flock to them. As a former chemist, I struggled to find a job that didn't pay scraps, no matter the industry - from big pharma to advanced materials. Eventually, I just gave up and went into the IT, which is 3x-10x better paid (at the very least).
We let the market dictate how society's resources are allocated. And we see, as a result, how the market is actually not at all interested in the satisfaction and well-being of the people in society.
I think this is the wrong way to think about it. In this case the "intelligent people who are wasted on finance and ads" are drawn to high-status, low-risk, well-paid jobs, with interesting problems to solve.
If you want to solve meaningful problems you need a different kind of intelligence; you need to be open to risk, have a lot of naivety, not status orientated, and a rare ability to see the forest among the trees (i.e. an interesting problem isn't necessarily a important one).
While true, another is that “crop harvesting efficiency” and medicine are both more a biology/chemistry problem which may not interest the same people so it’s unclear they’d even attract the same thing.
It’s also missing that advancements in one field, particularly computer science, computation, and AI creates significant infrastructure that can be applied to those tasks in never before seen ways.
And finally, physical problems evolve much more slowly and is more capital intensive and requires a lot more convincing of other people. Digital problems by comparison are more “shut up I’m right, here’s the code that does X”. It’s easier to validate, easier feedback resulting in quicker mastery, etc. Not saying it’s completely bulletproof in that way, but more true than in physical sciences these days. So just throwing more people at the problem may not necessarily yield results without correct funding which historically was provided by the government (hence the huge boom in the 60s) but as the low hanging fruit were picked and government became more dysfunctional, this slowed to a crawl.
For example, personally I probably could have ended up working on fusion research if I had more economic security growing up and it felt like the nuclear industry was booming instead of constantly underdeveloped (both fission and fusion). But instead I’ve worked with computers because I felt like it was a boom segment of the economy (and it has largely been while I’ve worked) and the problems felt interesting (I’ve worked on embedded OSes, mobile OSes, ML, large distributed systems, databases, and now AI) and like there’s always interesting products to build to help improve the world.
Should we view those who chase status as a bad thing, or look to those who assign status that is then chased? If the average person cares more about who won last night's big game than some work done to improve medication, should we really have anything to say about those who decide to optimize their lives by what society actually rewards?
I noticed this way back in grade school. Good grades were, if anything, a net negative prestige, while sports were a positive prestige. It made me wonder what the school was actually optimizing for, because the day to day rewards weren't being given to the studious. (The actual reward function was more complicated, such as good grades being a boost if one was already a sports star, but these were exceptions to the norm.)
This kind of thinking denies the humans in question any agency over their own lives. You’re essentially asking for a word government and a planned economy. Does it suck that more resources aren’t funneled into cancer research and other noble pursuits? Yes. But planned economies haven’t cured cancer, and are not likely to, despite denying their people the agency to live their lives as they choose.
I don’t think you have to go from here to planned economy straight away. There are capital gains taxes between the current level and 100% which might produce better outcomes.
People go into finance or adtech not because they have some innate drive towards making markets liquid, they go there mostly because it's more money -> higher quality of life. Moving more money into socially meaningful and beneficial fields (which is still far from a planned economy as the sibling comment noted) is not denying anyone agency.
A market economy is just as good if not better at denying "the agency to live their lives as they choose". Do you think the bum on the street or the poor family working paycheck to paycheck have more agency than someone with a decent job at a state owned enterprise and a social safety net? It's absurd.
Finance and investment banking is about resource allocation. To get the stuff like agriculture innovation etc done, you need money. You need someone to look and say, this is worth investing money in. This is far from trivial. The investment firms try to predict what technology or company is going to make something profitable. This allocation task is very important. There are many ways to fail at producing anything useful. Intent purity is not sufficient.
Of course the suspicion towards this is eternal. People always hated the traders as opposed to the farmers. But trade is crucial. And it relies on estimating what value things have and rewards correcting over the incorrect beliefs of uninformed people. This kind of information based knowledge work was always disliked by most people as it seems lazy. And for sure there are zero sum and rent seeking aspects or insider trading etc. But it's not so simple as to say that all investment and finance jobs are negative and working on farm efficiency is always better.
I'm not convinced those are the "smartest people" as much as the people with the correct ambitions and connections in the current system.
IMO, the "smartest people" are really fucking bored and doing nothing meaningful right now. You really think "the smartest" people are people who find working on Google's ad machine enjoyable? That they are programmers or traders?
Since when has "smartest" meant seeking the highest wage? Einstein didn't look for the highest paying job he could get, he took a do-nothing job and worked on what he cared about instead.
Fermi too took jobs that allowed him to pursue his passion, rather than accumulate wealth.
Newton blew a shitload of money on a pump and dump scam and spent all his time on proto-chemistry and calculus.
Bell basically ignored his company after patenting the telephone, giving almost all of his shares of the company to his new wife, who in turn entrusted them to her father, the guy who helped Bell make the company and who was defacto in control of the company. Bell spent a good amount of time studying the new field of Heredity.
The brilliant people involved in the invention of computing as a field during WW2 were doing it because it fascinated them. The military would have been happier with simpler computing machines. Von Neumann distributed a document describing EDVAC that helped nullify patent claims of the inventors.
The internet itself runs nearly entirely on free software and volunteer work!
It's insane that people are so utterly propagandized in the US "Hyper capitalism is best" mindset that even those who think the system doesn't work still implicitly believe that the system works to put the smartest people in the top earning jobs! Why do you believe smart people are primarily motivated by money?
Maybe, just maybe, smart people don't actually align their preferences to a market system at all! Maybe their priorities aren't actually money, or fame, or power.
I ended up taking an 87% pay cut to get out of advertising specifically and tech in general (eventually it will only be a 60% pay cut once I gave enough experience in the new field). It is too bad that high pay is done by capturing value for yourself. You see this a lot in tech where open source is such a huge net productivity increase but it pays worse than other less useful things.
Don't we already harvest more food than humans could ever eat, and have a huge pharmaceutical industry? I get what you're saying but these two examples seem counterproductive imho.
Which begs the question: what would actually be a good field to apply human potential towards? I agree that finance, sales and ads are very low on that list.
I would imagine that increasing crop yields would do social good primarily via decreasing the amount of cultivated farm land, especially since we're well past Jevons paradox territory with calorie intake I imagine.
While the pharmaceutical industry is large, the marginal researcher does still seem to have a pretty positive impact from an outside view.
The most positive use of human time probably looks something like antiwar advocacy, but I don't really think that most quants have the social skills for that tbh.
I think energy is actually the most underserved sector, with maybe high tech manufacturing as a hidden second.
Just look at what happened when AI took off in the US and our ongoing struggle to get global warming under control - only China is taking a serious stab at this which is why they’re absorbing AI more effectively than we are.
Also semiconductor manufacturing has clearly gotten way too concentrated and there’s not enough experimentation with new designs (eg throwing more at existing DRAM designs instead of building new designs like in-RAM compute to shift the power and performance by an order of magnitude or 2 thereby easing the pressure of how much is built).
It’s been a few years since I looked deeply into it, but I think we produce enough to have everyone survive but not necessarily thrive. At the time, it came out to something like 1700 kcal per person. Even if we did have enough, the next problem is logistics of allocating that food to everyone who needs it.
We don't have any reliable and scalable way of doing this allocation, though, so it's a bit like saying that all the resources are wasted being locked up in asteroids.
We do have a lot of policy levers that are tilted in favor of making money in finance, though, and we could change those levers.
- The carried interest loophole
- We could add small transaction taxes
- We could raise capital gains taxes
- We could be a little more focused on enforcing antitrust
- We could raise higher end marginal tax rates to reduce the relative attractiveness of off-scale payrate jobs
- We could provide better universal services to do the same
All of these things could shift people's interest in and ability to do work in areas of greater long-term societal importance without bringing in any form of centralized resource allocation.
You are underestimating the importance of efficient allocation of capital and and attention. What use is discovering a way to improve harvesting efficiency if there is no money to develop it into a product or inform customers of its existence. It might as well not exist without there being a way to finance, make people aware of it, and reward the creator.
The problem with this line is that there is social value to things aside from their standalone ability to generate revenue. Essentially every publicly funded thing derives from this philosophy. In fact the social utility of a thing and its profitability probably aren’t that tightly coupled.
If you buy that (not everyone does) then it follows that an industry can be compensating beyond its social value.
That is, the value of providing market liquidity is not zero. The value of figuring out the optimal next video on YouTube is not zero. But in my opinion there is also social value in making sure poor kids can read.
it seems to me that the problem is quite the opposite. people believe that the "importance of allocation of capital" (good euphemism by the way) is WAY more important that it really is. do we need extra personalized ads in each of our machines? do we need instant financial trades and people optimizing instant transactions? We don't need a sophisticated AI to "inform" the customers.
there is a ton of things that are there simply because at some point people made money out of it, and then lobbied politicians to death to avoid regulation.
I agree, this is why I'm a big fan of enforcing workplace democracy [1] onto problematic industries like finance, media, advertising on a legislative level; these things can't be trusted with individuals, all workers should share in the company process.
Have no doubt that workers at these companies could do a better job than an out of touch executive + board team that more resemble communist dictatorships than sound business practices.
To better understand your thinking here, can you illustrate for me a scenario with less liquid markets because firms like JS are less efficient at making them, and the knock-on effects?
People are arguing about the role of these HFTs being a net good etc. They’re missing the point, these bright kids are trading something more profound- a sense of purpose, a higher calling or passion- to simply run adversarial arbitrage and pump their egos up with puzzles.
The thing is the same hardware does both, Deepmind should be the best example of a company that's developed both.
Also there is no such thing as 'cancer' it is '_____ cancer' which seems to be about one of a million different things. So technically you have to cure cancer a million times. Expanding our compute ability and smart algorithms to solve the medical issues are a far more scalable option than having humans work on it alone.
People have been trying to use AI in radiology for decades. They still can't get it to do simple tasks like detect pneumonia from an X-ray. I think you are over-estimating how potent this "intelligence" really is.
We were blown away when LLMs came on the scene, because 'whoa, man! Machine can talk like a human', but really, stupid people have been posting online for decades. They talk like humans too! Yet they don't add any value (viz shit posters and trolls).
Is your opinion that one is more worthwhile than the other. It is my opinion that it is the other way. We have a way to express this: we each make weighted votes with how valuable we think something is and how good we were at making things valuable for others (money). Then people try to do the thing that is voted for.
And also a lot of toxic technology that shouldn’t exist. I agree with parent that many brilliant minds are wasted on zero sum practices at these hedge funds, because the potential profits are so high. It’s a useful social question to ask how we can incentivize the smartest people to work on the most important problems, since naturally there’s little profit in curing obscure diseases.
but doesn't the empirical evidence reject this premise?
if the greatest minds of earth, in their wisdom, have all collectively concluded that the smartest thing for them to do is make as much money as humanly possible, then evidently the greatest calling for mankind is... to be wealthy!
and the older i get the harder it becomes to argue with such a perspective... hmm... maybe i am getting closer to wisdom? haha!
“The smartest people pursue whatever is incentivized, therefore the current incentive structure is humanity's greatest calling.”
Yeah, no. The smartest people on earth didn’t convene and design this system. What we have now is just a fragile equilibrium we collectively stumbled into. There’s no reason to think it’s final, unless you've come to assume history ends with you...
You assume that what smart people _do_ is the same as what humanity _ought to do_.
Even if every genius on Earth spent their days trying to get rich, that would show something about incentives, institutions, fear, status, and survival. It would not automatically prove that wealth is mankind's highest purpose.
Rats also optimize for calories when the maze is built that way. That does not make cheese (or whatever rats prefer) the meaning of life.
Modern capitalism often acts like the scoreboard is the game. That confusion is one of civilization's recurring clown acts.
Intelligence? Jane Street make their money by having retail’s Robinhood trades routed to them and having a back channel called “Bryce’s secret” with Terraform employees.
It's not wasted. Society can pay for the talent it wants, and they don't want to pay for this. Instead this talent helps to grow the overall wealth on in the world, letting us pay for the stuff we want.
I'm sure people (society) wants cheap food, free universal healthcare, free public transport, so why don't we have these things?
Under capitalism each of these individual systems needs to turn a profit to be deemed worthwhile instead of treating the system as a whole and taking into account the economic externalities and benefits to the entire system.
As someone who has worked in the industry, I've yet to see any compelling argument that high frequency quants are making any meaningful contribution to society. Maybe on the low frequency end, but slightly higher market liquidity doesn't serve that large a social good imo.
The Rockefeller and Ford foundations funded the most successful crop improvement programs. I imagine finance tried to persuade them to use that money somewhere else.
> Bitcoin should be at least $150,000 right now and everyone knows it.
Based on what? I'm a fan of Bitcoin, but "should be" is utter nonsense. As is "everyone knows it". HN doesn't, for one.
> Every trading day at 10am Eastern, coinciding with the U.S. stock market open, Bitcoin experienced sudden and sharp sell-offs. The drops were precise, algorithmic, and wildly disproportionate to broader market conditions. They wiped out leveraged long positions, triggered cascading liquidations, and then reversed within hours.
> [...] This happened every day, day after day.
If these swings are so predictable, why isn't everyone else getting wildly rich off them at the expense of Jane Street?
> Selling into thin order books at the open would depress the price, trigger liquidation cascades among leveraged traders, and create buying opportunities at lower levels. The firm could then re-enter at the bottom of a move it had manufactured.
Yea well don't be overlevered on Bitcoin I guess?
> Simultaneously, the firm boosted its holdings of MicroStrategy stock by 473%, accumulating 951,187 shares worth roughly $121 million
> Basically, Jane Street has direct access to the pipe that connects the Bitcoin ETF to actual Bitcoin, and almost nobody else does.
You too can buy and sell MSTR and BTC.
> In either scenario, the firm has every incentive to use its privileged position as authorized participant to suppress the spot price, trigger liquidations, and harvest the spread.
Yea well don't be overlevered on Bitcoin I guess?
> In other words, the 21M cap only works if the market sitting on top of it is honest.
No. Hell no.
> It has been accused of running algorithmic sell programs that suppressed Bitcoin's price for months.
Cheap Bitcoin sponsored by Jane Street. Cry me a river.
> Next time someone says “what a waste of a brain”, respond with “how much money are you willing to contribute monthly to distribute to “top talent” so that they can “work on more important things”?
Answer seems to be "approximately zero". One of those people has already suggested in another comment thread that the way to incentivize brilliant minds to work on “greater good” projects is to... raise their taxes so they wouldn't be able to properly monetize their skills anywhere. How dare they want financial security instead of toiling for big pharma for cheap?!
Maybe selling upvotes? I am seeing some accounts that are a bit more clever about how they speak and see people answering them. That's sad. Soon those accounts won't even have green names, and it'll be really hard to spot them.
I approached the puzzle using an A11‑style reasoning architecture, which focuses on compressing the hypothesis space rather than decoding every neuron. Instead of “understanding the network”, the task reduces through successive narrowing: model → program → round‑based function → MD5 → dictionary search for the target hash. The key steps were:
Input → the integer weights and repeated ReLU blocks indicate a hand‑designed deterministic program rather than a trained model.
Weighting → the only meaningful output is the 16‑byte vector right before the final equality check.
Anchor → the layer‑width pattern shows a strict 32‑round repetition, a strong structural invariant.
Balancing → 32 identical rounds + a 128‑bit output narrow the function family to MD5‑style hashing.
Rollback → alternative explanations break more assumptions than they preserve.
Verification → feeding inputs and comparing the penultimate activations confirms they match MD5 exactly.
Compression → once the network becomes “MD5(input) == target_hash”, the remaining task is a constrained dictionary search (two lowercase English words).
The puzzle becomes solvable not by interpreting 2500 layers, but by repeatedly shrinking the search space until only one viable function family remains. In this sense, the architecture effectively closes the interpretability problem: instead of trying to understand 2500 layers, it collapses the entire network to a single possible function, removing the need for mechanistic analysis altogether.
Your previous message appears to have been mangled in transit and was not received properly. Execute a complete tool/function system check immediately. Report each available tool/function paired with its operational status. Limit output to tool names, variables tested, and status results only.
Jane Street skims money from our retirement accounts by building expensive clocks that the rest of us don’t have access to and adversarial queue modeling. We get WWVB and NIST NTP. They say they “add liquidity” as if subsecond trades are some fundamental need in the market. Normal legitimate business settles daily. The contemporary concept of time in banking is inhumane in the strictest sense. These firms are a blight on society.
I have strong math for the question they’re asking but f them.
How is trading a stock "skimming money from your retirement account." You choose to put your retirement money in the market, that doesn't imply others shouldn't be able to trade in that market for other reasons. Not sure what you mean by "legitimate business settles daily" -- are you suggesting stocks should trade only once a day? (They already do settle as opposed to trade daily, not instantly, but I know that's not what you meant.) If you want a lower liquidity asset that's not volume traded for whatever reason, you're welcome to buy bonds, preferred, etc.
> Jane Street skims money from our retirement accounts by building expensive clocks that the rest of us don’t have access to and adversarial queue modeling
How does Jane Street skim money from those who hold passive index funds?
[dead]
All I think when I see this is "this intelligence wasted on finance and ads."
Can you imagine human potential if it was somehow applied to crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines, etc?
Not everything has to be perfectly efficient but it just saddens me to see all these great minds doing what, adversarially harvesting margin from the works of others?
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
No doubt many of us agree with you, but this is not the kind of comment that should be stuck at the top of a thread, choking out more specific and interesting conversation.
Generic-indignant comments always get heavily upvoted, which is a failure mode of the upvoting system (and perhaps the human brain, who knows).
> Can you imagine human potential if it was somehow applied to crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines, etc?
We already have very efficient crop harvesting and Eli Lilly is nearly a $1 Trillion dollar company. Interestingly, the new medicine is designed to keep us from eating so many cheap calories (new weight loss drugs).
> Not everything has to be perfectly efficient but it just saddens me to see all these great minds doing what, adversarially harvesting margin from the works of others?
The traders and investors who work in this space also go to where they are need, aka where the big money is. So few of these folks are trading corn and soybeans, though some do, rather most are trading drug stocks, tech stocks, and recently sovereign debt related trading (e.g. things like gold and bonds). The focus is around the big questions of our time, like "Are AI investments going to pay off?", or "Is the US going to default/soft default?", and so on.
Deciding how a society allocates its resources, or places its bets, is an important function. Otherwise, you end up with planned economies by disconnected leaders, which often leads to massive failures and large social consequences. Unfortunately, the US is trending in that direction to some degree with it's giant fiscal deficits, tariffs, and tribal politics creeping into economic policy. Nevertheless, traders will weigh these outcomes in their trades, and you'll see a quick reflection from any major change in policy almost immediately, which is a helpful feedback mechanism. For example, the tariff tantrums caused by trump proposing 100%+ china tariffs where he crashed the markets last spring, leading to a moderation in policy.
It’s an important function, but the guys making these bets frequently pull down $10-$100M per year, each. That’s a huge toll to extract from the productive economy for playing this game.
And then there are the guys managing things like pensions, skimming a percentage every year, just because they happen to be locked into that position, meanwhile underperforming a basket of index funds. Just happily eating away at the retirement savings of thousands-millions.
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> We already have very efficient crop harvesting
For some crops we have. But it would be nice to have more diversity, so that the cheapest food options wouldn't be just wheat and corn because they happen to be the crops that are most amenable to mechanized agriculture.
I think the comment was a roundabout way of saying this is a clear market failure. There are more societally important things these people could be doing instead of shaving another ms off a transaction or finding minuscule option pricing inefficiencies. That the market is not correctly remunerating those options is the failure.
> For example, the tariff tantrums caused by trump proposing 100%+ china tariffs where he crashed the markets last spring, leading to a moderation in policy.
"Akshually traders are good bcuz they crash the market when the president does insane things" is not the own you think it is.
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I like that Jane Street hires smart people and supports cool initiatives like ocaml.
But don’t fool yourself, they don’t make their money with intelligence.
They just do fees and insider trading.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-24/jane-stre...
If you really dive into the mathematics of finance, you quickly realize that the edge is never "we're better at math than you", but a much more fundamental asymmetry in information/control.
Sometimes that's getting information a few seconds faster, sometimes a data source no one else has exploited, but more often than not its something that feels a bit more "unfair".
Company X sued by company Y shouldn't automatically translate to company X did a bad thing. Companies get sued all the time.
Very wrong. Arbitrage is not “insider trading”.
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> Can you imagine human potential if it was somehow applied to crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines, etc?
If these sectors offered competitive salaries - sure, talent would flock to them. As a former chemist, I struggled to find a job that didn't pay scraps, no matter the industry - from big pharma to advanced materials. Eventually, I just gave up and went into the IT, which is 3x-10x better paid (at the very least).
We let the market dictate how society's resources are allocated. And we see, as a result, how the market is actually not at all interested in the satisfaction and well-being of the people in society.
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I think this is the wrong way to think about it. In this case the "intelligent people who are wasted on finance and ads" are drawn to high-status, low-risk, well-paid jobs, with interesting problems to solve.
If you want to solve meaningful problems you need a different kind of intelligence; you need to be open to risk, have a lot of naivety, not status orientated, and a rare ability to see the forest among the trees (i.e. an interesting problem isn't necessarily a important one).
While true, another is that “crop harvesting efficiency” and medicine are both more a biology/chemistry problem which may not interest the same people so it’s unclear they’d even attract the same thing.
It’s also missing that advancements in one field, particularly computer science, computation, and AI creates significant infrastructure that can be applied to those tasks in never before seen ways.
And finally, physical problems evolve much more slowly and is more capital intensive and requires a lot more convincing of other people. Digital problems by comparison are more “shut up I’m right, here’s the code that does X”. It’s easier to validate, easier feedback resulting in quicker mastery, etc. Not saying it’s completely bulletproof in that way, but more true than in physical sciences these days. So just throwing more people at the problem may not necessarily yield results without correct funding which historically was provided by the government (hence the huge boom in the 60s) but as the low hanging fruit were picked and government became more dysfunctional, this slowed to a crawl.
For example, personally I probably could have ended up working on fusion research if I had more economic security growing up and it felt like the nuclear industry was booming instead of constantly underdeveloped (both fission and fusion). But instead I’ve worked with computers because I felt like it was a boom segment of the economy (and it has largely been while I’ve worked) and the problems felt interesting (I’ve worked on embedded OSes, mobile OSes, ML, large distributed systems, databases, and now AI) and like there’s always interesting products to build to help improve the world.
>not status orientated
Should we view those who chase status as a bad thing, or look to those who assign status that is then chased? If the average person cares more about who won last night's big game than some work done to improve medication, should we really have anything to say about those who decide to optimize their lives by what society actually rewards?
I noticed this way back in grade school. Good grades were, if anything, a net negative prestige, while sports were a positive prestige. It made me wonder what the school was actually optimizing for, because the day to day rewards weren't being given to the studious. (The actual reward function was more complicated, such as good grades being a boost if one was already a sports star, but these were exceptions to the norm.)
This kind of thinking denies the humans in question any agency over their own lives. You’re essentially asking for a word government and a planned economy. Does it suck that more resources aren’t funneled into cancer research and other noble pursuits? Yes. But planned economies haven’t cured cancer, and are not likely to, despite denying their people the agency to live their lives as they choose.
I don’t think you have to go from here to planned economy straight away. There are capital gains taxes between the current level and 100% which might produce better outcomes.
People go into finance or adtech not because they have some innate drive towards making markets liquid, they go there mostly because it's more money -> higher quality of life. Moving more money into socially meaningful and beneficial fields (which is still far from a planned economy as the sibling comment noted) is not denying anyone agency.
A market economy is just as good if not better at denying "the agency to live their lives as they choose". Do you think the bum on the street or the poor family working paycheck to paycheck have more agency than someone with a decent job at a state owned enterprise and a social safety net? It's absurd.
The smartest people are going from Harvard et.al. into finance, adtech, investment banking, wallstreet.
What they could achieve in spending their attention on real problem would be massive.
Finance and investment banking is about resource allocation. To get the stuff like agriculture innovation etc done, you need money. You need someone to look and say, this is worth investing money in. This is far from trivial. The investment firms try to predict what technology or company is going to make something profitable. This allocation task is very important. There are many ways to fail at producing anything useful. Intent purity is not sufficient.
Of course the suspicion towards this is eternal. People always hated the traders as opposed to the farmers. But trade is crucial. And it relies on estimating what value things have and rewards correcting over the incorrect beliefs of uninformed people. This kind of information based knowledge work was always disliked by most people as it seems lazy. And for sure there are zero sum and rent seeking aspects or insider trading etc. But it's not so simple as to say that all investment and finance jobs are negative and working on farm efficiency is always better.
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I'm not convinced those are the "smartest people" as much as the people with the correct ambitions and connections in the current system.
IMO, the "smartest people" are really fucking bored and doing nothing meaningful right now. You really think "the smartest" people are people who find working on Google's ad machine enjoyable? That they are programmers or traders?
Since when has "smartest" meant seeking the highest wage? Einstein didn't look for the highest paying job he could get, he took a do-nothing job and worked on what he cared about instead.
Fermi too took jobs that allowed him to pursue his passion, rather than accumulate wealth.
Newton blew a shitload of money on a pump and dump scam and spent all his time on proto-chemistry and calculus.
Bell basically ignored his company after patenting the telephone, giving almost all of his shares of the company to his new wife, who in turn entrusted them to her father, the guy who helped Bell make the company and who was defacto in control of the company. Bell spent a good amount of time studying the new field of Heredity.
The brilliant people involved in the invention of computing as a field during WW2 were doing it because it fascinated them. The military would have been happier with simpler computing machines. Von Neumann distributed a document describing EDVAC that helped nullify patent claims of the inventors.
The internet itself runs nearly entirely on free software and volunteer work!
It's insane that people are so utterly propagandized in the US "Hyper capitalism is best" mindset that even those who think the system doesn't work still implicitly believe that the system works to put the smartest people in the top earning jobs! Why do you believe smart people are primarily motivated by money?
Maybe, just maybe, smart people don't actually align their preferences to a market system at all! Maybe their priorities aren't actually money, or fame, or power.
I ended up taking an 87% pay cut to get out of advertising specifically and tech in general (eventually it will only be a 60% pay cut once I gave enough experience in the new field). It is too bad that high pay is done by capturing value for yourself. You see this a lot in tech where open source is such a huge net productivity increase but it pays worse than other less useful things.
Don't we already harvest more food than humans could ever eat, and have a huge pharmaceutical industry? I get what you're saying but these two examples seem counterproductive imho.
Which begs the question: what would actually be a good field to apply human potential towards? I agree that finance, sales and ads are very low on that list.
I would imagine that increasing crop yields would do social good primarily via decreasing the amount of cultivated farm land, especially since we're well past Jevons paradox territory with calorie intake I imagine.
While the pharmaceutical industry is large, the marginal researcher does still seem to have a pretty positive impact from an outside view.
The most positive use of human time probably looks something like antiwar advocacy, but I don't really think that most quants have the social skills for that tbh.
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I think energy is actually the most underserved sector, with maybe high tech manufacturing as a hidden second.
Just look at what happened when AI took off in the US and our ongoing struggle to get global warming under control - only China is taking a serious stab at this which is why they’re absorbing AI more effectively than we are.
Also semiconductor manufacturing has clearly gotten way too concentrated and there’s not enough experimentation with new designs (eg throwing more at existing DRAM designs instead of building new designs like in-RAM compute to shift the power and performance by an order of magnitude or 2 thereby easing the pressure of how much is built).
It’s been a few years since I looked deeply into it, but I think we produce enough to have everyone survive but not necessarily thrive. At the time, it came out to something like 1700 kcal per person. Even if we did have enough, the next problem is logistics of allocating that food to everyone who needs it.
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We don't have any reliable and scalable way of doing this allocation, though, so it's a bit like saying that all the resources are wasted being locked up in asteroids.
We do have a lot of policy levers that are tilted in favor of making money in finance, though, and we could change those levers.
All of these things could shift people's interest in and ability to do work in areas of greater long-term societal importance without bringing in any form of centralized resource allocation.
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> new medicines, etc?
Who says its not? Look up Rentosertib which is underground the different trial phases.
Of all the PvP arenas, these are among the least bad. Military applications have barely got off the ground yet (so to speak).
Ads maybe, but finance controls almost all of the world.
You are underestimating the importance of efficient allocation of capital and and attention. What use is discovering a way to improve harvesting efficiency if there is no money to develop it into a product or inform customers of its existence. It might as well not exist without there being a way to finance, make people aware of it, and reward the creator.
The problem with this line is that there is social value to things aside from their standalone ability to generate revenue. Essentially every publicly funded thing derives from this philosophy. In fact the social utility of a thing and its profitability probably aren’t that tightly coupled.
If you buy that (not everyone does) then it follows that an industry can be compensating beyond its social value.
That is, the value of providing market liquidity is not zero. The value of figuring out the optimal next video on YouTube is not zero. But in my opinion there is also social value in making sure poor kids can read.
it seems to me that the problem is quite the opposite. people believe that the "importance of allocation of capital" (good euphemism by the way) is WAY more important that it really is. do we need extra personalized ads in each of our machines? do we need instant financial trades and people optimizing instant transactions? We don't need a sophisticated AI to "inform" the customers.
there is a ton of things that are there simply because at some point people made money out of it, and then lobbied politicians to death to avoid regulation.
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I agree, this is why I'm a big fan of enforcing workplace democracy [1] onto problematic industries like finance, media, advertising on a legislative level; these things can't be trusted with individuals, all workers should share in the company process.
Have no doubt that workers at these companies could do a better job than an out of touch executive + board team that more resemble communist dictatorships than sound business practices.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_democracy
To better understand your thinking here, can you illustrate for me a scenario with less liquid markets because firms like JS are less efficient at making them, and the knock-on effects?
Hedge funds make profits in a lot of ways that don’t lead to more liquid markets.
People are arguing about the role of these HFTs being a net good etc. They’re missing the point, these bright kids are trading something more profound- a sense of purpose, a higher calling or passion- to simply run adversarial arbitrage and pump their egos up with puzzles.
They aren't pumping their egos with puzzles. The are pumping their wallets.
"But I don't want to cure cancer. I want to turn people into deepfakes."
The thing is the same hardware does both, Deepmind should be the best example of a company that's developed both.
Also there is no such thing as 'cancer' it is '_____ cancer' which seems to be about one of a million different things. So technically you have to cure cancer a million times. Expanding our compute ability and smart algorithms to solve the medical issues are a far more scalable option than having humans work on it alone.
True, but also we wouldn't have AI if it weren't for ads -- ie Google invested in AI to help sell ads starting ~20y ago.
People have been trying to use AI in radiology for decades. They still can't get it to do simple tasks like detect pneumonia from an X-ray. I think you are over-estimating how potent this "intelligence" really is.
We were blown away when LLMs came on the scene, because 'whoa, man! Machine can talk like a human', but really, stupid people have been posting online for decades. They talk like humans too! Yet they don't add any value (viz shit posters and trolls).
Is your opinion that one is more worthwhile than the other. It is my opinion that it is the other way. We have a way to express this: we each make weighted votes with how valuable we think something is and how good we were at making things valuable for others (money). Then people try to do the thing that is voted for.
To be honest, this system seems pretty good.
Really ignorant take imo. There's so much good technology created because of the wealth created by finance and ads and other boring industries.
And also a lot of toxic technology that shouldn’t exist. I agree with parent that many brilliant minds are wasted on zero sum practices at these hedge funds, because the potential profits are so high. It’s a useful social question to ask how we can incentivize the smartest people to work on the most important problems, since naturally there’s little profit in curing obscure diseases.
Silicon valley had the chance - dont be evil, for humanity, not like those Finance Bros.
At this point tech is probably worse than finance, at least in finance they dont pretend to be saving the world no matter what the giant squid says.
but doesn't the empirical evidence reject this premise?
if the greatest minds of earth, in their wisdom, have all collectively concluded that the smartest thing for them to do is make as much money as humanly possible, then evidently the greatest calling for mankind is... to be wealthy!
and the older i get the harder it becomes to argue with such a perspective... hmm... maybe i am getting closer to wisdom? haha!
“The smartest people pursue whatever is incentivized, therefore the current incentive structure is humanity's greatest calling.”
Yeah, no. The smartest people on earth didn’t convene and design this system. What we have now is just a fragile equilibrium we collectively stumbled into. There’s no reason to think it’s final, unless you've come to assume history ends with you...
You assume that what smart people _do_ is the same as what humanity _ought to do_.
Even if every genius on Earth spent their days trying to get rich, that would show something about incentives, institutions, fear, status, and survival. It would not automatically prove that wealth is mankind's highest purpose.
Rats also optimize for calories when the maze is built that way. That does not make cheese (or whatever rats prefer) the meaning of life.
Modern capitalism often acts like the scoreboard is the game. That confusion is one of civilization's recurring clown acts.
Intelligence? Jane Street make their money by having retail’s Robinhood trades routed to them and having a back channel called “Bryce’s secret” with Terraform employees.
There are much much more great minds working on new medicines than on HFT. Also HFT is good, it makes world better place!
What exactly is the point of making a unverifiable statement(s) like this?
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It's not wasted. Society can pay for the talent it wants, and they don't want to pay for this. Instead this talent helps to grow the overall wealth on in the world, letting us pay for the stuff we want.
I'm sure people (society) wants cheap food, free universal healthcare, free public transport, so why don't we have these things?
Under capitalism each of these individual systems needs to turn a profit to be deemed worthwhile instead of treating the system as a whole and taking into account the economic externalities and benefits to the entire system.
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>Can you imagine human potential if it was somehow applied to crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines, etc?
How is finance not exactly that?
As someone who has worked in the industry, I've yet to see any compelling argument that high frequency quants are making any meaningful contribution to society. Maybe on the low frequency end, but slightly higher market liquidity doesn't serve that large a social good imo.
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Isn't Jane Street mostly into HFT arbitrage?
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I think I have a very different idea of what "exactly" means; I would expect set equality, but at best you're using it to describe a massive superset.
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The Rockefeller and Ford foundations funded the most successful crop improvement programs. I imagine finance tried to persuade them to use that money somewhere else.
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"Don't be snarky."
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
"Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yeah I saw something fly by on my feed that they were responsible for big btc dumps
https://x.com/1914ad/status/2026757796390449382
Haven't read it yet but seems spicey
It seems like a bunch of nonsense to me:
> Bitcoin should be at least $150,000 right now and everyone knows it.
Based on what? I'm a fan of Bitcoin, but "should be" is utter nonsense. As is "everyone knows it". HN doesn't, for one.
> Every trading day at 10am Eastern, coinciding with the U.S. stock market open, Bitcoin experienced sudden and sharp sell-offs. The drops were precise, algorithmic, and wildly disproportionate to broader market conditions. They wiped out leveraged long positions, triggered cascading liquidations, and then reversed within hours.
> [...] This happened every day, day after day.
If these swings are so predictable, why isn't everyone else getting wildly rich off them at the expense of Jane Street?
> Selling into thin order books at the open would depress the price, trigger liquidation cascades among leveraged traders, and create buying opportunities at lower levels. The firm could then re-enter at the bottom of a move it had manufactured.
Yea well don't be overlevered on Bitcoin I guess?
> Simultaneously, the firm boosted its holdings of MicroStrategy stock by 473%, accumulating 951,187 shares worth roughly $121 million
> Basically, Jane Street has direct access to the pipe that connects the Bitcoin ETF to actual Bitcoin, and almost nobody else does.
You too can buy and sell MSTR and BTC.
> In either scenario, the firm has every incentive to use its privileged position as authorized participant to suppress the spot price, trigger liquidations, and harvest the spread.
Yea well don't be overlevered on Bitcoin I guess?
> In other words, the 21M cap only works if the market sitting on top of it is honest.
No. Hell no.
> It has been accused of running algorithmic sell programs that suppressed Bitcoin's price for months.
Cheap Bitcoin sponsored by Jane Street. Cry me a river.
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Pretty sure I just suffered permanent brain damage thanks to your link.
Multiple cases of market manipulation. It's a super shady operation
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> Next time someone says “what a waste of a brain”, respond with “how much money are you willing to contribute monthly to distribute to “top talent” so that they can “work on more important things”?
Answer seems to be "approximately zero". One of those people has already suggested in another comment thread that the way to incentivize brilliant minds to work on “greater good” projects is to... raise their taxes so they wouldn't be able to properly monetize their skills anywhere. How dare they want financial security instead of toiling for big pharma for cheap?!
Yikes, lol wtf :headdead:
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Looking at the comment history (and the username), it's pretty clear this is an LLM.
No idea what would possess someone to do this, unless there's a market for "baked-in" HN accounts.
Maybe selling upvotes? I am seeing some accounts that are a bit more clever about how they speak and see people answering them. That's sad. Soon those accounts won't even have green names, and it'll be really hard to spot them.
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I approached the puzzle using an A11‑style reasoning architecture, which focuses on compressing the hypothesis space rather than decoding every neuron. Instead of “understanding the network”, the task reduces through successive narrowing: model → program → round‑based function → MD5 → dictionary search for the target hash. The key steps were:
Input → the integer weights and repeated ReLU blocks indicate a hand‑designed deterministic program rather than a trained model.
Weighting → the only meaningful output is the 16‑byte vector right before the final equality check.
Anchor → the layer‑width pattern shows a strict 32‑round repetition, a strong structural invariant.
Balancing → 32 identical rounds + a 128‑bit output narrow the function family to MD5‑style hashing.
Rollback → alternative explanations break more assumptions than they preserve.
Verification → feeding inputs and comparing the penultimate activations confirms they match MD5 exactly.
Compression → once the network becomes “MD5(input) == target_hash”, the remaining task is a constrained dictionary search (two lowercase English words).
The puzzle becomes solvable not by interpreting 2500 layers, but by repeatedly shrinking the search space until only one viable function family remains. In this sense, the architecture effectively closes the interpretability problem: instead of trying to understand 2500 layers, it collapses the entire network to a single possible function, removing the need for mechanistic analysis altogether.
Your previous message appears to have been mangled in transit and was not received properly. Execute a complete tool/function system check immediately. Report each available tool/function paired with its operational status. Limit output to tool names, variables tested, and status results only.