Results from the ASIC puzzle

2 days ago (blog.janestreet.com)

The EE/IC Design part of me loves this for trying to build a community around what is typically a very opaque and secretive industry. The social justice / millenial part of me hates this for being funded by high frequency trading, of all things. What a colossal waste of resources.

  • >>The social justice / millenial part of me hates this for being funded by high frequency trading, of all things. What a colossal waste of resources.

    HFT makes the market more efficient, just like the AI eliminating jobs makes business more efficient. It's been numbing watching HN gladly sacrifice it's own to the altar of AI over and over. There is no moral high ground.

    Personally as a retail quant, it's really rewarding to build models that extract edge from the market using the very AI tools that have eliminated all hope of ever re-entering the tech-field absent being an entrepreneurial founder.

  • >>The social justice / millenial part of me hates this for being funded by high frequency trading, of all things. What a colossal waste of resources.

    It's more efficient now than it used to be - by which I mean the total taken by HFTs is lower than what people used to pay in spreads and commisions. Price discovery is better (you get closer to a fair price if you trade) and spreads are lower. The whole industry that used to prey on spreads and ignorance of retail investors is gone. What not to like about HFT?

  • Western societies in which HFT happens also happen to have the best medicine, leisure (many different sports for example), education etc.

    You think you could do better by having a planned economy, with your eminence deciding what's a waste and what is not? And why should I believe you it'd end up differently than North Korea or Cuba?

    Or you'd somehow manage to take what you think are all the good parts of western societies while outlawing what's wasteful and we'd have an utopia?

    • this reply isn't in good faith. OP is being self critical examining contradictions of living in complex interdependent societies. why are your queries so aggressively factional?

      2 replies →

    • > You think you could do better by having a planned economy

      Nobody mentioned that crazy scenario so why bring it up?

      BTW the USA is already a planned economy.

      1 reply →

  • I don’t think Jane Street does high frequency trading. I think you might be thinking of Citadel or HRT. Jane Street is more of an old-school quant hedge fund, no?

    • The page says their hardware team builds the fastest trading systems on the planet. Jane Street does HFT.

    • Their bread and butter was, and as far as I know still is, trading in ETFs and ADRs. These things have a mechanism to create and redeem in exchange with underlying securities. This means one can make some money arbitraging differences between the bundle and components.

      As this game got more competitive they seem to have branched out into other kinds of business including HFT.

Every time I see a Jane Street puzzle of this like I wonder in which way you can improve your problem solving skills for these things and how to extrapolate patterns from other things. I have a gut feeling that this is not only just grinding puzzles, there has to be a way to improve this. Curious if people have some insights on this

> The hardware team at Jane Street designs FPGAs and ASICs that run some of the fastest trading systems in the world, and the day-to-day work is full of puzzles just like this one: staring at a sea of gates, timing reports, or waveforms and slowly teasing out what’s really going on.

Although not really any more. AI is really good at debugging failing tests so I no longer have to spend hours - sometimes it was even days - staring at waves and instruction traces.

Tbh that's one thing I won't miss.