Noticing a bit too much

What is the deal with it though? Daily front page content in various forms starts to raise eyebrows.

They pay a LOT of money, have some high level of “nerd” prestige for solving interesting technical problems, have good outreach with things like problem of the month, and have not been impacted by massive layoffs.

There are pretty few companies out there like this. Being relatively small probably helps; everyone knows someone that worked at Mag7 and maybe has a bad story to share, but this is more rare.

I am particularly fond of the assessment that Jane Street is a group of anarcho-capitalist syndicates disguised as a quantitative trading firm.

> They pay a LOT of money, have some high level of “nerd” prestige for solving interesting technical problems, have good outreach with things like problem of the month, and have not been impacted by massive layoffs.

I never heard of them.

If not for HN, I would never know they existed.

I don't think the remark about "nerd prestige" holds, but beyond that your points boil down to marketing.

And how an unknown company changed its hiring practices is hardly front page news.

Paying a lot of money and hard technical problems are not exactly marketing.

Like I said, they are relatively small but they are definitely not “unknown”. Out of curiosity, could you name any quantitative trading firm, or trading firms in general? You specifically may happen to just not be paying much attention to this sector.

Your ignorance of something does not mean the thing you are ignorant of is inconsequential

They are unknown because they choose to be unknown. The first rule of finance is that, you never tell anyone how you make money. Even more so if you make billions of dollars annually.

I posted this. I'm just a regular dev, without any kind of attachment to Jane Street, in fact i'm a little wary of them, and would subscribe to Evan Czaplicki's understanding of the faustian bargain working there would involve. I think they're banned from India, if you want an example of the kind of raiding they are equipped to do.

In general - I am wondering how engineering interviews change in the age of LLMs, Jane Street, tech-wise is a "thought leader", at least having opinions, sharing them is part of how they recruit "the best", i think oxide does this too.

So in some way, in this time of change it makes sense that they are noisy... It also makes sense that the noises they make may filter down...

> I'm just a regular dev, without any kind of attachment to Jane Street, in fact i'm a little wary of them, and would subscribe to Evan Czaplicki's understanding of the faustian bargain working there would involve.

Mind going more into this, since you named a specific person? Did he make some prominent statement?

It's a case study here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sl1UQXgtepE I think the critique is implicit so YMMV. Just my interpretation.

YOu're selling your soul for $ and telling yourself that you aren't extracting rents or directly harming retail investors but are just helping the market with price discovery.

Jane Street's whole business is front running and arbitrage. They make money in a way that's extremely unfair to the point a whole new stock exchange (IEX) was designed to stop it, hurts both retail and institutional investors, and provides no useful service to society.

All they've ever done for anyone but themselves is work on the OCaml ecosystem which is not exactly the biggest or most innovative.

> Jane Street's whole business is front running and arbitrage.

I instinctively hear a reply to this in Jeremy Irons’s voice, “We are selling to willing buyers at the current fair market price”.

I'm sure they make money using HFT strategies but I wouldn't say it's their whole business or even their largest profit center. They put on trades and take on risk in addition to having a market-making business. They're not the reason IEX was formed. Maybe they were a factor but idk.

Man, HN has really started to decline. How exactly is Jane Street front running?

Reacting faster than others to markets is not front running. Seeing someone else's order and putting yours in front of it is front running. Traders on the NYSE Floor would hear a big order is coming in, and put their ticket in front of it- that is front running.

In a computerized world, front running has essentially ceased to exist- the last major enforcement actions I could find are from 2003, when there was still quite a bit of trading done not by pushing buttons on a computer but by making phone calls. Trading on inside information is alive and well, but this is not what JS does at all, that's the realm of hedge funds that have traders that still click on buttons.

I never worked at JS, but have worked in MM.

> HN has really started to decline.

I don't mean to disparage JS and don't necessarily think one way or the other of their actions.

However, you should make yourself aware of their doings in India especially before trashing HN.

https://boringmoney.in/p/jane-street-prefers-arbitrage-manip...

Pay for Order Flow is not literally frontrunning and you can try to justify it as not literally fleecing retail investors but would just be dishonest.

They provide liquidity!

Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to imply anything nefarious on your part (or anyone else's part). It's just odd that a single financial firm keeps coming up.

OCaml like a lot of niche functional programming languages has a lot of weight on HN. Or used to for many many years, mostly before LLMs. Jane street is single-handedly keeping OCaml alive and in use in real applications and as such they get a lot of credence.

Whether you agree with what they do or not, they have had a sort of mystique about them (tons of money, quant vests, _and_ a niche functional programming language as a daily driver??? Sign me up!) that HN likes.

Their ban from India isn't particularly sinister. What they did would have been perfectly legal here in the US as "supplying liquidity". They just successfully arbitraged the liquidity gap between the Indian options market and the long position stock market.

No, this type of "liquidity arbitrage" is market manipulation, and illegal in the US.

eg: https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/litigation-releas...

> The cross-market manipulation involves buying and selling stocks at a loss, allegedly for the purpose of moving the prices of corresponding options, so that Avalon could make a profit by trading those options at artificial prices.

> The Court found that the two alleged manipulative trading schemes-if proven-would violate Sections 10(b) and 9(a)(2) of the Exchange Act and Section 17(a)(1) of the Securities Act.

They were also "banging the close," a common illegal practice: https://www.steel-eye.com/news/jane-street-fine-566.3m-marke...

they spend a lot of time recruiting. this post is more of that kind of outreach

There are three Jane Street stories on the front page right now. This one, "Socratic Tutor (github.com/janestreet)", and "A false smoke alarm almost drowned Jane Street's only NYC datacenter (bacarella.com)".

What I learned over time is that first, the pool of people who regularly submit to HN is surprisingly small, so if they have interest in a particular set of topics, these topics are overrepresented in the queue; and second, relatively few people patrol new submissions and the the first 3-4 upvotes in the first 15 minutes decide if something bubbles up to the front page or not. These folks often go by keywords / vibes / employer associations, so for example, anything that mentions any frontier lab is more likely to bubble up.

More generally, I think there's been a significant drop in topic diversity on HN over the past year. Almost everything on the front page is related in some way to AI or to companies on the forefront of AI. It's almost as if there's nothing else going on in tech or in the broader world.

What are some of the other aggregators?

The closest to "HN lite" is probably lobste.rs. There's a fair amount of overlap, but it's closer to 20% AI than 80% AI.

Reddit? General-interest subreddits such as /r/technology are mostly mainstream news, but there's plenty of specialized ones, such as /r/math, /r/programming, /r/c_programming, /r/rust, etc.

Many of the aggregators "killed" by HN are still alive, just not as popular. For example, boingboing.net is up and running. RSS feeds from places like Ars Technica are a fair choice for industry gossip too.

in other words, someone who works at Jane Street or use to posts on HN a lot

All three stories fit the criteria of gratifying one's intellectual curiosity, which is goal of Hacker News submissions.

Consider this: Would you find anything unusual about seeing those stories on the front page if each came from a different company or didn't mention the company name at all? I wouldn't, because each of the submissions is primarily interesting for the content, not the company associated with it.

This may be suspicious, but Jane Street has been posted here a lot forever, mostly because of ocaml.

Because they pay a lot, makes everyone curious. Plus high hiring bar, use of OCaml which is unusual.

I think Jane Street has gained prestige and notoriety in the last few years. For people like Math majors who are split between tech and finance, it’s the most famous I think.