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Jane Street and the OCaml Compiler (2018) [video]

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Re: Jane Street and the OCaml Compiler (2018) [video]

#101

Post by venamerican123 »

asveikau wrote: post #48
lend000 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher taxes are not the only economics implications of a Sanders presidency, especially when you look at some of the governments Sanders has praised over his career. A better tax structure is necessary and the easiest thing to do, but I don't trust Sanders to figure that out. Even Warren comes up with a wealth tax instead of just fixing the income and capital gains tax brackets. Hint: add three more brackets with 4m…

> especially when you look at some of the governments Sanders has praised over his career. Can you be more specific here? I mean, there can be praise for some governments without saying we advocate for everything they do. It's possible for instance to praise Cuba for health care outcomes without wanting to become Fidel Castro. There are also some ridiculous insinuations that Sanders is some kind of Chavista, which to…

I want to address your points re Cuba and Venezuela.

I'm going to start with Venezuela since I am a Venezuelan-American and you might not like what my views are on the topic. First of all, I always assume good faith, even when it comes down to Sanders, unlike Michael Moore, for instance.

- Venezuela

Sanders expressed his support of Chavez in many of his writings. So, you might not consider him a Chavista, but he's definitely praised Chavez at least up to 2011 [1].

I know this is anecdotal, I visited Venezuela many times: 2005, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2013. Believe me, anyone with good faith could not have praised whatever was going down there in 2011. 2000? I can give you the benefit of the doubt. Chavez had only been in office for ~3 years by the time and hadn't shown what an awful dictator he was going to become.

- Cuba

Have you been to Cuba? Again, this is anecdotal, but nothing like first hand experience on a matter to make some people understand what the ugly reality is outside whatever some organization states on what the state of those countries are.

Trust me, you don't want to be in a Cuban hospital.

>> No need for the government to seize the means of production > I do not believe Sanders proposes that.

Here's a video [2] where Chavez is seizing the means of production on national TV.

I find deeply sad when some Americans try to justify certain candidates who have supported awful governments, like Chavez's or Castro's.

[1] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/sanders-di...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-zfD5SKeVQ

Re: Jane Street and the OCaml Compiler (2018) [video]

#102

Post by asveikau »

venamerican123 wrote: post #101
asveikau wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> especially when you look at some of the governments Sanders has praised over his career. Can you be more specific here? I mean, there can be praise for some governments without saying we advocate for everything they do. It's possible for instance to praise Cuba for health care outcomes without wanting to become Fidel Castro. There are also some ridiculous insinuations that Sanders is some kind of Chavista, which to…

I want to address your points re Cuba and Venezuela. I'm going to start with Venezuela since I am a Venezuelan-American and you might not like what my views are on the topic. First of all, I always assume good faith, even when it comes down to Sanders, unlike Michael Moore, for instance. - Venezuela Sanders expressed his support of Chavez in many of his writings. So, you might not consider him a Chavista, but he's de…

I am not a fan of Chávez or Maduro or Evo Morales and that sort. There was some more optimism when that political wave started, and I in particular used to be more optimistic about them than I am today. This is probably true of a number of American left leaning people.

I have not been to Cuba. I hope to some day. (I speak fluent Spanish btw and hear about these places in their original, local non-US sources.) I do understand that they are said to have good health care outcomes, which is especially remarkable given how the rest of their economic system is going. The United States health care system is very terrible.

> Here's a video [2] where Chavez is seizing the means of production on national TV.

Yeah he does look kind of like a dumbass appropriating buildings on a whim without investigation or any kind of review (for the TV cameras and that silly applause), that was pretty much his way, but it's important to note that Bernie Sanders is not Hugo Chávez and can't be held responsible for the actions of another person, living or dead.

Re: Jane Street and the OCaml Compiler (2018) [video]

#103

Post by thesz »

helsinki wrote: post #6
smabie wrote: post #2

i asked this question at my Jane Street interview, but never got a real answer: how does a market making latency arb firm handle GC pauses that are inherent with any GC language? OCaml is better in this regard than, say, the JVM, but it still seems problematic. I know they wrote some FPGA compiler stuff with OCaml, but I can't imagine that all of their execution is running through FPGAs. Even if it's possible, it see…

Things to consider: The company is >20 years old. OCaml is a general purpose language that provides an equilibrium between the avoidance of bugs introduced by state (like all functional languages), speed, and polymorphic type inference. At the time of adoption, the other choices were Haskell (too academic, not practical), Erlang (no type inference, not suited for large code bases with complex business logic), and lis…

At the time of OCaml choice at JS (I guess it was circa 2008-2010; I also strongly suspect that it was not at the start of JS) Haskell already had multithreaded RTS with very green threads, software transactional memory and multicore support.

[1] https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/6.6.1/docs/html/libraries... (Control.Concurrent contains forkIO - thus, green threads!)

Guessing from what information is available to me, it was a matter of personal preferences, not technical decision.

PS From [2] in some other comment, it really was a matter of personal choice.

[2] https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2038036

At [3] it can be found that ghc had green threads at 2002.

[3] https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/5.04/docs/html/base/index...

Re: Jane Street and the OCaml Compiler (2018) [video]

#104

Post by zarkov99 »

hermitdev wrote: post #50
ironSkillet wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With so much money on the line, hedge funds and other trading firms focus a lot of effort on marketing and building up a perception that they truly are something special (at least those that take outside client money). Internally, things could be rather mundane, and even downright awful (from a technology perspective). Not commenting on Jane Street in particular, just the industry in general. Source: I've worked at a…

Also having worked for a hedge fund, they're generally going to do their best to get you at the lowest salary possible. The overall benefits might be good, but they're going to do their best to low ball on the salary, "you'll make it up at bonus time!" Bullshit, You have to negotiate with hedge funds and be willing to walk away from a shit offer. I started at one a year out of college. Made 3x what I did as an intern…

There is another, more sinister reason for low base: typically if you have a non compete and are forced into a one year garden leave, they can get way with paying you just the low base.

Re: Jane Street and the OCaml Compiler (2018) [video]

#105

Post by lend000 »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #77
lend000 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sanders proposes a wealth tax as well. Not knowing that This is my point. They propose a radical new tax that requires measuring people's entire net worth, instead of fixing what's broken using our existing infrastructure which measures forms of income and money flow, because they are clueless, and it's good politics right now. The guy is a self proclaimed socialist, and that means socializing things [0]. I'm not i…

If measuring wealth is a problem, I'd look into inflation, and Land Value Tax. Inflation would depreciate money, and land value tax would erode physical possession. Then we can redistribute. Land value tax in particular seems particularly interesting: if generalised to comprise (almost) all of tax, we can expect a drastic simplification of tax collection, and much less paperwork for everyone when doing all kinds of e…

Compare the junior software engineer who spends months writing an elaborate new system, full of bugs, to the senior developer who addresses the same problem with 10 lines of code. Which camp do you think your proposals, or any wealth tax proposal falls into? As opposed to just fixing the tax brackets, and not re-writing any code.

Re: Jane Street and the OCaml Compiler (2018) [video]

#106

Post by codingslave »

fnord123 wrote: post #60
codingslave wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah worked in the industry as well, there's a story an older buddy used to tell when he worked at PIMCO in the 90s. Bit different than a quant fund but still applies. They hired a few Harvard Economics PhDs, who when looking at their macro economics material for institutional investors, claimed it was all wrong/didn't make sense. Bill Gross, the fund manager, told them it was to "get the money in the door from the f…

>Harvard Economics PhDs tbf, academia is its own racket.

Yeah absolutely, the value of the Harvard PhD in this story is the name and nothing else.

Re: Jane Street and the OCaml Compiler (2018) [video]

#107

Post by gbronner »

smabie wrote: post #2

i asked this question at my Jane Street interview, but never got a real answer: how does a market making latency arb firm handle GC pauses that are inherent with any GC language? OCaml is better in this regard than, say, the JVM, but it still seems problematic. I know they wrote some FPGA compiler stuff with OCaml, but I can't imagine that all of their execution is running through FPGAs. Even if it's possible, it see…

Preallocate all of the memory on the box, and control GC runs.

There's an entire library of tricks for ensuring that GC pauses don't affect trading, but the biggest one is to use userspace allocated memory pools.

Re: Jane Street and the OCaml Compiler (2018) [video]

#108

Post by loup-vaillant »

lend000 wrote: post #105
loup-vaillant wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If measuring wealth is a problem, I'd look into inflation, and Land Value Tax. Inflation would depreciate money, and land value tax would erode physical possession. Then we can redistribute. Land value tax in particular seems particularly interesting: if generalised to comprise (almost) all of tax, we can expect a drastic simplification of tax collection, and much less paperwork for everyone when doing all kinds of e…

Compare the junior software engineer who spends months writing an elaborate new system, full of bugs, to the senior developer who addresses the same problem with 10 lines of code. Which camp do you think your proposals, or any wealth tax proposal falls into? As opposed to just fixing the tax brackets, and not re-writing any code.

Depends. How big is the rest of the project? I assume the 10 lines of code you are speaking of are a delta. But depending on the rest of the project, the consequences of that small fix could reach further than anticipated.

The new system may be full of bugs, but why would the old system be any better? I've seen old systems. Some of them get their bugs fixed. Many get their bugs worked around, either by the devs, but often by the users themselves: "don't click here, it makes the program crash!"

As for Land Value Tax, do not confuse land with other kinds of wealth. Land doesn't move. Its surface doesn't change. It's market value can change, but it's not wildly fluctuating, like, say, Oil. That makes it much, much easier to tax than whatever property you build on top of it, or goodness forbid whatever precious trinket you might store in that property.

The other proposition, taxing salaries, works today. Taxing more or less salary is just a knob to turn. And at the time such taxes were put in place in France after WW2, the change was swift, and the "new system, full of bugs" worked. Communism (or something close to it) worked, in a Western, democratic country. Okay, it was only applied to school, roads, hospitals, retirement, unemployment insurance, energy… but that's already a pretty big deal, don't you think?

---

We could "just fix the tax bracket", but then my first reflex would be have a top marginal rate at 100%. I want a limit on maximum individual income. Something like $10M per year to begin with. That may seem ludicrous, to inflict such a brutal end on the American Dream itself. That's it, game over, no one will get rich ever again. But really, that dream is a lie to begin with.

Better yet, we could tether the limit to the median income. Want to get rich? Make your country rich first. That at least should appeal to patriotism, which I believe is still fairly strong in the US.

Re: Jane Street and the OCaml Compiler (2018) [video]

#109

Post by darawk »

HereBePandas wrote: post #81
darawk wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a prop trading firm. It's pretty important to distinguish between hedge funds that take public money (which are generally probably low quality, as the OP described) and prop trading firms that only or primarily trade their own money (Two Sigma, Renaissance, Jane Street, Jump trading, etc.). The latter deserve their mystique, because you only trade your own money if you are actually beating the market.

Two Sigma and Renaissance (albeit not Medallion) primarily invest outside capital.

Renaissance does take outside capital, but their primary business is Medallion. The outside capital is just a way to make a bit more by trading on their reputation.

Two Sigma does generate a bit more revenue from outside capital than Renaissance, but it is my understanding that the heart of their business is still prop trading. But I don't know that for certain.

Re: Jane Street and the OCaml Compiler (2018) [video]

#110

Post by darawk »

amelius wrote: post #84
darawk wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a prop trading firm. It's pretty important to distinguish between hedge funds that take public money (which are generally probably low quality, as the OP described) and prop trading firms that only or primarily trade their own money (Two Sigma, Renaissance, Jane Street, Jump trading, etc.). The latter deserve their mystique, because you only trade your own money if you are actually beating the market.

Can you comment on relevance for society? Do these companies generate a net positive, or do they only extract value? I.e. should I look for a job there only because of the money, or also because I can make a difference somehow in the bigger societal picture?

I would say yes, they do make a positive difference for society, but in a fairly abstract way.

Efficient capital markets are an extremely important part of a market economy. They allocate capital where it will do the most good. Firms like Renaissance make that process more efficient. That is, they take a process that used to require 1000 MBAs working full time, and they accomplish it with 4 physicists, and automate it. This frees up the 1000 MBAs to go do something more productive with their time.

I think it's easy to be dismissive of this sort of value creation because of how abstract it is, and how concentrated the wealth creation at a firm like Renaissance is. However, I think the value add to society is actually real.

There are legitimate questions about the value being added by ultra high frequency firms. The ones that engage in market making are definitely adding value, but the ones that are doing things more like front-running or statistical front-running are a lot more questionable.

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