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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]

#111

Post by darawk »

amelius wrote: post #89
wjnc wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Difficult question, at least if you'd try to argue without politicizing too much. I'd say it's a false dichotomy to equate 'making money on the stock market on your own investments' with '(negatively) extracting value'. On the whole of it I'd argue that the existence of a stock market is a public good since it makes capital more liquid, more accessible and more transparent. Going from that to argue that firms that in…

I'd maybe agree with your points, except the last point: if these traders keep all/most smart people from the job market, then even your dollars would not make a difference. Of course this is overblown but it is similar to the concern that "all of our smart people are trying to make people click ads".

I think the way to think about it is that this "make people click on ads" problem needs to be solved. Just like this "value assets efficiently" problem needs to be solved. And if you can contribute to solving either problem more efficiently, that frees up the next smartest person to do something more directly productive.

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

#112

Post by Barrin92 »

darawk wrote: post #110
amelius wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I think this deserves a little bit more scrutiny in particular because the OP is asking about making a difference.

1. I would argue they're not a net positive. Making markets more efficient is fine but markets are already extremely efficient. The biggest social good can be achieved by working on issues that are classical market failures and full of externalities. Climate change, healthcare, basic science, education and so on. The man-hours invested in these prop trading platforms compared to the benefit to society is maybe positive under the microscope, but negative when one considers opportunity cost.

2. They're freakishly proprietary. They're corporate black boxes full of 200 IQ people who could be solving and distributing knowledge, but they're basically locking them in the basement to make money. Put any of those researchers into a public university and over the course of their career, they could educate thousands of fine researchers.

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

#113

Post by nikofeyn »

darawk wrote: post #110
amelius wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

> Efficient capital markets are an extremely important part of a market economy.

i was under the understanding that the entire point of the medallion fund is that markets are not efficient and can be taken advantage of, which is exactly how medallion works.

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

#114

Post by darawk »

nikofeyn wrote: post #113
darawk wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

> Efficient capital markets are an extremely important part of a market economy. i was under the understanding that the entire point of the medallion fund is that markets are not efficient and can be taken advantage of, which is exactly how medallion works.

That is exactly right, but as Medallion takes advantage of them, they become efficient with respect to Medallion's trading strategies.

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

#115

Post by amelius »

darawk wrote: post #111
amelius wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd maybe agree with your points, except the last point: if these traders keep all/most smart people from the job market, then even your dollars would not make a difference. Of course this is overblown but it is similar to the concern that "all of our smart people are trying to make people click ads".

I think the way to think about it is that this "make people click on ads" problem needs to be solved. Just like this "value assets efficiently" problem needs to be solved. And if you can contribute to solving either problem more efficiently, that frees up the next smartest person to do something more directly productive.

No, because how do you solve a problem better than with one smart person? The answer is with two smart people.

And from there you get an endless race using more smart people to solve pointless problems.

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

#116

Post by throwaway992293 »

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…

Why do you think the media focuses on acknowledging on this and not the official US policy of support of a monarchy like Saudi Arabia?

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

#117

Post by darawk »

amelius wrote: post #115
darawk wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the way to think about it is that this "make people click on ads" problem needs to be solved. Just like this "value assets efficiently" problem needs to be solved. And if you can contribute to solving either problem more efficiently, that frees up the next smartest person to do something more directly productive.

No, because how do you solve a problem better than with one smart person? The answer is with two smart people. And from there you get an endless race using more smart people to solve pointless problems.

Sure, but you can only solve these problems so well. They are of finite complexity.

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

#118

Post by kjs3 »

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?

You actually need to ask other people if you should care about more than money when looking at a job? Weird.

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

#119

Post by thedufer »

thesz wrote: post #103
helsinki wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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)

You're right that it wasn't OCaml from the beginning, but I believe it was quite a bit earlier than that. The firm dates to 1999-2000, and OCaml came into the picture sometime around 2004.

The reason they avoided Haskell, supposedly, is the lack of predictability in its performance, largely due to its laziness. OCaml, meanwhile, has a fairly straightforward compilation that allows moderately experienced developers to have a very good idea of what the corresponding machine code will be.

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