91–100 of 219 posts
I wonder if anyone has used Jane Street's open source OCaml libraries and tools for somewhat serious projects. I took a brief look at these things, and my impression is that their stuff isn't "ready" for anyone outside Jane Street, even though they put a lot of effort in building the ecosystem and open source their code.
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I think that's true up to a point, but it misses the distinction between accidental and essential complexity. Essential complexity has to go somewhere, accidental complexity doesn't, and most complexity in software is accidental. And even when the complexity is essential, IMO it's better off not in the build system. I'll gladly accept more complex code for the sake of a simpler build (even though that theoretically m…
Also the point of software engineering is to take the real complexity that actually exists and you can't get rid of and work out how to write simple code to deal with it. Good software architecture does not include complexity because there is complexity in the business. It manages the complexity with simple code. The trouble is when people say "complex" you don't really know what they mean, though. They often just me…
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OP should've been more specific. HFT firms, not any other finance companies, probably have a lot more exciting work due to the nature of reducing latency using all sorts of novel techniques. I wonder if they disable all the fancy exploit mitigation protection in linux kernel just for a tiny performance hit
Mother capitalism deems that our brightest young minds best serve humanity in two tasks. Keeping the public passively scrolling, and moving money at speed to make wealthy people more wealthy.
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OP should've been more specific. HFT firms, not any other finance companies, probably have a lot more exciting work due to the nature of reducing latency using all sorts of novel techniques. I wonder if they disable all the fancy exploit mitigation protection in linux kernel just for a tiny performance hit
Mother capitalism deems that our brightest young minds best serve humanity in two tasks. Keeping the public passively scrolling, and moving money at speed to make wealthy people more wealthy.
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Mother capitalism deems that our brightest young minds best serve humanity in two tasks. Keeping the public passively scrolling, and moving money at speed to make wealthy people more wealthy.
Some fraction of young minds, not all. I was happy to work at a small aerospace company with extreme concentration of brightest minds. Only because they loved the domain, and didn't mind a salary cut. What a joy and relief it was for me after FAANG!
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Grass is always greener my friend. Many jobs in finance are updating 20 year old Java code, or figuring out new ways to load data in and out of Excel files for custom reporting.
OP should've been more specific. HFT firms, not any other finance companies, probably have a lot more exciting work due to the nature of reducing latency using all sorts of novel techniques. I wonder if they disable all the fancy exploit mitigation protection in linux kernel just for a tiny performance hit
I have to respect Jane Street for proving that HM-typed functional programming can be production-ready and extremely fast when given enough love. I still occasionally hear things about how the more academic-styled functional languages can't work in production, but Ocaml shows that it absolutely can work, even with high performance requirements.
There's also pandoc written in Haskell. Facebook used it for it's spam-protection too, at some point (it might still do that, but I don't know).
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Maybe, but could you live with the fact that you're providing absolutely no value to the world? It always makes me sad when the greatest minds get gobbled up by these companies because they're creaming off the top of an enormously complex system they created.
People outside the industry just use that as cope because they making way less money. "How do you live with yourself making high 6 fig / 7 figs a yr?" Quite easily in fact.
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I don't mind CMake. It's awful, but I'm already using C or C++, so the bar is set pretty low. It does do a few things right, and at least some of the things it does wrong are manageable. I'll eat at least a bit of shit if it means I can get more than one platform's-worth of build process out of a single set of human-editable configuration files.
Have you tried meson? I used it once many years ago, and it seemed slightly better.
The world does not work like this though. CMake is weird but once you've learned some non-intuitive stuff, it works very well and there's a reason why pretty much everyone is using it.