201–210 of 343 posts
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Why do we say 17,000 kilometers instead of 17 megameters?
Scientists don't use either. If using SI units, they would say 1.7 x 10^7 m, or 1.7e7 in code, which is even shorter.
If the data consists of electrical potentials between 0.0000001 and 0.0002 V, it’s way easier to think about it as microvolts, especially if any other is in a complementary scale.
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Hectolitres and hectograms are used fairly often (the latter, daily) in Italian, for example.
Hectolitre is 100 litres, not 100ml, but hectogram is 100g, not 100kg? Very confusing!
Hecto = 100
Hectoliter = 100 litres
Hectogram = 100 grams
Kilo = 1000
Kiloliter = 1000 litres
Kilogram = 1000 grams
I work in quantitative finance and have wanted to to start using OCaml at work for years. I just find that unless you are at a shop like Jane Street with a well developed proprietary code base, internally developed tooling, etc, there just isn't the ecosystem available for me to be nearly as productive as I can be in other well accepted languages in the quant dev space...which is a bummer. It's been a little while si…
Any tips for getting a first quant job ? Is learning C++ a must?
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Scientists don't use either. If using SI units, they would say 1.7 x 10^7 m, or 1.7e7 in code, which is even shorter.
In practice, people tend to use units that match the “natural scale” of the data. If the data consists of electrical potentials between 0.0000001 and 0.0002 V, it’s way easier to think about it as microvolts, especially if any other is in a complementary scale.
I love them because they keep the OCaml dream alive, but any company shouldn't have this kind of reach, especially in the realm of automation. This probably won't end well... Meanwhile I'd love to know what their edge is... It's probably more than OCaml, although... ;)
What kind of reach? Just making a lot of money?From the article, it looks like they make a lot from market making in ETFs and similar. Thats an extremely competitive market that is necessarily a race to the bottom in terms of pricing
They are not making their money market making equity etfs afaik, mostly bonds. A slightly different game with a much higher barrier to entry etc
I often discuss Jane Street as a great model of employee branding. They do well placed adverts/sponsorships (e.g. Standup Maths[0]), they produce a quite decent quality podcast (Signals and Threads [1]), and they have consistent monthly puzzles [2]. That level of investment in branding only makes sense, I think, at a large size. I'm kind of surprised they only have ~2500 people. [0] https://www.youtube.com/user/stand…
My impression with them in general was that they were willing to do lots of things that did not "conventionally" make sense at their size, and those things paid off. The internship program, for example, was relatively large in comparison to the size of the company at the time (≈50 interns?) and had lots of structure (events/talks/classes/group projects/etc) like you would expect from a big tech company, not from a 300-person firm.
They were also willing to build a lot of tools in-house like their own build system[1], their own code reviews system[2], etc. Most people would see this as wasteful NIH but I'm convinced it was a net benefit for them—they managed to be so productive in an absolute sense and especially on a per-engineer basis because they were willing to build so much themselves, not despite it. I'm sure the same thing applied to their recruiting efforts.
The biggest thing I took away from my internship was how much conventional wisdom in the software world was not necessary or true.
[1]: First Jenga, now Dune
[2]: Here's a neat talk on how they do code review at Jane Street: https://www.janestreet.com/tech-talks/janestreet-code-review...
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Back in the 90s/00s the CSFB quant team went with F#. Immutable and functional is reasonable choice. Just not popular. These days, starting or running a financial business with less popular languages is, well, less popular.
F# came out in 2005, and was quite limited compared to the language it became from 2010 onwards.
> Jane Street is stupidly profitable — net trading revenues of $4.4bn in the first quarter, after a $10.5bn haul in 2023, and a profit margin north of 70 per cent — but it bears repeating. That is the fourth straight year of net trading revenues exceeding $10bn. Gross revenues came at a record $21.9bn in 2023, up 34 per cent from 2022. Yes, I suppose this is all something to get all starry-eyed over, Jane Street encr…
can you expand on this? I have zero idea of what Jane street actually does and how they actually make money. (someone wrote that they have ~450 traders. trading what? equity? stocks? dark pools? PE? are they market makers? are they offering services to institution types?)
also what does "people's hard earned money" mean? you mean that Jane Street takes away their 401k or ... ?
I often discuss Jane Street as a great model of employee branding. They do well placed adverts/sponsorships (e.g. Standup Maths[0]), they produce a quite decent quality podcast (Signals and Threads [1]), and they have consistent monthly puzzles [2]. That level of investment in branding only makes sense, I think, at a large size. I'm kind of surprised they only have ~2500 people. [0] https://www.youtube.com/user/stand…
Jane Street has been doing this since they were much smaller. I interned there when they had like 300 people, and they were actively cultivating a great brand as an employer back then too—and looks like they've really made it work over the last decade! My impression with them in general was that they were willing to do lots of things that did not "conventionally" make sense at their size, and those things paid off. T…
Do you remember any specifics?
I’m also curious how their tooling made them so much more productive. Were the tools just really well designed, or did they integrate perfectly with each other?