What the interns have wrought, 2025 • Hacker News Board

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#81

Post by marklar423 » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 9:04 PM UTC

plst wrote: post #7

KHRZ wrote: post #2

I was curious what kind of company needed to develop all these different kinds of advanced tech. Turns out it's just so they can be sneaky and trade shares quickly. Kind of sad IMO.

Can someone who actually understands the topic explain to me (or link good resources) why/if what they do is useful to anyone? Or are they literally just in the business of making money? (anyone except themselves of course. I'm serious, any hints of irony are unintended)

Here's how I think about it:

- Money (the concept) is useful to society as a store of value, so you don't have to waste effort bartering for things.

- Adding on to that, credit is useful to society since it lets humanity even more efficiently allocate its good and labor (stored as money).

- Finally, stocks, insurance, and other financial instruments are additional advanced developments on top of credit, where groups of humans (companies) can take on even more risky endeavors supported by investors or insurers.

So my view is companies like Jane Street facilitate these complicated value transfers, to let (e.g.) a spaceship company draw on resources generated by growing crops, selling shoes, giving haircuts, etc via a convoluted path through stocks, ETFs, whatever.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#82

Post by lotsofpulp » Fri, Aug 29, 2025, 10:50 PM UTC

techdmn wrote: post #63

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Amongst the top 5% smartest quantitatively-minded kids I knew in college, I’d say ~25% of them ended up at quant shops like Jane Street, sometimes straight out of school, sometimes after doing a PhD. I can only imagine what good that brainpower could do for humanity if it weren’t occupied finding cleverer ways to manipulate electronic money.

Apologies for a (mild) thread-jack. My opinion, one problem with our economic system is focus on short-term results, to the point that several notable companies' stock prices are completely divorced from the reality of their performance. This makes sense if the stock market is primarily a device for gambling or extracting wealth. Investors care less about the prospects of the company than the prospects of the market.…

> to the point that several notable companies' stock prices are completely divorced from the reality of their performance.

Which companies? Because the net income and profit margin trends for the most highly valued companies have been the highest in history, for many years now.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#83

Post by PartiallyTyped » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 3:44 AM UTC

infecto wrote: post #58

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't say that about my job; I am providing tools for engineers to use and making things better. As part of my job I am expected to contribute to CPython, and rustc among other things.

That’s great work, but even there you’re mostly building tools that make other engineers more efficient at building more tools. It’s not that the work lacks value it absolutely does, but it’s still part of the same recursive loop where the ultimate “benefit to society” gets pretty abstract. At the end of the chain, most of those tools are still helping businesses optimize, capture margin, or intermediate in some way.…

I am not critiquing the engineers… we are all rational agents looking at the data that we have in front of us and try to make sensible decisions about our lives.

I am just blaming society in that it doesn’t seem to prioritise “good” and “useful” things.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#84

Post by blargey » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 4:46 AM UTC

doovd wrote: post #12

plst wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone who actually understands the topic explain to me (or link good resources) why/if what they do is useful to anyone? Or are they literally just in the business of making money? (anyone except themselves of course. I'm serious, any hints of irony are unintended)

It's a common rhetoric from someone who has no clue about financial markets (the person you replied to). Suppose you want to invest in S&p500 so you want to buy the ETF. Someone like Jane Street can create sell you this ETF, and take care of the risk that comes along with it. For example, the price they sell you this ETF should take into account the pricing of underlying stocks. While it sounds trivial, doing this pr…

That's a terrible example - how much room for improvement is left for the VOO-tier sensible, simple investment vehicles that matter to normal people with their monthly 401k buys? 1/10th of a BP? 1/100th? Is Jane Street hiring to chase diminishing returns to such broadly relevant, already-efficient markets, or to cook up new market-manipulation schemes of the sort that got them kicked out of India, that are antithetical to the market integrity such firms are supposed to provide?

The notion that efficient markets require firms like Jane Street to endlessly chase extra "edges" is a false dichotomy. The world would be a better place if intelligent people made more of the concrete products and services that get priced, than if they chased butterflies to expose that price one minute earlier to concentrate ever-more ephemeral, irrelevant arbitrage opportunities into their own little house like a Maxwell's Demon of the stock market.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#85

Post by lurking_swe » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 5:00 AM UTC

infecto wrote: post #38

blitzar wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People in glass houses shouldnt throw stones. Tech is more parastic.

While a little harsh I don’t entirely disagree. Depending on your lens, very few of us here on HN are doing something valuable for society.

they are 100% correct.

Are the bright minds at Meta making the world a better place? What about OpenAI? Is the damage AirBnb has done to many communities (and housing stock) useful?

It’s debatable for sure…and hilarious coming from tech folks on this forum. Pretending we’re righteous doctors or something LOL. Give me a break.

For context i’m a software engineer that’s very grateful I don’t work in the ad, retail, or any other “dark pattern” space. But most tech jobs _are_ like that!

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#86

Post by strogonoff » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 6:23 AM UTC

infecto wrote: post #77

strogonoff wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Investors don’t just fund “good” companies Exactly what I am lamenting in my original comment. Investors chase returns, i.e. money for its sake. As long as that is conceptually a thing, it is a no-brainer to fund a bad company if you are sure its shares will go up in price during the term of your investment; it is also in your interest (and acceptable within the “money for its own sake” framework) to ensure its sha…

Returns-chasing isn’t some moral failure, it’s the mechanism by which capital gets allocated. If you strip that out, you don’t get fewer “bad” companies, you just get less disciplined pricing of risk and more capital scarcity overall. On farming: margins aren’t simply “a choice.” Prices are set in global commodity markets, not by a farmer unilaterally. Thin margins are structural, and access to capital or insurance i…

> less disciplined pricing of risk

I think it’s up to every participant’s discipline and that’s fair enough. If one sets prices in too much, another local farmer will sell more. If another local farmer undercuts on price, they’ll suffer more when times are tough and weather is bad.

> more capital scarcity

If there is a lot of capital knowingly feeding ethically problematic and/or incompetent companies due to an expectation of return (and then ensuring that return by promoting those companies), then less capital is absolutely better.

Regarding the rest of your comment, I’m not as advanced in this subject, so to me you seem to only list more issues with the system as is.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#87

Post by maxatoms » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 10:16 AM UTC

hackrmn wrote: post #3

I've not heard of Jane Street, but looking at the site, it seems they're quite the tech-savvy group for an _asset trading_ company. And reading the article, they apparently "trade" (pun intended) in quite a few different things from CSS to OCaml, which is really nice to see for a place that doesn't directly deal with software as their [business] product (or did I misunderstand their market?).

They are also a sponsor of ZuriHac (https://youtu.be/Jzh3e-I4j-w?feature=shared&t=817)

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#88

Post by infecto » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 5:48 PM UTC

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #83

infecto wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s great work, but even there you’re mostly building tools that make other engineers more efficient at building more tools. It’s not that the work lacks value it absolutely does, but it’s still part of the same recursive loop where the ultimate “benefit to society” gets pretty abstract. At the end of the chain, most of those tools are still helping businesses optimize, capture margin, or intermediate in some way.…

I am not critiquing the engineers… we are all rational agents looking at the data that we have in front of us and try to make sensible decisions about our lives. I am just blaming society in that it doesn’t seem to prioritise “good” and “useful” things.

But you replied to my post saying your job is most definitely useful and my argument is that it’s not.

I don’t disagree there are certainly things each of us on this planet think is good or useful but in my opinion that’s the problem. How do you get a collective group of different humans to agree what that is. Capitalism with all its faults solves this problem pretty nicely. It’s not perfect but as far as I know it has been the best system so far.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#89

Post by unabirra » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 9:14 PM UTC

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #26

KHRZ wrote: post #2

I was curious what kind of company needed to develop all these different kinds of advanced tech. Turns out it's just so they can be sneaky and trade shares quickly. Kind of sad IMO.

Agreed. Amongst the top 5% smartest quantitatively-minded kids I knew in college, I’d say ~25% of them ended up at quant shops like Jane Street, sometimes straight out of school, sometimes after doing a PhD. I can only imagine what good that brainpower could do for humanity if it weren’t occupied finding cleverer ways to manipulate electronic money.

Thinking that these kids would be solving meaningful societal problems if they were not working on HFT is delusional at best. To be able to tackle hard problems and make any meaningful impact you have to be very passionate about the problem that you are researching/trying-to-solve, and no amount of money is going to make this passion materialize when it's just not some of it inside you already. Now don't get me wrong I'm sure these people are really smart and I would be even willing to bet that the distribution of IQ at Jane Street is tighter than many top research labs even when the latter group produces more tech and accolades than the former; raw intelligence is not the only ingredient of world changing minds.

At the end of the day I believe that if CS/finance was not "cool" and paid the way it does (specially at the level of HFT) most of those kids currently there would go back to the good old law/medicine...

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#90

Post by dostick » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 10:21 PM UTC

techdmn wrote: post #63

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Amongst the top 5% smartest quantitatively-minded kids I knew in college, I’d say ~25% of them ended up at quant shops like Jane Street, sometimes straight out of school, sometimes after doing a PhD. I can only imagine what good that brainpower could do for humanity if it weren’t occupied finding cleverer ways to manipulate electronic money.

Apologies for a (mild) thread-jack. My opinion, one problem with our economic system is focus on short-term results, to the point that several notable companies' stock prices are completely divorced from the reality of their performance. This makes sense if the stock market is primarily a device for gambling or extracting wealth. Investors care less about the prospects of the company than the prospects of the market.…

There’s no fixing capitalism. It’s a failed system, as Marx predicted 100 years ago. But despite that for more than 100 years almost every country in the world implementing with same disastrous results.