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According to algolia, there were 57 posts with jane street somewhere in the title or url in the last year, so a bit more than one per week. For a Poisson distribution with rate = 57/52, P(X >= 4) ~= 2.5%. So there should on average be ~5 weeks with 4 or more jane street related posts at that rate.

Probably just random fluctuation.

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I appreciate a data-focused response here! What I'm more curious about is how many of these reached the front page. My impression is that the rate of how often they reach the front page is probably a good amount lower than once a week, which I think makes the question of whether this is a coincidence or not more reasonable.
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Probably a self fulfilling prophecy.

Jane street news made it to the front page a couple times and got a lot of attention.

Now more people are recognizing the name and upvoting other Jane Street posts.

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They’re pretty techy, idk why they’re showing up recently though.

Also one of my absolute favorite programming talks ever was hosted by Jane street:

https://www.janestreet.com/tech-talks/algorithm-for-precisio...

It’s like half talk, half story. Got me super interested in logic programming, and minikanren in particular.

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I'd lean towards no on that. Might be a bit of a Baader-Meinhof thing. They've been mentioned/discussed on HN pretty regularly for years:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=jane+street

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People like to talk about Jane Street because it is this Very High IQ™ company that pays people astronomical salaries and is extremely hard to get into.

They don't have to do marketing, though. It's not like they sell anything to Hacker News readers, they make their money trading finantial assets

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They sell employment to HN, is the parent comment's point.
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You don't think that companies who want to hire engineers ever try to post stuff to Hacker News as a way to market themselves as a potential employer? Where did you get this impression of "Very High IQ" and "astronomical salaries"? I'm guessing at least part of it is from reading stuff from them or from talking to other people who read stuff from them.

The fact that you seem to adamantly disagree that there's any plausible angle here doesn't mean it's not marketing, but it might mean that it is marketing and that it's working on you.

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> you seem to adamantly disagree

Such strong wording, you got that from me saying "They don't have to do marketing"?

> where did you get this impression of [...] "astronomical salaries"?

From the real world fact that the base salary is US$300k/yr, and often said that the total compensation for the first year ends up being US$700k+. Even for Manhattan + SWE jobs, surely that merits "astronomical". Other devs making that much are usually working at Anthropic or OpenAI, aren't they?

> where did you get this impression of "Very High IQ"?

You didn't copy my ™ there, which was meant to be snarky.

In any case, what I was trying to say is that they don't have to do marketing in the usual sense. They don't have to get the Jane Street logo in your subconscious so you buy a Jane St. product when you go to Kroger's, and you can't sign a Jane St. subscription plan.

People in this thread seem to be implying that the company is botting/astroturfing, but for what? To maintain the image that they're a highly sought after employer?

Anything Paul Graham posts gets upvoted here instantly, because it's Paul Graham who posted it. For Jane Street there's the same halo effect, because many believe Jane Street's work is impressive. Is it really easier to believe the idea of botting to get an even longer list of candidates to interview, than it is to believe people just like to hear what this company has to say?

I don't ever see anyone saying Paul Graham is botting posts about his "essays"

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> Such strong wording, you got that from me saying "They don't have to do marketing"?

The only alternative interpretation I can think of for what you said is "they waste resources on marketing they don't need to do". I didn't think that was more likely to be your intended meaning, but you're welcome to correct me on it.

> From the real world fact that the base salary is US$300k/yr, and often said that the total compensation for the first year ends up being US$700k+.

Can you clarify where these numbers are coming from? Real world facts tend to have sources that can verify them.

> In any case, what I was trying to say is that they don't have to do marketing in the usual sense. They don't have to get the Jane Street logo in your subconscious so you buy a Jane St. product when you go to Kroger's, and you can't sign a Jane St. subscription plan.

> People in this thread seem to be implying that the company is botting/astroturfing, but for what? To maintain the image that they're a highly sought after employer?

Yes, that's exactly what I'm implying. I honestly would have stated it explicitly in the first place, but I made the incorrect assumption that it was not controversial to claim that this phenomenon exists at least for some companies and that it can be described as a form of marketing.

> Anything Paul Graham posts gets upvoted here instantly, because it's Paul Graham who posted it. For Jane Street there's the same halo effect, because many believe Jane Street's work is impressive. Is it really easier to believe the idea of botting to get an even longer list of candidates to interview, than it is to believe people just like to hear what this company has to say?

> I don't ever see anyone saying Paul Graham is botting posts about his "essays"

If we were discussing this on a website originally created by Jane Street, I would find this a more compelling counterargument. That said, I also don't bother trying to discuss his writing much because I mostly find it insufferable. I find the motives of Jane Street to be more interesting precisely because my opinion on them is more malleable.

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> Real world facts tend to have sources that can verify them.

Sure. What I said is a real world fact is the base salary, which can be verified by any of their job postings, e.g. www.janestreet.com/join-jane-street/position/4274288002, where it says "Base salary is $300,000. Base salary is only one part of Jane Street total compensation, which includes an annual discretionary bonus".

The claim that has less direct sources is how much the TC ends up being. The figure I said is the one I've heard multiple times over, sometimes by JS employees themselves, so I assume it to be true

> If we were discussing this on a website originally created by Jane Street, I would find this a more compelling counterargument.

That's fair, but I used Graham just as an example of source that always gets upvotes here. Uncle Bob hasn't posted anything in a while, but if he did, it'd certainly trend here, so that might be a better example

> I find the motives of Jane Street to be more interesting precisely because my opinion on them is more malleable.

Yes, that's fair. I don't think it's impossible that JS would bot/astroturf like you're implying, I just don't think it's the case. By Occam's razor I find it's more likely that people do care for what they have to say, similar to P. Graham, Uncle Bob, or any sort of blogpost from Anthropic/OpenAI, etc. It's quite possible that they got to this stage due to intentional marketing, though, so I'll give you that

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> We know this sounds vague,

ok thanks for this slop then. Dont see why this stupid article is on frontpage.

They seem to belive in 'organic' marketing like doing a fake podcasts on dwarkesh. So maybe they have some bots upvoting their name.

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