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I posted this. I'm just a regular dev, without any kind of attachment to Jane Street, in fact i'm a little wary of them, and would subscribe to Evan Czaplicki's understanding of the faustian bargain working there would involve. I think they're banned from India, if you want an example of the kind of raiding they are equipped to do.

In general - I am wondering how engineering interviews change in the age of LLMs, Jane Street, tech-wise is a "thought leader", at least having opinions, sharing them is part of how they recruit "the best", i think oxide does this too.

So in some way, in this time of change it makes sense that they are noisy... It also makes sense that the noises they make may filter down...

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> I'm just a regular dev, without any kind of attachment to Jane Street, in fact i'm a little wary of them, and would subscribe to Evan Czaplicki's understanding of the faustian bargain working there would involve.

Mind going more into this, since you named a specific person? Did he make some prominent statement?

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Jane Street's whole business is front running and arbitrage. They make money in a way that's extremely unfair to the point a whole new stock exchange (IEX) was designed to stop it, hurts both retail and institutional investors, and provides no useful service to society.

All they've ever done for anyone but themselves is work on the OCaml ecosystem which is not exactly the biggest or most innovative.

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It's a case study here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sl1UQXgtepE I think the critique is implicit so YMMV. Just my interpretation.
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YOu're selling your soul for $ and telling yourself that you aren't extracting rents or directly harming retail investors but are just helping the market with price discovery.
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Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to imply anything nefarious on your part (or anyone else's part). It's just odd that a single financial firm keeps coming up.
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There are three Jane Street stories on the front page right now. This one, "Socratic Tutor (github.com/janestreet)", and "A false smoke alarm almost drowned Jane Street's only NYC datacenter (bacarella.com)".

What I learned over time is that first, the pool of people who regularly submit to HN is surprisingly small, so if they have interest in a particular set of topics, these topics are overrepresented in the queue; and second, relatively few people patrol new submissions and the the first 3-4 upvotes in the first 15 minutes decide if something bubbles up to the front page or not. These folks often go by keywords / vibes / employer associations, so again, certain topics get an advantage that's unrelated to the merit of the story.

More generally, I think there's been a significant drop in topic diversity on HN over the past year. Almost everything on the front page is related in some way to AI or to companies on the forefront of AI. It's almost as if there's nothing else going on in tech or in the broader world. If you go to some other aggregators, you get a different view.

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They pay a LOT of money, have some high level of “nerd” prestige for solving interesting technical problems, have good outreach with things like problem of the month, and have not been impacted by massive layoffs.

There are pretty few companies out there like this. Being relatively small probably helps; everyone knows someone that worked at Mag7 and maybe has a bad story to share, but this is more rare.

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> They pay a LOT of money, have some high level of “nerd” prestige for solving interesting technical problems, have good outreach with things like problem of the month, and have not been impacted by massive layoffs.

I never heard of them.

If not for HN, I would never know they existed.

I don't think the remark about "nerd prestige" holds, but beyond that your points boil down to marketing.

And how an unknown company changed its hiring practices is hardly front page news.

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Paying a lot of money and hard technical problems are not exactly marketing.

Like I said, they are relatively small but they are definitely not “unknown”. Out of curiosity, could you name any quantitative trading firm, or trading firms in general? You specifically may happen to just not be paying much attention to this sector.

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Your ignorance of something does not mean the thing you are ignorant of is inconsequential
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I am particularly fond of the assessment that Jane Street is a federation of anarcho-capitalist syndicates disguised as a quantitative trading firm.
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Noticing a bit too much

What is the deal with it though? Daily front page content in various forms starts to raise eyebrows.

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