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babush 13 hours ago [-]
I asked Claude to "fuzz the circuit" and, while it didn't work, it basically ended up going the Z3/SMT route and solving it in ~3 hours. This is after the writeups were already out, but still, as a software reverser, pretty wild. Writeup: https://www.babush.me/how-not-to-solve-jane-streets-asic-puz...
fragmede 13 hours ago [-]
Good read!
babush 3 hours ago [-]
thanks (:
kayson 15 hours ago [-]
The EE/IC Design part of me loves this for trying to build a community around what is typically a very opaque and secretive industry. The social justice / millenial part of me hates this for being funded by high frequency trading, of all things. What a colossal waste of resources.
bluecalm 15 hours ago [-]
>>The social justice / millenial part of me hates this for being funded by high frequency trading, of all things. What a colossal waste of resources.
It's more efficient now than it used to be - by which I mean the total taken by HFTs is lower than what people used to pay in spreads and commisions. Price discovery is better (you get closer to a fair price if you trade) and spreads are lower. The whole industry that used to prey on spreads and ignorance of retail investors is gone. What not to like about HFT?
hakfoo 9 hours ago [-]
The HFT industry creates an investment opportunity that's somewhat detached from business fundamentals. If you can trade on the volatility alone, you no longer need to pick investments based on their future prospects and behaviour.
mitxela 15 hours ago [-]
The upwards money funnel?
Maybe they're both bad?
shric 14 hours ago [-]
I work for an HFT (not Jane Street) so I am biased, but we (the HFT industry as a whole) are quite small compared to big tech.
I’d estimate the total global HFT revenue to be 100 billion dollars a year, which is less than Apple and a tiny percentage of all big tech combined.
anon-3988 11 hours ago [-]
I would love to talk more with you about HFT work :) i am working in one myself! Please email akazaa96@gmail.com if you wanna have a chat!
selestify 14 hours ago [-]
How is this any more of an upwards money funnel than the prohibitively expensive spreads and commissions that hindered lay access to the markets?
skippyboxedhero 12 hours ago [-]
what do you mean by bad? you want someone to be on the other side of every investment you make...for free? why don't you do this yourself?
bluecalm 11 hours ago [-]
There is a lot of value in markets being efficient and cheap to trade in. Someone needs to do the job. The cheaper the job is done the better.
Same goes for market making.
If someone is getting rich providing that service - great! Additional bonus is that it's usually very smart people getting the money.
vzcx 14 hours ago [-]
There is an open source silicon community built around multi-project wafer shuttles that has nothing to do with HFT.
They group dozens to hundreds of designs on one chip. The end result is that even hobbyists can afford to have their small ASIC on real silicon. It's still expensive but it's within reach of a serious enthusiast with a steady job.
this reply isn't in good faith. OP is being self critical examining contradictions of living in complex interdependent societies. why are your queries so aggressively factional?
genxy 15 hours ago [-]
There is a very vocal minority of folks that when they come across a comment that at all looks like an opponent of ancap [1], they become unhinged, even in this case where the GP was being internally reflective about their own beliefs.
The irony has most likely circled their drain (which just goes into a creek anyways).
Which is especially ironic when they bring up an example like Cuba, where at least today, you can’t really say whether the policies or de facto sanctioning it receives are at fault for the current economic state.
slopinthebag 13 hours ago [-]
they just said a planned economy where people's judgements of what is "valuable" allocate resources would not be a good idea, i dont see how that is "ancap" nor really all that wrong?
mitxela 15 hours ago [-]
> You think you could do better by having a planned economy
Nobody mentioned that crazy scenario so why bring it up?
BTW the USA is already a planned economy.
rowanG077 13 hours ago [-]
I think they mean a planned economy in the sense of the Soviet Union. The USA is not that, not even close.
kccqzy 15 hours ago [-]
I don’t think Jane Street does high frequency trading. I think you might be thinking of Citadel or HRT. Jane Street is more of an old-school quant hedge fund, no?
vzcx 14 hours ago [-]
Their bread and butter was, and as far as I know still is, trading in ETFs and ADRs. These things have a mechanism to create and redeem in exchange with underlying securities. This means one can make some money arbitraging differences between the bundle and components.
As this game got more competitive they seem to have branched out into other kinds of business including HFT.
wyre 15 hours ago [-]
The page says their hardware team builds the fastest trading systems on the planet. Jane Street does HFT.
optimiz3 13 hours ago [-]
>>The social justice / millenial part of me hates this for being funded by high frequency trading, of all things. What a colossal waste of resources.
HFT makes the market more efficient, just like the AI eliminating jobs makes business more efficient. It's been numbing watching HN gladly sacrifice it's own to the altar of AI over and over. There is no moral high ground.
Personally as a retail quant, it's really rewarding to build models that extract edge from the market using the very AI tools that have eliminated all hope of ever re-entering the tech-field absent being an entrepreneurial founder.
skippyboxedhero 12 hours ago [-]
i remember trading a us stock twenty years ago, i don't live in the us, i used a discount broker, the flat commission was something like $20+percentage of trade. this was significantly after there had apparently a massive drop in costs.
there is some kind of amnesia that exists with things that used to cost massive amounts but are now close to free. it is just not possible to explain to someone that in the recent past, most people were just unable to own stocks because of costs.
Arainach 5 hours ago [-]
HFT isn't necessary for cheap online trading. You can have bulk transactions execute once per day for very low cost and that's good enough for an efficient market. Companies spending billions to beat other bidders by milliseconds is just rent extraction with computers.
Retr0id 10 hours ago [-]
I don't know what typical HFT margins actually look like, but is there a tangible benefit to markets being 1% more efficient?
rcxdude 10 hours ago [-]
Things are a bit cheaper. It's pretty diffuse, but then so are the supposed harms they perpetrate as well. HFT is realistically a tiny part of modern finance. Huge numbers of professional traders made in total much more money doing the same job before it was automated.
affyboi 7 hours ago [-]
Yes, more liquidity is always good, and it’s a cascading effect of everyone competing to be a little more efficient than the next guy.
Arainach 5 hours ago [-]
> more liquidity is always good
Strong disagree. Liquidity at the level of milliseconds means insider trading and other information disparity is more profitable and encourages people to make rash decisions on incomplete information rather than well informed decision.
I'd love go see any information that proves that trades at the millisecond level lead to measurable improvements over, say, trades executing once per hour.
musicale 10 hours ago [-]
If the spread is 1% smaller, then someone saves 1%. Maybe.
didjdjeidjrj484 11 hours ago [-]
HFT is zero sum whereas the resources could be invested in net positives for society
jsw97 10 hours ago [-]
The core problem is that large numbers of people trade for effectively no good reason. Because of HFT, these people are now less screwed than they were previously. The "house" is competitive.
Yes, it's a profitable business for HFT. I'm not too bothered by that.
If you want to direct your ire somewhere, direct it at companies like Robinhood that are gamifying financial markets.
maest 8 hours ago [-]
> Yes, it's a profitable business for HFT
Wait till you see what the exchanges make.
Kinrany 6 hours ago [-]
No more zero sum than two parties exchanging one thing for another.
ryontikygod 14 hours ago [-]
Every time I see a Jane Street puzzle of this like I wonder in which way you can improve your problem solving skills for these things and how to extrapolate patterns from other things. I have a gut feeling that this is not only just grinding puzzles, there has to be a way to improve this. Curious if people have some insights on this
Aurornis 10 hours ago [-]
Doing more hard problems and learning how to persevere through them, even if it ends in failure.
There are some smaller strategies you can employ like doing introspection about decision processes that led you astray and learning how to avoid them. Reflect on what worked and what did not afterward. Try to recognize trigger points for both good and bad decisions then try to nudge your thinking toward or away from those decision points in the future.
The majority of it is simply doing more and persevering.
cindyllm 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
5 hours ago [-]
skippyboxedhero 12 hours ago [-]
do not give up before other people
amelius 15 hours ago [-]
Were AI models able to find the solution and easter eggs?
IshKebab 14 hours ago [-]
> The hardware team at Jane Street designs FPGAs and ASICs that run some of the fastest trading systems in the world, and the day-to-day work is full of puzzles just like this one: staring at a sea of gates, timing reports, or waveforms and slowly teasing out what’s really going on.
Although not really any more. AI is really good at debugging failing tests so I no longer have to spend hours - sometimes it was even days - staring at waves and instruction traces.
It's more efficient now than it used to be - by which I mean the total taken by HFTs is lower than what people used to pay in spreads and commisions. Price discovery is better (you get closer to a fair price if you trade) and spreads are lower. The whole industry that used to prey on spreads and ignorance of retail investors is gone. What not to like about HFT?
Maybe they're both bad?
I’d estimate the total global HFT revenue to be 100 billion dollars a year, which is less than Apple and a tiny percentage of all big tech combined.
Same goes for market making.
If someone is getting rich providing that service - great! Additional bonus is that it's usually very smart people getting the money.
They group dozens to hundreds of designs on one chip. The end result is that even hobbyists can afford to have their small ASIC on real silicon. It's still expensive but it's within reach of a serious enthusiast with a steady job.
https://app.tinytapeout.com/calculator The number of "devkits" is the number of chips you'll get, the number of tiles is the size of your design. You can see how many tiles current projects use here: https://app.tinytapeout.com/shuttles/ttsky26d
There is also a FOSSi matrix chat group: https://element.fossi-chat.org/
The irony has most likely circled their drain (which just goes into a creek anyways).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism
Nobody mentioned that crazy scenario so why bring it up?
BTW the USA is already a planned economy.
As this game got more competitive they seem to have branched out into other kinds of business including HFT.
HFT makes the market more efficient, just like the AI eliminating jobs makes business more efficient. It's been numbing watching HN gladly sacrifice it's own to the altar of AI over and over. There is no moral high ground.
Personally as a retail quant, it's really rewarding to build models that extract edge from the market using the very AI tools that have eliminated all hope of ever re-entering the tech-field absent being an entrepreneurial founder.
there is some kind of amnesia that exists with things that used to cost massive amounts but are now close to free. it is just not possible to explain to someone that in the recent past, most people were just unable to own stocks because of costs.
Strong disagree. Liquidity at the level of milliseconds means insider trading and other information disparity is more profitable and encourages people to make rash decisions on incomplete information rather than well informed decision.
I'd love go see any information that proves that trades at the millisecond level lead to measurable improvements over, say, trades executing once per hour.
Yes, it's a profitable business for HFT. I'm not too bothered by that.
If you want to direct your ire somewhere, direct it at companies like Robinhood that are gamifying financial markets.
Wait till you see what the exchanges make.
There are some smaller strategies you can employ like doing introspection about decision processes that led you astray and learning how to avoid them. Reflect on what worked and what did not afterward. Try to recognize trigger points for both good and bad decisions then try to nudge your thinking toward or away from those decision points in the future.
The majority of it is simply doing more and persevering.
Although not really any more. AI is really good at debugging failing tests so I no longer have to spend hours - sometimes it was even days - staring at waves and instruction traces.
Tbh that's one thing I won't miss.