Results from the ASIC puzzle
blog.janestreet.comThe 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.
>>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.
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.
HFT is zero sum whereas the resources could be invested in net positives for society
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.
> Yes, it's a profitable business for HFT
Wait till you see what the exchanges make.
I don't know what typical HFT margins actually look like, but is there a tangible benefit to markets being 1% more efficient?
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.
If the spread is 1% smaller, then someone saves 1%. Maybe.
>>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?
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.
The upwards money funnel?
Maybe they're both bad?
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.
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!
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?
How is this any more of an upwards money funnel than the prohibitively expensive spreads and commissions that hindered lay access to the markets?
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.
There is an open source silicon community built around multi-project wafer shuttles that has nothing to do with HFT.
Do you mind sharing them and what they do?
Presumably Tiny Tapeout. https://tinytapeout.com/
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
Yes, tiny tapeout.
There is also a FOSSi matrix chat group: https://element.fossi-chat.org/
thanks!
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?
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.
The page says their hardware team builds the fastest trading systems on the planet. Jane Street does HFT.
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...
Good read!
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
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.
do not give up before other people
Were AI models able to find the solution and easter eggs?
> 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.
Tbh that's one thing I won't miss.