6 ms·

Grass is always greener my friend. Many jobs in finance are updating 20 year old Java code, or figuring out new ways to load data in and out of Excel files for

• ericjmorey 2y ago
  Probably not the case at Jane Street
• udev4096 2y ago
  OP should've been more specific. HFT firms, not any other finance companies, probably have a lot more exciting work due to the nature of reducing latency using all sorts of novel techniques. I wonder if they disable all the fancy exploit mitigation protection in linux kernel just for a tiny performance hit
  • fuzztester 2y ago
    some use a fork of rust with borrow checking disabled. go fish
    • shepherdjerred 2y ago
      Isn’t borrow checking only compile time?
      • SkiFire13 2y ago
        Yes, but sometimes it forces you to write slightly slower code that can be proven safe.
        • spoiler 2y ago
          You don't need s whole compiler for that... You can use `unsafe`. Sometimes you don't even need that either!
        • andrepd 2y ago
          > forces you Definitely doesn't, you can just slap unsafe and manipulate raw pointers if that's what you want
    • francasso 2y ago
      Would they also change the aliasing assumptions to something close to C/C++? Otherwise I imagine it would be relatively easy to make mistakes and get "surprises" at runtime thanks to the optimizer.
  • n4r9 2y ago
    Mother capitalism deems that our brightest young minds best serve humanity in two tasks. Keeping the public passively scrolling, and moving money at speed to make wealthy people more wealthy.
    • udev4096 2y ago
      Absolutely. The moral aspect is certainly questionable. Although, I wouldn't say "all brightest minds" are going to neglect their moral concerns for getting rich
      • eru 2y ago
        At one point, Jane Street had a lot of the effective altruists flock to them to 'earn to give'.
        • n4r9 2y ago
          To be honest, even this is morally questionable. It makes superficial sense in that someone else will do the work if you don't. But this happening on a large scale is still a drain on talent that could hopefully be used for work of greater social value.
    • jrockway 2y ago
      There's also electronic medical records in there somewhere.
    • deepsun 2y ago
      Some fraction of young minds, not all. I was happy to work at a small aerospace company with extreme concentration of brightest minds. Only because they loved the domain, and didn't mind a salary cut. What a joy and relief it was for me after FAANG!
      • hereonout2 2y ago
        Possibly you didn't mind the salary because you'd already worked at FAANG?
  • secondcoming 2y ago
    Not HFT, but we disable those on our cloud VMs
  • deivid 2y ago
    Some jobs at HFT deal with a lot of this fun--I was doing Linux at one for 6 years. A lot of jobs are extremely mundane though, compliance, regulations, legacy code bases, etc. Yes, all mitigations get disabled
    • cduzz 2y ago
      Of course the mitigations get disabled. What's the threat model where your HFT application's running hostile / untrusted code? I'd like this stuff enabled on my desktop because I'm not sure what hideous javascript is being dumped into my browser by some advertising network. But my trading platform? If the badguys are able to execute these attacks there, it's because they've got full access already.
  • nly 2y ago
    Most of them simply bypass the Linux kernel altogether Processes reading and writing directly to FPGA/NIC ring buffers. Shunning TCP in favour of UDP based protocols that are easy to optimize for your particular usecas in userspace. Removing cores from the Linux scheduler entirely and pinning processes to those cores. This stuff isn't even novel, it's been standard practice for a couple of decades.