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Results from the ASIC puzzle

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kayson · 1791142152 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. TacticalCoder · 1791142988 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
  1. salvesefu · 1791143252 · focus · HN ↗
    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 · 1791144150 · focus · HN ↗
    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).
    [1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism
    msdz · 1791144743 · focus · HN ↗
    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 · 1791151937 · focus · HN ↗
    they just said a planned economy where people's judgements of what is "valuable" would not be a good idea, i dont see how that is "ancap" nor really all that wrong?
  2. mitxela · 1791145191 · focus · HN ↗
    > You think you could do better by having a planned economy
    "Oh you think you could do better in the middle of Chernobyl reactor 4 transported to the surface of the moon?"
    nobody said that.
    btw we already have a planned economy.
    rowanG077 · 1791150364 · focus · HN ↗
    I think they mean a planned economy in the sense of the Soviet Union. The USA is not that, not even close.
2. bluecalm · 1791143128 · focus · HN ↗
  >>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?
  1. mitxela · 1791145127 · focus · HN ↗
    The upwards money funnel?
    Maybe they're both bad?
    selestify · 1791145871 · focus · HN ↗
    How is this any more of an upwards money funnel than the prohibitively expensive spreads and commissions that hindered lay access to the markets?
    shric · 1791148715 · focus · HN ↗
    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 · 1791156723 · focus · HN ↗
    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!
    skippyboxedhero · 1791153707 · focus · HN ↗
    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 · 1791156911 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
  2. hakfoo · 1791166005 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
3. kccqzy · 1791143741 · focus · HN ↗
  [delayed]
  1. wyre · 1791144165 · focus · HN ↗
    The page says their hardware team builds the fastest trading systems on the planet. Jane Street does HFT.
  2. vzcx · 1791146137 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
4. vzcx · 1791146332 · focus · HN ↗
  There is an open source silicon community built around multi-project wafer shuttles that has nothing to do with HFT.
  1. tolugenius · 1791147429 · focus · HN ↗
    Do you mind sharing them and what they do?
    tredre3 · 1791149787 · focus · HN ↗
    Presumably Tiny Tapeout. <a href="https://tinytapeout.com/" rel="nofollow">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.
    <a href="https://app.tinytapeout.com/calculator?tiles=10&pcbs=1&shuttle=ihp" rel="nofollow">https://app.tinytapeout.com/calculator?tiles=10&pcbs=1&shutt... 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: <a href="https://app.tinytapeout.com/shuttles/ttsky26d" rel="nofollow">https://app.tinytapeout.com/shuttles/ttsky26d
    vzcx · 1791156494 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, tiny tapeout.
    There is also a FOSSi matrix chat group: <a href="https://element.fossi-chat.org/" rel="nofollow">https://element.fossi-chat.org/
    tolugenius · 1791159318 · focus · HN ↗
    thanks!
5. optimiz3 · 1791150519 · focus · HN ↗
  >>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.
  1. skippyboxedhero · 1791153907 · focus · HN ↗
    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 · 1791180244 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
  2. didjdjeidjrj484 · 1791158891 · focus · HN ↗
    HFT is zero sum whereas the resources could be invested in net positives for society
    jsw97 · 1791160695 · focus · HN ↗
    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 · 1791167856 · focus · HN ↗
    > Yes, it's a profitable business for HFT
    Wait till you see what the exchanges make.
    Kinrany · 1791175647 · focus · HN ↗
    No more zero sum than two parties exchanging one thing for another.
  3. Retr0id · 1791160749 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't know what typical HFT margins actually look like, but is there a tangible benefit to markets being 1% more efficient?
    musicale · 1791161333 · focus · HN ↗
    Not really to humans.
    rcxdude · 1791161740 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    affyboi · 1791172392 · focus · HN ↗
    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 · 1791180325 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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.
6. doctorpangloss · 1791179649 · focus · HN ↗
  this is meant to be a funny and stylized comment. if you can't read to the end, copy and paste it into a chatbot and ask it what I am saying.
  there were always two possibilities about why math/STEM stuff was important to these people like Jane Street or whatever:
  - they sincerely need to apply theoretical math to, i don't know, better exploit trading rules.
  - this stuff was always a shibboleth to select for a certain kind of person.
  Okay, what kind of person? it helps to be that kind of neurodivergent, because it's easier to be unethical if it furthers your special interest. like yeah, obviously it's a huge waste of resources and time, and if you just erased the total output of Jane Street, Two Sigma, Citadel, whatever, literally nothing of value would be lost.
  the sad thing is, do we need any of this? like what does this say about "puzzle solving?" puzzle solving has nothing to do with problem solving. why do we call it problem solving? all of our problems are political. nobody at Jane Street solves any problems whatsoever, they only seem to create them!
amelius · 1791144725 · focus · HN ↗
Were AI models able to find the solution and easter eggs?
ryontikygod · 1791148433 · focus · HN ↗
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
1. skippyboxedhero · 1791153977 · focus · HN ↗
  do not give up before other people
2. Aurornis · 1791160352 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. cindyllm · 1791170088 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
3. doctorpangloss · 1791179037 · focus · HN ↗
  it doesn't solve any problems though. why is it called problem solving skills? all of your real problems are due to relationships and politics. if anything math gets in the way.
IshKebab · 1791148532 · focus · HN ↗
> 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.
derin-picment · 1791151038 · focus · HN ↗
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babush · 1791151196 · focus · HN ↗
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: <a href="https://www.babush.me/how-not-to-solve-jane-streets-asic-puzzle.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.babush.me/how-not-to-solve-jane-streets-asic-puz...
1. fragmede · 1791152488 · focus · HN ↗
  Good read!

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