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Comment by rebelos | Hacker News Reader

Some of this is unforgivable, but reflecting on it I also realized that software engineering at quant firms has an almost impossible mandate. You want something akin to the extreme rigor of mission critical software (airplanes, cars, NASA, etc), while also remaining nimble enough to modify strategies as market conditions rapidly evolve.

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Same is true for blockchain smartcontracts, which have similar catastrophic consequences.

That truly is scary to me. I can easily* write advanced Solidity and could try to make something big. But I won't, because I know I would not be able to handle the stress and responsibility. One tiny logic error and millions lost. Thanks but no thanks.

*The fact I believe I could easily do it is probably exactly why I'd end up making some huge mistake. ;)

I’m sure that any big contracts are written only by CMM Level 5 organizations using formal methods and provably correct with certification that less than 1 line in a million contains an error. It’s all spelled out in the SOW attached to the RFP.

I don't think I could, since the language was designed by amateurs after no research into safe programming, and is only being improved one gigantic loss at a time.

Maybe if you could translate from Coq.

It is challenging, although, with financial markets, it seems like it would be simpler to have some automatic anomaly detection mechanism to unplug or slow things down to prevent further damage.

There are a lot of preventative measures they could have taken, starting with just not leaving in dead code and paying attention to automated alerting. But the moral of the story is that they got away with it for so long that nobody cared about it anymore. After all, if it were truly a big deal why hadn't it broken years earlier. Then when the technical debt finally got called it bankrupted the entire firm in one go.

Most of us (hopefully) have less devastating technical debt to deal with, but it is still a cautionary tale about what could happen if you ignore it for too long.

That's a weird statement.

The extreme rigor on the one hand seems to require a value judgement of the real benefits to HTF that I'm not willing to make. The remaining nimble'ity, on the other hand, is an odd word to use over agility or old fashioned responsibility. The benefit is proportional to it, but not exclusively.

The rapidly evolving market conditions concern regular trade too. Swift reactions are expected in any other systems application. "almost impossible" is a weasel word. It's almost impossible to win except for the last man standing, is that it? And there's no practical upper limit to nimble'y, though conservative estimates indicate that less work is more.

What's missing is the perverse incentives, corrupt policies, sociopathic leadership, ...

Why unforgivable? It's only numbers in an account. No one died.

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