Hacker News Reader

Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

They sure are productive.

What are we going to see tomorrow? DeepSeek OS or something?

To be fair they’ve been working on this since 2019 for HFT. So it’s not like they just whipped this up.

The amount of brainpower wasted on HFT games that will never see the light of day is kind of a bummer. Congrats to China.

>They sure are productive.

I have a theory as to why...

enlighten us

my theory is that their own DeepSeek writes the code for them, so they are highly productive.

That would be terrifying in itself if true because for this type of work you really need the best of the best. But I doubt this is the case here. LLMs as we know them today are not quite yet there for this type of work.

Do you, though? Need the best of the best?

As someone who did some simulation focused engineering grad school stuff; there is a tendency for some of the best to go become quants. Does the field need it? I don’t know. But for whatever reason the draw of the “print money using math tricks” seems to attract some hardcore folks, haha.

It is really frustrating to see good engineers go to play trading games. We should study how exactly it is China managed to unlock this capacity.

Government effectively banned unproductive tech (adtech, fintech etc) and told ppl to go do stuff like robotics and AI

I’m beginning to suspect this invisible hand isn’t as clever as it was made out to be.

|O|I|L|!|o o|W|A|R|!|

I think so yes. There's very few engineers that can pull out this type of work IME. In a pool of ~30M SEs around the globe I'd say there's no more than ~30K of such engineers. This is 0.001% and it's a very optimistic number I'd say.

Why do you think this would be controversial? This isn't an every day work.

I’d expect them to highlight that, rather than keep it secret. I wouldn’t be surprised if they used it a little bit, but probably not to an extent that is really unique or unusual.

lol

They wrote this in 2019, well before any useful codegen LLMs existed.

https://www.high-flyer.cn/blog/3fs/

996 work culture?

That's been illegal for three and a half years?

That's been illegal since May 1995 (before that China had six working days week).

Does it really matter whether it's illegal or not, if there is no enforcement? Pinduoduo (in other name, Temu) has been doing 70 hours week since they started. Yes, they are still doing it right now.

Sergey Brin: a 60-hour workweek is the “sweet spot” for productivity in a recent memo sent to employees.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com