jayruy

Location: Austin, TX

Remote: Yes

Relocate: No

Technologies: Hadoop, Spark, Hive, Python, Django, Angular, Ionic

Resume: https://my.indeed.com/r/ae0b7c0b62849b95?trk.origin=myindeed

Email: jrule [at] alumni [dot] rice [dot] edu

I'm in the ibanking risk technology space, and while I've never been in your position, I'd be happy to bounce some sales ideas back and forth

my first concern would be: what do you offer over riskmetrics, that couldn't be a feature in a larger offering? most of the work in utilizing third part software is data normalization over the inputs, so you've got to have a compelling use case

e-mail me web at foobox dot com if you're interested

i agree with this explanation - what will be interesting to watch is where these coders wind up:

* hyper-secretive buy-side firms like SAC decide there's a labor opportunity, and these blogs are shut down in short order

* some PG figure emerges to steer these promising technologists into the light; i know roger ehrenberg has tried to step to the plate in this regard and what i've gathered from the sidelines is that this is easier said than done

* they compromise on building sell-side execution platforms, who would be more tolerant (more apathetic is probably closer to the mark) of blogging and we start to see a real banking technology community form

the third option is the one i'm betting on and hoping for.

I think you're saying the same thing, but I agree deathflute has stated the problem more clearly from a business perspective: the strategies do not scale, yet they need to reinvest proceeds into the business to remain competitive. the result is more technology to execute the same strategies faster, rather than mitigating risk by diversifying into new strategies. this is why people call HFT an arms race.

i tried to post this comment on your post on religion:

i get where you're coming from, but you've convinced yourself you're smarter than others and that makes you less happy, probably because other people (rightfully) view you as a dick... if i were you i'd consider giving some thought to big issues of international coordination our governments face, things like what if someone such as yourself were in control of a big red button to drop a nuclear weapon

Gold Panda, Four Tet, Baths, Toro y Moi, Caribou, Pantha du Prince - http://www.rhapsody.com/myrhapsody/playlists?playlistid=mp.1...

i consider myself more right-brain leaning than many in this field, but i still consider this nonsense. wtf does, for example, knocking about on foreign adventures have anything to do with making a great app? ok great, resourcefulness, but show me something relevant if you want $1k an hour

if he has some experience other than coding that makes him so fit, he should mention it, but this is pure bravado, and that doesn't sit well with me

Doing event-driven trading isolated in the Cayman Islands without any sort of insider connections is a recipe for failure.

There are lots of high-frequency trading shops that could put your engineering chops to work, most of the shops are small enough that I'm sure they'd be happy to offer you some form of partnership with your spare cash. HFT strategies have very definite limits on lifespan and investment cap, but tend to produce out sized returns (yes, 10x).

Most of the big shops are in Chicago. Start with Jane St: http://www.janestcapital.com/

"im so great at coding because i've spent so little of my life doing it! that makes me better, qed"

huh?

in politics relative merit is what gets things done (Hint: you can get around this by starting your own libertarian paradise on some uninhabited island, may I submit the name "jackassland" for your consideration)

although i appreciate your attempt at libertarianism, your logic is non-nonsensical: you attack regulation without offering an alternative or re-defining the problem

sure but you can't attach moral obligation or duty to a corporate entity, all you can do is regulate (and we are trying...)

to tie the two together, i don't believe regulators are paying nearly enough attention to how incentives have changed over the past 15 years and why board of directors have become powerless to common sense in this arena

Do it, I worked in HFT for a year and enjoyed it. It's a small and secretive world. People that go this route don't tend to start up "how to" blogs on HFT, and you'd likely be shunned by the community if you did.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. -Wittgenstein

From how you describe your experience of teaching yourself to not only create a working program via independent research, but also recognize it's flaws and refactor afterwards, I have no doubt you could find some level of success in the industry. Not being able to "execute on your ideas" is not that important in many micro-managed niches of the industry, which are not great gigs in the long run, but are good if you are starting out and need to develop perspective on "getting shit done". Be humble and look to learn - you'll be fine.

I'm a bit confused on the Columbia thing - if it's 5 years instead of 4 - go for it, education is the best investment you'll ever make. If it means 4 more years after undergrad: just go work, it's probably not worth getting out-of-sync with your age cohort.

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

> watch NYC launches

Is there a site to keep up with this? I'm in NYC.

Similarly for air travel: what do you use to find good deals? Sounds like you've done research.

Ridiculously techno-centric comment. You cannot replace trust with a shell script. IT has the profound ability to tell us, with amazing detail, the state of the world today. But business planning is done based on the future, and that requires trust.

Even if you are "building the future" in a startup: if you've taken funding or are drawing salary, you've convinced someone about a possible future state of the world, and that requires trust.

> 'Nature follows from the basic mathematical assumptions.'

This statement is more treacherous than you give it credit for. If we understood all those mathematical assumptions, wouldn't that be the death of free will?

One might make the statement that mathematics is the act of discovering god's laws, but godel makes even that statement treacherous because he proves god's laws can never be consistent.

my understanding of the modern philisophical take on mathematics is that it's just the invention of useful tools for manipulating logical entities, which can seem rather pedestrian to the layman - but will never deter a true mathematician

isn't the base problem one of collaborative filtering? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_filtering

seems like a fairly interesting problem to me - or am i idealizing? i suppose some developers would rather work on language/framework problems than data analysis problems...

huh? define a philosophical constraint and i'll undefine it for you... i believe the import is that it helps us come to terms with our humanity, which has no formal definition, by definition

mathematics certainly informs philosophy, the most pertinent example that comes to mind is godel on the works of wittgenstein... if you look at philosophy post godel/wittgenstein it has become continental philosophy (analytically formed 'novels') and analytic philosophy (which informs the impact of logic on natural language)...

each of these activities carries as much or as little weight as you would like to give it... but conservative thinkers might say the same of even pure sciences - are we really better off with all the devices/distractions of modern life?

i've never understood why some are so averse to ads as a business model in new media... it seems as if facebook/twitter are in a real place to sell me stuff i might actually want, which could be a great service in and of itself.

sure - the execution isn't quite there yet - but it seems we'll get there in the next 5 years? i don't work in the industry so i could be misguided - will the actuality be more akin to a bunch of spam in my twitter feed?

im talking using card counting to inform rational betting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion

Agreed. Also - surprising they mentioned blackjack - can't you turn the odds in your favor with card counting and rational betting?

Show me proper Matlab data structures, I/O libraries, and string manipulation and I might actually care about language features...

I do agree with all of these advantages of using Matlab in an environment where my data is already cleaned and normalized; I just rarely find myself in that position.

thanks - no i just like to find relevant pictures - breaks up the text and helps me think visually

I'm sorry, you must have mistaken hacker news for alt.emo

It really tickles me that he not only had the moxy to propose such a hypothesis, but attach an exact month to it.

"One possible explanation is that no one actually understands the dire state the world economy is in. Discarding that theory, let me note some observations that you will also not understand, but will at least leave you feeling self-satisfied."

I appreciate the shout-out to Frank Knight, an under-appreciated genius, but this is nonsense:

"Investment banks that in recent years regarded their own apparently precise risk assessments as trustworthy may have thought they were operating in conditions of Knightian risk, where they could judge the odds of future outcomes."

You can't get a position in risk management without understanding the limitations of the normal distribution baked into every risk calc (eg, 'fat tails'). The disconnect comes when executives ask: "so these numbers mean we can turn it up to 11?!?" and the risk managers who simply shrug and mumble under their breath are the ones who get promoted.

I'm not sure if you can solve this problem, Basel is attempting to by standardizing and publisizing risk calcs.