Three dominant threads in the discussion
| # | Theme | Key points & representative quotes |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Talent “wasted” on finance, advertising and other low‑impact sectors | “All I think when I see this is 'this intelligence wasted on finance and ads.'” – wittyusername “We don’t have any reliable and scalable way of doing this allocation, though, so it’s a bit like saying that all the resources are wasted being locked up in asteroids.” – 0x3f “The smartest people are going from Harvard et al. into finance, adtech, investment banking, wallstreet.” – KellyCriterion |
| 2 | Allegations that Jane Street is manipulating markets (Bitcoin, ETFs, etc.) | “Multiple cases of market manipulation. It’s a super shady operation.” – davedx “Jane Street has direct access to the pipe that connects the Bitcoin ETF to actual Bitcoin, and almost nobody else does.” – tasuki “They were responsible for big BTC dumps.” – kobieps |
| 3 | The technical puzzle – reverse‑engineering a neural‑net MD5 implementation | “Input → the integer weights and repeated ReLU blocks indicate a hand‑designed deterministic program rather than a trained model.” – gormen “The puzzle becomes solvable not by interpreting 2500 layers, but by repeatedly shrinking the search space until only one viable function family remains.” – gormen “Model interpretability is going to be the final frontier of software.” – bethekind |
These three threads capture the bulk of the conversation: a critique of where top talent is deployed, a specific accusation against a major trading firm, and a deep dive into a challenging reverse‑engineering puzzle.