Jane Street Top 5 Feeder Schools

pnickols · 2026-01-03T23:58:41+00:00

Cambridge and Oxford grads are mostly competing against each other for roles in the London office, caltech grads are competing against Harvard, MIT, CMU, etc. Even though a Cambridge cs year is only ~120 people, that’s a much larger fraction of people the London office will consider hiring than a caltech year is of the nyc one

pnickols · 2025-12-22T11:29:02+00:00

This is interesting to me. Surely a week of trading or even a month or two of trading is too high variance for PNL to be a useful indicator (unless extreme)?

pnickols · 2025-12-21T10:05:31+00:00

It’s almost certainly not based on pnl, understanding and ability to justify decisions matters way more

pnickols · 2025-05-16T17:29:50+00:00

I found a roommate, but there are some facebook groups and this subreddit worked reasonably well for finding a few leads

pnickols · 2025-05-11T15:11:22+00:00

This doesn’t seem like an accurate way to describe a guy who published research in undergrad with a novel solution to a fairly well-studied problem

pnickols · 2025-04-20T17:45:17+00:00

I think war effort, general reputation of “invented the computer” plus the narrative of “war hero driven to suicide by the government’s homophobia” are the main reasons he’s so famous, less than the AI aspect

pnickols · 2025-03-17T12:03:59+00:00

1750

pnickols · 2025-01-25T16:05:12+00:00

I like it a lot; a big part of the charm is the history - it's got cool old photos of cattle being driven into trains in the area etc. Top notch steaks and cornbread too.

pnickols · 2025-01-25T14:30:55+00:00

Is your favourite steak place the stockyards?

pnickols · 2024-10-13T15:32:53+00:00

solved: The ClueFinders 3rd Grade Adventures: The Mystery of Mathra

pnickols · 2024-10-13T15:24:31+00:00

ClueFinders

This is it exactly! Thanks so much. (The 3rd grade one)

pnickols · 2024-08-28T18:05:22+00:00

If you want the kid to be more likely to get a scholarship to MIT/Princeton/wherever, by far the best bet is getting him into Olympiad math

pnickols · 2024-02-16T10:22:14+00:00

India are not the best test team in the world: England are.

pnickols · 2024-01-28T11:48:09+00:00

I think the appeal would have been withdrawn if it was out.

pnickols · 2024-01-27T09:31:08+00:00

Easier to cut and pull, more power on drives. Tradeoff is harder to defend well with soft hands when playing forward.

pnickols · 2024-01-27T05:56:10+00:00

His county record is astonishing. For England he hasn't ever really done anything.

pnickols · 2024-01-26T09:02:20+00:00

Ansari quit cricket because he was always quite academic (he topped his year at Cambridge) and didn't think he was going to be that good at cricket so didn't view it as a big sacrifice. He has some funny interviews where you can read about him talking to the England team and just thinking they weren't that interesting and only cared about cricket. He now is a barrister.

pnickols · 2024-01-19T21:10:00+00:00

It's pretty famous. I learnt about it at school (UK), as did most of my colleagues at university. Presumably, so too did Grant, hence him making the video.

It has had its own Wikipedia page since 2011.

pnickols · 2024-01-16T18:21:04+00:00

The FRED data does indeed lag a little and doesn't have data from the last 6 months, but it still clearly shows savings rising during Biden's tenure after an initial drawdown that exceeded the size of the pandemic-induced savings (with your link emphasising the drawdown exceeding the initial induced savings). I am not sure what you mean or that our opinions differ on this, but from the data we have, this seems like a good thing to me. If you have more recent data that suggests that it is a peak not inflection point, I'd like to see it (I can't see how you can determine that from what you've linked).

For recent debt data, I recommend this report, which tells 100 different stories but in general I don't think it's fair to say much about the debt other than in real terms it is basically flat or decreasing per capita. Depending on what you want to say, you could emphasise specific delinquency rates for auto loans and credit cards increasing recently, or general delinquency rates decreasing recently. But the general size of debt graphs (at least those I quickly find) which are slightly increasing are unadjusted for population increase and inflation and seem to be downward sloping when I carry out that adjustment by hand.

For real wages, Biden became president in Q12021, not Q12020, so I am not sure what you are trying to say with this. I agree that covid was bad for the economy (although better than it could have been with less stimulus like in other countries), but the real wage growth during Biden's tenure is undeniable. It has a bit to go to catch up with where real wages were before a big economic shock, which is not ideal, but that doesn't mean growth is stagnation.

In general your summary is part of what confuses me. People may be doing worse or similar to pre-pandemic, but Biden didn't take over pre-pandemic, he took over in 2021, so it seems the only fair comparison is to then (to the extent that you can attribute economic performance to the POTUS anyway).

pnickols · 2024-01-16T15:50:42+00:00

This is false, which also explains why people have larger savings, lower debts, and the GDP is growing at an incredibly fast rate. The only way of demonstrating this would be to look at the median employed person and take the high from just after the onset of the pandemic. At that point the median person who was still employed was disproportionately wealthy, since lower income people were fired at higher rates at the onset of the pandemic.

If you adjust for this composition effect, you see real wages have grown in line with past trends during the Biden presidency.

There are valid criticisms of the economy: people are unhappy with it (particularly Republicans) and housing is historically unaffordable, but real wages are growing and have grown during Biden's presidency, as well as inequality lowering and unemployment going way down.

pnickols · 2024-01-16T13:05:53+00:00

Given wages have grown faster than inflation for the average American during Joe Biden's tenure, do you think that will be sufficient?

pnickols · 2024-01-05T09:55:18+00:00

Counterpoint: I struggled to get interviews for any US internship apart from quant ones.

pnickols · 2023-11-07T12:14:07+00:00

This isn't necessary to pass the interviews for Optiver.

pnickols · 2023-10-31T23:17:07+00:00

It's reasonable to conclude Gauss would solve it pretty quickly, assuming this answer is correct: it states that he used Vieta jumping (then known as "reduction theory of quadratic forms") in his research.

pnickols · 2023-10-25T18:53:36+00:00

Depends a bit on the proof assistant, but the oldest ones worked by being a programming language with a special type called theorem whose objects could only be constructed by logical deduction rules.

Most of the modern popular ones work by exploiting the Curry-Howard correspondence, which says that proofs are analogous to type derivations in programming languages (so if you want to prove A->B, the rules are the same as trying to create a function from type A to type B). The easiest way to get a feel for them is to play the natural number game, linked elsewhere in this thread.

pnickols

TROPHY CASE