Top all-time · #268
Jane Street Blog
Company blog · blog.janestreet.comprogrammingsystems
Jane Street Blog is the company blog at blog.janestreet.com, writing about programming and systems. Since 2017, 183 different Hacker News readers have linked it 267 times, most often “Effective ML Revisited”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-13, and you can follow it by feed.
Jane Street Blog Homepage
Most-linked posts?
- Effective ML Revisited9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2017-12-26
- /7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2017-09-02
- Putting the I back in IDE6 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2018-03-28
- Commas in big numbers everywhere: An OpenType adventure6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-10-25
- Formal Methods and the Future of Programming6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2026-06-11
- What is gained and lost with 63-bit integers? (2014)6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2017-09-29
- What if writing tests was a joyful experience? (2023)6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-01-11
- Jane Street Tech Blog – Oxidizing OCaml: Locality5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-05-26
- Deep-Learning the Hardest Go Problem in the World5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-04-06
- Magic-trace: Diagnose tricky performance issues with Intel Processor Trace5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-01-27
What Hacker News says?
https://blog.janestreet.com/the-perils-of-polymorphic-compar...
Comment linking /the-perils-of-polymorphic-compare/
on “Go 2 Draft Designs”Submitted A better build system for OCaml as a story · 355 points
HN discussionHi HN! I'm Clark, one of the maintainers of magic-trace. magic-trace was submitted before, our first announcement was this blog post: https://blog.janestreet.com/magic-trace/ . Since then, we've worked hard at making magic-trace more accessible to outside users. We've heard stories of people thinking this was cool before but being unable to even find a download link. I'm posting this here because we just released "v…
Comment linking /magic-trace/
on “Magic-trace – High-resolution traces of what a process is doing”Submitted Putting the I back in IDE as a story · 297 points
HN discussionI opened this document expecting to have my mind expanded by learning about amazing new techniques for high-level software engineering. I was disappointed. A lot of it just seems to be about release engineering. Yeah, sure, release engineering is really hard and important for a company like Google, but it's of limited general interest. I was particularly disappointed by Google's indifference to the use of smarter la…
Comment linking /testing-with-expectations/
on “Software Engineering at Google (2017)”Submitted Plans for OCaml 4.08 as a story · 246 points
HN discussionYaron Minksy is probably too busy. But the tech blog is really good too. https://blog.janestreet.com/
Comment linking /
on “Understanding Jane Street”Submitted What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition as a story · 236 points
HN discussionThanks! Just played through fontemon now (I think, the final battle is unbeatable right? I think I tried every move combo). Had a bit of trouble getting it to work in system programs, but on your site it worked just fine (in libreoffice it would just repeat the intro if I changed the font size, and gimp would shift things up and down depending on the highest pixel in the frame). Overall, awesome stuff :D Ever since…
Comment linking /commas-in-big-numbers-everywhere/
on “Show HN: Video Game in a Font”Submitted A Higgs-Bugson in the Linux Kernel as a story · 232 points
HN discussion> Submissions close on September 4th, 2026. https://blog.janestreet.com/can-you-reverse-engineer-an-asic...
Comment linking /can-you-reverse-engineer-an-asic/
on “Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge”Submitted Deep learning experiments in OCaml as a story · 218 points
HN discussionHi HN, I recently solved the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge [0], and I wrote a blog post on how I reached the answer. It's a moderately technical and (hopefully) entertaining run through of the process. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed doing the challenge (though, as you'll read, it was also quite a frustrating process). My github is on the post if you were interested in seeing a bit more…
Comment linking /can-you-reverse-engineer-an-asic/
on “Solving the Jane Street reverse engineering challenge”Submitted What the interns have wrought, 2018 edition as a story · 190 points
HN discussionOpenType font shaping is shockingly powerful ([e.g.]( https://blog.janestreet.com/commas-in-big-numbers-everywhere... ), so I'd be surprised if someone hasn't made a Roman numeral font already.
Comment linking /commas-in-big-numbers-everywhere/)
on “A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness”Submitted Can you use autoregressive diffusion to generate market data? as a story · 186 points
HN discussionFully agreed with your overall position, but I got a small correction in regards to what you said about fintech. While you are correct in that at a lot of finance companies, devs just act as "support for the real business" (e.g., Goldman Sachs). But there are others where devs and quants pretty much harmoniously run the show. Look at something like Jane Street and their tech blog[0]. Their annual "what our interns h…
Comment linking /
on “The other kind of staff software engineer”Submitted Commas in big numbers everywhere: An OpenType adventure as a story · 186 points
HN discussionI think he currently works at Jane Street https://blog.janestreet.com/author/jsomers/
Comment linking /author/jsomers/
on “I reverse engineered Google Docs to play back any document's keystrokes (2014)”Submitted Magic-trace: Diagnose tricky performance issues with Intel Processor Trace as a story · 170 points
HN discussionThere's no ownership concept, but in the JaneStreet fork, there is something resembling lifetimes[1]. [1]: https://blog.janestreet.com/oxidizing-ocaml-locality/
Comment linking /oxidizing-ocaml-locality/
on “Dada, an experimental new programming language”Submitted Using Python and OCaml in the same Jupyter notebook as a story · 165 points
HN discussionMaybe https://blog.janestreet.com/commas-in-big-numbers-everywhere... ?
Comment linking /commas-in-big-numbers-everywhere/
on “Show HN: I wrote a book about UI [pdf]”Submitted L2 Regularization and Batch Norm as a story · 159 points
HN discussionThere's a similar situation with Go where some positions utterly confuse bots trained on playing mostly normal games. There was this interesting research blog post on training a bot specifically to become good at solving one of these weird problems (Igo Hatsuyoron 120, the "hardest go problem ever") https://blog.janestreet.com/deep-learning-the-hardest-go-pro...
Comment linking /deep-learning-the-hardest-go-problem-in-the-world/
on “Positions chess engines don't understand”Submitted Results from the ASIC puzzle as a story · 99 points
HN discussionI think the original formulation is "make illegal states unrepresentable" from Yaron Minsky: https://blog.janestreet.com/effective-ml/ and https://blog.janestreet.com/effective-ml-revisited/ (or maybe there are older sources than 2010?)
Comment linking /effective-ml-revisited/
on “Parse, Don't Validate (2019)”Submitted What the interns have wrought, 2021 edition as a story · 95 points
HN discussionJane Street has a good one at https://blog.janestreet.com/ https://www.redblobgames.com/ is not strictly speaking a blog, but an interested collection of articles on algorithmic concepts you might want to know for writing games.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What are the best engineering blogs with real-world depth?”Submitted How to Build an Exchange (2017) [video] as a story · 91 points
HN discussion
