It's really useful to have a chat app that is gatekept behind a 20k/year+ subscription. It's a particularly useful signal if someone is offering you a million+ dollar asset for sale.
I get that, was more curious if you knew how much that is used for signaling and the traffic there. I sort of expected these communities to exist in other sources (like regular SMS / Slack / private back channels etc).
I'm going to copy-paste one of the comments from ryukoposting higher up in the thread because I think it's relevant here:
> 2) Bloomberg's chat is important because, as a hedge fund or investment bank, the chat is how you buy and sell bonds. You agree to the trade in the chat, then tell the back office folks to execute the trade. Direct quote: "I'd wager 90% of the ~400 trillion in annual bond trading value happens over Bloomberg DM"
You may discuss trades via SMS or Slack; maybe you're important enough that you have a broker, and you send them your idea. But the broker at the investment bank is probably handling those trades via Blomberg terminal. That's the network effect: all the bankers are in Bloomberg chat, and it is therefore the easiest place to find who owns an asset and negotiate a trade.
Until you work in financial markets and you want to measure latency vs a bunch of other servers you don't own, all of whom pick different smears (and some of whom aren't sure in advance which smears).
Early in my career, I had to babysit our FX quoting app through the July 2015 leap second.
And some things do trade 24/7 (though I wish they wouldn't, one auction per minute during US east coast business hours would be totally sufficient for most US markets).
Assuming your labour contribution to these agents is 'minimal':
Why would you own them, instead of some well capitalized billionaire?
To the extent that you do have capital, why do you assume that your 'minimal direction and guidance' would outcompete a full time specialist working for that billionaire?
Assuming agent costs keep declining exponentially as they have over the last three years, why would everyone not own some agents? It's not like the number of agents is capped and the billionaires hoard all of them. I imagine it would be more like smartphones, where there were only 50 million smartphones after the iPhone was first released in 2007 and now there are something like three billion. They become more accessible and plentiful over time. Same thing should apply to agents.
And in this world of abundant agents, what advantage does the billionaire have exactly over the non-billionaire? Their employees are less motivated than owner-operators, and they no longer have the scale advantage that large corporations used to have. Each individual can effectively operate like a large corporation, because each individual can have their own large synthetic workforce at very low cost. The scarce resource here then becomes uniquely human insights and real motivation, which entrepreneurs are always going to have more of than employees.
I'm hoping it's likely the powerful cannot monopolize agents. If open models are easy to obtain, and every homestead has solar and large batteries, everyone can routinely charge their robots like Seven of Nine plugging into her Borg alcove. As long as they have the right to repair them, and a monopoly can't fleece you with robot maintenance!
It's basic economics; larger firms become progressively less efficient for the same reason that communist command economies are inefficient, because there's no internal price signals to guide resource allocation. So there's a natural cap on how big a firm can get (in information theoretic terms, there's a hard limit on the amount of information a centralized structure can process effectively).
I'm pretty skeptical of the market argument - reading the linked article, it seems low granularity subsidizes market makers when there are many small orders (which often get worse prices than they would otherwise) and this subsidy allows market makers to be deeper, which subsidizes large orders. Which is a difference, but not an unalloyed good.
Surely price competition is more economically valuable than the queue position game, which is measured in economically meaningless nanoseconds.
Woah, I just realized (because of this comment) that I've been grouping "technique" and "technology" as a single thing in my understanding and calling it "technology"/"tech".
For example, I would describe a method to do something in a video game as "tech" but in my mind I would expand it to "technology" if I thought about it. I didn't realize that the word "technique" would be a better fit in those contexts. Looking at Wikipedia [1], it looks like the words are pretty closely related so I haven't been using the word completely wrong.
Funnily enough, I had been doing the same thing and it hadn’t even occurred to me that my comment might cause confusion for people who aren’t familiar with speedrunning lol
If you run an interview process where candidates who take 6-8 hours and claim to have taken 4 hours score highest, those are the candidates you will hire.
All these objections rely on removing agency from the professionals applying for jobs. You look at the work sample. You use your professional judgement. You decide if it's reasonable to execute it to what you think a professional standard would be in the time allotted. You make a decision.
I think you're answering a different objection than they're making. Their concern is that people will choose to spend 8 hours on your 4 hour problem but then tell you they only spent 4. Then you'll think they're a leet hacker because their solution is so awesome and they did it so fast.
Again: I am responsive to the concern that hiring processes can demand too much of candidates, and particularly to the idea that work-sample challenges are unreasonably demanding compared to interviews. That's why hiring processes I've designed over the last 10 years have all been budgeted against the time typically allotted to an interview loop. And then, to people who say "the challenges take more time than the budget, so I'm forced to spend more time", I say "if you believe that to be the case, don't do the work sample challenge".
The rest of this I'm not interested in. For as long as we've been talking about hiring processes on HN, there have always been staunch defenders of interviews. Lots of people have spent time getting good at them, there are classes on it, there are books, there are drilling exercises. I don't anticipate talking those people out of their investment in interviewing.
> And then, to people who say "the challenges take more time than the budget, so I'm forced to spend more time"
People aren't saying that. They are saying that other candidates will put in more time. If I do a professional job in four hours, then an equally talented candidate who puts in eight hours will produce a much more polished effort, and they will get the job.
I guess the fix is to ask the candidate to pick a four hour window, and to ask them to complete the task in that time.
Again: the rubric is defined up front. You can actually lose points for doing too much.
I understand that some people are concerned that they're competing with candidates who will put in 12 hours to do what they should be doing in 4. But that's not their problem. Their problem as a professional is to evaluate whether they can do the challenge in 4 hours; that's the expectation the job is setting.
It is perfectly reasonable for someone to look at the hiring process we're running and say "no, this communicates to me that this job wouldn't be a good fit for me". That's a good outcome! Most jobs aren't a good fit for most people; that's the whole challenge of hiring.
Thanks for clearing that up. So if you employ someone who's actually really slow then I guess you just fire them?
I'm based in the UK, where firing people is harder, so this wouldn't fly. That said, I know interviews are basically useless so I would like something better.
This is capitalism working as intended. Only the best run airlines can survive, and investors are collectively subsidizing air travel for non-investors.
Nothing in the article (or in the real world) even remotely suggests that "the best" airlines survive. Simply, the airlines that survive are the ones that survive.
