[4gotunameagain]

So many manhours spent on finding better ways to shovel around money and pocket what falls from the cracks.

What a wasteful and unproductive enterprise, considering the vast majority of the devised improvements never see the public eye.

Still, impressive work. Imagine if those brilliant minds behind this were focused somewhere else.

[posnet]

The greatest minds of our generation spend their time thinking about how to:

- make people click on ads

- make trading algos faster

- replace human artists

- build more efficient killing machines

- destroy any remaining concept of privacy

[geodel]

Greatest mind of previous generation made nuclear bombs and other deadly things.

[astrange]

Aren't the greatest mind(s) of our generation writing Terry Tao's blog posts?

[vladms]

This directly implies that all the people that did useful stuff (improving cancer survivability, new vaccines, renewable energy, and others) are all "below" the "greatest minds of our generation".

Not to mention it also suggests there is a way to "compare" minds. I would not choose myself to do somethings, but that does not mean I despise automatically people choosing to.

[geodel]

I think they meant greatest minds have to be greatest money earners also. Else they are not greatest minds.

[4gotunameagain]

Hey, at least we had one of them working on TempleOS.

[toast0]

It doesn't seem wasteful and unproductive, given that the result of the HFT industry is smaller bid/ask spreads (lowering costs for all trades) and payment for order flow which is the mechanism that eliminated retail commissions and provides price improvement on many retail trades. And even so, HFT firms are making money.

It might not seem like real work, but making money by reducing costs of market participants sounds like a good thing. I admit though, block trades might be harder now than before the rise of HFT.

If you could do warehousing/distributing/coordinating fresh foods in a way that reduced the difference in price between the farmer and the consumer and make money doing it, that would clearly be good work.

[appendix-rock]

What do you work on?

[4gotunameagain]

Public funded, public benefiting space missions.

[almostgotcaught]

I'll never be able to figure out what people get from repeating the same thing over and over. I've seen this same exact comment 1000 times on hn and I'm 100% sure you have too (indeed I believe the reason you repeat is because you've seen it and agree with it).

[XorNot]

It's virtue signalling.