Numberphile2
11 HN recommenders · recommended in 15 months, 2015–2024
1:00:43 · 1.4M views · May 13, 2015
The full-length Numberphile interview with mathematician and hedge fund founder Jim Simons. He discusses his path from mathematics and codebreaking to founding Renaissance Technologies, his use of algorithms in markets, and his philanthropy.
HN recommends it as the best readily available interview with Simons, notable for his emphasis on luck and a humble approach to success.
20 comments from Hacker News
While I'm not one to fawn after billionaires, I found his life story and personality really fascinating. He really seemed to maintain a humble approach, and in the Numberphile interview, which is excellent, he really emphasized the notion of luck in success. He donated a ton of money in very targeted ways that have been extremely successful. I think because of his humble approach, lack of self-promotion, etc., he's a bit unknown outside certain circles, but his impact in certain areas has been big. While I wish that our country didn't have to rely on billionaires spearheading initiatives, which often goes the wrong way, Simons was absolutely an example of one of the good ones. this video
RenTech is unparalleled and Medallion has proven itself for decades. This interview with Jim Simons is fantastic: this video
the full length one is very good. it gives an understanding as to why simons has been so successful. this video
It's because James Simons is a serious and actually intelligent person with depth of knowledge, and thus, he is one that doesn't need to opine on random things. He also makes a lot of money in a very secretive way. I'm not sure why anyone expects him to expound in detail on how Renaissance Technologies does it. Simons also spends more money than some governments on very serious and advanced scientific research. I suppose he's rather busy with all his investments and philanthropy. Musk is busy selling himself and filling his unfillable ego. You can see in Simons' TED interview with Chris Anderson how he gets rather annoyed with Chris at times, particularly when Chris mentions Simons' "amazing mind" at around 8:30. Simons seems, to me, to be a rather pragmatic and humble person who doesn't particularly enjoy flattery. Chris even throws out a quote by Musk at the very end of the interview, fishing for some similar platitude from Simons, but Simons deftly avoids giving out such an empty quote. [LINK] Most interestingly, you can tell Simons' like of science and mathematics and alludes to his interest when he mentions his investment into the origins of life towards the end. There are two interesting talks or interviews I know of with Simons: * Full-length Numberphile interview: this video * His lecture on his life given at MIT: [LINK] Simons actually attributes a lot of his success to luck.
You can troll through the job postings of most of these companies and learn about their org structures and tech stacks. When I looked almost nothing is public other than older documentaries. Nanex had some neat wiring diagrams and a few videos clips if you google them. Don't get too excited you're not going to learn about some super secret strategy or anything. This book was good [LINK] in that is sort of explains at a high level how you'd build a company to look at something like this (think it was one of the last chapters). You'll need extremely deep/skilled hardware/networking groups, data acquisitions (think packet capture to data) folks, people to clean and maintenance massive the data repos, internal tool teams, quantitative analysts, traders, management/admin, etc. At this level just getting the fiber to each exchange likely costs many many millions. When you go and look through those job postings you can sort of slot these into your mental model of this flow and start to see how it might be put together. That book is good but if you are new to the topic it will be almost unreadable. At least it was for me. I had to read it 3-4 times over the years and still find new things as my knowledge grows. I don't know if rentec is a HFT firm or what strategies they use but this was a really good interview with one of the founders this video .