[HN Gopher] Jane Street's Figgie card game
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Jane Street's Figgie card game
Author : eamag
Score : 349 points
Date : 2025-02-15 09:59 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.figgie.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.figgie.com)
| ewuhic wrote:
| Upvote to comments ratio: nobody knows how to play, hadn't even
| heard before, but it has "nerdy corpo" attached to it, so must be
| good.
| tabarnacle wrote:
| Projection?
| mistercheph wrote:
| What exactly is being projected, and from where onto what?
| colesantiago wrote:
| > Upvote to comments ratio: nobody knows how to play, hadn't
| even heard before, but it has "nerdy corpo" attached to it, so
| must be good.
|
| Correct, it's the first trap us nerds make when corpos make
| "puzzles" to rope in future engineers to make lose their soul
| in immoral challenges like finance.
|
| When the FAANG jobs boom fizzles over due to the shift to AI,
| we will see more engineers compromise to finance as a way to
| make FAANG level salaries.
|
| We just don't like to admit it, instead we like nerd games like
| this.
|
| This is the finance recruitment marketing machine to entice
| future engineers to lose their soul to make obscene amounts of
| money doing the most morally bankrupt actions against humanity.
| yeeetz wrote:
| hows quantitative finance more morally bankrupt than being an
| engineer in oil/gas, defense industry, etc.
| LPisGood wrote:
| Or data harvesting, or making games with addictive micro
| transactions, or...most industries.
| colesantiago wrote:
| Most industries don't make billions of dollars betting on
| the demise of other industries and also not giving
| anything back to society.
|
| Traders, private equity, hedge funds fall in this bucket.
| LPisGood wrote:
| The blog post linked in the top comment itself is very well
| written though. I had assumed poker was a good game to teach
| traders to play and the counterpoints were insightful.
| vessenes wrote:
| Love this. I'd really like to play with real cards, but the
| uneven suit setup makes that tough as a party game unless the
| host sits out. I guess you could prepare a bunch of decks ahead
| of time. At 4 minutes a round you'd need maybe 10 decks for an
| hour of playing though. To even it out I guess you'd have 12? But
| that means you'd have more info about what's likely in later
| rounds..
|
| Hmm. Maybe I can nerd snipe some into making a deck sorter..
| notpushkin wrote:
| Sort the deck ino 4 stacks by suit, have somebody else remove
| the cards without looking at the suits, shuffle stacks back
| into a deck.
| vessenes wrote:
| Yes. I think you'd want half the players to watch the stack
| placement and half the removal and rearrangement. Lots of
| incentive to peek.
| The_Blade wrote:
| I get that Diplomacy feeling where if you pull off
| cheating, good, it's part of the game. Like insider
| trading, or when I'd play the banker in monopoly and
| sleight-of-hand. Ledgerdemain, if you will
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Person 1 enters the room, makes a bunch of decks and puts them
| in boxes. Leaves the room.
|
| Person 2 enters the room, shuffles the boxes, leaves the room.
|
| Person 1 re-enters the room and picks a box.
| lightbendover wrote:
| Person 1 made every deck exactly the same way though.
|
| I guess Person 2 could run some simple validations of what
| Person 1 initially did.
|
| Then again, Person 2 could have also replaced all of Person
| 1s decks with their own.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Person 1 would make exactly one of each possibility.
| They're just deciding which cards go in which pile/box.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| make a bunch of decks from identical standard decks (all blue
| or all red) and then just mix up the boxes?
| linsomniac wrote:
| Maybe you could just shuffle a full deck and then peel off 12
| cards. Probably better simulates the stock market, there's a
| good chance somebody is going to get totally screwed (the case
| where the top of the deck is predominantly one suit). I
| wouldn't want to play for money that way, but playing for fake
| money maybe?
| lewiscarson wrote:
| There is a fantastic blog post by Ross Rheingans-Yoo about the
| shortcomings of poker as a tool to teach trading and why Figgie
| is a better one. https://blog.rossry.net/figgie/
|
| He also wrote an equally brilliant eulogy about Max Chiswick, one
| of his colleagues, who helped him develop it.
| https://blog.rossry.net/chisness/
| matt_daemon wrote:
| Wow, that's sad about Max Chiswick.
|
| I was reading about him and his peculiar approach to eating
| only a couple of months ago.
|
| May his work on poker live on.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| His peculiar approach to eating??? Wow I need to hear about
| this. I'll Google, but do you have any recommended articles?
| sebg wrote:
| https://chisness.substack.com/p/automate-the-food
| oidar wrote:
| Very sad. Max wrote about optimizing nutrition and cited
| a satire piece about over-optimization ruining someone's
| life. Then, ironically, he died from malaria while
| traveling--despite having donated to malaria prevention.
| Life defies our attempts to control it.
| lovich wrote:
| Is this satire or was he a conspiracy theorist? It didn't
| take very long into the article before he started talking
| about "seed oil infiltration".
|
| My eyes rolled into the back of my head and I was unable
| to continue reading any more of the article after that
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| My impression is that he's sincere, but that his writing
| is lighthearted and does "overplay" things for humorous
| effect. That said, I do think he's opposed to seed oil.
| Not having looked into it much, I can't judge whether
| he's crazy or not. But even if he's wrong, who among us
| _doesn't_ have some conspiracy-ish views? I'll go first:
| I think fruit juice and milk are not "health foods", and
| more comparable to soda. We've been duped by Big Milk.
| xrd wrote:
| My god that eulogy post is a work of art. What incredible
| writing and what an incredible albeit brief friendship they
| had.
| xrd wrote:
| I downloaded the app to try it. It's interesting, appears that
| you can join a game with other players? I see two tabs: "4
| starting" and "12 active" But clicking on these had no effect
| until suddenly the overflow broke rendering.
|
| I am fascinated by this app mostly because it has a recruiting
| message at the bottom from Jane Street. I've never seen that
| before.
|
| But, it's also interesting because it is one of the more poorly
| designed apps I've seen. It's react native when you check out the
| logs using adb. I bet this was a side project from a Jane Street
| employee. They did their best.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| Given that Jane Street's prowess is in OCaml, I'm more inclined
| to give them grace when trying to release a React Native app.
| RN is one of those languages/frameworks that is both very easy
| to get into and also incredibly difficult to make a polished
| app.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| RN barely works even if you're an experienced JS dev.
|
| Something is just messed up with it, maybe it's fixed now but
| 2 weeks ago I tried to build an Expo app and the default
| template just doesn't build on android. Known issue on
| GitHub.
|
| Everything is jerryrigged together. Flutter is what RN should
| of been, but Google doesn't seem to really care about it. Why
| one company needs multi cross platform frameworks, with
| multiple languages... I'll never know.
| xrd wrote:
| I agree about RN.
|
| But not about flutter. I just used aider to code a brand
| new flutter app from scratch. It has Google login. And a
| webview on a second screen. It looks gorgeous and is
| performant. And deploying it to my android device from
| within the aider session worked flawlessly.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/01/google-lays-off-staff-
| from...
|
| Google did a major cut to its flutter team last year.
| It's a great framework, I've used it for several
| projects. But I doubt it's future...
| xrd wrote:
| Ok, I'm glad you mentioned that you have used it in the
| past. I have not, have only done RN and plain Android
| using java and kotlin. Your comments are spot on. Thank
| you.
| HelloNurse wrote:
| React Native is easy to be tempted into using. It's clever
| in all the wrong ways, from opaquely ad hoc code
| transformations to a perennial flux of unfinished
| transitions between old and new designs for the same
| things; it's popular and from Facebook; it does its job
| well enough to convince many developers that malfunctions,
| bugs and general misery are either an accident or their
| fault, they just need to hack a little.
| pjmlp wrote:
| From the screenshots this is the kind of stuff that could have
| been a Web game.
| infecto wrote:
| Define web game? I played it in my browser.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I missed that, thought it was apps only.
| infecto wrote:
| Interesting, works fine for me on both mobile and web. I am
| sure there are bugs in it but of the few games I played it
| worked fine though I imagine live is a much better experience
| when it comes to live bidding.
|
| But overall this is a fairly common recruiting tool for firms
| like this, Jane Street is a definite outlier in how proactive
| they are but its not out of the norm for these this type of top
| tier org.
| dmurray wrote:
| This game seems like it shouldn't work playing one-off games with
| no money on the line. How do you win in that context - by ending
| up with the most money at the end of the game? That would change
| the gameplay very significantly - a strategy that has you end
| with $1000 one time in three and 0 the rest should be favoured
| over one where you end up with $300 every time.
|
| Poker solves this with poker tournaments: everyone starts with
| say $10,000 in play money and plays until one player wins it all.
| Backgammon solves it with match play: two players play first to
| say 7 points. In both cases, additional complexity is introduced
| to the game as optimal strategy changes depending on the size of
| the bets relative to the players' stacks or the number of points
| remaining.
|
| Backgammon is just about playable as a one-off without a cube,
| though not by serious players. A single hand of poker without
| wagering makes no sense at all. Figgie seems closer to poker than
| backgammon, based on my reading. But it's being presented as a
| game to play one-off with bots or strangers. What am I missing?
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| It's Jane Street. If two people haven't played this game for
| $10,000, I would be very surprised.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Their version of Liar's Poker.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| I would bet that at Jane Street they absolutely do put money on
| the line when playing internally.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _A single hand of poker without wagering makes no sense at
| all._
|
| There are a lot of variations of poker. Playing single hands
| of, for example, five card draw makes sense without wagering.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| That's true, but it's not very fun. A series of hands in
| which you determine how heavily to invest allows strategy to
| control for randomness. A single-hand five-card-draw showdown
| is a single decision about which cards to replace, and is
| largely determined by the shuffle, and the single bit of
| strategy "how many cards did the people before me ask for".
| thehappyfellow wrote:
| You should play a lot of hands, or organise a tournament, for
| Figgie to really make sense. It's fun but I prefer to play in
| person.
| LPisGood wrote:
| How do you play in person? Are the cards for sale somewhere?
| thehappyfellow wrote:
| Just a normal deck is fine, you have to prepare it but it's
| not a big deal.
| LPisGood wrote:
| I think that is kind of a big deal. You either need to
| prepare many identical decks in advance or come up with
| an elaborate selection procedure you repeat every 4
| minutes.
| nsarafa wrote:
| Why not use your own characters or companies to trade?
|
| Would be way more fun having some mascots to trade instead of
| common cards
| gruez wrote:
| The game mechanics require 2 colors that each contain 2 suits.
| Playing cards fits this requirement, are widely available, and
| importantly everyone knows what the suits/colors are. The same
| isn't true if you used random companies or game characters.
| infecto wrote:
| Which is a good message that this type of role / career is not
| good for you. The excitement is in the winning, does not matter
| what is being traded as long as you win.
| hcnews wrote:
| lol hyperbole much.
| infecto wrote:
| What's the hyperbole? This is partly a recruiting tool. If
| you think the game is not exciting then this is probably
| not the career for you. Do you have something more
| substantive than a weak attack?
| nsarafa wrote:
| The whole choosing games thing is strange.
|
| Give me one button and throw me into a live game.
|
| Or let me practice against bots before going live.
|
| Also the notice that my username was taken wasn't clear (was in
| white) so i thought the app didn't work until i learned my
| username was already taken by scrolling up and seeing the notice
| that didn't stand out
| programjames wrote:
| I think it's because there's usually only a couple players at
| any given time, so live matching would never fill.
| AttakBanana wrote:
| I've enjoyed playing this.
|
| The basic strategy that works for me:
|
| 1. If I have an obvious skew in the distribution of cards I've
| been dealt, I can assume the common suit and hence the goal suit
| and try to buy the cards of that suit.
|
| 2. If the distribution of cards I have is more or less even, then
| I just save that round and try to make back the base cost.
|
| The hard part has been trying to understand how to update my
| beliefs based on the trades being made. If you assume everyone is
| making the rational choice, you might be able to come up with
| some strategy, but if its against humans who might be trying to
| bluff, I have no idea. Although, they say its a win-win game, so
| maybe theres a way there too.
| EvgeniyZh wrote:
| A better strategy would be to estimate card value based on your
| starting hand (i.e., probability that each suit is goal suit).
| It requires some non-trivial combinatorics but I guess if you
| take the game seriously you just memorize those once. Then you
| buy cards if the price are lower than your estimate and sell if
| it is higher. You also should pay a somewhat more for the card
| that gives you majority (4th/5th).
|
| The updates are in this case, at least assuming others are
| doing something similar, is to increase expected price if you
| see sell for higher price and reduce if you see the sell for
| lower price. To figure out how much to update would be the hard
| part.
| lordnacho wrote:
| This reminds me of how I got my first job in trading.
|
| They had all the candidates going around doing various gimmicks
| like mental arithmetic. But one of the things we had to do was a
| trading game where you had to get a set of some commodity by
| trading your cards with other candidates. So just a screaming pit
| of kids trying to declare what they wanted to swap for.
|
| I got dealt a ridiculously good hand, and all I had to do was
| wait for a couple of people to give me the missing two or three
| cards.
|
| Once I started, poker was the game the bosses had us play. It
| seemed like a 10 quid subsidy from the head trader every day, I
| just had to wait around until he decided he'd played enough and
| went all in on what was always a crappy hand.
|
| That essay about why poker probably isn't the best game for
| traders is pretty good btw. But there was a golden age of online
| poker going on at the time, and you could sit there with 5 tables
| open if you wanted.
|
| I like the design of the game, having looked at it superficially.
| It's basically a market for cards, with what seems like a goal
| for collecting the right suit.
| kqr wrote:
| > But one of the things we had to do was a trading game where
| you had to get a set of some commodity by trading your cards
| with other candidates. So just a screaming pit of kids trying
| to declare what they wanted to swap for.
|
| This is _Pit_ , right? I remember it from an Aaron Brown book.
| Always wanted to try it!
|
| https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/140/pit
| lordnacho wrote:
| Yeah something like that. There wasn't time to explain
| anything complicated, just the basic "swap one card at a time
| with whoever, let me know when you have a set"
| colesantiago wrote:
| While this is a fun intellectually stimulating nerd toy for
| engineers, trading just doesn't make sense to me.
|
| Making massive sums of money from bad policies of governments,
| shorting companies or even entire countries and making money from
| wars by shorting and longing commodities is a repugnant way of
| making money and is immoral.
|
| This is no better than crypto trading and gambling.
| arduanika wrote:
| > trading just doesn't make sense to me
|
| Skill issue. Let me if I can help. Look up "price discovery"
| and try to understand how it's a service to the world.
|
| > bad policies of governments... wars...
|
| What's wrong with helping the markets react calmly and
| accurately to these events? Is a surgeon evil for treating a
| tumor, or a farmer for addressing your hunger?
|
| > This is no better than crypto trading and gambling
|
| Crypto is subject to much debate, but gambling does nothing to
| help with efficient markets, liquidity, or capital formation.
| It's strictly worse than trading actual assets.
| colesantiago wrote:
| > What's wrong with helping the markets react calmly and
| accurately to these events? Is a surgeon evil for treating a
| tumor, or a farmer for addressing your hunger?
|
| Great Strawman. A surgeon is more morally good than a trader
| or hedge fund waiting to short companies to profit from their
| demise, or it's cousin the private equity industry buying up
| shares to take over companies and laying people off to make a
| profit.
|
| You seem to have already forgotten it was these people that
| caused the 2008 crash with scandals (Look up the LIBOR
| scandal to remind you) not surgeons or farmers.
|
| > Crypto is subject to much debate, but gambling does nothing
| to help with efficient markets, liquidity, or capital
| formation. It's strictly worse than trading actual assets.
|
| I don't think that SPACs, GameStop and other hundreds of
| unprofitable companies IPOing in the 2010s to 2022s were
| efficient markets and lots of traders made billions out of
| them.
|
| A doctor or farmer as you describe have far more morals than
| these people, as traders and the finance industry make
| obscene amounts of money while doing this from their desks
| doing virtually nothing and contributing nothing to the
| industries and especially society.
|
| Wall Street has invaded tech and the reverse is happening
| already because the FAANG boom is now over.
| arduanika wrote:
| You're still missing the point, by a long shot.
|
| You get a tumor, a surgeon removes it.
|
| The economy gets a shock, a trader helps the market absorb
| it.
|
| Lots of other confusion here, but I don't really care to go
| point by point, since you seem pretty determined to believe
| that markets "contribut[e] nothing to the industries and
| especially society". Maybe someday you'll come back to this
| topic with more curiosity, but in the meantime if you don't
| like this sector, you don't have to work in it.
| colesantiago wrote:
| > You get a tumor, a surgeon removes it.
|
| That is not the same thing for traders and you know it.
|
| > The economy gets a shock, a trader helps the market
| absorb it.
|
| And in the process the trader "absorbs" and enrich
| themselves with more profits?
|
| The whole point of my argument is about morals, a trader
| doesn't have to do what you just said, and why should
| they? It's all about money in the end without caring for
| the millions of people in society, traders can bet
| against the markets and win big, at the expense of the
| economy without helping anything or giving back to
| society.
|
| In almost all cases, the traders win in the end,
| employees of other industries that are affected by the
| economy always lose, (jobs, income, taxes, etc.)
|
| There is a reason why bankers, traders in Wall St in New
| York or 'The City' in London are disliked.
| riskneutral wrote:
| > trading just doesn't make sense to me.
|
| it's not complicated. suppose Bob wants to buy an Acura NSX and
| Kazuo wants to sell a Honda NSX. enter trader Joe. he knows
| Bob, and he knows Kazuo, and he knows that the Honda NSX was
| also marketed as the Acura NSX. trader Joe can buy the car from
| Kazuo, obtain an export license, arrange for shipping and tax
| duties, and sell the car to Bob for a profit. that is called
| trading.
|
| you're thinking of "speculation." one could argue that the
| market needs speculators to take the risks that hedgers want to
| reduce. speculators might also find interesting information and
| improve the efficiency of market prices. traders intermediate
| between speculators and hedgers.
|
| now does it make sense?
| colesantiago wrote:
| > now does it make sense?
|
| no.
|
| speculation and trading are practically the same to me, the
| end result is an unhealthy amount of money and immoral profit
| extraction from virtually doing nothing at all.
| Kortaggio wrote:
| Previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38679078
| sawxwkdm wrote:
| Saddaow
| sawxwkdm wrote:
| 81877778ssal
| thx wrote:
| just curious , if anyone knows --
|
| is this the same game played by FTX sam in that Michael Lewis
| crypto biopic ??
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| I've not watched FTX's biopic - I think it's one Michael got
| wrong. But Michael Lewis is a Liar's Poker fan from his days at
| Salomon.
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(page generated 2025-02-15 23:00 UTC)