"Alternative data" is Wall Street's name for information that comes from non-traditional sources: satellite photos of parking lots, credit card panels, weather forecasts. Eric Mannes has spent over a decade at Jane Street, first as a commodities trader and now helping lead the firm's alternative data team. In this episode, Eric and Ron talk about what it takes to turn messy external data into datasets a trading strategy can rely on. Along the way, they cover the day oil futures settled at a negative price and the systems that broke as a result; the years when the commodities desk's risk system was one very large Excel spreadsheet; the hard question of what a company even is; and why better ML models raise the value of careful data engineering.

You can find the transcript for this episode on our website.

Some links to topics that came up in the discussion:

• Figgie
• Adverse selection
• 2020 Russia–Saudi Arabia oil price war
• Dual-listed company
• "LAMBDA: The ultimate Excel worksheet function"
• Trino
• The Bitter Lesson
• Learn more about Jane Street’s internship program.

In university Jacob Baskin studied at the intersection of computer science and economics, thinking about systems that incentivize people to express their true preferences. He put those ideas into practice at Google, where he worked on ad serving, before joining Jane Street’s database infrastructure team. In this episode, Ron and Jacob discuss Superstore, a distributed columnar database now central to Jane Street’s tech stack that Jacob began building practically the day he started. How do you support wide-ranging analytical queries while transactional writes stream in at the speed of trading systems? And what’s it like when your first design doc leads to an eight-figure hardware purchase? After building Superstore Jacob has since gone back to his roots, thinking about schemes for bidding on compute time as he works to optimize usage of the Hive, Jane Street’s massive compute cluster for research.

You can find the transcript for this episode on our website.

Some links to topics that came up in the discussion:

• Mechanism design, second-price auction
• MapReduce, BigTable, Google File System
• Vertica
• Apache Parquet
• CockroachDB
• Paxos
• BitTorrent

Nate Foster is a professor at EPFL in Switzerland in the Networked Systems Abstractions Lab, and a visiting researcher at Jane Street on the Networking team. In this episode, he and Ron consider what happens when you bring a software mindset to network engineering. Can you use programming language theory and formal methods to realize the dream of software-defined networks? Along the way, they discuss how hyperscalers have shaped networking hardware; the return (or not) of multicast; the ways ML workloads are reshaping the networking layer; and the success Jane Street has had using an early Internet protocol, BGP, together with a more declarative high-level specification language.

You can find the transcript for this episode on our website.

Some links to topics that came up in the discussion:

• P4 (Programming language
• Lenses (bidirectional transformation)
• OpenFlow
• Kleene algebra with tests
• NetKAT
• End-to-end principle
• Border Gateway Protocol
• “Stable Internet routing without Global Coordination,” aka the Gao-Rexford conditions
• Unison file synchronizer
• Barefoot Networks