Building https://xitter.cf/t.co/8efcQuHC2e Chaotic good. Dad, musician, climber, baller, CTO / investor. https://xitter.cf/t.co/MvyFyvW64B
New Delhi, India
Joined January 2009
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I learned this late in life:
Being confident doesn’t come from being tough and persevering. It comes from feeling safe to explore failure. Knowing you have a physical home to come back to - that there is enough - and an emotional home - that you are enough.
Filed a support ticket 8 days ago. Zero response. No way to email... @AskCapitalOne @CapitalOne
Can't believe @urbancompany_UC...
Guy broke my RO, then the guy lied about it.
I complained.
Stonewalling AI bot, 2 hours and 3 callbacks later hours, then they assign a senior technician...
The same guy who broke it in the first place.
Jacob Singh retweeted
Had a Jane Street phone interview in 2016. "Price a 6-month forward on carrots."
There's no carrot futures market, so I build one from scratch: seasonal harvest cycles, USDA demand elasticity, cold storage decay rates.
One trader stops me. "Your storage cost function– you're modeling the carrot as dead inventory. Like grain in a silo." He asks me the metabolic respiration rate of a post-harvest carrot at 2°C. I estimate.
"Your forward is overpriced by exactly that shrinkage. The underlying is consuming its own sugars. It's alive." Good correction. I adjust the model. I think I've recovered.
Rejection email comes the next morning. Subject: "Ethical Review." My framework, they write, "relied on the severance of the root organism from its growth medium." The question about respiration was a test. The carrot was still alive and I'd built an entire derivatives structure on top of its death without questioning whether harvest was an acceptable act.
I pull up the recruiter's original email. It doesn't say Jane Street. It says Jain Street– a non-violent quantitative commodities fund.
The carrot was never supposed to be priced. It was supposed to be refused. I later learn the only candidate who passed that round was a former monk from Gujarat who sat in silence for eleven minutes and said, "I cannot put a price on life." He's now a partner.
Jane Street made ~$40B in 2025 with 3,500 employees, a ~2x from the year before.
At ~65-70% profit margin, that's $8M profit / employee, the highest for a 1000+ ppl company. High-frequency trading continues to be the most efficient money making engine.
I want to share an old story about my Jane Street interview in 2014. Jane Street was known for hiring a lot of math, physics and CS olympiad winners from top universities and putting them through many rounds - including, for trading roles, a gauntlet of mental math. It was my 6th interview and my final round and I recall being asked "What is the next day after today in DD/MM/YYYY where all the digits are unique?" They'd toy with you and say "You can use a pencil and paper, if you want" but you knew that was an instant no. Painstakingly and as quickly as I could, I came to an answer. "How confident are you that this is correct on a 0-1 probability scale?" the interviewer said. "0.95", I blurted out, not fully knowing how to answer that. "Are you sure?" After thinking harder for a few more seconds, I realized I could've flipped the digits around to get a closer date. I gave the interviewer my answer. It was correct. "0.95 huh?" he chuckled. That's when I knew I failed.
Note: fwiw, other companies that come close in efficiency are
- Tether ($90M+ profit/emp)
- Hyperliquid ($80M+ profit/emp)
and on revenue:
- Valve ($50M/emp)
- OnlyFans ($37M/emp)
- Craigslist ($14M/emp)
- Anthropic ($12M/emp, run rate)
- OpenAI ($8M/emp, run rate)
For comparison, Nvidia is very efficient at scale and is $4.4M/emp.
I know no one sees my shit anymore, because I am against genocide, but I really miss @twitter.
A feature I want Google Flights to have: "around the same price"... you are sorting by price for a 500rs difference.
I don't care. Everything within 1k is the same price to me. I want timing and airline after that.
Jacob Singh retweeted
58,000 Americans died in Vietnam.
Over 3,000,000 Vietnamese died.
And for fifty years, American culture has centered the grief of the 58,000 while treating the 3,000,000 as a backdrop.
As scenery. As context. As "the Vietnam War experience."
They built a wall in Washington with American names on it.
A beautiful wall. A solemn wall.
Good. Mourn your dead.
But understand what that wall does not say.
It does not say why they died.
It does not say what they were doing there.
It does not say what was done in their name to the people whose country it actually was.
It does not mention My Lai, where American soldiers massacred an entire village, old men, women, children, babies, and the officer who ordered it served three years of house arrest before being pardoned.
Three years. House arrest. Pardoned.
For five hundred people murdered in a ditch.
It does not mention the 2.7 million acres of Vietnamese forest doused in Agent Orange, a chemical weapon disguised as herbicide, that is still deforming Vietnamese children today.
Not in 1970. Not in 1985. Today.
Children born in 2020 with bodies twisted by a war their grandparents fought.
And the chemical companies that made it are still in business.
Still profitable.
Still un-prosecuted.
And yet they send us human rights reports.
They grade our democracy.
They warn us about our behavior.
The audacity is so enormous it becomes almost impressive.
Almost.
All my experience playing "Keep talking and noone explodes has prepared me to be a claude code superstar"
Jacob Singh retweeted
Ketanji Brown Jackson graduated magna cum laude from Harvard-Radcliffe College and cum laude from Harvard Law School where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. She had 20 years experience as a lawyer and 10 years experience as a federal judge when she was nominated for the Supreme Court.
They called her a DEI hire.
Mark Wayne Mullin has a high school diploma and a 2 year community college degree in construction management, no military or law enforcement service, and was a cow-calf rancher. He was nominated by Trump as the secretary of Homeland Security.
They have the caucacity to call this meritocracy.
Sometimes I feel like @claudeai code is intentionally asking too many stupid permission questions so I get frustrated, run it YOLO mode and it takes over my computer.
Jacob Singh retweeted
Remember that I predicted a long time ago that President Obama will attack Iran because of his inability to negotiate properly-not skilled!
Sports really tells you everything you need to know about nationalism.
Dirty player on another team is a gritty veteran making winning plays after they slip your color journey on.
The only thing keeping robot drones from killing us all are the ethics of the men who control them.
Those men... checks notes... are mostly pedophiles and racists.
Jacob Singh retweeted
Of course that's your contention. You're a first-time SaaS bear. You just got finished listening to some podcast, Dario on Dwarkesh, probably. Now you think it’s the end of white collar work and seat-based pricing is screwed. You're gonna be convinced of that til tomorrow when you get to “Something Big is Happening”. Then you’ll install ClawdBot on a Mac Mini, vibe code a dashboard on top of a postgres database and say we’re all just a couple ralph loops away from building a Salesforce competitor. That’s gonna last until next week when you discover context graphs, and then you're gonna be talking about how the systems of record will be disintermediated by an agentic layer and reposting OAI marketing graphics.
“Well, as a matter of fact, I won't, because ultimately the application layer is just ….”
The application layer is just business logic on top a CRUD database. You got that from Satya’s appearance on the BG2 pod, December 2024, right? Yeah, I saw that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us? Do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter? Or...is that your thing? You get into the replies of anyone posting a SaaS ticker. You watch some podcast and then pawn it off as your own idea just to impress some VCs and embarrass some anon who’s long SaaS? See the sad thing about a guy like you is in a couple years you're gonna start doing some thinking on your own and you're gonna come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life. One: don't do that. And two: you dropped thirty grand on Mac Minis and LLM API calls to come to the same conclusion you could’ve got for free by following a handful of VC accounts.
Jacob Singh retweeted
Israel killed all these Palestinian journalists .don't look away
xitter.cf/i/status/2022090844149…
