Agreed. Everyone love puzzles that are worthy of an entire section in a blogpost for their interview questions, rather than stuff actually relevant to the job.
So I just brute forced every UUID in existence on my RTX GPU and loaded the dataset into a HA opensearch cluster on AWS. It took about 5 years of calling ‘uuid.Random()’ to effectively cover about 64% of the keyspace which is good enough.
To facilitate full-text search I created a langchain application in python, hosted on kubernetes, that takes your search query and generates synonymous UUIDs via GPT o1-preview before handing over to opensearch.
Opensearch returns another set of UUIDs, which I look up in my postgres database: “SELECT uuid FROM uuids WHERE id IN (…uuid_ids)”
I could imagine some candidates starting with their default tools like this, and start complaining about the cluster performance after a few weeks.
You need a certain way of thinking to have a gut feeling "this could be expensive" and then go back, question your assumptions and confirm your requirements. Not everyone does that - better to rule them out.
Congrats on the launch - there's a lot of unstructured public data as well (existing in the form of PDFs/Excel/PPT) are you planning to add support for those?
Also would be great to show the source in the list without having to click "source" :)
I'm in the business of selling AI tools to high-frequency traders / hedge funds and the bad news is that, most of them are so risk averse and/or technically illiterate that sometimes we joke that there's big alpha to be had in starting a hedge fund that simply embraces AI.
I think you might be slightly misunderstanding why you're struggling to sell. In finance, correctness matters. A tool that's mostly right most of the time, but radically incorrect sometimes is a very hard sell when there's battle tested and well understood boring tools out there that do the same thing.
Ive heard many variations of this along the lines of pennies and steam rollers. Yes, you have to have positive EV across the strategy. And just about everyone makes money when times are good, or theres volatility that matches your strategy, or your pods null out a bunch of factors.
But to survive long term you have to _not fail_ in a very repeatable and consistent manner. Long term success is risk and downside management.
> there's big alpha to be had in starting a hedge fund that simply embraces AI.
Maybe hedge funds are completely out of step with the rest of the finance world, but much of finance has been using AI for a long time. AI is old news at this point.
The people who are impressed with a Tesla are the same people who are impressed with the build quality of a Chevy or a Buick. Ergo: they haven’t been exposed much to Mercedes-level build quality.
> Whenever I play it, I get the distinct feeling that I could instead do the same thing but productively instead
This is me, but extended to all games. I stopped playing games because I feel like I can always do something more productive with my time instead. If I really want to check out, I watch some TV instead. But games (especially modern ones) take too much work without any real reward.
