I worked at an HFT firm. We didn't cure cancer, but we tried hard to improve the technical ecosystems we were a part of. Many other firms do the same. We spo

I worked at an HFT firm. We didn't cure cancer, but we tried hard to improve the technical ecosystems we were a part of. Many other firms do the same. We sponsored the x64 port of LuaJIT and kicked off a sponsorship system for it [1]. OpenResty took nginx and integrated it with LuaJIT. Ten years later, CloudFlare started using OpenResty and LuaJIT to protect massive swathes of the Internet. This kind of butterfly effect makes me smile. The same HFT crew discovered critical issues in the circa-2009 Linux kernel, wherein there was significant packet loss on multicast workloads [2]. We were using bleeding edge Debian/Ubuntu distros whereas much of the industry used more stable kernels (which didn't have the issue). So because of our hard work, along with much love from the incredible Eric Dumazet, we figured it out and everybody benefitted (especially RedHat and SUSE who got to put the fixed kernel in their stable releases a couple years later). We also sponsored other open source projects, Debian packaging, etc. HFT firms from 2006-2010 were early adopters of the advanced network and computing technologies that now power the clouds (e.g. Arista, Solarflare, various acquired storage/network companies); those companies might not be around now if they didn't get those early wins from the finance community. [1] https://luajit.org/sponsors.html https://luajit.org/sponsors.html [2] http://www.spinics.net/lists/netdev/msg90771.html http://www.spinics.net/lists/netdev/msg90771.html