Did Goldman Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer? • Hacker News Board

Re: Did Goldman Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer?

#111

Post by Symmetry » Fri, Aug 02, 2013, 5:50 PM UTC

clicks wrote: post #19

impendia wrote: post #14

I was on a jury for a murder trial, and so I have some insight into how juries work. At one point, when I was splitting some hairs and discussing the meaning of some small details from the evidence, one of the other jurors got impatient and reached for the coroner's photo of the victim. "Someone died here, you realize."

You should have taken him to a side and told him to go watch 12 Angry Men when he gets home.

12 Angry Men might, perhaps, not be the best example.

http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2012/11/odds-again-ba...

EDIT: Actually, this is the one I should have linked to: http://www.avclub.com/articles/did-12-angry-men-get-it-wrong...

Re: Did Goldman Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer?

#112

Post by minimax » Fri, Aug 02, 2013, 5:52 PM UTC

noonespecial wrote: post #21

“He was stringing these computer terms together in ways that made no sense. He didn’t seem to know anything about high-frequency trading or source code.” Programming is esoteric to common folk. Almost like witchcraft. When things go wrong for villagers, they often burn witches. They didn't burn witches in the old days because of some moral failing that we've outgrown. They burned them because they were unable to unde…

That cringing sensation you got when you saw the scare quotes around "subversion repository" is the same feeling people in trading get when journalists write about HFT and algorithmic trading. You can see an obvious example in the article where Michael Lewis applies scare quotes to "dark pools."

Re: Did Goldman Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer?

#113

Post by chollida1 » Fri, Aug 02, 2013, 5:52 PM UTC

lgeek wrote: post #71

melling wrote: post #18

In case people aren't clear on this. He worked in an industry that takes this sort of thing very seriously. He shouldn't have even been trying to download open source from work. You don't email stuff home to work on it, for example.

Initially I thought something along these lines as well. But according to the article, it was common practice: > They’d followed his case in the newspapers and noted the shiver it had sent down the spines of Wall Street’s software developers. Until Serge was sent to jail for doing it, Wall Street programmers routinely took code they had worked on when they left for new jobs. “A guy got put in jail for taking somethin…

> il Serge was sent to jail for doing it, Wall Street programmers routinely took code they had worked on when they left for new jobs.

This is a huge grey area, well maybe not so grey right now. Often you can't seperate quants from their excel sheet( or R models) and they will keep these models as they move to new firms.

As far as programmers keeping the code they wrote, This is the first time I've ever heard of a programmer, and I'm one, leaving a shop and bringing their code with them.

Let's just say, there is no ambiguity what-so-ever about how employers feel about this in the finance industry.

Re: Did Goldman Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer?

#114

Post by RockyMcNuts » Fri, Aug 02, 2013, 5:53 PM UTC

aqme28 wrote: post #96

RockyMcNuts wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No way. You sign away any rights to anything you come up with. You get the lecture on it. This guy Serge got shut down when he wanted to open source something. (although GS has open sourced some simple and non-strategic stuff, as a presumable PR move) By both the letter of what you agree to and industry standard it's not really ethical to dump your employer's code into Dropbox or whatever. They go a long way to block…

But he's arguing that he worked on open-source code, which isn't something he is legally able to sign over the rights of.

whatever he or anyone at Goldman did on that open-source code, belongs to Goldman, and he can't assign the rights of or share it, either, it's up to Goldman (and the terms of the license).

Re: Did Goldman Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer?

#115

Post by rollo_tommasi » Fri, Aug 02, 2013, 5:53 PM UTC

This article is also interesting in that the total blind trust McSwain put in Goldman's explanation of the situation really illustrates the typical mob hit-man mentality of most law enforcement agents. The Big Boss gives them a name and they take that guy out, no questions asked.

Re: Did Goldman Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer?

#116

Post by finnh » Fri, Aug 02, 2013, 5:54 PM UTC

jmduke wrote: post #69

This is the first front-paged post I know of where nobody's invoked Betteridge's Law of Headlines, which I find particularly ironic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

I was actually just about to post a corollary to Betteridge's law of headlines, which is:

Any headline asking if Goldman Sachs committed malfeasance can be answered with "yes."

Re: Did Goldman Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer?

#117

Post by jacalata » Fri, Aug 02, 2013, 5:56 PM UTC

candybar wrote: post #106

vasilipupkin wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In our industry( HFT ) generally, you sign all sorts of agreements which specifically prohibit you from taking any code whatsoever from your employer without specific authorization to do so. Michael Lewis article almost makes it sound like its Goldman's fault. But the fact is, he signed agreements that prohibited him from doing stuff like this and then did it anyway

Violation of private agreements is typical a civil matter.

yea, ask Aaron Schwartz.

Re: Did Goldman Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer?

#118

Post by chrisgd » Fri, Aug 02, 2013, 6:05 PM UTC

gd1 wrote: post #79

chrisgd wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try listing them

His 'second jury' were comical. "Most were surprised by how little he had taken in relation to the whole: eight megabytes in a platform that consisted of an estimated one gigabyte of code. " Really? One gigabyte of code? Or one gigabyte of third party binaries, precompiled libraries, documentation etc.? All you need are the source files, and those language keywords compress nicely. Exactly how much plain text do you…

Aren't these problems the jury faced or measured incorrectly rather than inaccuracies in the article itself?

Re: Did Goldman Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer?

#119

Post by hexasquid » Fri, Aug 02, 2013, 6:05 PM UTC

noonespecial wrote: post #21

“He was stringing these computer terms together in ways that made no sense. He didn’t seem to know anything about high-frequency trading or source code.” Programming is esoteric to common folk. Almost like witchcraft. When things go wrong for villagers, they often burn witches. They didn't burn witches in the old days because of some moral failing that we've outgrown. They burned them because they were unable to unde…

> "He was stringing these computer terms together in ways that made no sense."

That's how I see job specs from recruiters.

Re: Did Goldman Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer?

#120

Post by nohuck13 » Fri, Aug 02, 2013, 6:10 PM UTC

I was working at one of the rival HFT's mentioned in the article when all this went down. I had some thoughts.

-It's never ok to take proprietary code with you after quitting. I don't know anybody that would have thought that was OK, especially with the amount of money people were making off this IP in 2008. Of course that's true in any industry, but especially in trading.

-That said, you can't just walk out the door of Goldman on Friday and be trading on Monday, even if you had their entire codebase. The infrastructure needed to be a world-class HFT player at Goldman scale is insanely complicated and prohibitively expensive to all but the most well-funded folks these days. You're going to need colo space and power at tens of trading venues, low-latency WAN infrastructure to ship production quotes and data around the world, expensive exchange gateway connectivity, quant research platforms and a giant compute cluster, significant devops and monitoring infrastructure to run and monitor it all, and smart people evolve the stategies, models, and code as it decays while you're setting all this stuff up.