
Ex-Goldman Programmer Found Guilty - takinola
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/02/business/dealbook/ex-goldman-programmer-found-guilty.html
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chollida1
From the article:

> Mr. Marino did not challenge the underlying facts of the case. Instead, he
> said they added up not to a crime but to a simple breach of Goldman’s
> confidentiality policy.

> “There’s no doubt Mr. Aleynikov did something wrong,” he told the jury,
> stopping occasionally to sip from a water bottle he clutched to throughout
> the closing statement. “But this is a very badly misguided case.”

There has been a lot of misinformation surrounding this case. I think its well
established now that Sergey Aleynikov did indeed take more source code than
just his open source contributions with him, his lawyer admits as much.

So I guess the take away is on your last day of work, don't just zip up and
ftp any code from your company, it's just not worth it.

Actually I think the real takeaway is that if you are really good at your job,
your company will pay more attention to you, especially when you leave. Sergey
was a big part of the HFT team at Goldman, he literally rebuilt their
infrastructure and his leaving was a huge deal to the team, and he wasn't just
leaving to go to say Google, he was going to a new HFT outfit that would
compete with Goldman.

His actions would be like Mark Lucovsky leaving Microsoft with some windows NT
kernel code he wrote, or Jeff Dean leaving Google with parts of the deep
learning code to go to competitors to work on the same thing. I'd be willing
to bet that both google and Microsoft would get lawyers involved in both those
cases.

If you want to make open source contributions while at work join a company
like, um...., Microsoft?

 __EDIT __toned down the language calling him the entire HFT talent at
Goldman, it was a bit over the top:)

~~~
e40
_So I guess the take away is on your last day of work, don 't just zip up and
ftp any code from your company, it's just not worth it._

Not just "not worth it" but actually illegal.

The only question of debate here is whether jail time was warranted here.

~~~
miralabs
I was actually shocked to find out that there are actually a few programmers
that does this. I don't know what is the reason but it is tantamount to
stealing.

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lordnacho
This is totally ridiculous. The man is a veteran software architect. When
you're a veteran software architect, you don't NEED the source code. The only
thing it tells you is a few syntactical idiosyncrasies of whatever
language/framework you happened to implement it in, and it saves you time in
typing it out.

Ask anyone who is familiar with GS's code base whether they would rather start
fresh or have GS's code base. I've done this, and you can tell from my tone
what they said.

I've also been on the other side of such a case; someone copied some code I'd
written. Guess what, they couldn't get it to work because they didn't
understand how it worked.

I suspect the jury is composed of people who are easily talked into a "cooking
recipe" view of how software works. Well, just as I'm not going to be a
Michelin chef from copying a recipe, you are also not going to know how to
design an HFT system if you don't have a deeper understanding of how it works.
Or maybe more to the point: there are plenty of people who copy recipes and
make tasty food (my parents are quite good at this, actually). They don't get
paid what a Michelin chef gets paid, because a Michelin chef is not a guy who
just mixes some ingredients according to a formula.

~~~
Patient0
A lot of the high frequency trading code actually is very expensive to
recreate, because it contains logic like (and I am paraphrasing here):

if(bookPressure > 0.7 and alpha23signal<0.2) buyEurUsd()

where constants like 0.7 and 0.2 were arrived at from looking at actual trade
activity (and order book fill rates) conducted by the firm over a period of a
few months. That can be incredibly expensive and or impossible to "recreate"
from scratch.

The exact original code is also useful if you wanted to write code to "detect"
that some automated trading is being done by a Goldmans proprietary algorithm,
and then anticipate what it's going to do next so you can trade ahead of it.

~~~
lordnacho
Right, so that's a parameter, isn't it? A mathematical number that fits into a
model.

In which case you need to understand the model.

~~~
Patient0
Right but I don't see how this detracts from my point. Also, often the models
are very simple - it's the calibration to a particular market that is very
expensive (the constants - which are then often hard coded for best
performance). This is because calibrating it requires access to data from
actual trading activity (not just tick data, I mean also information on say
the chance that your order will be filled in a particular situation:
information you can only get by actually placing orders of size in the market
and observing when they got filled).

~~~
dropit_sphere
>(the constants - which are then often hard coded for best performance).

This caught my eye. _Really_?

~~~
tedunangst

        #define TARGET_DELTA 70
    

Is a reasonable form of "hard coding".

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discardorama
The fact that the Manhattan DA's office spent so much effort pursuing this
case goes to show how much power GS has over there. They are trying to make an
example out of him. The state is literally doing GS's bidding here. Such a
shame.

~~~
choppaface
Agreed. While it's important for law enforcement to step up to new and
technically challenging cases, the public would have been much better served
had the DA focused on the Dewey & LeBoeuf case (as the NY Times suggests).
This case had small marginal negative impact on society (and the leaking of
HFT technology might even result in a positive for investors). Dewey & LeBoeuf
are outright accounting fraudsters. Great story:
[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/10/14/the-
collapse-2](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/10/14/the-collapse-2)

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fweespeech
Does anyone feel like the Ex-Goldman Programmer did something
shady/questionable ethically but nothing that should be considered illegal?

~~~
rayiner
On most days I feel like you should never be able to get jail time for a crime
that doesn't involve physical violence.

~~~
e40
I agree mostly, but the exception is financial harm, which can devastate
people and families. That retirement savings you were planning on using? Gone.
When that happens, either restitution needs to be made or you go to jail.

~~~
protonfish
So you're saying Goldman Sachs should be in jail?

~~~
e40
Some of the people that work there, yes.

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boh
"The prospect of a mistrial stemmed from a dispute between two jurors deciding
Mr. Aleynikov’s fate, with a female juror accusing a male one of “food
tampering” — in part because an avocado was missing from her sandwich."

The justice system in action.

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erikpukinskis
Steal from your employer: you're in trouble. Steal from your clients or the
taxpayers: take slightly less profits for the quarter.

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rada
I am quite grossed out by the racist and misogynist media coverage of the
"missing avocado" incident. Every single article about the case makes sure to
mention that it was a _female_ juror against a _male_ juror and some of the
articles also point out that the accuser is _asian_ while the accused is
_white_. How are these factoids relevant to the incident, or the larger case?

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fenollp
The only way Sergey "stole" code was by pushing open source code back to
upstream..

~~~
Mikeb85
This has been discussed over and over, but organisations aren't required to
release GPL code that never leaves their servers. GPL code belongs to the
organisation and the organisation alone if hired programmers work on it on
behalf of the organisation.

The programmer in question did not own the code, GS did. By releasing the
code, he's stealing from them. End of story.

Source - I've actually read the whole GPL licence.

~~~
alnsn
Indeed, it has been discussed many times. But I don't remember any discussion
on attribution rights. If GS replaced GPL text with their own header they
presumably deleted names of the original authors. I wonder if those authors
could (collectively perhaps) send a complaint to GS and ask to restore the
attributions?

