The Triple Jeopardy of a Chinese Math Prodigy
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Also, it's amazing how fast the wheels of justice move when a large financial company has been wronged, no?
To add...the deference in courts and the public is generally towards assertions by powerful people as truth. Even when we know they have no basis, the deference remains and frames inferences and interpretation.
Example:
>But they knew, from the tight security in the office and the imposing nondisclosure agreements they were asked to sign, that their work was extremely valuable
It must be valuable because it's secured. I'm not saying it's not, but assuming it is simply because a corporation that acts in this way tries to secure it is nonsense. It's allowing them to author a narrative simply because you assume they act in good faith.
Plenty of places have secure rooms I went to an interview at an online gaming company and they had biometric locks on some rooms.
And I have been to more than one interview where you leave any electronics outside the building
They sent me one of those online automated coding tests; I prepared for several days, which turned out to be unnecessary as the test was quite straightforward. I completed both questions in the "choose one of the following" section, and an SQL question despite never having used SQL. I think the test was just there to filter out chaff, but they were very keen to get me in for an interview.
I talked it over with my wife, who was also quite stunned by the salary but pointed out that I'd literally just be moving money around to make rich people richer. I actually also talked it over with the boss of a smaller company that had already made me an offer. His advice, which turned out to be very wise, was to research them very thoroughly as a lot of city firms like this will offer big bucks but will suck the soul out of you.
I then spoke about it with a friend who mentioned that one of his friends worked there. This is when I discovered their paranoid security practices, such as handing in your mobile phone as soon as you enter the building. That was the final straw in my head... no doubt they had their reasons but a culture of paranoia was not what I wanted at all.
Going back to how keen they were to get the interview, I remember telling the recruitment agent that I wasn't that interested and that I was going on holiday shortly which would cut down on opportunities to "just go in and see what it's like anyway". At this point he said I could literally name any time of night or day to go to their office, or I could speak on the phone with one of their guys who was currently in Spain for some reason. It started coming across as weirdly desperate.
I ended up going with the offer from the smaller company and have been very happy. I read about the case of Ke Xu not long afterwards and affirmed my conviction that I'd made the right choice.
Everyone i met there - interviewers, other developers on the team, bosses - seemed great: really smart and absolutely lovely. I'm sure i would have enjoyed working with them. They did some aggressive pursuing after the interview. But ultimately, the environment was just too weird and paranoid for me. A real shame.
I'm sorry but that is a whole head of red flags. Meanwhile, people seem to have a problem with G-Research in what they did to track him down. They tried to stop him travelling - seems pretty reasonable since he fled the country. They tried to stop him leaving HK - seems pretty reasonable since he tried to leave and succeeded in smuggling IP worth millions into mainland china. They hired PIs to watch his family - seems pretty reasonable since they actually DID participate in the crime and lie about it!
I feel sorry for the guy but this really does seem like an example of someone doing pretty much the worst thing they can do in a situation and doing it to the most powerful person they could.
However their later actions to continue to push for additional jail time and to harass UK government entities when they didn't get the desired response seem less reasonable.
It seems like they're using the UK criminal justice system to attempt to scare people, which is not its intended function.
That said - who in all honesty will root for some paranoid vengeful billionaire? I couldn't care less if he loses some 30 millions in his multi-billion empire. Which, according to the article, shouldn't be the case - strategies expired, the secret isn't worth anything anymore, and this is just bullying and revenge, because he can and his ego got hurt. With almost 100% guarantee he is 'optimizing' everything to Guernsey he can tax-wise, so British citizens don't see anything from his vast income.
Not much sympathy for some little man with big ego and even bigger wallet.
Xu did a bad thing. End. It doesn't matter who he did the bad thing, we can all agree that it's a bad thing to lie cheat and steal for personal financial gain. The other player in the story doesn't make it acceptable. But people want to shift the narrative to "but what about how bad G-Research is" and that's just the consequence of the first bad action.
What we see here is punishment for the sake of punishment, from person who is clearly amoral according to anything you can find on him online (quite a bit). All I say is I have no sympathy for him and the case, which btw even the company itself originally claimed would expire in +-August 2018. Yet they still go for revenge. That's pathetic and clear abuse of legal system from my viewpoint.
interesting, especially when combined with how happy such companies say they are to hire STEM graduates with zero Finance knowledge. is that what one has to expect when entering such an industry?
of course Mr. Bumble is also an ass, but perhaps it takes one to know one.
He ain’t no Ramanujan, or a Terrence Tao or any of the recent Fields’ medalists who have poured their heart and soul into their craft with no expected financial return.
This is rather strong evidence for the statement that "ordinary people" are often not qualified to judge whether someone is a genius or not.
1. It means just means highly talented.
2. Some who accomplishes/performs something rare/unusual/novel.
I tend to go with number two as well, but for instance if you look at the etymology its roots are more in the first definition.[1]
"prodigy" - extraordinary - derives from Latin: prodigium.
The guy was a math prodigy though. What else would you call one of the top math students at cambridge?
> He ain’t no Ramanujan, or a Terrence Tao or any of the recent Fields’ medalists who have poured their heart and soul into their craft with no expected financial return.
You don't have to win the Fields' medal or achieve greatness to be a prodigy. There are plenty of prodigies who fail to live up to their potential or simply choose to do other things.
It's not just in academics. There are sports prodigies who, for a variety of reasons, fail to achieve greatness.
Take baseball. For every ken griffey jr, there are a bunch of brien taylors. For every lebron, you have a greg oden or kwame brown.
I would call him a good, hardworking student. (At least that's what we'd call it in Singapore ;) Coincidentally me and Xu went to high school at the same time in Singapore)
If we labelled everyone who did well in the undergraduate curriculum as prodigal - the word itself starts loses its meaning.
Let's take the top 20 universities across the world (harvards,mits, tsinghuas, iits etc.) and take the top 10 graduating students from each class (math, physics, etc.) => are we saying that the world is producing 500-1000 prodigies every year?
How many singaporeans are top math students at cambridge? If hard work is all that it took, we'd all be studying math at cambridge.
> Coincidentally me and Xu went to high school at the same time in Singapore)
"Coincidentally Xu and I..."
> Let's take the top 20 universities across the world (harvards,mits, tsinghuas, iits etc.) and take the top 10 graduating students from each class (math, physics, etc.) => are we saying that the world is producing 500-1000 prodigies every year?
I'd say there are far more prodigies than that being produced every year. You do realize that there are 7 billion people on earth right?
You don't have to be newton or einstein to be a prodigy. Most prodigies never live up to their expectations. Maybe you use the word differently in singapore than in the US.
Not in the use of Allen & Overy, they're a private law firm, anyone who's got the cash can pay them.
The ability to get the quantity of police resource use detailed in this case assigned to a white-collar crime, would seem amazing to UK citizens who would struggle to get that kind of response to likely more serious crimes.
Nobody likes being lied to repeatedly, especially courts.
I doubt China would be as keen to extradite one of its citizens.
Was Xu simply underestimating PdeP's wrath, or did he have more faith in the UK legal system than warranted?
To the effect, it simply doesn't, even with few countries with witch it has extradition treaties
Otherwise, for a smart guy, he wouldn’t be very smart.
This is the case in a lot of situations. Smartest math guy thinks legal system works on logic and precision. They are wrong.
Are you suggesting he depart HK illegally and make his way into China? I assume that happens, but not sure how I'd go about it.
If he realy want to and have money, pay to be smuggled through Vietnam, or Laos is fairly easy, locals there charge like 50 rmb to motorcycle you through the border jungle.
Or maybe pledge allegience to the party on TV shows like some Chinese with criminal records overseas, for example this guy went on Chinese TV to recount how he as an innocent patriotic citizen was persecuted by the vicious American.
I understand that HK and China share a land border. But AFAIK that is not a border you can just walk over - there's a river and a fence and guards and all. You can cross the border at designated border crossings, by foot or train, but you will have to go through HK immigration to leave HK and then mainland immigration to enter China.
To go from HK to Vietnam or Laos, you'd have to take a plane from HK, in which case you also have to go through HK immigration to leave HK.
It remains my impression that HK immigration, which one has to go through when departing HK (at the airport or the land border or the train to China or, before someone mentions that, the ferries to mainland or Macau), did not let him leave HK.
(As for pledging allegiance, again, the problem for that particular Chinese citizen was not entering China, the problem was leaving HK.)
Thus, I remain puzzled by the suggestion that he "just walk past to Shenzhen" or "get on a train". Swim over, sure, but walk or take a train?
It's a program (or function, or object, etc) where you feed in events for changes in market data and perhaps other things, and it feeds out commands to buy and sell particular quantities of particular instruments at particular prices.
AIUI, that program is typically quite simple in structure: it might work out target prices for some set of instruments based on prices for another set of instruments, with a function that is not necessarily more complicated than a polynomial. Then it buys or sells if the market price is sufficiently different to the target price.
The structure of the pricing function will be designed by a quant, and the coefficients in it will be set by fitting to historical data. A lot of the work goes into developing tools and practices for doing that fitting, backtesting the fitting, etc.
While reading the 3rd part, I kept thinking "brexit logic" which I have come to associate with British thinking that seems too idealistic to be actually implementable. And yet apparently the entire British judicial system allows it.
It amazes me that in this day and time, some naive rich people genuinely believe of some piece of code can simply magically make money out of thin air (while some look to do so, what they do is a banal spread trading without realising it.) Quants people... they have that habit of puffing an air of mystique around themselves, but when you read their technobabble you can't hold yourself from laughing.
I met a number of such, all claiming some bizarre "supersophisticated" strategy, but even with a level of math availing me, a half baked engineer wannabe, I can't not to notice their math being junk, to the point of it having banal arithmetic errors. Sometimes, they resemble me the crazy guys who are trying to invent perpetuum mobiles - people in that cult-like subculure are not dumb for sure, engineers and mathematicians, but all having trouble with thermodynamics, all thinking that it must me them to find a hack for the first law.
How much of quant thing is RNG, and how much is just a cover for insider trading, think yourself. A man like PdP, may have much more reasons to go after Xu just for suspicion of him getting an idea of how his business was actually making money https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/nodes/12016846
Much of the quant field is very straightforward mathematical modeling. Every field has bad research, but writing off CS as a field because some researchers have created a zombie out of stackoverflow code should also strike you as wrong.
You have to understand that a company like G-Research could easily be put out of business (or made to suffer severely) if their IP is stolen/disclosed - and Xu's refusal to cooperate with authorities is Xu's own undoing, not G-Research's.