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Comment by chollida1 | Hacker News Reader

No mention of Garmin whose main watches all have Pulse ox sensors in them, so either they licensed the tech or they have their own implementation.

I'm glad I couldn't find Garmin here, I love their sensor data.

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It seems that the difference is that a previous Masimo employee then worked at Apple, lending credence that the patent was directly violated because they stole Masimo's trade secrets. Maybe Garmin was advised by Masimo (and then subsequently negotiated a license) for the patents? Alternatively, Garmin may have different implementation that avoids the metioned patents.

If it’s patented it cannot be a trade secret. And vice versa. Trade secrets are defined by not having been shared yet, patents are defined by having been published publicly. Patents give you a temporary monopoly in exchange for contributing to public knowledge what might otherwise remain a trade secret.

What is the downside to keeping things as a trade secret? Someone else might independently ‘invent’ the same thing and you’re SOL?

Exactly

More likely they would reverse engineer your product and recreate it. This is more likely for products sold than for internal processes.

There are other ways you can fail to bolt the lid down well enough and the actual secret leaks. You can make all your employees sign NDAs but they still know the secrets. Those employees go and get jobs elsewhere. You can extract some punishment on them for leaking and breaking the NDA (contract law), but once the cat's out of the bag, it's out. If you accidentally leave a laptop on a train, you're done. If a corporate spy targets you successfully, you're done. You can't have copyright on ideas, so if your trade secret is in essence an idea, then people can go and copy the idea.

For a secret that can't easily be reverse-engineered, that means the biggest difference between patents and trade secrets is how long you expect to have a monopoly for. For patents, if you are granted one, then you get a monopoly for exactly 20 years, which for almost any idea is enough time to make a lot of money if it's a good idea or at least get enough of a head start. But once 20 years are up, that idea has been in the open for 20 years already. For trade secrets, the number of years depends on you. Some companies can make it for more than 20 years. Employee retention helps. Spending lots of money on information security helps. Not letting Chinese companies through the door who pretend to want to buy yours, do some due diligence and then back out once they figure out a few of your trade secrets, also helps.

You can selectively have patents for the tier-2 designs and use trade secrets for the tier-1 designs that you wouldn't really want to diverge to the world. It's not mutually exclusive like you're implying here (okay, in the strictest sense a certain part of the invention can only be either be patented or kept secret, but the totality of the device makes it likely that both patented and non-patented trade secrets were used).

Close, but I didn’t say a device has to be either patented or not, only an idea. Again, there is absolutely no such thing as a “patented trade secret”. Just call it an idea.

Hello chollida ,

This might be unrelated to this post , but I just read a post you wrote back at 2014 , talking about how to get a quant job.

And I aspire to be one day in it.

I was an engineering background now current at Risk management .intermediate in python, SQL and shell scripting.

I work in non finance field before and 3 years ago I break into finance by joining a risk consultancy as a data analyst for automation and data centralisation.

Then now I m in a small Investment Bank in market risk as analyst to automation all the report for them.

I m applying for a master of statistics currently

And now I have a dilemma for current next job opportunities. I m Googling around and trying to collect enough data for making career decisions.

1 offer i got : A Swiss asset management firm - Junior trader (no programming , only VBA) and it came with a pay cut as I don’t have direct experience

2 offer in a retail bank: Data engineer with 25 % pay raise doing digital transformation and automation like my first finance related job.

Question: While I m working toward a master degree (part time)

Q1) Would getting offer 2 be putting in a bad track record on CV and driving me away from the path into becoming a quant - who trade

Would getting a data engineer job completely throw me off the path of trying to become a quant in the future even tho I m working on getting a master in statistics and phd after ?

Q2) being now in middle office, would staying in market risk (which I m just doing automation for report ) be better to make a better track record

Q3) would job offer 3 be better while working toward my master in statistics be better in your opinion (pay cut to trade off for experience)

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