Comment by tpatke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tpatke | Hacker News Reader

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I used to work at Goldman's and I can tell you that they will be absolutely furious about this. I have never worked at a company so paranoid about having work stolen. Once - a friend of mine sent me an email with a tag-line with a bit of code in it. When I replied the email filters picked it up and I had to explain to my boss why I was trying to "export" Goldman's code. They are nuts about it.

Goldman put a lot of time and energy into making an example out of this guy. He blatantly "did it" - they had recorded phone conversations of him talking to his new boss and uploading code immediately after. I know the details because we received almost weekly reports on the case via the corporate intranet (in the "news" section). Goldman wants their people scared so nobody else tries this.

I always found it a bit odd because the court sentenced this guy to 8 years. Ummm... ok. But why is Fabrice Tourre still walking around? Justice indeed.

Forget Fabrice Tourre, how about John Corzine? The government isn't even going to use the law _that he created_ to go after him for stealing client money.

What bothers me more about this particular case is that Goldman's attorneys claimed that this code could be used to manipulate the market, and yet the SEC did nothing to investigate.

You have documented court testimony of a market participant (Goldman) claiming they have the ability to manipulate the market. This should be a slam dunk if we had regulators with anything remotely resembling balls.

You misunderstand, knowing how someone else is going to trade allows you to do market manipulation, knowinf how you are going to trade yourself obviously doesn't help you do market manipulation

You can use a hammer to kill someone quite easily.

Let's imagine that I go to the police complaining that a bunch of my tools, including a hammer, was stolen from my truck. Should I be prosecuted for murder? Is this a "slam dunk", and should the police and prosecutors have their manhood questioned for not going after me for murder? Even though, to the best of everyone's knowledge, no murder has been committed by anyone, least of all me?

Pretty much anyone, including you, has the ability to manipulate the market. It's not hard; in fact it's so trivial that you can do it by accident. That doesn't mean we should throw you in jail just in case you decide to do it in the future.

is the culture there as back-stabbing and ruthless as it seems like to outsiders? Or is it just an exaggeration and people are mostly nice and pleasant, albeit ambitious?

Probably both. I have a couple friends there and they're some of the smartest, most decent human beings I know. On the other hand you get stories like this, and the Fabrice Tourre's and whatnot. Grey, not black or white.

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