Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 450 posts

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#191

Post by xdavidliu »

wolco wrote: post #139
jhardy54 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rich black people don't have the same privileged to buy justice as rich white people? > > That's not true. Kinda funny how you made up a statement that they didn't say and then started arguing against it. Congratulations, you fought yourself and won.

It was in response to the parent post. Below is a direct quote. "A courtesy not afforded to the largely not-rich, not-white general prison population. "

but in your direct quote, it clearly says "not-rich, not-white", so clearly the direct quote was not talking about "rich blacks"

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#192

Post by ashtonkem »

devonkim wrote: post #157
illustriousbear wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People in the security industry have told me that this sort of thing often comes down to ego and self-importance. In Intelligence, people have been caught selling state secrets for 10-20k a pop. The kind of secrets that can land you decades in jail. It makes no sense from a monetary standpoint.

Intelligence screening essentially tries to select for more financially conservative people and in the cases so far people only go that far due to extenuating situations like divorce, addictions, etc. rather than standard American Greed motive. Until relatively recently people didn’t make $500k+ / year as individual contractors or founding random boutique firms. As such, one of the oddities of the US IC demographics…

You should probably provide some evidence for those assertions.

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#193

Post by ashtonkem »

w0mbat wrote: post #50

This guy had such a sweet deal at Google originally, it staggers me that he'd go to these lengths to steal even more. He was getting a massive salarY, bonuses in the millions, and he had persuaded Google to pay him even more money through a side-hustle company of his while remaining an employee. Then he quits and steals their stuff.

Giving up $120mil and going to an American prison, never an easy thing, during a pandemic.

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#194

Post by CarelessExpert »

hannasanarion wrote: post #165
CarelessExpert wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Trade secrets were invented as a riskier way to extend your monopoly by giving up government protection. You're definitely mistaken on that point. Trade secrets enjoy protection in the law, both in the US and worldwide: https://www.uspto.gov/ip-policy/trade-secret-policy > If the government is going to give trade secrets the same protection as patents (or even more, because patent infringement doesn't come with jai…

Trade Secrets were not protected under US law until 1996. All of the upsides of trade secrets you list are benefits that they have, despite a complete lack of government enforcement, as it should be. Coke protected its formula for over a century with NDAs and effective security measures. They went through enormous effort and expense to protect the secret, because the law until 1996 said that they were responsible for…

Well, lucky for you I'm not arguing on the merits of the law, only that it exists (and has since at least 1979 when the first federal law in this area was passed, though state protections pre-date that), and that the original commenter was mistaken in thinking it didn't.

As for the rest, eh, I genuinely don't care enough to argue. My original purpose was to correct a misunderstanding and provide some hopefully helpful additional context, not to argue for or against the ethical righteousness of various IP protection regimes.

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#195

Post by strogonoff »

Wait. The guy essentially says “I committed a crime, will pay US$XXX million, but we had it in our contract that the guys who hired me would take the blame, so make them pay me US$X billion.” Am I reading that correctly?

Can that contract even remain legally recognized?

Sorting out quarrels between entities who were found cooperating in a crime, evaluating whether one should compensate the other for failing to uphold its part of the deal, certainly looks like the best use of a country’s justice system.

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#196

Post by BeetleB »

xdavidliu wrote: post #191
wolco wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was in response to the parent post. Below is a direct quote. "A courtesy not afforded to the largely not-rich, not-white general prison population. "

but in your direct quote, it clearly says "not-rich, not-white", so clearly the direct quote was not talking about "rich blacks"

The phrase can be interpreted two ways.

To simplify this comment, when I say "black" I mean "not white". Easier than to keep typing non-white, etc.

You have a quadrant of four categories:

1. Rich and white

2. Poor and white

3. Rich and black

4. Poor and black

You are interpreting the statement to refer to "people who are not (rich or white)" - which with Boolean logic expands to "people who are not rich and not white)". Looking at the first form, this means category 4 (people who are poor AND are not white). It also means that poor white people get this privilege, and rich non-whites do.

The other person is interpreting it as "not (rich and white)" which means all the categories except 1.

Hence the confusion.

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#197

Post by breck »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #122
breck wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not sure if this comment is sarcasm No, I'm generally curious, why do we have trade secret laws? Seems anti-capitalist, anti-freedom, anti-equality to me. There must be people who question them and I'm curious to learn more. > If I invest billions... Yes, if you had billions to invest you should strongly dislike this idea. I'm saying that perhaps trade secret laws are good for billionaires, bad for everyone else. S…

> I'm saying that perhaps trade secret laws are good for billionaires, bad for everyone else. Sure. In a certain, short-sighted sense, so are any property rights. Trade secret law is important for anyone who wants to invest in the creation of high value intellectual property that won't be protected with patents. Without such protection, there is much less incentive for investment. Billionaires are one group of people…

> so are any property rights.

The term "Intellectual Property" is a red herring. You cannot have property rights and IP rights. Logically it doesn't work (if you say my computer is my property, but that I can't arrange the bits how I want, then it is not my property). This case is well made in many places so I won't regurgitate much further. But it's important to clarify that the term is a euphemism and is in direct conflict with actual property laws. Better choice of terms include "Intellectual Control Laws", "Intellectual Bureaucracy Laws", or "Intellectual Slavery Laws".

> Trade secret law is important for anyone...

I am not arguing that trade secret law is unimportant for investors of capital. I agree it is very important for investors of capital. However, it seems to be an unnatural state of affairs, to have the government involved in enforcing secrets among its citizens. Why not let the free market figure it out? To me it seems that would be both more equitable and much more effective in a utilitarian sort of way. However, I don't dispute that it is in the strong financial interests of the top 1% of the population (myself included) to keep these laws as is. I'm just saying they are likely unethical and counterproductive if one were to optimize society for innovation.

> I know I personally would not attempt to build high value intellectual property if there were no trade secrets.

Mathematically the world would not notice, even if your name was Edison. The most impactful inventions in the world were all invented far before we had copyright and patent laws. We are all putting grains of sand on mountains built by our ancestors.

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#198

Post by momokoko »

bduerst wrote: post #127
illustriousbear wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People in the security industry have told me that this sort of thing often comes down to ego and self-importance. In Intelligence, people have been caught selling state secrets for 10-20k a pop. The kind of secrets that can land you decades in jail. It makes no sense from a monetary standpoint.

It's likely Levandowski has narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), as is evident by his founding The Way of The Future , which is his own church to worship artificial intelligence.

You cannot seriously believe “narcissistic personality disorder” is a real thing, right?

This has to be the most “it came from social media” I’ve read on HN in a while.

Every personality trait you don’t like or is difficult to deal with is not a “disorder”

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#199

Post by BeetleB »

credit_guy wrote: post #40
glitchc wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said money can’t literally buy a get out of jail card?

When you say "literally" do you mean to imply he literally paid someone? That's quite implausible.

> When you say "literally" do you mean to imply he literally paid someone?

Sadly, "literally" can mean "figuratively":

From M-W:[1]

"in effect : virtually —used in an exaggerated way to emphasize a statement or description that is not literally true or possible"

(Yes, I know they used the word "literally" in the definition).

They also made a special page to explain this.[2]

[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally

[2]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/misuse-of-lite...

Re: Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed

#200

Post by rorykoehler »

ponker wrote: post #153
teej wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the Google version of winning the lottery. Right place, right skills, right time.

No, you cannot compare becoming the world's best self-driving engineer to winning the lottery. This is like becoming Lebron James, it's tremendous talent combined with tremendous commitment.

It's not that he's the best self-driving engineer (though no doubt he is excellent). It's that he is the best self-driving engineer who is also a shrewd political operator.
Post reply on HN