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

I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

basta.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 565 posts

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#131

Post by jabroni_salad »

brap wrote: post #62

> He simply couldn’t believe that I’d written a full spreadsheet engine that ran in the browser. I can't believe it either, and I don't mean this in a good way. Apache POI lets you run headless Excel. You import and interact with sheets programmatically in Java. We used this in my old workplace for exactly the same reason (functions, cell references, the whole thing), it worked great. You found the ‘circ’ problem wit…

As a generalist sysadmin sometimes I wonder wtf is in the future for me but at least I can say I made sure our data guys have a really good compute node instead of a crashy laptop cluster and dollar store excel. Are you guys REALLY sure about the no-ops dream?

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#132

Post by OJFord »

> having answers that were very, very close is objectively worse than having numbers that are wildly wrong: very wrong numbers usually always mean a simply logic problem. Almost-correct numbers mean something more insidious.

Ha! I massively identify with this. 'The market-wide median is off by £3.07' is a much harder but to crack than the 'worse' report that 'the median is twice the max and the min is null'.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#133

Post by deodar »

mock-possum wrote: post #126
continuitylimit wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So come on man, let’s be honest here. I got serious sacred masterpiece vibes from this story. This reminds me of some Hindu parable about people who let go of possessions and head out to become ascetics. So there is this wealthy man and wife and the wife is all upset because her brother keeps insinuating that he’s gonna go ascetic and cut loose. The husband tells her to stop her crying and don’t worry about it, he ai…

What an utterly bizarre story. What’s the point of it? Why is the wife upset about her brother? Why is the husband so sure the brother won’t do it? What’s the significance of his little performance at the end? Why is the wife the husband’s mother, what does that have to do with anything, considering the issue is with the wife’s brother? Why don’t we get to see what the wife’s reaction to the husband’s stunt is - is s…

I put one (possibly wrong) interpretation in an earlier comment.

As for the mother part, in many Hindu traditions monks and voluntary celibates are encouraged to see all women the same as their mothers, to remove temptation. Now he's an ascetic ergo his ex-wife is like a mother to him.

The cryptic yet amusing tone is much like a Zen koan, not a Hindu parable.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#134

Post by TAForObvReasons »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #129
fader wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My entire career is effectively to sit in meetings and tell young, passionate engineers not to build things. It’s a bit depressing, but it’s also vital. This was the single most impactful thing I learned in my early career. I was building out monitoring systems for an in-house service we hosted on site. My boss wanted to buy some small utility to keep tabs on some minor aspect of our environment. I was a bit offend…

> This tool will cost us $500 to buy. What's your hourly pay rate for 40 hours This argument makes sense, but I worry that it’s a bit short-sighted. There are a lot of metrics that are hard to quantify where it might end up better: for one thing, I’ve found that integration costs and maintenance of integration of third-party systems are routinely underestimated: I’ve implemented “buy” for various systems where the wo…

Is it any more shortsighted than using the "open tools" in the first place? There will be integration costs and maintenance of integration with open tools. You may not be able to pay anyone for support issues because those people may not provide the sort of customer support you expect when you pay someone.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#135

Post by ryandrake »

Tao3300 wrote: post #102
School-Cotton wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> any contract attempting to gain such ownership is unenforceable I highly doubt that this is true, at least in the US. Can you cite case law? You can write a contract granting ownership of all the songs a musician performs, or all the books a writer writes during a specified time period. Why shouldn't the same be true of programmers and code?

Because no programmer is going to sign that. They'll go somewhere else. Musicians and writers don't usually have as many options, if any.

Many programmers sign this. I directly know that at least two FAANG employers (and probably all of them), have extremely broad copyright assignment clauses in their employment agreements that claim ownership of every software you create, on or off the clock, using company equipment or your own equipment. And many people work for these companies.

Whether these are enforceable or not doesn't matter because a lone developer is not going to go up against an army of corporate lawyers to find out.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#136

Post by sushiburps »

tempaway85751 wrote: post #21
bastawhiz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. The code was originally written outside of work hours. I offered the code to Box and they didn't want it. If Uber wants a few thousand lines of JavaScript from over half a decade ago that didn't originate with them and that they used for less than a month, they can send me a letter.

... Nothing came of it, but I took the code and shoved it into my back pocket for a rainy day ... You can't really do this. Depends on your employment contract but code you write for an employer is usually copyright to them ... My first reaction was to publish the code on Github ... You can't really do that either.

Well, he just... did

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#138

Post by [deleted] »

bastawhiz wrote: post #25
tempaway85751 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... Nothing came of it, but I took the code and shoved it into my back pocket for a rainy day ... You can't really do this. Depends on your employment contract but code you write for an employer is usually copyright to them ... My first reaction was to publish the code on Github ... You can't really do that either.

I mean, I asked at the time, and I did it. If either company wants to start a legal fight over a pile of code that neither of them wanted that's old enough to be in elementary school, they know how to reach me.

[deleted]

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#139

Post by flaviut »

Tao3300 wrote: post #102
School-Cotton wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> any contract attempting to gain such ownership is unenforceable I highly doubt that this is true, at least in the US. Can you cite case law? You can write a contract granting ownership of all the songs a musician performs, or all the books a writer writes during a specified time period. Why shouldn't the same be true of programmers and code?

Because no programmer is going to sign that. They'll go somewhere else. Musicians and writers don't usually have as many options, if any.

> Because no programmer is going to sign that.

I have. I got an extra $130k out of it.

It's a work of art. Even this comment is a violation of the agreement, since I don't own the copyright to anything I do apparently, either in or out of the scope of my employment, so therefore I can't give Y Combinator a license to display this comment.

I even talked to the company's legal team about the absurdity of the agreement & they were unwilling to budge.

The relevant portion of the agreement, for your reading amusement: https://pastebin.com/ZF9MEkfG

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#140

Post by OJFord »

erulabs wrote: post #23

I read this article looking forward to the complex bespoke code to be ripped out and deleted - but the author clearly grew as an engineer in a way I didn’t expect: > Sometimes that’s just how it is. The devops saying “Cattle, not pets” is apt here: code (and by proxy, the products built with that code) is cattle. It does a job for you, and when that job is no longer useful, the code is ready to be retired. If you tre…

I'm not really sure what you're saying, or what the criticism is, if it is one - but shortly before the bit you quoted OP links the code on GitHub: https://github.com/WebSheets;

And you can't really conclude they made a poor implementation choice on a report of completing it successfully (albeit too successfully even, too much of Excel implemented, and then fixed by removing that (how do you do that to your XLS download link?)) on time within a short deadline.

The takeaway is supposed to be 'don't get too attached to your code', which in some circumstances (not this one) might mean 'don't succumb to NIH syndrome, use an XLS download link', but that's not the whole.

Post reply on HN