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I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

basta.substack.com

201–210 of 565 posts

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (from the article) - Having Excel in the browser was a useful solution, but the problem wasn’t showing spreadsheets in the browser: the problem was getting a specific UI delivered to the right users quickly. > (from the above comment) - A good engineer can solve any problem with clever code. A great engineer knows what problems aren’t really problems and probably an XLS download link updated daily would have been f…

> "Just make it like Excel" is a super low quality answer from someone who has a completely different set of objectives. The only way forward would have been to consult with someone closer to the actual users and counter-argue from there. The only contact we had with "actual users" was over WeChat because they were on the other side of the planet. > What's missing here is the courage to recognize weak assumptions and…

Nah, that's why you have product managers. I would have talked to this stakeholder for an hour and realized the solution is not to build another excel.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t say china can’t innovate… I said that the Chinese government actively encourages and finances at a large scale industrial and economic espionage activity. See for example the China National Intelligence Law’s Articles 7 and 10: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Intelligence_Law_of...

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It is not "same old rhetoric" if it is in fact true. There are many publicly known examples of Chinese Espionage, including fake "police" departments in SF coercing nationals and naturalized citizens alike to commit espionage.

You don't have to take our word - you have the internet at your disposal and can locate this information freely. You are simply choosing not to.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t say china can’t innovate… I said that the Chinese government actively encourages and finances at a large scale industrial and economic espionage activity. See for example the China National Intelligence Law’s Articles 7 and 10: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Intelligence_Law_of...

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If GP is so wrong then argue against what they said and not what they didn’t say.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#204
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel does not relate to Ubers’ core business. I’m nearly 100% certain we can look back at this comment in 20 years and find that absolutely nothing happened.

The author explains how analyzing and presenting data was worth millions of dollars. The author documents how a senior executive instructed him to write excel . It is clearly their core business. Also, and this comes back to the fantasy/denial/wishful-thinking aspect here, neither I nor the law says core business. That's a word that you added. If you did it as part of your job, then it is, by definition, part of thei…

Excel is not their före business. That executive knows nothing. This is an example why you need product managers and engineers don't talk to users.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#205
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It is not "same old rhetoric" if it is in fact true. There are many publicly known examples of Chinese Espionage, including fake "police" departments in SF coercing nationals and naturalized citizens alike to commit espionage. You don't have to take our word - you have the internet at your disposal and can locate this information freely. You are simply choosing not to.

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Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sup PLA. The Chinese people are intelligent and strong. Why don’t you let them express that strength freely?

PLA. What? I don’t even know what that stands for. I assume it’s the Chinese army right? Any post that is isn’t anti China here is now labeled as paid for by the Chinese government right? It shows how much anti-China propaganda has gotten since Trump came into power and how much the US has turned nationalist. People here have drank so much anti China propaganda that any neutral to positive post about China is immedia…

To be clear I am no Trump supporter. Feel free to check my comment history if you don’t believe me.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, not just corporate espionage, right? State espionage is going to be at every large US company too. To speak to the article, I can only imagine how excited an agency would be to get real-time updates on the Uber movements of a target.

> State espionage is going to be at every large US company too. Snowden revealed, among other things, that the NSA did state espionage on Brazil's state oil company, Petrobras https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/09/world/americas/nsa-spied-... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-bra... https://g1.globo.com/fantastico/noticia/2013/09/nsa-document... International relations are based on reciprocity. I…

A crucial difference is the US spying is for state use, whereas in China the state is deeply intermixed with industry. State industrial espionage is used for commercial competitive advantage. This is a huge structural and cultural difference.

For instance it’s hard to believe China bootstrapped BYD and GWM among others from green fields. They’ve been exfiltrating and transferring automotive technology for decades. Their products are often near duplicates of other brands - such as the fiat case:

https://www.carsguide.com.au/car-news/spot-the-difference-ca...

These aren’t cheap knock offs, they have a relatively high quality and with stolen R&D it’s easy to produce at a low cost - the cost can’t be explained by labor alone, as automakers outside China have access to similarly low cost labor.

Note, I don’t think China is incapable of making their own R&D at the same quality as anywhere else; they can. But they don’t when they don’t have to.

The next few decades will see a huge realignment as the decades of theft and forced transfer will begin to seriously pay off.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PLA. What? I don’t even know what that stands for. I assume it’s the Chinese army right? Any post that is isn’t anti China here is now labeled as paid for by the Chinese government right? It shows how much anti-China propaganda has gotten since Trump came into power and how much the US has turned nationalist. People here have drank so much anti China propaganda that any neutral to positive post about China is immedia…

To be clear I am no Trump supporter. Feel free to check my comment history if you don’t believe me.

You don’t have to be a Trump supporter. Both liberal and conservative media have been 100% anti-China since Trump came into power. Both sides use anti-China rhetorics to generate views and votes.

The consequences trickle down to the opinions and views of the average HN poster.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#210
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not "same old rhetoric" if it is in fact true. There are many publicly known examples of Chinese Espionage, including fake "police" departments in SF coercing nationals and naturalized citizens alike to commit espionage. You don't have to take our word - you have the internet at your disposal and can locate this information freely. You are simply choosing not to.

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If you believe the US has done what China is currently doing, then I have a bridge to sell you...

There's no point in furthering this discussion if you are unwilling or incapable of acknowledging basic, publicly accessible facts about China's espionage campaign and worse. Hint, it's not simple industrial espionage...

Whataboutism is not going to make anyone side with your position while China grows increasingly belligerent towards it's neighbors and hostile towards European and North American nations.

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