Levandowski sentenced to 18 months in prison as new lawsuit against Uber filed • Hacker News Board

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

#311

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 10:11 AM UTC

treerock wrote: post #309

dragonwriter wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The flip-side of this truism is that this point of view is probably healthier for the individual than seeing themselves as helpless victims. That's not the flip side of that view, because the socialist view of an exploited proletariat in an advanced industrial democracy is not one of “helpless victims”, but of a powerful force that has the power to reverse the power structure once they realize it exists and act in…

> socialist view of an exploited proletariat is one of...a powerful force May be mistaken, but historically didn't socialist view proles as a 'lumpen mass', with no real power? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpenproletariat

> May be mistaken, but historically didn't socialist view proles as a 'lumpen mass',

No, the lumpenproletariat, in Marxist theory is an underclass beneath and contrasted with the proletariat consisting largely of the unemployable (not due to economic system or structure, or physical capacity, but personal character and inclination), career criminals (of more than mala in se than malum prohibiting sense), and the others who neither make nor are inclined to make a positive contribution to society, and which unlike the proletariat is not viewed as a fertile ground for developing class consciousness and is viewed as a dangerous class at best useless to revolutionary organization of the proletariat, and also having a great potential, largely for pay, to individually be recruited as agents by the bourgeoisie against the proletariat.

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

#312

Post by user5994461 » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 10:30 AM UTC

pcwalton wrote: post #188

ponker wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At this point the right sports comparison isn't LeBron James; it's Lance Armstrong.

Sounds about right. Lance could basically sit down in the rocket and take the fame, while thousands of other people did the work to make the rocket and have it go to the moon and back.

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

#313

Post by Tomis02 » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 10:31 AM UTC

tester34 wrote: post #299

Tomis02 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> world's best self-driving engineer Citation needed. I don't see many self-driving cars around, did you mean "world's most self-promoting engineer in self-driving cars"?

>I don't see many self-driving cars around It doesn't mean that he's not the best, does it?

That's why I was asking for a citation, I want to know by what criteria he was deemed to be the god of self-driving cars.

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

#314

Post by jimmytidey » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 10:31 AM UTC

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.

The same delusional self belief that gets you to 100 million dollar bonuses sends you to prison.

If he was rational he wouldn't have got to the 100 million dollar stage.

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

#315

Post by thewhitetulip » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 10:39 AM UTC

ineedasername wrote: post #136

6nf wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't steal $5,000 from the liqor store, that will get you arrested at gunpoint and you'll spend many years in prison. Instead steal $50,000,000 and you'll probably still be rich once you pay the fines and complete the community service or home arrest.

Depending on the circumstances and state, unarmed robbery could earn you less jail time than Levandowski. Armed robber on the other hand may carry a minimum 5 year sentence. This seems just fine to me. The amount of money between the $5k liquor store and Levandowski's theft is almost irrelevant: the armed robbery comes with significant risk of violent loss of life, which rightfully weighs much heavier in the criminal…

But that's the case with all white collar crime right? they all get very less sentences.

from the outside, it looks like the system is rigged to favour the rich white collar folks or maybe your point is also valid, as in, there is no threat to life and that's their criteria of measurement.

But it is a fact that rich people get treated better in the Prison system

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

#316

Post by thewhitetulip » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 10:52 AM UTC

lostcolony wrote: post #231

bonoboTP wrote: post #140

An honest and naive question from someone outside industry: where is the line between stealing trade secrets and taking your experience and expertise developed at another company to a new company. Where does a lesson learned during project X become taking the know-how of the company which it developed during project X? Because obviously the next company pays you so much because they see in your CV that you gained exp…

Taking best practices is not the same as taking trade secrets. It's ambiguous and murky, yes, but realistically, if it is ambiguous and murky, the case is likely to fall apart. It's when it's clear that you took some secret sauce with you, and replicated it wholesale, that a case is likely to be brought, and likely to be won.

nobody can actually point out 'best practices' even if you implement them in new company.

in this case, they literally copied code and that's why there was a case after the email gaffe.

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

#317

Post by s17n » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 10:53 AM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #125

s17n wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting sued / prosecuted for switching jobs.

> Getting sued / prosecuted for switching jobs. No, getting sued and prosecuted for stealing trade secrets, using them as a basis for starting one business competing with the employer from which they were stolen, and then selling that business to another competitor of the one from which they were stolen.

A similar case could be made against anybody who goes to work for a competitor. He fact that you aren’t guilty might not matter so much if you’re facing vastly asymmetric legal resources.

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

#318

Post by usrusr » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 10:54 AM UTC

cgb223 wrote: post #146

bduerst wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>bonuses in the millions Hundreds of millions. As part of breaching his employment agreement by stealing trade secrets, Levandowski had to pay back one of his bonuses, which was $120 million . I mean, part of paying this type of comp is to retain talent. How much more should Google have paid to retain him? Or was this even preventable?

God what kind of knowledge / training do I need to get that level of bonus?

One basic requirement is that you must be so greedy that this kind of bonus isn't enough. A person less greedy than that would never pull through with the posturing that gets anyone to that level.

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

#319

Post by sah2ed » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 11:09 AM UTC

Traster wrote: post #269

ridaj wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a profile of the dude in Wired that goes over what made him so valuable in Larry Page's eyes. https://www.wired.com/story/god-is-a-bot-and-anthony-levando... Basically, he was one of the key founders of the project that made Google Maps what it is today (a crown jewel of Google with one of the best cartography datasets), vs what it was originally (better UI to third-party, licensed cartography data). I rememb…

>Google Maps basically showed the GIS crowd how their work oughta have been done all this time. With a corporate sponsor willing to sink billions of dollars into a project with potentially no upside?

> With a corporate sponsor willing to sink billions of dollars into a project with potentially no upside?

I wouldn’t frame it as having potentially no upside. In public talks after Google found success as a public company, Larry Page has never hidden his desire to leverage Google’s strengths to improve the transportation industry, so the desire to invest in a venture that has nothing to do with Google’s vision of “organizing the world’s information” was always there. It turns out that transportation and search have a lot in common but it wasn’t immediately obvious back in 2009 how transportation could benefit from investments by an Internet search engine.

I remember attending a Google sponsored event where Google Street View—along with crowd-sourced data added by human users—was marketed as data that would lay the foundation for a self-driving car project. They would later screen a video of the panda-like prototype from the Google Self-Driving Car project, and how the SDC could use Street View data to safely drive people around town, to which there was a lot of applause by the audience.

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

#320

Post by philh » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 11:13 AM UTC

throwaway2048 wrote: post #273

noobermin wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's telling that the "he deserves it, it's all foresight and brilliance" is the leading reply and the "right skills, right time" reply is behind. I imagine just by sheer nature of the power law that some upvotes are people trying to justify their lot but that would be the minority of people. I guess just so many who haven't made it at all but hold this fiction dear for their own peace of mind?

The Just World Fallacy is an important cornerstone of a lot of people's beliefs about the world. It tends to come out most fervently in strained justifications about such massive and obvious inequalities in compensation, such as this case.

Whenever someone says "this state of the world is just, because ", it's easy to say "that's the just world fallacy talking". But it's basically contentless. Really you're just saying that you disagree with the "because", and not explaining why you disagree.

I wish people did it less often.