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I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

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Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#361

Post by waffleiron »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #317
aurareturn wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US media: China is wrong to use its military power to bully countries. Poster: But the US does it too and has done it for far longer and more often. Average HN reply: Omg, whataboutism.

That is sort of the definition of the informal red herring fallacy whataboutism. It doesn’t mean the US hasn’t. It means it’s not related to China being wrong to use military power to bully countries. An awful lot of folks here agree it’s wrong for anyone to bully anyone in any context, especially nations bullying the people of another country. We are all, after all, people. But people citing a fallacy when a fallacy…

> An awful lot of folks here agree it’s wrong for anyone to bully anyone in any context, especially nations bullying the people of another country.

Sure, but the hypocrisy is also in how things get reported. See for example:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/us-china...

Which says:

> through incentives and pressure on consortium members.

No doubt this would be "bribes and threats" if it were done by a geopolitical opponent.

Second, posts critical of the US tend to get many less votes or flagged quickly, with people calling it whataboutism in posts about China or Russia. That leaves no space to properly discuss those things.

Finally, it’s good to have things in a realist context. It’s idealist thinking if we get upset when a geopolitical enemy does something which is commonplace in out own country and that if allies.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#362

Post by eitland »

Aeolun wrote: post #190
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…

> Apache POI lets you run headless Excel. You import and interact with sheets programmatically in Java. How does this help you in the browser?

You make a small small backend-for-frontend that translates requests from the browser to calls to the Apache POI library and return the information to the browser, probably as some kind of json representation.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#363

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

tomcam wrote: post #293
stickfigure wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're being generous, the author may have had permission to do so. It's not inconceivable; the code was abandoned. If one of my reports had asked, I would have approved.

I’m assuming you own the company. Because if you don’t, you don’t have that right.

Unless the company has an open source program that allows open source releases with manager approval.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#364

Post by camkego »

sneak wrote: post #246
zik wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hair stood on end both times he did this. Holy crap that's some massive legal liability.

The code is MIT licensed. Anyone is legally allowed to upload MIT licensed code to GitHub, it's free software and may be freely redistributed.

You can be 99.999% sure unless the engineer went through a long painstaking process to get Box or Uber to open-source and then re-license the code to MIT, it was fully owned under traditional copyright by Box when it was originally authored. Actually, it gets fairly complicated, because he created a derivate work at Uber with with what is likely Box's IP.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#365

Post by camkego »

choppaface wrote: post #357
sneak wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The code is MIT licensed. Anyone is legally allowed to upload MIT licensed code to GitHub, it's free software and may be freely redistributed.

It's MIT licensed now . It probably wasn't originally, and/or he may not have had the authority to choose the license while at Box / Uber.

You can't just re-license intellectual property that someone owns the rights to. EVEN if you authored originally. It's likely Box and Uber own rights to different parts of the IP, under both employment law, and his employment contract.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#366

Post by concordDance »

mkii wrote: post #177
ipython wrote: post #144

Best quote: "People working for Didi apply for intern jobs at Uber China and then exfiltrate our data. We can’t let them see the formulas or they’ll just copy what we do!” This is so true. People in the US just don't understand the level of economic and industrial espionage that happens in China on a daily basis. I was responding to an unrelated breach at an unnamed tech company back in mid-2000s time frame and had a…

And yet, when the author takes code from one company to use for another, or releases company code on Github, nobody bats an eyelid.

That's because that code wasn't in use, so there's no lost business.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#367

Post by concordDance »

lovich wrote: post #267
zik wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hair stood on end both times he did this. Holy crap that's some massive legal liability.

I got into this with another set of engineers on Reddit where I discovered there’s a subculture of engineers who don’t believe you can’t actually own code and apparently take a copy of their employers source code repository everytime they switch jobs. Edit: Updated “can actually own code” to “can’t actually own code”

One thing I regret is not taking a copy of the code I wrote for another company, so many handy little utility functions I made that I then had to recreate. The transaction costs for b2b are far too high for any reasonable sale, so exfiltration is the utilitarian choice.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#368

Post by lovich »

concordDance wrote: post #367
lovich wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got into this with another set of engineers on Reddit where I discovered there’s a subculture of engineers who don’t believe you can’t actually own code and apparently take a copy of their employers source code repository everytime they switch jobs. Edit: Updated “can actually own code” to “can’t actually own code”

One thing I regret is not taking a copy of the code I wrote for another company, so many handy little utility functions I made that I then had to recreate. The transaction costs for b2b are far too high for any reasonable sale, so exfiltration is the utilitarian choice.

That’s still just theft if you’re not a contractor? Full time software employees are doing work for hire. There’s plenty of moral and ideological arguments about theft being morally acceptable in this situation but I was more marveling at the people who thought that taking source code from their company was legally not theft

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#369

Post by canadianfella »

iancmceachern wrote: post #320
ipython wrote: post #144

Best quote: "People working for Didi apply for intern jobs at Uber China and then exfiltrate our data. We can’t let them see the formulas or they’ll just copy what we do!” This is so true. People in the US just don't understand the level of economic and industrial espionage that happens in China on a daily basis. I was responding to an unrelated breach at an unnamed tech company back in mid-2000s time frame and had a…

I've watched this happen. I've watched key, core engineers and technical leaders work for US and European companies, develop their next generation products, then turn around and design and develop essentially the exact same thing for the Chinese market. They then build a company, in China, that makes essentially the same product, but for the Chinese Market, and with Chinese investors, etc. Examples: Thoratec/Abbot He…

[dead]

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#370

Post by robertlagrant »

concordDance wrote: post #366
mkii wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, when the author takes code from one company to use for another, or releases company code on Github, nobody bats an eyelid.

That's because that code wasn't in use, so there's no lost business.

That isn't how ownership works.
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