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

441–450 of 565 posts

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#441

Post by didntcheck »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #207
nextaccountic wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Th…

It's not just China. For example, there's been several accusations of the French state assisting in industrial espionage against the US, and France has acknowledged some of these cases as true

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_espionage#France_an...

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#442

Post by berniedurfee »

xmcqdpt2 wrote: post #437
emptysongglass wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not "the deal". It's illegal. No one on either side agreed to do this and had that been part of the negotiation, the offended party would have walked away or else agreed to a higher sale price in exchange for technology transfer.

> It's illegal. According to who? Sovereign states have their own laws, that's what makes them sovereign. You claim that companies wouldn't have done business in China (in the times before our current Second Cold War) had they known about the lack of IP law enforcement there. I think companies who outsourced to China knew very well what was going on, and calculated that they'd still come out ahead.

I agree with this. The executives that made the decision to outsource and offshore understood that near term gains would come with long term consequences, they always do. Those executives did very well by those short term gains.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#443

Post by hu3 »

DwnVoteHoneyPot wrote: post #82
abeppu wrote: post #59

I'm confused about the circular reference thing. Like, was there a reason to do the linear regression that way? Is there a secret story in a story where next week, in a spinoff / sequel episode, the data scientist responsible will explain why they took the weird/surprising choices they did?

It's a common excel trick in finance. For example, let say you have $0. If you borrow $1,000,000 at 5% interest, by end of year you'll be short $50k. That means you actually needed to borrow $1,050,000. But the extra $50K causes more interest ($2,500)... so you needed to borrow $1,052,500, which causes more interest... and so on. Instead of doing some Excel Goal Seek or Solver or VBA macro, it's nice to let the excel…

Your explanation is brilliant!

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#444

Post by fnwbr »

given this website’s name it’s incredible how deeply neoliberal posts’ contents, comments and discourse have gotten…

y’all seriously believe that the only valid reason for an engineer or a programmer to exist is to “create *bUsiNess~ value”? i’m shaking my head.

this blog post is full of ideological blindness.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#445

Post by xmcqdpt2 »

aragonite wrote: post #385
lovich wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

1. Suppose the OP did not take the source code files, but memorized the source code and later recalled it from memory. Would that be theft? 2. Suppose the OP neither took the file nor memorized the code, but had photographic memory and replayed the exact visual scenes during their creation of the utility functions and copied down the code from what they saw in their mind's eye. Would that be theft? 3. Suppose the OP…

> 1. Suppose the OP did not take the source code files, but memorized the source code and later recalled it from memory. Would that be theft?

It is copyright infringement, yes. That's why clean room implementations are done by someone who hasn't seen the original source code,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

For the other examples, it depends but I'm pretty sure a copyright infringement case for either of them wouldn't be immediately thrown out. IANAL but I do know that law is quite fuzzy.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#446

Post by speed_spread »

aurareturn wrote: post #331
fnordpiglet wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't have a problem with the US bullying others. My problem is that people here on HN and in the west in general, demonizing China for doing the exact same thing when the US has done worse. They think it's ok to boycott Chinese products, but they won't boycott product from their own country. They will say that the Chinese government is evil, but is completely ok with the government of their own. They will say Chin…

Because China's government is the CCP, which is the sole political party of China, which is headed by a dictator, whose endgame is to ultimately have all power concentrated into his hands, forever.

We're not demonizing Chinese people, Chinese culture, Chinese land or Chinese industry, but the forceful alignment of those things to serve a single entity over any other concern.

The West, no matter how bad it can be, doesn't have _that_ problem. Elites come and go, grassroots revolutions have happened and will keep happening without major bloodshed.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#447

Post by xmcqdpt2 »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #259
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.

Not when he wrote it for and showed it to box. Doesn’t matter how he “licensed” it. They would have had good legal standing to come after him. I can’t believe he wrote that on his blog. He should honestly take it down.

Yes, that would look awful in a court case IMO,

> I demoed Box Sums to the Box Notes team at some point, and they nitpicked the UI and implementation details (“What if two people type in the same cell at the same time? They’ll just overwrite each other.” ). Nothing came of it, but I took the code and shoved it into my back pocket for a rainy day.

emphasis mine

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#448

Post by delusional »

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.

This seems like a reasonable amount of pragmatism. As with most things in contract law, it's not meaningfully illegal unless some claimant is actually going to enforce it. You give enough context in the post to alert at reader that they should be careful of using it.

Thanks for sharing a cool story.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#449

Post by IG_Semmelweiss »

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…

Its not only that, but when they can't beat them...they make them join: startups with valuable market intelligence get bought all the time by Chinese companies.

See for example the case of DEAR systems, which is a cloud-based WMS that is particularly useful for intelligence as to how much (US) importers are paying for worldwide goods, and what is the cost of shipping from A to B.

It was bought by a chinese company not long ago. That's 1 example.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cin7-acquires-dear-...

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#450

Post by sametmax »

iancmceachern wrote: post #344
vkazanov wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So an engineer learns how to make something, and then goes elsewhere to make it. To be honest, the way you put ut, the story feels OK to me. There are many truly bad examples, e.g. the arm china story, but engineers doing their thing is not one of them.

This isn't that. This is engineers deliberately taking tech to somewhere where they know IP laws won't be enforced. It's not like I'm saying they can learn calculus here and then go to China and use calculus to design things. It's that I'm saying they design a very specific thing, a very specific way, for hire, then go make that exact specific thing, that same specific way. If it were in any other country but China,…

If you learn how to build a castel with a very specific era look and feel as an architect, would you not then be likely hired to build a similar castel elsewhere?
Post reply on HN