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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

#531

Post by pl4nty »

concordDance wrote: post #413
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

It's not theft, it's copyright infringement and is very morally and practically different from theft. The range of circumstances in which it is morally acceptable are MUCH broader.

in my country, copying source code is definitely theft and is contractually enforced. but reproducing similar concepts/architectures from memory happens often

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#532

Post by whimsicalism »

concordDance wrote: post #413
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

It's not theft, it's copyright infringement and is very morally and practically different from theft. The range of circumstances in which it is morally acceptable are MUCH broader.

It's quite literally IP theft, not just copyright infringement.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#533

Post by diogenes4 »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #258
diogenes4 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People in the US just don't understand the level of economic and industrial espionage that happens in China on a daily basis. Back in my day this was called "competition" and worked for the consumer, not against them. I find the espionage factor to be theatrical hogwash trotted out by the corporate types. We americans love competition, right? Stfu and compete.

You're missing a huge part of this: The "competition" you think you're referring to had, you know, actual rules. Sending people to get jobs at a rival, and steal all of their internal documents and trade secrets, is illegal in most countries.

> You're missing a huge part of this: The "competition" you think you're referring to had, you know, actual rules

This is, of course, false.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#534

Post by iancmceachern »

flakeoil wrote: post #415
barry-cotter wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I really doubt this unless all the inputs are commoditised. Industrial espionage usually fails because if you don’t have the know how to make the tools that make the tools it’s difficult to impossible to literally copy it. Not saying what you’re saying doesn’t happen…

> if you don’t have the know how to make the tools that make the tools it’s difficult to impossible to literally copy it. Smart and knowledgable people in a certain field, but who are slightly stuck, can be helped by a few tiny details. If someone can provide a specific manual or piece of documentation, or just a photo copy or image of some key detail then those smart and knowledgable people can pass the hurdle and c…

Exactly, and now days you can buy most tools you would need on ebay. Need a huge cnc milling machine? Ebay, Need an injection molding machine? Packaging equipment, whatever. Even medical equipment

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#535

Post by victorbjorklund »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #511
prox wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did this become a thing on a cultural scale? Like that everyone does it and it is almost expected as it were?

> How did this become a thing on a cultural scale? A IP is not a 'natural' concept, most cultures do not have it. Better question might be how did IP become a cultural thing in the West?

Of course they have IP in China. If a western firm violates a chinese firms IP they will of course take action.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#536

Post by blackqueeriroh »

stormfather wrote: post #417
aurareturn wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's both the phrasing and the content.

I don't see the content as racist. If a wikipedia article lists the proportion of ethnic Chinese in Malaysia, is that a racist article too?

What is with the constant need to deploy logical fallacies? Here, you’re deploying false equivalence - what some person said as a first-person out loud based on unknown evidence that compared people to animals of some sort that walk on all fours is completely different than a Wikipedia article that contains sourced objective comparative data and shares it in third-person. And why are these two things different?

Context.

Nothing exists without context, and analysis of a thing or an action or a situation without considering context is pointless and, frankly, bad analysis. In fact, it’s bad science. Understanding, recognizing, accounting for, and sometimes mitigating context is crucial to being an engineer, a software developer, a rocket scientist, et al.

So honestly, I don’t particularly care if it’s racist or not (it is, but not because P necessarily hates Chinese people, but because it reinforces ideas and beliefs that contribute to the systemic oppression of Chinese people in the US), I just think your argument is so flimsy a stiff breeze would tear it apart.

Do better.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#537

Post by PeterStuer »

avidiax wrote: post #392
PeterStuer wrote: post #338

Running the models on laptops overnight? They know desktops and servers exist right?

Uber, at that time, was "scrappy". Every operating city was a different market with different rules, so Uber was akin to a franchiser that gave their market managers wide leeway to setup whatever business processes are needed to succeed in that market. Excel is the easiest way for business-oriented people to make numerical decisions, run incentive campaigns, segment riders and drivers, produce reports required by cit…

A laptop is basically a desktop with sustained performance thrown out the window in favor of sleek portability.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#538

Post by kubanczyk »

bsder wrote: post #76

Side question: Why the hell is it so stupidly difficult to display and edit tabular data from programming code? You can't drive Excel from Python/Rust/etc (Microsoft just announced to great fanfare that Excel can call Python--which is the wrong way around). All the editable table widgets for the web seem to suck. Nobody seems to have a TUI which you can drive from an external program. A poorly written spreadsheet wit…

> Microsoft just announced to great fanfare that Excel can call Python--which is the wrong way around

How do you cause users to even discover that Python app, or feed an input to it? Of course the spreadsheet software is an obvious candidate for the primary UI.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#539

Post by concordDance »

akozak wrote: post #526
concordDance wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think that's not how it works?

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/504

You could have said "There's statutory damages in of $750 or higher" in addition to providing the link.

Thanks anyway.

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