rogerdonaldson

barleyworth, I believe the email was written in a humorous way. If it was a serious email, with that sex point in it, then I agree it would have been weird, and wrong.

But the whole email right from the first word to the last was written in a jovial manner with plenty of jokes in it. So I dont feel it was that bad.

I can understand that Travis was trying to create a party atmosphere after all of them worked really hard to get to where they are. Imagine, if you and your colleagues worked day and night for years and then finally you reached a milestone -- you might want to celebrate and have some fun! I think Travis was just trying to setup the jovial atmosphere so that people do not just have a standard corporate event.

"But in this case the larger problem is that it's (more or less) a single-purpose account for getting into flamewars about Uber. That's not how this site is supposed to be used."

So a person cannot give opinion in a civil way, and highlight information which was not known to others? It is "mandatory" to talk about multiple topics at HN?

How do you define "flamewars"? Just giving your opinion about a topic, discussing, debating is flamewars? Then one could say the entire world of comments on HN is flamewars, since most comments discuss and debate topics.

I believe arguing your opinion civilly, giving reasons etc, should be okay, regardless of whether you talk of only one topic -- or have a particular opinion on one side of the debate. Most users of the site typically have some view which falls on one side on any debate. But they defend it and give their reasons civilly. Thats the whole point, isnt it?

I have read employee8000's posts and they all seem civil. Except for the one which was changed. But that particular comment was wrong, his other comments on this thread are very civil IMHO.

Why do you think so? He is making sound, well-reasoned statements IMHO.

employee8000 well spoken!

Why am I seeing all of the comments employee8000 made down-voted? Again, this is what the world does to Uber -- try to suppress all true and positive facts, and only let media's negative opinions based on 0.001% know-how of the company prevail!

This is pretty much normal for any tech company.

In fact, Uber has very little data on their users (it is limited to trips taken on their platform) -- a company with more digital services like Google, Facebook, Apple etc have humongous amounts of data on their users. Even small companies which are in the ads industry have lots of info on users using third-party cookies.

Note that all companies in the ride-sharing market are doing the same thing, not just Uber. Uber in fact looses less money than Lyft per ride.

I dont see Uber itself having done it. Levandowski was the one who downloaded the documents when he was a Google engineer. It has not been proven and is very unlikely that Uber asked him to download the documents or knew about it. If Uber did not know that he downloaded documents, then I dont see how Uber did the wrong thing here.

In fact, Google's Java lawsuit with Sun/Oracle seemed worse for Google to me, as Google empployees openly discussed in emails that they were violating licensing terms and still did it.

Btw, how do they prevent "reverse theft" here? When Google looks at Uber designs, couldnt they learn from them and incorporate the learnings back into their designs?

Regardless of whether Uber's design is using some of Waymo's design concepts -- I am sure there will be a lot of different aspects in Uber's designs some of which could be useful for Waymo.