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Comment by valuearb | Hacker News Reader

"But Larry Page is no longer convinced that Levandowski was key to Chauffeur’s success. In his deposition to the court, Page said, “I believe Anthony’s contributions are quite possibly negative of a high amount.” At Uber, some engineers privately say that Levandowski’s poor management style set back that company’s self-driving effort by a couple of years."

So does this mean Waymo owes Uber damages, or payment for taking the problem off their hands?

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I could see Page saying that. Urmson seems to have been the one who took the Waymo technology from "sort of works" to "works reliably". There's a long, slow grind phase of testing, logging, and dealing with more unusual situations before the technology is ready for deployment. Levandowski tends to skip that part, as with the Otto demo. One can see why he got along with Kalanick.

Levandowski comes out of this fine. Google can't sue him. Google has an employee contract which forces employee disputes into arbitration. That arbitration has already happened and can't be reopened. The settlement terms are not public.

The LIDAR design is a side issue. There will be lots of good, low-cost LIDAR units as soon as someone is able to order a few hundred thousand of them. Continental's flash LIDAR will probably be the first successful mass-market flash LIDAR. Quanergy made a lot of noise, but never shipped. Now they seem to be pivoting from automotive to border security. (They want to make Trump's border wall a virtual one.) Tetraview has funding but no products. Velodyne has been making flash LIDAR noises but hasn't demoed yet. Innoviz has demoed an experimental unit and claims to be selling it. Meanwhile, Velodyne is trying to get their rotating devices down to $500 in quantity.

Currently studying arbitration. Do you have a source on Levandowski’d arbitration already having been completed? Interested to know more there...

https://www.google.com/search?q=Levandowski+arbitration

Details: https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/29/waymo-pursued-arbitration-...

Knowing the Tetravue founders personally and having seen the tech years before any the funding came in I can say that their product is at least as real as their competitors'.

Who?

PMD/IFM has been trying to drive their costs down for a while as well.

That's a modulated carrier type system. Those aren't useful in sunlight, because they have to outshine ambient lighting continuously. Pulse-type devices only have to outshine the sun in a narrow frequency band for a nanosecond, which is quite possible.

That's the idea behind the modulation, though. It's relatively easy for the receiver to lock to the modulated AC frequency in the presence of sunlight ("DC" at baseband).

Same concept as TV remotes that frequently use a 36-38 kHz carrier. If they just gated the IR LED on and off at the baseband data rate, interference from room light would be a problem.

Those things are fun. The idea is that you modulate the outgoing beam with a RF carrier, and measure the phase shift of the incoming beam relative to the outgoing beam. Today you can do this directly, because electronics is fast enough to count in the gigahertz range. It used to have to be done by superheterodyning, like a radio receiver. You down-convert both the incoming and outgoing signals using a local oscillator, and get two new signals at a much lower frequency. This transformation has the useful property that the phase difference between the lower-frequency signals is the same as the phase difference at the higher frequency. But at the lower frequency, it's easier to measure the phase difference. Also, you get the selectivity of a superheterodyne receiver.

That's fine for a scanner, where you only need one copy of the electronics, but doing it for every pixel means something like a radio receiver behind each pixel. Still, you could probably do that now.

The SwissRanger [1], a short-range time of flight imaging camera, worked like that. It's been discontinued.

(I fooled around with this in the early 1990s, trying to build a laser scanner. Too many noise problems.)

[1] http://hptg.com/industrial/

Yeah, that's an intriguing piece of hardware. A camera that outputs a Z buffer at conventional digital-photo resolutions and data rates would have lots of uses, but it sounds like it fell short of that goal.

Luminar inked Toyota deal…

I'm curious what LIDAR solves for border security, that infrared cameras can't already do. I guess they could more easily identify slow moving objects and camoflage?

The stuff he stole wasn't necessarily his own work. Page is saying that not only Levandowski didn't help, he also stole the hard work of the other engineers.

I understand, but still find it humorous that Google & Uber now say Levandowski didn't make positive contributions. It's like saying my ex-girlfriend that I lived with for 4 years and moved across the country for, was fat, lazy and a boring conversationalist. Obviously she was also amazing or the 4 years never happens.

Obviously people have both good and bad attributes. It seems pretty clear that Levandowski is a brilliant engineer, with his minor (lol) flaws being arrogance and a psychopathic lack of respect for authority and others.

It's not a unique story. Smart people who solve hugely valuable problems typically do it through obsessive work, this gives them less experience developing acceptable social behaviors, and when they get hugely successful and get to operate without normal social constraints they haven't developed a strong personal judgment to help constrain their behavior.

I once worked at a startup with a brilliant founding developer building a revolutionary new visual programming language. The entire company depended on their efforts, so they didn't get much pushback on their personal behavior. Over years this can be corrosive, and he often was quite the jerk.

Eventually there was a blow up, and the developer left and was forced to work for other companies where he was just an employee, no longer the most important person. I still kept in touch and marveled at how much more self aware he had become, and how much more the inner nice guy I had always known was there had come to the foreground.

Ha, ha, yes; I originally thought it was similar to a bitter ex-boyfriend thing, especially since Levandowski and Thrun basically invented the Google self-driving car program.

I can understand Page feeling that way, since he had to get dragged into the dispute between Levandowski and Thrun's replacement.

The man was giving a deposition to enemy lawyers in a multi-billion dollar lawsuit. I wouldn't try to derive his raw, uncensored opinion of the man from that data point alone.

Yes, of course not. I agree that everything in this affair should be considered in that light.

> was fat, lazy and a boring conversationalist. Obviously she was also amazing or the 4 years never happens

Well (for the defense!) I could argue that you were tied to her for other reasons and/or were co-dependent. After all people stay in abusive and bad relationships frequently and not just for money reasons for all sorts of emotional reasons.

Can you explain the codependency?

I think the key is some underlying and rare technology. In this case it is LIDAR. Google itself was Page Rank. Oracle was SQL. Microsoft was Basic.

I read it as Page saying it was a net negative. Levandowski's positives are outweighed by his flaws/actions.

Bad analogy: people stay in dysfunctional relationships with awful people all the time. Companies do too.

Wow. Thanks for sharing this. I think this is overlooked by society today. People have no idea what it takes to truly make software. I would argue most of the people on the software side in tech have non human like abilities which enable such great technology stacks to be developed. It's such a shame that we are so quick to judge, especially when the people have no idea what went into devolpment of a technology. We Champion the outcome but not the process. I think until there is a shift in thinking and celebrating the process and the product you will constantly see nonsense comments, like Page stated, appear in a vicious loop. It would be great to see them release the emails of praise. It just sucks that negative information travels or carries more weight than positive information.

No, what Page is saying, which is corroborated by this article, that after Sebastian Thrun's departure, Levandowski actively inhibited the project. Because he didn't get along with Thrun's replacement, Anthony's squabbling caused project delays to the point where Page had to personally mediate between the two. Later, Levandowski solicited Chauffer employees to quit Google to join his startup.

When the CEO of a company has to step in to mediate disputes between two of his directors, there is something seriously wrong.

The article nor Page claim that alleged theft of trade secrets has somehow slowed down Waymo's progress.

>> When the CEO of a company has to step in to mediate disputes between two of his directors, there is something seriously wrong.

I agree and for every large corporation I worked at, hearing something like this is quite odd to say the least. I would think Page would dispatch some underling to sort them out instead. Or was the project that important that Page felt he had to get involved to save it from disaster?

Probably should have fired both quickly

They may have reported directly to Page. Not unusual for a high profile projects with founder attention until they get bored and move on to something else.

And yet, Page had Levandowski working on his self-funded flying car startup.

While Levandowski repeatedly bit the hand that fed him, they continued to feed him.

this kind of thing happens over and over in SV. the east coast equivalent is hedge fund managers who continue to blow up or just not produce, yet, always manage to raise new funds.

Is it though? Name some funds that have blown up and have continued to raise Capital again? I think you're confusing the two because I think they are drastically different, but that is just my opinion. As the saying goes,there's a sucker born every minute.=) Or as a troll would say, don't hate the player hate the game.

I said fund managers, not funds themselves: John Meriwether raised a new fund just a year after LTCM collapsed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Meriwether

on the one hand, it's hard to read too much into this statement: what else is Larry going to say?

but if you assume it's accurate, you've really got to wonder who's driving the bus. A few months ago it's "let's make this guy rich if this succeeds" and letting him start businesses on the side, and then all of a sudden it's the opposite. It would almost make one think that, maybe, everyone isn't so great at assessing impact and contribution of an individual. And if that's the case, maybe everyone should slow the roll on the whole fetishization of engineers/visionaries that's such a favorite pastime in the valley?

So they discover that he was routing contracts to his own companies, for any other employee this would be unethical behavior and out of the door, but no, this is just fine in this instance. And then, many years later they get surprised...

This entire story is mind-boggling.

"is no longer convinced" - that is very cheap

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