Hacker News Reader

Comment by cardigan | Hacker News Reader

(I work at scale)

Hmm this blog post and the website doesn't mention that this dataset was mostly annotated by Scale (scale.ai), as part of a partnership with Lyft ... We're going to publish a blog post about this soon, but if anyone at Lyft is reading this, please figure out how to reasonably credit Scale since I doubt leaving out Scale completely from the announcement is in the spirit of the agreement. Scale should probably also be added to the bibliography and website in some form

Contrast this with the nuScenes website, which was also annotated by Scale, and whose data format set the standard for this dataset: they credit Scale pretty reasonably

View on HN

Hi, I'm the CEO of Scale.ai.

This comment does not represent the company's viewpoint, and cardigan is not speaking on behalf of Scale.

We are very excited to have been able to work with Lyft in open-sourcing this dataset and advancing the research community. We are also very grateful to Lyft for choosing to leverage our point cloud viewer and have credited the annotations to us on their launch page.

Ouchy

Gotta love HN.

Good people come to comment on a minute notice!

Still odd Lyft doesn't credit this when posting about it.

That escalated quickly.

Business should not be lost. Credit is secondary.

Under the bus they go!

This is pretty effective marketing... generate some fake controversy over some small slight and have it go viral on HN.

(I work in marketing at scale)

Thank you.

(I don't really)

Plot twist: Original comment was also the CEO.

> I doubt leaving out Scale completely from the announcement is in the spirit of the agreement

CEO Narrator: it was.

MULTI-KILL

BBBBUYOUT

PPPPAAAAYDAY

ACQUI-FFFFIRED

Someone will get fired today

Hopefully not. Cardigan obviously is has the company's interest in mind, even if perhaps the execution is a little flawed. Cardigan has just learnt a lot about PR and also gave a lot of free airtime to Scale.

Also hopefully Scale will use this opportunity to educate team members about situations like this.

Quick tip: voice concerns about partners in private. Lyft will probably be happy to credit Scale more - it was likely an honest mistake. But now you dragged them through the mud publicly, which is going to make big companies less likely to work with Scale in the future.

Yeah, this comment to me really gives off a bad impression of Scale as a whole. My immediate reaction, assuming this is how Scale normally deals with PR, is that this company is still far too immature to be properly handling any sort of legitimate partnership.

FYI, you’re unlikely to solve any of your problems airing grievances on a public forum instead of just directly emailing the people involved.

If you are an officer of scale you should take this offline. If not then you’re probably not authorized to speak on behalf of scale. Check your NDAs and service agreements. This is in such poor taste, anyone who would consider scale’s service now has to consider this sort of public commentary.

> Anyone who would consider scale’s service now has to consider this sort of public commentary.

Not if they leave attribution.

Leaving out attribution is in poor taste. There were multiple chances to give attribution in the original blog post.

We don't know the terms of the deal between the two companies. Your comment makes a lot of assumptions.

Out of curiosity, isn't Lyft just a customer that pays Scale for annotation services? Or is there a reason for this to be more of a partnership and less of a customer-client relationship?

yeah, i'd say so. what if lyft's lidar manufacturers said that they should be included in this release because it's their lidars? I agree, it doesnt really need mentioning

OP here, just waking up (I'm remote) - I can't edit my original comments so let me modify them here:

I wasn't involved in our communications with Lyft, so I was talking about something I didn't know much about. My audience was just the anonymous commenteriat: turns out a lot of people whose opinion makes a material difference to Lyft/Scale read these comments too. Sorry for not realizing that; I probably wouldn't have posted an uninformed personal opinion had I realized that.

I was being way too aggressive - genuinely sorry to anyone at Lyft who felt maligned by these comments. I woke up to 20 messages from coworkers who told me I was being an ass - genuinely sorry :(

Also I really should've clarified I was not speaking on behalf of the company: this was just a personal, uninformed opinion.

I cannot go into the details I learned about Scale's agreement with Lyft since it's confidential

I seriously suggest you to add "Disclaimer" to every comment you leave on threads related to your company (see boulos' comments for example here on HN).

Also, and I really mean this in a friendliest way possible, take a pause commenting here. You're not doing yourself a favor. I suggest you talk to your PR/marketing department before exposing more internal details, or run comments by them before posting.

It's in your best interests to edit out the last part of your comment.

Maybe everyone here could stop asking this person to edit their comments? People have been banned by dang and co for much less...

Your apology seems sincere but from the outside it looks like the CEO forced you to do so.

Word of advice. If someone is paying you for a service (Lyft in this case), you really should think twice, three times, four times, before you disparage them in public. Live and learn. Good luck.

Also, the viewer packaged with nuScenes was built by Steven Hao from Scale, and while it was packaged as part of nuScenes it should probably be called Scale's viewer instead of nuScenes' viewer. The original viewer in the nuscenes SDK has the Scale logo, but it looks like Lyft removed that in the fork. Maybe a bit of public shaming will fix that...

Dear Lyft marketing person who wrote this: we are a data labeling company, and you may think that means we have a bunch of useless bozos working here like most other data labeling companies, but that's not true - e.g, Steven is one of the smartest people in the world - https://stats.ioinformatics.org/people/3113 - he learns ridiculously quickly - e.g, gets to number one on random video games in a few weeks and learned to boulder L10 in a few months from scratch (normally takes years/decades and most climbers never get there)

Not nitpicking, genuinely curious. L10? I've never heard of that climbing scale.

There is no such thing. They have to have meant v10, and climbing v10 "in a few months" is an incredibly skeptical claim.

Without some kind of gymnast background I honestly don't think it's possible. Even 0 to v10 in a year is hard to believe. I've heard of phenoms doing it in 2 or 3 years, and don't doubt a year is possible... but a few months? Kind of like going from couch to sub 5-minute mile in a few months.

> Steven is one of the smartest people in the world

Also has a fan club on HN. :D

These should probably be deleted.

At first I was on kind of on your side against the other comments telling you to delete your other comment. I think its important to set the record straight if you can as early as possible. A small retraction/correction isn't guaranteed to make the frontpage of HN again.

But then this comment took it into a weird turn with how fast steven can learn rock climbing (seriously, i am still kind of unsure if we're talking about rock climbing because its so random and unrelated).

I think you're just jealous that he learned to boulder L10 in a few months from scratch AND gets to number one in video games!

Have a wonderful day tomorrow. Good luck.

I'm hoping this was coordinated with the CEO and he's getting free lunch tomorrow for the successful publicity stunt.

"Gets to number one in random video games"

Genius

Intelligence makes you good at everything, it's almost not fair.

> Maybe a bit of public shaming will fix that...

Wow dude (or dudess), I was on your side but you are losing me there.

You seem to be pretty pissed, and I hope you are anonymous and not Steven Hao... There is little room for emotion in business. Grow up.

I dont care, but god what is wrong with the replies. Let the guy speak his/er mind and stop playing game of thrones

(I work at Lyft)

I've had it with you Scale.AI people always trying to take credit for Lyft's work. We've been working weekends and nights for years, even the hourly workers have had to take unpaid overtime. All that time, I've never seen Scale.AI do extra work to help us before a big deadline.

You should delete this.

Nah, it’s a harmless mistake. Good for people to learn from.

Nah, all publicity is good publicity.

Overall many more people will know scale now, so I don't necessarily think it's as bad as many think. Maybe not the best choice of words obviously...

I just researched scale before your comment here ! I tought : "This isn't done by scale ?"

Hope you guys get acquired by someone that recognizes the talent of your team. You deserve it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com