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Comment by monktastic1 | Hacker News Reader

Do you mean morally or legally? It's hard to imagine a Google engineer not knowing that sharing trade secrets is something their employer would seriously frown upon, no?

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There's a name for it, it's called Shadow IT. It's the most common and often non-malicious kind of data leak. The only reason we care about it here, is because he's Chinese, and because he allegedly did meaningful things at Google.

I went to Kubecon in Shanghai last year, and they should have probably just called it LLMcon, since that seems to be 90% of what big tech in China is focused on right now. Not saying that there probably wasn't some interesting stuff in the data he took, but I think people here massively underestimate the talent and investment in China in this domain. Nvidia literally just identified Huawei as their top competitor[1].

I've never had an imposter syndrome as big as the one I had there (and in Taiwan, but more on the hardware side of things) anywhere in the valley.

[1] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/gadgets-news/nvidia-list...

Is your allegiance to your employer above your allegiance to your country?

I'm not sure why you're asking me that. I made it clear from my comment that there's a distinction between legal and moral "wrong," and I described the unlikelihood that he didn't know it was the former. That's all.

What's legal is not constant in space and time. I bet the only thing he thought he didn't do right is not get out of the US in time. Then it would have been both legal and moral for him.

If he felt that he had to "get out in time," then he knew he did something "wrong" in the sense that my parent is (presumably) asking about. That's the only question I'm answering. You seem intent on drawing me into a debate about subtleties of moral and legal ethics, but I'm sorry to say I'm not interested right now.

And yet you're the one who brought it up

GP asked a clarifying question. You're desire to read into the question and make assumptions about what you think must have been their intent, rather than just taking the question at face value does not mean GP is "the one who brought it up."

I've not read into anything. Someone brings up a subject, someone else expands on it, then the person who brought it up to begin with starts complaining about what they got. It's stupid, waste of text.

Don't reply to me btw. I didn't bring this up for you to speak about it.

What I'm inferring from this truly bizarre thread is that some people assume that clarifying questions are always fronts for hidden motivations (such as springing "gotchas" or getting into debates). It might be worthwhile to consider that not all people operate that way.

No and I also don’t think American companies should be employing citizens of foreign adversaries. That this is controversial shows just how naive the average American is and how unsustainable we are as a civilization these days.

> That this is controversial shows just how naive the average American is and how unsustainable we are as a civilization these days.

IMHO, dismissing any potential opposition as "naive" before you've even heard it, is about as naive as it gets. It also overshadows what otherwise might have been an interesting discussion point by declaring your unwillingness to actually discuss the point.

No it is naive to favor employing citizens of a foreign adversary. There is no argument for this that isn’t based on emotions and “not being mean”

The statement is not about allegiance, it is about knowledge of breaking company policy and conducting corporate espionage.

The question is, just to clear: "Regardless of whether it is right or wrong according to his personal morality, do we honestly believe that he didn't know it was going to anger his employer and likely violate his employment agreement to the extent that he'd face civil or legal penalties?"

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