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
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.
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.
That’s a strange take on this. Not all staff are authorized to speak on the company’s behalf. That’s true almost anywhere I’ve worked. Your efforts cannot always be recognized externally. NDAs and various other types of contracts commonly outline that.
I would be surprised if many people here really just assumed that a pseudonymous user chatting with us in the HN comments was speaking on behalf of the company in an official capacity. I mean, obviously there are legal niceties to be observed and he should have appended the usual disclaimers, blah blah blah, but we do have common sense here right?
No, people don't have common sense. People should not post publicly on behalf of their employer without running it by a manager. This is lesson one at every major corporate introduction and I now understand why, because people don't have common sense.
I didn't say anything about whether he should or should not have spoken out about the deal. And I specifically said that common sense doesn't cut the mustard legally. But I am asserting that the damage from people supposedly assuming that he was speaking officially is speculative and likely zero.
This isn’t really about employee recognition. The whole comment was about attribution for the company and marketing the partnership with Scale. Which is pretty standard in some business arrangements but which wasn’t the case here, which the employee wasn’t aware of and turned out to not that big of a deal for scale. Plenty of companies work in the background supporting other. Businesses and don’t always need attribution.
OP is trying to pigeonhole this into some sort of anti capitalist diatribe by trying to make it about individual employees wanting recognition and some big evil company is treating them like invisible cogs in the machine... which doesn’t make much sense since he asked for the company itself to be attributed, not individuals. It’s up to the company to reward and recognize employee contributions, not in some 3rd party partners announcements.
Plus he was always free to comment how he helped work on it or letting people know Scale had a role in helping make it (which are both common on HN). Only if the parent company tried to suppress that would this argument make any sense. But I don’t know why I’m bothering to counter such a position.
that's a strange response. i'm already clearly critiquing the dominant paradigm, capitalism. why would you just itemise a bunch of conventions from this paradigm, which i likely disagree with?
do you need hn to be an agreeable echo chamber for you?
capitalism depends on people not thinking thoroughly about the "deal" they are being drawn into. i'm here to harm this situation.
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.
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.
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)
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).
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.
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.
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