skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IAAL (but i've only done small amount of criminal work).

A crime has been committed, even if they don't pick up the officials.
If uber is operating illegally, the drivers that have picked anyone up have committed a crime.

Keeping the cars away from the officials trying to ticket and prosecute those drivers is the obstruction.

That is, it's not the "avoiding sting" that causes it to be obstruction, because the crime was committed the second a driver picked someone up. Instead, the obstruction is "helping drivers who have committed crimes not be noticed, ticketed, or prosecuted"

That's definitely obstruction in jurisdictions that have this form of obstruction.
> It's not like you enter into a contract with Uber just by downloading the app

Ahh, but Uber themselves say you ARE!

"By accessing or using the Services, you confirm your agreement to be bound by these Terms..."

It'd be incredibly amusing to watch their lawyers try to argue it both ways though. They'd have to either admit that they did have a contract, or they'd have to completely tear up their terms-of-service.
> That is the sort of attitude I would have expected to encounter from someone in the 1990s.

This is not a rebuttal.

> This link is only two clicks away from the link that you provided.

I fail to see the relevance of this. UCSF literally has no school of computer science or engineering. It's absurd to suggest that they should create one in order to handle their IT needs. Also, FYI, many (most?) schools' IT departments are separate from their actual research departments.

If UCSF decides to partner with Johnson & Johnson, will you take that as evidence that UCSF should start a school of janitorial studies to handle their housekeeping needs?
>The USA rules are interesting for this. If you marry a non-US spouse you will not have these problems. You cannot BRING a spouse or fiancé to the US without the minimum financial requirements. But once they are in the country one (like if you married a tourist), you would not have these problems nor are they being proposed. It is relatively easy to bring your spouse or fiance to the USA.

I think there are more nuances. If you marry outside the US and want to bring your spouse in on a tourist visa and then apply for a US marriage license, that is visa fraud (even if you never got officially married in the country where you got "married"). Happened to a friend of mine.

If you meet a great person online and you decide to marry him/her, and if that person tries to enter the US on a tourist visa but really with the intention to meet and marry you - that's visa fraud. I know most people get away with it, but occasionally the immigration officials figure it out and deport you immediately without letting you in.

If your fiance manages to get in on a tourist visa and you two get married, it is likely still fraud as long as the fiance had the intent of marrying you when applying for the tourist visa. They likely will not bother hunting you down, but it is probably illegal as far as the rules go.

Because of these kinds of things, I know several friends who do not take these risks. They marry the person officially in the person's home country, and then go to the consulate/embassy to formally get a PR visa for them to come over. Can take 1-2 years.
I was part of the team that started kompose. The main idea was to help developers who had adopted docker-compose moved to Kubernetes. We understand that this is not a perfect match and there will always be semantic mismatch. Personally, I don't expect folks to use this for production. But, if you started down the road of docker-compose and want an easy way to generate Kubernetes manifests then kompose does the trick. This will get you on the way, and you will start learning Kubernetes primitives.
> Maybe 'Tina' is a bad boss, but to take one employees gripes and accept a face value that she has they behavioural awareness to know her boss is 'insecure' is a stretch too far.

I would agree with you if the author of the article put forth 'insecurity' as an explanation. But she didn't; that was my interpretation of the claims presented in the story as they were written. And yes, I did take them at face value, just for the purpose of illustrating that it's plausible to wonder if there's more going on here than tank tops.

I mean, the author doesn't exhibit any behavioral awareness. The author presents one email she wrote to HR as a complaint, claims HR did nothing about it, labels her boss and HR as sexist, and says things need to change. She's more concerned with the atmosphere at Uber that allowed her complaint to be ignored than anything else.
Stoking the flames, perhaps, but...

"Greyball and the broader VTOS program were described to The New York Times by four current and former Uber employees"

The employees, current and former, are lighting the fires.
> It would be sexism if it was directed only at women [...]

So if a manager has a department composed of 100% of one gender they can't make sexist comments about their employees' clothes because there isn't someone of the opposite gender to see if it's 'sexist'?

It sounds a lot like things I've heard used as examples of sexism in lawsuits against companies before, so I'm willing to believe that it is sexist (sounds like it fits in my mind) and I believe it's what the writer was referring to in the title (whether others think it is sexism).
It might make it hard to prove the coins' source, but it would make proving money laundering easier.
The difference is that the government gets REALLY pissed when you use their playbook, and they can do something about it.
You've given a good, detailed summary. For me, the most welcoming place to start is the earlier VU stuff that's in an inventive pop vein: the self titled album, and "Loaded."

I agree that (the much later) "Songs for Drella" has some excellent, thoughtful tunes. It's worth reading the liner notes so you can understand what some of the songs are about, especially about the shooting of Andy.
Of course, you can push any system to its limits and you can certainly replace your calculations with integer arithmetics. But why would you? Decimal floating point types are readily available and usually offer enough range and precision for all practical purposes. So why reinvent the wheel? And just imagine the pain you are going to go through if you have to adjust your base denomination, say because the law suddenly requires two additional digits of precision. You will have to touch every number you ever stored somewhere.

Someone else in the comments mentioned arbitrary precision arithmetics, but even those don't solve all your problems magically. Not only are they comparatively slow and more cumbersome to deal with due to their variable length nature, but they still fail to correctly deal with one third, so rounding will still be required unless you manage to avoid all the bad numbers.

You may then be tempted to switch to a rational number type with arbitrary precision integers as numerator and denominator. But while you now solved the problem with the one third, you still have to approximate irrational numbers and transcendental functions, for example Euler's constant, which is not unlikely to appear in interest calculations. So you still have to think about rounding, even if possibly in less places.
This is why I bought a Ducky keyboard, which does all this via an ARM controller/firmware right on the board. Zero software for my macro, lighting, settings, etc.
Why not assume people are being genuine? Uber has done tons of things to piss people off. I think people in the HN bubble forget that the majority of the country has never been in a ride share. Talk to some blue collar people. Talk to some taxi drivers. Talk to drivers who left Uber. You might find that they aren't as sympathetic to Kalanick as people on HN are. HN in general has more sympathy for corporations and billionaires than I've seen anywhere else on the internet.
>What can I do if I don't like the service a state provides

You can vote.

>The state is a huge corporation

No.
Most of the Uber employees I've interacted with have taken a quite cynical "who gives a fuck - IPO" stance or will rationalize away their behavior to an absurd degree. With this series of leaks from current and former Uber employees, I'm glad to see that there are more ethical people at Uber than I had previously thought.
But "they're contractors, not employees", remember. That's why Uber doesn't have to take any responsibility for their actions.
It says uber legal approved this, but uber legal is mostly corporate and ip counsel.

I strongly doubt they had anyone with significant criminal experience look at this, because i have trouble seeing someone not immediately saying "you're joking,right? Are you stupid?"

(unless they were a canonical tv mob lawyer)
Money is an information and accounting system. Regardless of how implemented, it has processing costs.
You can vote, run for office, petition, volunteer, protest,etc to the local, state, and federal government to have policies that reflect your values. The only thing you can do with Uber is use it or not. Maybe you could write Uber a letter.

You have a say in government - that is its stated goal and purpose. Of the people for the people.
The Portland city government is not "the same government" that runs the FBI and NSA.
I studied for a Master's Degree at Northeastern, and their introductory Computer Science class, which was referred to as "Boot Camp for Master's Students" and was designed to bring us all up to a common level of programming knowledge, was taught in a Scheme variant called Racket.

I already had several years as a software engineer, but I was shocked at how much programming we did before we got to the "mutating assignment" statement: set!.

That class and it's follow-ons in that program did a lot to expand my mind about programming and thinking about data. I later used the curriculum to introduce several other self-taught programmers like you to a more rigorous, data-oriented way of thinking about programming.

You can work through the curriculum yourself here: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/

Career-wise, having 3 years of experience and a Master's Degree in a hot programming market like Boston opened a ton of doors for me.
Worth noting that in the case of this security review of Sandstorm, the customer of the review was a Sandstorm user, namely the government of Taiwan, which probably means incentives were aligned better than if we had commissioned the review directly.
More high-income housing doesn’t make housing less affordable
Their own economics will sink them. A lot of their most ardent fans are unscrupulous or shortsighted, so bad press probably won't do the trick.
i think the poster you're responding to didn't realize your first paragraph was sarcasm
"Tina" is preying on the author's nascent anxieties about how her male co-workers perceive her body, clothing choices, etc. It's a form of harassment that's pretty obviously tailored to the author's gender (how many men report anxieties about being taken less seriously because they show too much skin?).

The modern use of the word "sexism" includes gender-tailored harassment. It's a broader term nowadays than just "holding a belief that women are worse at X".
I wonder if it's because a colouring book is not a Serious Adult thing, and women have - or allow themselves - a bit more wiggle room to not be Serious Adults all the time.
> I don't think NYTimes need empowerment or to wait for someone to call out Uber to publish this story.

The "people" in question being empowered are not the NYT reporters, they're the other employees that feel free to come forward, respond to requests from proactive reporters, or contact reporters themselves. The idea presented is that after there starts to be negative press, more people come forward, thus more news.

There are many reasons this might be true. A very simple one is that most people may think their concerns are isolated, and not mention it to others enough to learn how endemic they really are. In this case, the employees that have info about this program might not have been happy about it, but might have thought the company was just doing what it had to and were willing to overlook it. Other negative news may change their opinion of the company just enough to put them over the threshold of thinking it should be brought to light. Then again, some employees may have been perfectly fine with this program, but know the public will react negatively, and are using it to punish the company for other misdeeds (such as the reported sexism).

There are many explanations for why people with knowledge of misdeeds may come forward once it's reported. This happens with victims as well (e.g. Bill Cosby). It's easy to think you're the only one when there's no evidence to the contrary.
Sounds a lot like my wife's car. Interesting . . .
Heh, not the best example to make your point [in this context] because the presenter also manages a group that writes/maintains the companies web tools, which consists of 340,000 lines of Javascript and 500,000 lines of C++ server-side code.. :)

https://deplinenoise.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/webtoolspos...

My experience has been that people who are good at the bottom layers of the stack are good with the top layers of the stack, too. And if they're unfamiliar, they can ramp very up quickly.
Where I'm from a taxi driver gets a fine if they refuse service to someone. Seems that Uber has that built in. Seems like it could easily abused for discrimination.
>I've never been able to tolerate Lou Reed's music; the stuff I've heard on the radio (esp "Walk on the Wild Side") strikes me as pretentious and not especially lyrical nor musical -- but I feel like I must be missing something as he is continuously heralded as a radical innovator of rock & punk music.

Well, there's always Def Leppard or Chick Korea, whatever floats your boat :-)

Kidding aside, the VU albums where incredible, and inspired almost everybody in any left-of-field rock/pop setting.

And I don't get what's pretentious about "Walk on the wild side", in an era (the seventies) when mainstream bands (from the Genesis and ELP to Pink Floyd and Yes) had huge concept albums about the meaning of life, alienation in modern society, and/or the legend of King Arthur, like Spinal Tap without the humor.

Reed did indeed live in those circles he sings about on "Walk of the Wild side", and was even married to a transvestite for a few years in the seventies himself. It's not some suburban kid trying to play it "dark".

>Help me here. What am I missing? What should I listen to in order to get a good cross-sampling of his work?

You could go backwards. E.g. try some of his later works first, like:

Magic and Loss and New York. E.g. from them, about old friends dying (from AIDS at the time):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb_r-IwB8t8

Busload of faith:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBIlehYpdwk&index=8&list=PL0...

What's good:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jTkTukfjZM

Then how about "Perfect Day", a honest straight up song?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYEC4TZsy-Y

Satellite of Love:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FH2EgYq_NCY

Or this, a masterpiece that many artists would have loved to write:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK4DeMYtumc
Worth noting that you can use synapse (the driver software in question) in offline mode. Launching it during the s3 outage wasn't possible without manually editing the config XML file, but you can change to offline mode directly in synapse if their system isn't down.

Once you're in offline mode, you don't get cloud sync (nbd, honestly, except for when I get a new machine) and everything else works fine.

So synapse is online by default and has bad error detection (should just fall back to offline on timeout), but doesn't, strictly speaking, require cloud services to work. Not great design choices here, but not as bad as it sounds.

source: I am an owner of a razer mouse, couldn't configure it in windows on S3 day until I changed my config.
It was a long time ago, but I got it from the Camaro5 forums. Try asking at http://www.camaro5.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=29
> Being willing to break dumb rules to show how pointless they are is an excellent public service. Breaking rules that stand in the way of your profit is completely different, and it's important to call it out.

Depends on whether you view this particular detail as part of providing a service people want (and thus want to pay for), or whether you view it as exclusively in the service of profit (whether it benefits people or not). Ignoring regulations so you can make money by hurting people would be evil. Ignoring regulations so you can help people by providing a service they want (whether you make money doing so or not) is entirely different, and far more reasonable. (It's still a dangerous road to go down, but not universally wrong.)

I've seen what the attempts at "local", "authorized" alternatives look like; they're almost all terrible, and even the ones that work half as well as Lyft or Uber suffer from being non-universal (you need a different service for each location). Look at the various places actually fixing their broken taxi regulations; would they have even considered doing so if the far better alternatives had asked nicely before developing a huge base of interested customers who see how much better the alternative works?

As you said, "break dumb rules to show how pointless they are" can serve as the first step in fixing them.

(For the sake of clarity: Uber has done some truly and unambiguously awful things. This particular story just doesn't seem like one of them.)
> HTML-based UI:s (rendered on gecko) just aren't there in terms of performance

I'm actually going to quibble with this. Having ran Firefox OS 2.1 on the original (crappy hardware) Flame, all of the main UI and built-in apps were buttery smooth. I wasn't expecting this, and it kind of blew me away.
Part of keeping the company free from liability is not enabling massive sexual harassment problems that end up causing multi-million (or billion) dollar (possibly class-action) lawsuits.

Even an ultra-strict "HR only does what's good for the company" should lead to them preventing sexual harassment issues due to legal landscape.
you can run synapse in offline mode.
Lets not forget that YC has endorsed Uber multiple times in public statements. When YC says "be naughty" this is what they mean.

They'll try to distance themselves from this now, but their statements were "be naughty" while holding up AirBnB and Uber as examples to be proud of.

Take what you will from that.
Show HN: Per-directory Sublime Text (syntax specific) settings (like .htaccess)
There are costs to accepting cash for a business too. It probably costs the restaurant more to go 100% cash than it would to accept credit cards.
But the city's goal with these sting operations wasn't to catch and prosecute drivers/uber for previous trips. It was to catch them in the act for a single trip and prosecute them for that.

To use another analogy, if I'm a drug dealer and the cops try to buy drugs from me in a sting operation and I somehow figure out that they're cops and walk away before doing a deal is that obstruction of justice? Because I think that's basically what is (was?) happening here.
used to be even broader - there was a time (pre aca) when I could pay for most OTC medications with HSA funds... not anymore. :(
Show HN: Wp-Graphql – A Client-Side GraphQL Wrapper for the WordPress REST API
They aren't too big to fail.

What I have noticed is that even people that have concerns about their culture and unethical acts, will often use the service because it's convenient and (for now) cheaper than other alternatives.

As long as Uber is fighting cities (instead of state/federal governments) and continues to have deep pockets... They will be around.
>> Along those same lines, I never understood why bars and clubs have such loud music as to make conversation impossible.

Bars I can understand but the point of a club is the music/dancing. You go to a bar for some conversation before the club. Seems a lot of bars are becoming part-clubs though because that's what people want (local bars and pubs have been closing down pretty quickly in the last 10 years).
I'm interested in hearing a discussion on this. It seems reasonable, but it also seems like it could be missing what's going on (is the new housing market-rate or above market-rate?) or missing other driving mechanisms ("investment" properties that then go empty?)

But it does name a mechanism that seems reasonable for driving rents down as new high-end housing gets built; although the mechanism sounds suspiciously like "trickle down".

Edit: I am in no way associated with the authors or site or any of; it came across my feed and I found it interesting.
This is not normal.

But on Ayn Rand, it is.
I'm actually not arguing for an absence of punishment, but rather against punishments whose only end is retribution. Things like solitary confinement, mandatory minimums, inhumane conditions, forced prison labor and more, all very normalized within the US criminal justice system, are all suspect practices whose only definite result is an increase in suffering. Punishment could be educational and rehabilitative (and still austere and undesirable, without being purposelessly cruel).

Deterrence is commonly cited as a justification for retributive justice, but does it actually work that way? We obviously don't have a great control since we've had this system of justice for centuries so it's hard to imagine a radically different system. But the data we do have suggests that increasing the severity of punishments does little to increase the deterrence factor [1]. So we could likely make our criminal system significantly less cruel without reducing the degree of effective deterrence.

Also I wasn't arguing for moral judgements of judges and prison guards for working within the current retributive justice regime (though those who wantonly exacerbate the cruelty of the system should certainly be judged for doing so). It's a systemic issue that retribution and cruelty are the implicit end goals of the US criminal justice system.

[1]http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent...