eddieplan9

Linkbait. To save you a click, the article, after spending more than half talking about past stuff, then states:

> We also independently reproduced and verified the bug, albeit with mixed results. In some cases the bug would work, and in others the bug would fail, with nothing obvious to determine why.

The state of the attention economy is truly depressing.

Little Snitch has this with automatic profile switching: https://blog.obdev.at/automatic-profile-switching/ though you will have to build the list of rules yourself

This is the most ridiculous explanation I have read about why Chinese work hard.

It’s extremely simple: everybody wants to be successful, and right now because of many reasons, Chinese think they can be successful by working hard. This is the Chinese equivalent of American dream, that one can pursue happiness by working hard.

Comparing China's National People's Congress to the US Congress is ludicrous. The NPC holds one annual session lasting less than 2 weeks, and passes legislations often with 99% Yeas. Every Chinese knows that the NPC is largely a show and holds no real power despite what the constitution says. Wikipedia summarizes it pretty well [1]:

> In theory, the NPC is the highest organ of state power in China, and all four PRC constitutions have vested it with great lawmaking powers. However, in practice it usually acts as a rubber stamp for decisions already made by the state's executive organs and the Communist Party of China.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_People's_Congress

This. It’s not uncommon to price the common shares differently in tender offers. Facebook did almost the same thing in 2009: DST bought preferred share at $10B valuation and then tender offer at 6.5B [1]

[1] http://kara.allthingsd.com/20090713/facebookers-start-cashin...

Why is this even news? This is the case for pretty much every privately-held company in the valley, because the tax law dictates that [1]. When Pinterest changed their exercise window from 90 days to 7 years, it was big news [2]. When you leave a privately-held company, you have to convert your stock options to stocks to hold onto them, and then AMT kicks in and taxes you on the spread and that often hurt a lot. But in the case of these employees mentioned in the article, they are guaranteed to make a huge profit in the tender offer.

Next up: evil companies in Silicon Valley invalidate employees' RSU when they leave the company.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9254299 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9253497

Interestingly, the IRS has a WI80 of 22.6, higher than all the industry averages listed in the article except gaming: the 1% pays 50% of the income taxes, and the top 20% pays 85% [1]

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2015/04/13/top-1-pay-nearly-half-of-fed...

I worked for a big pharma (#2 in the world by most measures), and their email retention policy was 90 days. If you have built any enterprise messaging software, you know you have to support retention policy or it won’t sell to the big companies. Slack can be configured to be aggressive as delete-after-one-day

You mean he should have told those affected without knowing what actually was leaked, the scope and impact of the leak, and the whereabout of the leaked data, or making sure there is enough safeguard in place so no one can repeat the same attack? Does not sound more responsible?

The keyword is responsible disclosure, not just disclosure.

This media then blames everything on Facebook and twitter and google, and write an article everyday about congressional hearing and how Americans are not trusting tech any more.

This has been blown out of proportion.

- This is not Equifax, which leaked hundreds of millions SSN; or LinkedIn, which leaked hashed password of millions[1]; or Yahoo, which leaked personal information of billions, including security questions and hashed passwords [2]; or Target, which affected 40MM credit cards [3].

"Compromised data [..] included names, email addresses and phone numbers of 50 million Uber riders around the world, [..] including some 600,000 U.S. driver’s license numbers. No Social Security numbers, credit card information, trip location details or other data were taken"

- There is no gross incompetence. The breach was due to an AWS access key in a private github repo. I bet you can find enough developers in this forum who store sensitive information in private GitHub repos without git encryption, and who may or may not feel guilty, because of the (false) sense of safety given by 1) the guarantee of github private repo and 2) the fact that access keys can be revoked and are generally handled with less care.

- The response by the new CEO is decisive and timely. The CSO was fired on the same day the CEO learned about the incident. There is also internal review, new advisor, and reasonable protection offered to the drivers affected, even though there is no indication the data is leaked beyond the thief, and driver license numbers are not the best for identify theft.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_LinkedIn_hack

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_data_breaches

[3] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-dezenhall/a-look-back-at...

You are misinformed. If you had followed both companies from the beginning, you would know that Uber started with licensed drivers - even UberX started that way with only cheaper cars - and it was lyft who broke the city ordinances by using unlicensed drivers under the disguise of tipping-as-payment. Uber refused to do it, until they realized the governments were not enforcing the laws at all. The case in Miami is the best example of it, as pointed out by malandrew in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15686983. This is covered in the book "Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination".

As many drivers in the lyft reddit point out, lyft just want you to believe it's more ethical, when it is far from the truth. It's also sad some people here draw conclusion from talking to drivers, often lyft drivers only, without considering there is huge survival bias.

Comparing WeWork to traditional office landlord is like comparing Starbucks to Dunkin' Donut. Please don't go to Starbucks because its coffee is better or cheaper (it's neither), but as a lifestyle choice. Similarly, people don't go to WeWork because they need a desk.

Not to discount their achievements, but it's important to note that as the content creator (instead of an aggregator or a content platform), it's much easier to have control over the quality of metadata, which is immensely useful in recommendation engines.

Not exactly mileage program, but Verizon Up is super sweet deal. I get 20% off for both Uber rides and UberEATS.

Call PG&E and switch to EV rate. I get 9c/kWh by only charging at off-peak hour. They also give you rebate for driving EV.

The real difference is that in China, WeChat Pay and AliPay are better than alternatives (i.e. cash), while in the US, Walmart Pay and CurrentC are worse than alternatives (i.e. credit cards).

If you look at the changes of carbon emission per country, the U.S. emission has decreased in the last 20 years. China's emission has tripled in the same period:

https://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/...

The main reason is the growth of Chinese economy. So if you want to make real impact, help the next emerging economies to grow without incurring huge growth in emissions. For example, if you look at the per-capital carbon emission by country:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

China's is half of that of US, while India's is 1/8. Imagine if the India's number grow 4 times to that of China's, any saving in the U.S. will be completely cancelled out and some. In fact, U.S. can cut its emission to 0, and India only needs to grow its number to 75% of that of China's to cancel out the U.S. improvement.

Safari Technology Preview (r31) on MBP gets me 8kH/s

(Chrome on the same machine gets 12kH/s)

And you can reasonably draw the conclusion that is a plot for stealing technology? It's perfectly reasonable to tell someone that, go make an MVP and we will acquire it.

The title screams bias and misinformation. It presumes Uber took technology from Waymo, which the judge rules against by stating that "Waymo’s patent theories are too weak to support any provisional relief" and "it has become clear that Waymo has both overreached in defining its trade secrets and made moving targets out of its asserted trade secrets to evade defensive arguments".

China taxes automobile imports by emission. This makes Tesla cheaper than other cars similarly priced in the western markets. (However, the price does not matter to the target audience though.)

You need to read up on Levandowski a little bit. To quote a Bloomberg article:

> “Whatever Google may say about him stealing lidar trade secrets, he was the lidar team at Google,” says someone who worked at the company’s driverless car program. “This is like the Swiss patent office suing Einstein for inventing the theory of relativity while he worked there.”

> Google’s self-driving car project began the following year with ... hardware supplied by Anthony’s Robots. Like 510 Systems, Anthony’s Robots was operated as an independent company. The arrangement—whereby Levandowski was at once a founding member of the Google self-driving car team and a vendor who was also selling technology to other companies—was well-known to Google executives, though it was never publicly disclosed. “Anthony is a rogue force of nature,” says a former Google self-driving car executive. “Each phase of his Google career he had a separate company doing exactly the same work.” According to two former Google employees, founders Page and Sergey Brin tolerated Levandowski’s freelancing because they saw it as the fastest way to make progress. Google’s car team embraced Levandowski’s nature, too. The attitude, says a former colleague, was “he’s an asshole, but he’s our asshole.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-03-16/fury-road...

Equating outdated city-level taxi regulations to universal law punishing murder is disingenuous, to say the least.

FTC did a report [1] in 1984 about taxi regulations and pointed out why cities were not well-equipped nor incentivized to regulate for the purpose of market efficiency:

> There are, in fact, reasons to doubt that existing regulations are efficient. One problem is that the analytical and informatiqnal problems involved in determining the efficient levels of the relevant policy variables are great. It is doubtful that regulatory authorities generally have the necessary expertise or information to determine these levels. Also, taxi ordinances and the government agencies that issue taxi regulations may not be motivated primarily by concern for market failure and achievement of an efficient resource allocation. It appears that taxi regulations have often been designed to protect public transit systems and existing taxi firms from competition.

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/reports/ec...

Yes. We were happy when the border control releases folks detained at airport after the immigration ban.

Deceiving the government does not necessarily extend to deceiving the people. It depends on whether the government represents people's interest in the case. In the Portland's case in particularly, it's absolutely certain the the government was not siding with the interest of the majority of the people.

Similarly, if someone is protesting drone strike, it does not mean he is protesting against the US people.

This. I know this country is unique. It's a country born from rebellion to begin with.

I am trying to come up with an analogy to comprehend this.

Imagine a city government has a rule against palm oil and no restaurants are supposed to use palm oil. A restaurant think that rule is nuts and decides to protest it publicly by using it. At the same time, they rip off the label from the palm oil. The city was having trouble finding the palm oil in the restaurant.

You can claim that the restaurant has broken the city rule - which is not a secret. But I don't think ripping off the label or making the regulators life more challenging is a crime by itself.

Of course everyone that knows more facts on both sides of the story and draws a different conclusion is a victim of cargo cult.

Sadly, no one is willing to state the facts on the other side because they will be labeled as, cargo cult victim, if not worse. And we might lose our critical thinking skills along the way.

The media environment is partly to blame. They are chasing shiny objects that generate clicks, while leaving fact-based reporting in the backseat. There was an actual harassment case against Tesla filed in court last week by a current employee. How many stories have we seen on that?

According to leaked financial in [1], Lyft is expected to generate $32M of net revenue on about $158M of fare, while losing $50M per month. If everything stays the same, Lyft would have to raise rate by 156% to break even. Also, Lyft's growth is mostly purchased:

> While rides increased about 11 percent from April to May, fully paid rides, without the use of a coupon or a credit, grew by only 5 percent in that period.

They recently launched in 50+ cities simultaneously, which means they will bleed cash faster in hope of generating some growth number.

In comparison, according to [2], in Q3 of 2016, Uber collected 5.5B of fare, and after paying drivers, had a net revenue of 1.7B (30%) and a loss of 800M. If everything stays the same, Uber could break even by raising rate by 47%. If you consider that most of the loss is from developing markets, it's actually not that hard for Uber to break even in the U.S.

[1] https://mattermark.com/lyft-financials/ [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-20/uber-s-lo...

Edits: grammar