simplekoala

Refreshing to read. Her answers are not carefully rehearsed and perennially regurgitated sound bytes you hear all the time.

From my observation, it seems this gap is prevalent mostly in engineering (not so much in HR, Marketing, Sales etc).

or don't accept status quo. Improve the current system by 10X and solve real problems and position yourself as a great company.

As a top technology company, Uber should have had some basic measures to ensure safety of their rides. In this specific case, the driver turned off the GPS, and took a detour. At the very least, these incidents should have triggered alerts on their internal monitoring systems. And, assuming they had an agreement with cellular service providers for public safety, they could have tracked of the location of the female rider through her cellphone, and dispatched cops to that location.

Precisely for the reasons you mentioned in your blog post about how things can be gamed in India through bribes, Uber should have been careful about expanding in India. Asking the drivers to provide a conduct certificate in a corrupt country like India is a "cover your ass" move to precisely brandish this certificate and say - "Hey, see, we did our homework. It is not our fault" in situations like this.

This was an opportunity for them to raise the bar. This is a leadership failure. They were too eager to just expand overseas. They could have used technology to mitigate such risks in the "rape capital" of India (world?). Some things I think they can do as a technology company in India

- Install custom GPS trackers which cannot be turned off manually on the cars.

- Install a special audio/video cam in the car, and automatic audio/video feed analysis for distress screams, struggle.

- Automatic algorithmic tracking of the car route/de-tours

Like I said, they had a golden opportunity to showcase how technology could be used to mitigate the risk of such incidents in Delhi, and used it in their marketing. They could have raised the bar. They could have shown how it is done. They could have made the world safer and better. This is what separates the great from the good. Larry Page calls them Moonshots. Uber had the resources to do it. They played the "CYA" game. They should take responsibility. They could have taken something and made it 10X better. That's what great companies do.

Hmmm..shouldn't Uber banned in whole of India instead of just Delhi, till the Govt of India figures out how to allow Uber to operate with better safety measures.

Thanks for sharing your knowledge and helpful information!

Check out his list of awards on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kailash_Satyarthi. None from India?

It is a shame that Indian government never even conferred a Padma award to Kailash Satyarthi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padma_Shri) but was bestowing these awards in abundance to corrupt and classless politicians and journalists (Rajdeep Sardesai, Burkha Dutt)

Govt of India and Indian media was probably caught off-guard by this development.

Feel humbled to read about him. Floored!

I suspect the opposite is true. Mostly IIT CS/EE majors get into the top CS PhD programs. Many non-CS folks, sure change professions to being programmers but rarely graduate with a stellar PhD from a top 5 (10?) computer science program. Most of these IIT grads have to apply to graduate school with 6 semesters of work. Without a CS/EE degree, and a recommendation of a top IIT CS prof (who has a good reputation of sending top students regularly to graduate programs) whose students get pattern matched by the selection committee's from top 10 CS schools, it is next to impossible for a non-CS IIT grad to compete with a typical top 10 graduating CS grad (9.4 + GPA, probably some Math/Phy/Chem olympiad medal or ICPC finalist/winner, almost perfect GRE scores, may 1/2 ACM conference papers). Please note that I emphasize the top 10 CS schools part quite a bit because the game of finding an asst prof job is heavily rigged and top 10 CS school grads have a major advantage over others here.

yes, yes. Thanks!

It is remarkable that top 4 IITs combined make up 5.2% of undergrad degrees of CS professors right after MIT 5.9% and ahead of Harvard at 3.1%. What is even more impressive is the fact that these four IITs admit around 140-150 students into the Computer Science program every year. It will be interesting to know how many undergrads graduate with CS/EE degrees from MIT and Harvard. Nehru's vision (India's first prime minister) for creating IITs was producing best technical minds for the development of new independent India, what happened instead was IITs attracted the best and brightest in India and became the number one exporter of top technical minds to USA. This brain-drain seemed to have slowed down a bit in the last decade.

There was post on HN of a blog post link which contained a list of all free machine learning/data mining books. Wondering, if someone can post the link to it. I am unable to find it through search.

I haven't done much assembly (barring some FPGA programming I did in an undergrad course, and writing an editor on a Motorola processor).

This code so eminently readable. Is this the norm or is it Woz working his magic writing incredibly detailed documentation. Writing easily understandable code takes effort and wisdom. Anyone who writes code for a living knows the importance of writing code which is easy to read and maintain.

It looks like Brian Acton, Whatsapp's founder was turned down by Facebook in 2009. What a comeback! This must be even sweeter!

https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/3109544383

When you get a chance, would you be kind to write a "how to" blog post about how to build and wire one yourself, so others without any clue about how to do this can have a shot at learning and doing it themselves?

Interesting you chose Scala. I have built and managed Jetty based adservers to talk to bidding exchanges and wondered how would the system perform if the adserver was written in Scala instead. Going with Jetty initially was the right choice as none on the team were experts in Scala, and the base assumption was that Jetty is battle tested, has good documentation and is already optimized to perform great from the get go. So, we simply chose Jetty. I didn't get a chance to build an equivalent system in Scala to compare performance. Will be great, if you can throw some light on how you went about building highly performant adservers in Scala, and scaled them. Does coding in Scala make it a lot more easy to deal with concurrency (for development and debugging), keeping a small codebase, help in rapid iteration, and in general make it fun to program and manage the servers? Do you have a blog post or a write up on this topic? I encourage you to make one, if you don't have one already. Good karma, and an opportunity to showcase your engineering chops to hire other great engineers.

You have a typo: Brandon Eich -> Brendan Eich. Not nitpicking, am compelled to point out since it is a name.

You think they are not technically savvy to understand that the system is obsolete. It is deliberate. They defer payments, so they can hold up the cash for a few weeks; This gives them a working cash-flow pipeline they can dip into. There is a technical term for it. Erudite folk on HN can throw more light on this practice.

EDIT: I am not specifically sure what they do with affiliates. I am talking about the general principle they operate on - They typically delay paying their vendors/suppliers, so there is a delay-pipeline of cash flow which Wall-Street analysts deem as a good thing business wise.

Is it Werner Vogels (Amazon's CTO) who submitted this story?

Agree with this advice. There are many immature, egoistic, self-absorbent founders (consciously emulating wrong traits of Steve Jobs) that it is always better to play it safe, and leave like a professional instead of risking back-lashes, burning bridges by being open and forth-coming. What if you get fired immediately on the spot? People with work visa's should play the cards even close to their chest as their immigration status is tied to their employment. It takes a lot of courage, self-awareness, emotional maturity and discipline from management to handle situations like these. Most people cant handle a rejection. I am privy to two cases where people were fired on the spot when the management got to know they were actively interviewing or openly communicated that they are planning to move on. If you have a family to support, children and a mortgage err on the side of caution. Don't be naive.

Thank you for making the valley a better place (and hope you make a good return on your investment in the process)

I think the situation has started to get better with software start-up infrastructure costs going significantly down, angels and incubators eating traditional VC's lunches (to a point where firms like Sequoia had to initiate stealth scouts program so they could get in early into potential killer startups), founders getting better terms, a healthy founder friendly eco-system nurtured (carefully?) by newly minted successful entrepreneur turned angles. I am optimistically hoping that "Shark VCs" are a dying breed. Not sure how long have you been a VC; You probably have a better handle on this, and privy to a lot more than what keeps getting written. Not to put too much pressure on you but frankly I was hoping you would have a thesis on how to make it even better for engineers/budding-entrepreneurs.

The structural and core part of the issue gets muddled due to poor education/know-how among engineers (partly due to excellent marketing by VCs). See below an excerpt from Alex Payne's article at https://al3x.net/2013/05/23/letter-to-a-young-programmer.htm...

" ... As a VC at a top-tier Sand Hill Road firm told me during a pitch several years ago when describing a conceptual feature in Simple that would let users easily and regularly donate a portion of their savings to charity, “let’s not waste time on that stuff; we’re here to make money” ... ".

There are a breed of VC's who project themselves as if their sole purpose in life is to help entrepreneurs realize their dreams and that there is a higher purpose for their VC avatar. Some believe it and mean it, and some pretend (It is important to keep up the pretenses in this business lest you get shunned by all starry-eyed entrepreneurs who come to valley to change the world). VC's exist to help their investors make money. They have a fiduciary duty to do so. When you are giving away a good part of your life (sleep, money) in pursuit of a dream, and getting into a financial transaction with VCs to do so; It is vital for you to understand how they operate, how they make decisions, are incentivized to behave, and also be cognizant of their true (ulterior?) motives. VC's are a vital part of the startup eco-system. I am not against them or how they operate. They are smart enough to be politically right and make themselves desirable to entrepreneurs. All I am trying to say there is usually information/knowledge/expectation asymmetry (as pointed out in the article) when engineers are getting into financial transactions with VCs, and that they need to be cognizant and work on ways to mitigate this. [Edits for typos/grammer. Added two sentences at the end]

There is a treasure trove of wisdom in this article for all starry-eyed engineers coming to valley with dreams to eventually start a company someday. I realize that starting a company by itself is a poor goal and slightly narcissistic but I am intentionally using it as I have heard many engineers say, "I want to start a company one day" instead of saying "I want to solve a problem because I am passionate about it, and my solution will solve a real-problem in the world today or make the world a slightly better place or makes it suck less"

Apologies for shooting from the hip. Never meant to say I can come up with a better design than mechanical engineers. You seem to suggest that building this table requires some serious engineering chops. May be there is some truth to it. As a layman ( in mechanical engineering ) I find it extremely hard to believe that technology for synchronized hydraulic lifts is not commoditized yet.

It just feels like these ergonomic goods producing companies are selling chairs/tables with super high markups ($900-$1500) for ergo chairs - really?). Seems like you have a better handle on the production costs of a hight-adjustable table. How much does it really cost?

I have a simple(minded) idea here. Connect a damn horizontal rod between the two pistons/moving-legs on each side

Why should it be made of wood? Any composite material will do. We just need to build one which is affordable. It looks like a niche product right now, and a whole lot of average americans cannot afford to purchase one. It looks like one of those things we have to pay a premium to own. You get sturdy and durable hydraulic barber chairs between $100-$150. A table with the same kind of lift mechanism should cost you ~$750 to own?

What is a reasonable guess here..hmmm. I have no idea about how much these motors would cost but I am assuming given the number of office chairs (which move up and down with a lever) we produce, they shouldn't be costing a lot. We get good office chairs which support up to 300 lbs for under $100. I am assuming the technology for moving tables should be similarly priced. A sturdy steel frame + planks (wood/composite) + up/down motor/hydraulic lift shouldn't cost more than $300 in my subjective opinion. I am not willing to pay more than that. Wonder how much would IKEA charge for these, if they made one (edited for typos).

Why are these things so damn expensive? Looks like they are fleecing money ( or it appears so for my cheapskate sensibilities ). Someone should start a kick-starter project to make good ones for a reasonable price.

I have been doing this for about a month now. I am kicking myself for not having made the switch anytime sooner. Come to think of it, I feel humans are just not designed to sit for long hours in chairs. Standing position is natural. You feel free and are less constrained compared to a sitting position. Posture changes happen a lot more; And breaks you take are more active or sometimes continuous. They also become less of a chore.

If there is an iota of doubt in your mind, that sitting for long hours is somehow screwing up your back then please switch to a standing desk.