I've never once heard rumors like these until recently but I've noticed an uptick in people saying that there HAS been, when there hasn't been rumors to begin with.
I lead a team of women doing computational pharmaceutical research. 12 women and 3 males, and 2 female undergrads and 2 male undergrads.
But hey, your narrative is that I'm out of touch with women because I'm not a woman so how could I possibly know, and I wouldn't want to ruin that little victory for you.
I wouldn't call having a woman as a direct report a "close friend." The fact that you immediately reached for your employees as cover, makes me think that you don't have anyone else to use.
I find it doubly absurd to think that your reports would talk to you about these things. First you're in a position of power over them, and we're dealing with a topic that goes hand in glove with abuses of power. Second on a personal note, you appear to be completely dismissive that any such claims could possibly have merit to them. Finally, look at your choice of name. I commend you for not going with "pussypuncher".
You've become uncivil and made personal attacks on HN many times. That's not allowed here, even if your cause is 100% right and all of your views are correct. We ban accounts that do this, so please stop doing this.
You've also been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. That's another abuse of this site, and we ban accounts that do that as well. HN can't both gratify intellectual curiosity and be a battlefield, so please use the site as intended.
I would disagree with your characterization, of "uncivil" and "personal attacks", but I will admit that this has become a flame war.
I will say this, HN's very recent position of trying to remain apolitical when the topic of social and political issues regarding tech companies is completely untenable, and I think the recent discussions about Uber has shown that. You can't bring up the very relevant topics of either diversity or sexual harassment in Silicon Valley, without people coming out of the woodwork and quite loudly declaring that either the accusations are false, or they're not that bad. These positions can not go unchallenged, as they have been shown to be false many times before and with just as many actors, and perpetuate the very problem being highlighted.
So what are we going to do about it? Ignore it? I'm not because I too much about a liberal civil society. Ignoring the ideas doesn't just perpetuate them, but gives them strength and credibility, when they quite frankly they were discredited when I was young.
Since HN has made it a policy to stick its collective head in sand regarding these issues, I think the only option HN is willing to take is clear. Ban me, because I'm not going to stop, because I take these topics very seriously. I don't say that out of some sort of defiance, I say that because I know myself. It will happen again, and again, and again. Either you're going to have to remove all discussions from the front page as soon as these topics come up, or you're going to have to ban accounts including mine to ensure an off topic prosaic comments like "I like the old logo better."
The rule isn't that HN must be apolitical, it's that accounts should not use HN primarily for politics. That's a necessary rule, otherwise the site will drown in flames.
Yes, commenters here show up with all sorts of opinions and competing (often bad) ideas. HN is divided because society is divided. Presumably the same divisions would show up in any large-enough sample. The question is what do we do given these divisions, since we can't eliminate them.
If we stepped back a couple posts and jk had cited the recent, public claims of employees tracking celebs & ex's, Uber self-driving cars exiting SF b/c they are above licensing laws and myriad other slights of rules/regs this discussion could have stayed on point.
Damn, you're right and too late to edit. I was grabbing straws, admittedly not very informed about Uber's goings on. I do recall seeing Uber internal strife claims repeatedly over the last two years. Specific examples do not come to mind at the moment.
Tangentially: Stalking an ex is a perfect example of sexual harassment, albeit not necessarily toward another member in that organization.
I think yall are on the wrong side of this. Benefits of the free market vanish once regulations begin. If comcast wants to charge by the hour, let 'em try. How long until some guy creates the same product for 1/100 the price?
Scarcity being the key point here. You don't have a RIGHT to use the internet, that's why it works in the first place as a commodity of sorts.
I want the market to destroy comcast, Google fiber, etc. No more megacorp ISPs.
I'd love to see the FCC dissolved entirely, tbh. We're not helpless, if like a meshnet initiative r we got some real big faces behind it, we'd have a gov-proof Internet in no time.
> How long until some guy creates the same product for 1/100 the price?
A last mile telecommunications network to your house? Comcast is known to immediately increase speeds and slash prices whenever anyone does, but only in the specific region the competitor offers service, thereby ensuring that the new competitor is unprofitable and that all future competitors get the message not to do that.
I understand the sentiment, but doesn't it sound much more reasonable to have strictly enforced net neutrality (or consumer protection policy X), than it does to assume the "free market will take care of it someday"?
These megacorps have a stranglehold on large swaths of the States – they won't allow challengers without a fight.
Well actually I'd say that I just explained exactly why that's a bad idea. No business is too big for consumers to choose to destroy. Yahoo is a good case in point. People chose, Yahoo was killed.
The free market could do it overnight tonight, if people chose to. I get the feeling there's a lot of uninformed people who think the free market is some boogie man voodoo science that someone made up, but it's all black and white in reality. The core forces of markets are very well understood for the past... Oh about 400+ years.
"wouldn't it be better to just let the govt strictly enforce arbitrary rules with zero checks and balances from people who actually have to experience it?"
I agree with you that unchecked enforcement of rules by the government is a negative. But perhaps you would agree with me that net neutrality, and perhaps more broadly the FCC, are not in an "unchecked" state.
Like I said in my original comment though: I don't disagree with you entirely; I understand that the free market in most cases does correct itself. It just seems that there is a certain balance required for free-market correction, which if upset, allows for unchecked behavior by private companies.
I suppose a better articulation is as follows: the free market, when working correctly, allows me to choose with my wallet. I literally can't do that in my city, unless you mean to say that spending thousands to millions to construct my own ISP is a reasonable alternative to true competition. At least from a consumer perspective?
My point was that net neutrality would solve this specific issue in a top down manner, removing the need for people in cities across the country to "take matters into their own hands".
It seems that you are suggesting that free market forces are capable of correcting all imbalances? (not 100% sure your position)
I realize that .NET is F#'s biggest strength from the perspective that Microsoft probably holds of trying to push C# more functional, and trying to attract talent from R, Ocaml, Rust, Julia, Haskell, etc, but it also feels like its biggest weakness.
I'd love to see some sort of bootstrapped version that makes use of .NET Native or CoreRT or whatever they use today, and I'd REALLY like to see a strong Stdlib for F# that takes into account what functional programmers are used to.
I've been doing functional programming for several years, and I feel like a moron working with F# because I don't know half of these dumb .NET classes and some of the domain problems don't really leave me able to budget enough time to bootstrap my own solutions OR learn all the .NET stuff I need. Especially not when I can jump into several other languages and have a working prototype often in days or hours.
Edit: just before somebody starts whining about it, I ain't got no problems with NET on its own, but the barrier to proficiency in it from a functional universe is needlessly high, and if F# had a stronger core it would be something non NET programmers could pick up along the way rather than continuously bash their heads into while doing rather menial work.
I don't want to sound whiny either but it's such a punch in the gut when someone sees me struggling with basic FP stuff in F#, just because I guess I'm so proud of what I've learned about FP in other languages.
There's also some stuff that F# is missing, but it hasn't screwed me yet because I still haven't figured out enough about all the NET classes.
What is needed is new blood among F# users, not coming from C# background and not too snob about F# not having most advanced type system when compared to Haskell or other similar ML languages.
Then, effort on making functionally orientated base libraries (without relying on baking those things in FSharp.Core, but as set of small libraries) wrapping undelrying .NET APIs, taking inspiration from what is there in Haskell and other similar languages.
Most F# users today are fine relying on mostly .NET libraries + fresher F# libraries, but most projects will be done with a mix of paradigms (which is manageable in F#) which is not most appealing to people with significant FP background.
I agree mostly but I'd argue that most F# devs are coming from c# to begin with. I'd love to see some data suggesting otherwise, but I have a very strong feeling that its true. I also like multi paradigm, doesn't take away from F# at all, but it's something that doesn't mix well with developers not familiar with the NETverse
Well because it's dealing with like comments on blog posts. There's a time and place for mass scale comment backends, but most blogs are not those places, and most people ain't got the time anyways.
Yall, I'm down with Uber. I know there's a lot of mudslinging lately, but I am so damn excited about the future. A world where we can do pub transit + big data, freight + big data, air freight + big data, food delivery + big data et al.
Bad shit happens sometimes. There's a lot of shitty assholes in the world, but crucifying a worthy cause and successful business because a couple of morons work there just seems counter productive.
As other comments have noted, this smells like the github situation a while back, and I'm no fan AT ALL of github, but even I concede that they are making a real difference for open source. I think uber is making that difference for moving people/things.
I want to see some justice, I want to know exactly how it went down and how it was able to get to that point ie a dependency resolution as far as who shirked policy and who didn't, AND THEN I want business as usual. Shit happens, fix it, move on.
First off, how cool and futuristic you judge a company's tech to be should have absolutely zero bearing on how an investigation like this is treated, and the fact that you even bring it up makes it hard to take the rest of your post seriously.
Secondly, Fowler did exactly the right things in response to these incidents, over and over: she kept evidence, and she talked to the people in the company who were ostensibly supposed to help her deal with them. For a year straight. The fact that things continued to steadily get worse for her throughout this process shows pretty clearly that this is not a couple of morons. This is an institutional problem at Uber that must be dealt with at an institutional level.
Perhaps you're technically right, but she claims to have it documented, and has already shared it as per her tale in her HR efforts. The NYTimes would not likely publish nor Kalanick contritely move to investigate so thoroughly if it were so easy to repudiate her claims as hearsay. We'll know in short order as the company rushes to save face.
Obviously. She's presented her personal story in the form of a blog post - we're all well aware of that. And it seems you're perfectly willing to accept that story up to the point that it matches your preferred narrative (ie. "bad shit happened, couple of morons"), but anything more and it's "where's the proof?!"
Why not just call her a liar and show your real true colors?
It's not good to conflate healthy skepticism with the belief that one is an outright liar. We know so much about the fallibility of memory and how bias affects recounts of events these days.
If somebody with "hate" in their name responds to credible accusations of sexual malfeasance with false interjections of "but there's no proof", then we're already approaching Fox-News-comments levels of quality.
If you aren't claiming that ultrahate is displaying healthy skepticism, then what do you think he's doing? And why is that valuable enough that you took time to defend it?
I mean, it sounds like basically all of Uber's HR was shirking policy here. I kind of agree with you that "shit happens and it needs to be fixed..." but there seems to be a lot of fixing that needs to be done here.
Uber's "crucifixion" is well-deserved in this case. Time after time, Uber has proven itself to be an irresponsible company. Whether it's "God View" or the weird data blog they published on people's private data or this sexual harassment thing, they deserve some backlash.
I don't think "crucifying a worthy cause" is a good idea either. But I also don't think that Uber is a company working towards a brighter future. The future's definitely not brighter for their employees- I mean, contractors-, as those people's rights as employees are currently in the middle of a legal battle.
I think it's cool that Uber's breaking down the monopoly that taxi companies had. I think it's great that people are trying new things.
But Uber has proven time and time again that it's an irresponsible company and the sooner we realize it's probably not going to bring us the future we need, the better.
Uber isn't making the world a better place. Not in any meaningful way. Not in the way they exploit drivers; not in the way they feel they can dare and do anything.
Uber is the worst face of the "sharing economy", which is a fitting definition of these kind of businesses only if by "sharing" you mean: "dear worker use your own property to make money for us while we centralize profits without even having to own the means of production". It's a metastasis of capitalism.
I sympathize with your viewpoint here, but recognize that a 'crucifixion' may help change the culture and retain Engineers and improve their daily lives which would help Uber deliver it's product faster.
You are assuming that without Uber, peer to peer taxiing (and more generally people selling stuff to each other through a marketplace with someone spying on the data) is dead. However that is clearly not the case.
When you smell this does it recall the GitHub CEO resigning due to inappropriate behaviour per the findings of the investigation?
Surely you must understand how, if these inappropriate actions truly occurred at least in part and management was complicit up the line the company must be held accountable as a whole? That accountable is what effects systemic change at organisations.
What a shame that I'm excited that my country still supports my rights as a citizen to some degree.
I'm disappointingly satisfied. Our rights are inalienable and self-evidently truthful. How can someone or some court thereafter determine what rights I have?
> Our rights are inalienable and self-evidently truthful. How can someone or some court thereafter determine what rights I have?
I would probably define a right as "A persuasion technique for convincing others to decide disputes in your favor". Then, your rights can be weakened simply by having people not be persuaded by them; and removed legally by having the highest court not be persuaded by them.
If somebody asks something like, "Do monkeys have rights?", keep in mind that nothing about the universe changes depending on that answer. No computers will blink their lights on in response to a sensor picking up a right when it scans you. So rights don't exist.
Why do people pretend that rights exist, even though they don't? Game-theoretically, collectively pretending that we have a natural-born right to free speech independent from the government reduces the risk that a King will rise up and cause trouble while suppressing the press. Anyone questioning his policies can appeal to the right in their arguments.
So we choose to allow ourselves to admit an "appeal to a right" in arguments, because we want others to be convinced as well. So "Why do people not respect my rights?" seems ill-framed, but "Why do people not understand the consequences of allowing a right to be asserted?" is. And there would be no such thing as a "self-evidently truthful" right, only a right where the consequences of allowing it to be asserted in an argument are clearly beneficial.
I'm really anxious for Julia to start taking packaging more seriously. Pkg2 situation is pretty terrible imo, and the pkg3 whispers just sort of strike me as offputting, since there's basically no timeline of when they'll make it to a stable 0.x release and the 1.0 is just a "when it's ready" situation.
Julia is one the most pleasant programming experiences I've had otherwise. It's the Lua I've always wanted, with just the right mix of Scheme, but not too much that it tastes Haskell-y.
But yeah, current packaging situation is awful.
Oh, that reminds me though, Julia has a lot of really incredible packages already. It's mindblowing how quick Julia went from "new technical computing language" to "general purpose, performant language with a ton of useful packages readily available and they actually work"
Leveraging the technical computing open source community turns out to work really well!
the metaprogramming resources in Julia are very slick. I wrote a DSL that lets you write functions in that are then turned into synthesizable verilog modules. Implementing combinatorial logic (I haven't gotten to sequential yet) took about three days.
Yeah, meta is something I always struggled with in Lua, as you're completely constrained to the table structures, but just that little extra power of being able to metaprogram over whatever data I want, is absolutely incredible, and it's a bit easier to think about imo than Scheme macros just in the sense of trying to macroexpand in your head.
> Julia has a lot of really incredible packages already. It's mindblowing how quick Julia went from "new technical computing language" to "general purpose, performant language with a ton of useful packages readily available and they actually work". Leveraging the technical computing open source community turns out to work really well!
Yep, it turns out that a lot of scientists are great programmers :)
Regarding packaging, I completely agree that Pkg2 is a mess; there's a Julep (RFC) out for Pkg3 and it opens with a sobering list of the problems with Pkg2's design, and continues with a new design which is already in the works:
The Julep is a rough cut of what Pkg3 will look like (see issues on that repo for some modifications), but I'm actively working on an implementation. For example, yesterday, I was working on a script to translate the current METADATA repository to a Pkg3 registry file.
I'm not sure what "make it to a stable 0.x release" means – every 0.x release is stable and usable, we're just not 100% happy with the language design and APIs yet – at least not satisfied enough to commit to supporting them for the next decade. But that's coming soon... Julia 1.0 will be released this summer (2017), which I announced during the talk I gave at JuliaCon last summer:
The 0.6 release has slipped by 1.5 months, but it also includes more features, so it doesn't actually push the 1.0 release schedule back. During this release cycle, we realized that a number of changes we want in 1.0 need to be at least partly in place in 0.6 so there's a smooth upgrade path to 1.0 that doesn't break people's code without deprecation warnings. We decided that it was worth letting this release slip a bit in order to have a clear path forward to 1.0. Once 0.6 is out, I will post a 1.0 release timeline.
