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