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!

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.