Huh. I first started listening to 538 in the run-up to the 2016 election and started really paying attention to them precisely because their 30% figure was so much higher than all the other polls. It was shocking to me then (and still is now reading your comment) that people didn’t seem to understand that 30% in the context of that particular election and that particular candidate suggested a remarkably high chance of winning, not a really low chance of winning. It’s a strange thing where people seem to think that less than 50% = not happening.

I teach in the humanities and have a small software development practice. I strongly encourage adding a course (if you don’t have one already) on computing ethics and/or an ethics component to a course on human-computer interaction. Regardless of where AI is 3-5 years from now, preparing students to make good decisions about how, when, and where to use tech will be more important than ever.

> an academic trying to do similar work in multiple articles would have gotten review from peers on each article

Academic books are also peer-reviewed.

I feel vindicated by this recent turn back to vanilla js (which I never left).

I spent months trying to decide if I really was going to pay for search. Then I did it (about 2 years ago) and haven’t looked back since. Totally worth it.

It made me realize that one of the more troublesome things Google did was train us all to expect tech to be free. And then, by extension, trained us to accept shitty tech precisely because it was free.

AIs recommend what is most popular/well-known, which isn’t necessarily what is best. Both your description of AI sourcing and your AI-written comment demonstrate this point.

While I‘m glad that there’s an immediate safe option for women riders, in the longer term this lets Uber off the hook when they should be taking responsibility for their drivers who are functionally employees despite Uber insisting otherwise. It’s worth noting that the old school taxi companies did not have this problem of rampant sexual assault committed by their drivers. Why? Because they performed background checks before hire. I know that at least in Chicago it was very difficult to get licensed as a taxi driver. The problem with Uber is that they make it very very easy for shady individuals to be drivers, then act like they have no control over who’s driving.

Long term it will be Waymo, and there won't need to be issues anymore because no human drivers.

> It’s worth noting that the old school taxi companies did not have this problem of rampant sexual assault committed by their drivers.

Wait what? Did you not read a newspaper in the 80s and 90s? If you do a google search today for "taxi driver" and "sexual assault" you will not come up with nothing.

> Why? Because they performed background checks before hire.

99.9% of the taxi drivers in the US have and have always been independent contractors. Uber does background checks on all drivers in the US. A family member applied and was rejected because of a marijuana possession conviction when she was much younger in a state far far away from where she lives now.

https://www.uber.com/us/en/ride/safety/driver-screening/ (this is much more screening that I've seen elsewhere, but maybe you think they are cutting corners?)

I only have experience in one city but I know that getting to drive for Uber is much much easier than getting a taxi driving job in the 90s. Taxi companies performed extensive background checks and while Uber claims to do so now, it’s not clear to me that they have really taken seriously the safety problem and that any random person shouldn’t be allowed as a driver. Their incentive is to get as many people driving as possible.

I never said there were no instances of sexual assault by taxi drivers; just pointing out that there’s a real crisis of rampant assault with Uber for which there are solutions that they’ve essentially refused to entertain because they don’t want to take responsibility for their drivers. I’m saying that these companies need to be held responsible for their role in this problem.

Taxi drivers were notorious for sexual assaults back when they were the only game in town, it used to be a meme before we called them memes! I wouldn't be surprised that now that most of their business has moved over to ride shares, so has the crime.

Some recent data:

> London (2016): In a rare direct comparison, there were 154 allegations of rape or sexual assault where the suspect was a taxi or private hire driver (including Uber). Uber drivers were involved in 32 (roughly 20%) of those cases. During this period, Uber accounted for over 30% of journeys in London but only 20% of the reported assaults, suggesting Uber drivers were statistically less likely to be involved in an incident than traditional taxi drivers in that market.

That is London, not the USA of course. Who knows what other factors were at play.

For the USA we have:

> Uber (2017–2022): Reported 12,522 serious sexual assaults. This occurred across approximately 6.3 billion trips, meaning these incidents happened in about 0.0002% of rides.

> Reporting Bias: Modern apps have "emergency" buttons and digital trip trails that make reporting easier and more traceable. Historical taxi assaults were often only recorded if a formal police report was filed, leading to significant underreporting.

> Victim Demographics: In Uber's 2021–2022 data, 42% of reporters were drivers and 56% were riders. Historical taxi data rarely distinguished between driver-on-passenger vs. passenger-on-driver incidents.

> Internal Data: A 2024 government report found that while some taxi companies collect incident data, they treat it as internal information and do not share it with the public

> I’m saying that these companies need to be held responsible for their role in this problem.

People suck, and they always have. The only way for 100% safety is self-driving taxis.

Reach out to advocacy groups and service organizations that work with the kinds of people you‘re seeking for testing. Some might have a structured advertising channel that you can plug into or they could be willing to share the info through their internal lists and networks.

I like the original premise for the upvote, which was that you don’t vote on whether you agree but on whether the comment/post is a good contribution to the discussion. The upvote should be a way of saying “good point (even if I disagree)” and the downvote should be saying “this is irrelevant or otherwise doesn’t contribute to the conversation.”

Of course, almost nobody uses the vote this way anymore. While your granular voting is quite interesting in principle, in practicality it seems it would negatively compound the existing problems with the vote system, namely that instead of voting to support the continuation of good faith discussion, everyone is voting to support just their own ideas. That in turn leads to fractious discussion (if we can even call it discussion) where the most popular and well-known ideas are strongly upvoted and continue to circulate, and anything deviating is barely seen. Then you don’t really have a discussion; you just have a series of highly upvoted statements. (See, for example, Reddit.)

This is a strong critique. If voting inevitably drifts toward factional reinforcement, is there any interface you’ve seen that resists that drift? I’m curious to know which product or feature you think solves this the best.

I like that HN doesn’t give voting power to new accounts. And because it takes a while to build the points (or whatever they’re called here) to get the voting power, that time allows newcomers to see and get used to how discussions works here.

I like that Discourse only has an upvote button and no downvote, but that the replies still stay in chronological order. That way there’s an actual flow to the conversation but you can still see which ideas people value.

> in 10 years we (the world) will look back into the present with disbelief.

This is a very optimistic outlook, to the point of naivete, though I really hope you are right. In reality, neither Trump nor his cronies are acting like people who imagine they will be out of power anytime soon. In 10 years the world will likely still be dealing with the fallout of this administration, if not still dealing with the administration itself.

I think both will be true. We'll be dealing with the fallout of this administration and dealing with his goons and cronies for decades while still looking back at this time in disbelief and wondering how we ever let it happen and what needs to change to prevent it in the future.

Hot take: Trump's denialism of 2020 and the use of '3rd term' is so that they can make a case that he can have a '4th term' -- that the will of the people to elect him overrides the constitutional limits of Presidency.