I was under the impression that Uber has to act as a pure play buyer-seller matching system. Otherwise the drivers aren’t independent contractors, they’re being controlled like employees.

No business I’ve ever worked at has encouraged or tolerated the use of personal messaging platforms for business.

Why do these execs get an exception? What are they doing that warrants hiding? I think any normal bystander would see this as suspicious.

Why are so many companies trying to hide their executive decision making? It keeps showing up in the news.

Why did Arthur Anderson and Enron shred all those documents? Who knows? I have no idea what was in those reams, and nobody ever will. I’d bet it would not look good for the folks at the top if we could.

With the amount of power these businesses yield, they absolutely should be held to basic record keeping standards. Companies are groups of people, their lifeblood is communication. The only way they can perpetrate large scale wrongdoing is via communication.

Our elected government representatives should be able to inspect and question how these powerful entities are run and respond to any wrongdoing they find.

We ask a lot from our elected representatives. Likewise, we must ask a lot from our unelected corporate overlords. Yes this is uncomfortable for them. Being powerful should be.

A disclaimer about me: I work for a megacorp as a leaf node IC. Opinions are my own and I don’t speak for anyone else and all that.

OP and the parent comment are focused on tenants that don't appear to have done anything wrong or unreasonable, they're just in a bind and the landlords in question are choosing not to be fair.

I’m on a flight right now and just went to this URL. Sure enough, it works!

I know this information is available via the wifi portal’s UI, but a JSON blob just hits different.

```

{"timestamp":"2023-09-28T21:57:39Z","eta":"23:45","flightDuration":164,"flightNumber":"DAL992","latitude":47.4557876586914,"longitude":-111.73490905761719,"noseId":"3883","paState":false,"vehicleId":"N883DN","destination":"KMSP","origin":"KSEA","flightId":"N883DN_SF_20230928195737","airspeed":null,"airTemperature":null,"altitude":35273,"distanceToGo":13,"doorState":"Closed","groundspeed":499,"heading":95,"timeToGo":107,"wheelWeightState":"Off"}

```

Apologies for the JSON formatting, I’m on mobile.

---

Edit:

Since I enjoyed OP's story, I thought I should clarify a bit.

I'm speaking broadly of how I remember (from the outside) Uber's fast-and-loose IP attitudes in the 2010s.

I don't think OP did anything of a similar sort. From comments here it sounds like they used some code they built in their free time that a previous employer didn't want.

At Uber it sounds like they asked and were permitted to post their no-longer-needed code to GitHub. It's got its own GH org and everything.

This whole chain is legally risky (I wouldn't do it and would strongly advise others not to do it).

I feel OPs actions are not Ethically Wrong, though. I wouldn't enjoy living in a world where OP gets sued for this, since it sounds like nobody at work wanted the work and it's not giving competitors an advantage. I won't claim the world isn't like that, though.

I really wish I could share OP's attitude and sense of ownership. I built something really cool (entirely in my free time) for a previous employer's hackathon. That code lives on some server they own now, possibly deleted. I deleted my copy after submitting it to the hackathon because I didn't want to risk anything. Company lawyers make just building things for fun feel so risky! It takes the soul out of our work.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36957094

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Once a code base is a certain size, explicit but bigger can be a boon. Magic dynamic dispatch systems and other tools that simplify plumbing make onboarding and routine, drive-by maintenance way harder IME.

I find that once you understand systems that have a dash of "magic", though, it is easier to add features and stuff. Single points of maintenance and all that.

It's a continuum, with each side having different benefits.

https://www.geekwire.com/2016/report-amazon-employee-jumps-o...

http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-share-though...

It prompted a lot of discussions in my workplace cafeteria and I recall it was discussed at length on Blind. The consensus I saw at the time was that Amazon has a really rough culture and something needed to change.

I have not worked at Amazon, so I cannot speak directly to any of this, though.

All these unusual units are kinda fun, could spice up a presentation or conversation to throw in without context.

It gives me that hacker having fun, tarsnap picodollar/byte-month pricing vibe.

An example of the issue I found searching the issue real quick: https://www.thetechmentor.com/posts/fix-lightning-cable-burn...

If you have a stand alone player, however, perhaps that trick still works. Just press stop, then press stop again, then press play. It skips the warnings, pre roll stuff, menus, and just plays the movie.

It both tests bandwdith and gives some cool latency measurements (both idle and under load). It's super helpful at diagnosing bufferbloat if there is any on your network connection.

I don't run it much since I don't want to tear through my ISP's data cap, but is an excellent tool.

For a bit of context:

I found myself using this site via my xbox's web browser to make sure my wifi latency is acceptable where I put the xbox.

Also, my spouse and I just moved to a new place, so I used this site on my phone to get a quick idea of the latency on wifi in my spouse's office.

There's tons of web-based tools to test your bandwidth, but I feel there just isn't a similar ecosystem of quick, web-based "ping" (well, latency, since I can't send ICMP packets from a web browser) tools.

-

RE: HTTP only, good point. I've set up certbot and the page supports https now. I am not certain how HTTPS will impact the latency measurements, it appears the results are typically a bit higher and occasionally much higher when using HTTPS.

-

I don't get the disappointment with the use of JS. It's just a bit of inline JS, easy to manually audit if concerned. JS is quite safe IMO and is a very powerful tool, it makes a rich universe of interactive applications possible in the humble web browser. I basically got into CS because of the fun I had creating things for and sharing things on the web.

Edit:

I think I found a way to get the best of both worlds!

I've removed certbot's 301 redirect from HTTP to HTTPS and made it so the protocol used during latency measurements matches the page's state. Now if one wants HTTPS they can use it, but if they want a slightly more stable measurement they can use the http page.

Labelling this a "ping" was a poor choice on my part. I meant ping in the RTT/latency sense, rather than an ICMP sense. Calling it "HTTP latency" is a huge improvement that clearly (and concisely) gets the idea across, I made a quick edit to do just that.

RE: recording a range of samples and reporting percentiles: My hope is to keep the code super simple and the delay to visible info in the UI very low. Elsewhere in the thread folks mentioned the excellent http://gcping.com/. That site has a ton of destinations to test latency to and reports the median of a number of samples - that is a really cool feature set! I don't think I'll be able to do anything close to that in tens of lines of inline JS, unfortunately.

Still, the measurements start super noisy and I'd like to ensure my site gives useful data even at the start. I did a bit of a hack to hopefully force the RTT to converge to something useful. I now fire off 3 time-delayed measurements after the page loads. By the time the third finishes, the numbers appear to be pretty stable.

I find myself testing my ping from time to time, especially when my internet seems wonky while WFH. It feels like there should be an easier way test my ping than puling up a terminal or a complex web app - especially when I'm on my phone or any other device that doesn't have a terminal.

I figured I should be the change I wish to see in the world and created this super light ping test.

I also created a latency monitoring solution (https://github.com/cjjeakle/network-monitor), feel free to clone and try it out! I know there are a lot more mature monitoring solutions out there, but I never did figure out how to set them up. This one is super simple: clone it to some device that's always on, compile it, set up some systemd stuff, and it's ready to rock on port 8180!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33049820

Points: 96

# Comments: 61