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.
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.
> This only applies to schools taking federal money.
Which means all poor public school districts (free breakfast programs are funded with federal money) and most other public schools districts (special needs programs are funded with federal money). So the “only” here is basically “all” public school districts.
So? That is exactly how every other lever like this applies, by both parties. It has absolutely nothing in common with Russian arbitrary draconian speech repression and to suggest that it is insulting. It's like, technically wage tax is like forced labor so it's basically similar to slavery, right? Somehow very few people would make this argument.
Now, the reason the admin can do that is because every district in the country is yoked to federal funds. This gives them a massive power lever. As far as massive power goes, it's strange that HN understands this well with surveillance but not with anything else. Surveillance is really great, if you could magically make it only usable by people you agree with, say to find lost pets or catch armed robbers and nothing else.
However if you create a power, it will also be used by people you disagree with, for the purposes you abhor. The only solution is to remove the power.
If not, what is your other solution, never allow people who disagree with you to win elections?
I commented on just one thing — that this book ban effectively impacts all public school districts. My comment says nothing about Russia, elections, or anything else you mention. I’m only making the point that this ban is not just about “some” public schools; it’s virtually all of them.
> “I’ve never filmed pornography,” Wylder says. “But they have plenty of pictures and videos of my body and me walking in and out of the office, myTikTok, photos of me on Twitter before my account was deleted. They could easily make a composite of me, and I could be starring in adult videos that I never agreed to and never consented to.”
It just needs to be illegal to make an AI likeness of someone without their consent. I honestly still don’t understand why it’s not. It’s a whole new form of exploitation when brothel owners want to create AI porn that will be more profitable for them than the sex work taking place in the brothel yet they don’t want to pay the sex workers for the porn (or even get their consent to create it).
Fewer people even knew about the dot com boom (or understood what it was) because the 24-hour news cycle didn’t exist yet and the means through which news and information would travel widely and rapidly (the subject of the boom itself) had not yet boomed. In contrast, news about AI seems almost inescapable. The discourse on the dot com boom was limited almost exclusively to people in tech and finance (who were poised to benefit the most) whereas the AI discussion is much broader and involves the general public, which is now rightly debating whether the upside is worth the cost.
But domains and social handles gain meaning and value because they are keys to something else. Even if the something else never materializes (e.g., I hold a domain for years but never build a site), they are still valuable because of the potential they hold. Similarly, a deed to land (even vacant land) represents the potential value of that land as much as it represents the land itself.
A deed is meaningless if what it represents doesn’t have the potential for real value.
edit: I commented before clicking on the link (bad me). I has assumed the “experiment” was at no cost to the participant. Now that I see that there is a fee ($10) for a deed to nothing, the “experiment” seems more like yet another AI-driven cash grab.
That’s a fair distinction, and I agree that domains or land usually derive meaning from the potential of what can be built on top of them.
This project is intentionally different in that it isn’t trying to represent future utility or productive capacity. It’s closer to a fixed record in a single persistent registry, more like a commemorative or historical artifact than a functional asset.
The closest analog is probably things like early internet artifacts (e.g. Million Dollar Homepage squares, early domain registrations, even username systems), where any meaning that develops tends to come from longevity, shared recognition, and the fact that the registry itself remains stable over time.
The fee isn’t meant to frame it as an investment, it mainly exists to prevent automated claiming and to keep the registry finite and durable. Whether something like this can ever accumulate broader significance is really the core question behind the experiment.
That’s a terrible situation for that person to be in but it’s strange to me to suggest that there was no other possible alternative. I say this in the kindest way possible but people do get through grief without chatbots and have been doing so for all of human history. Also, just because something helps doesn’t mean that it’s good for you.
TFA is quite clear that her and her fiance were socially isolated and, upon his passing, she had no support network. In the loneliness epidemic. And trying to "just go out" and make friends after years of not being able to , when you're stuck with your grief and at a low point in life is what the kids would call "hard".
This person is clearly at the fringe of society and holding onto their well-being by a thread. They need professional help and a reboot of their life.
I don't think the relationship with a chatbot or was healthy, but "just get better" is an entirely unempathetic, unreasonable suggestion for a high-risk individual faced with an arduous, life-altering journey at the height of mental instability.
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