This seems weird to me, maybe it's a generational thing. Is it really that bad to share a car with someone? You don't have to talk to them the whole time.

As a woman, while 95% of the ridesharing trips I take are perfectly pleasant and sometimes great with conversation the 5% of rides where you are trapped in a car with a creep asking you extremely off putting questions sours the entire concept of ride sharing for me.

Same. Ever been a vulnerable woman stuck in a car with a man who starts ranting that "nobody wants to date men who aren't rich anymore" and it turns out the driver is angry because the women that are trapped as riders won't go out with him?

Or how about, "Nice place...you live alone here?"

Absolutely would choose the robot.

Yea, I can't imagine being a woman and having to deal with some of these drivers.

This doesn't compare, but as a man I get really put off by the amount of invasive questions (where I work, where my family is from, etc) when I'm just trying to get from point A to point B.

I'm a mid-millenial FWIW, so I very much remember a world of only having old school taxis.

the situations you've described and the fact that our answer as a society is seemingly to throw up our hands at our inability to solve these situations other than by increasing the number of cars on the road in a way that funnels even more wealth to a tiny group of unfathomably wealthy sociopaths who also use ourour personal information to impact our spending habits... very depressing. i really hate it here.

Erm, what would you propose as an alternative answer?

Presumably women are giving those creepy drivers bad ratings, and yet they are still on the road. So, that's clearly not working.

Sure, the US should fix their transit system, but that doesn't help women now.

So, the default answer becomes, "Get your own car, plebe." And that's super expensive and requires you to drive.

Or, a woman can take a Waymo.

I'm right there with you about hating the megajillionaires, but I'm open to hearing your alternative suggestions.

arm all women :)

I like humor, however, for the peanut gallery who might not get sarcasm:

Every credible scientific study of women and guns in the last two decades strongly indicates that a firearm in a woman’s home is far more likely to be used against her or her family than to defend against an outside attacker.

More women carrying guns makes them more likely to get shot, and, mostly, not by strangers.

> Is it really that bad to share a car with someone?

Sometimes it is, and you never really know when.

Some of my most unpleasant experiences involved a couple of reckless drivers, even more nutters who insisted on talking about their politics or pet peeves, I fear one of them may have gone beyond mere eccentricity and probably required some medical intervention, but couldn't figure out how to report that without possibly resulting in the driver being punished by the app.

Hah, I had a 2am conversation with a woman from Argentina about Javier Milei which is one of my Uber riding highlights.

But then another time a guy warned me not to open his glove box because his Glock was in there and he sounded deranged and it’s the one time I’ve literally gotten out of the car and cancelled my Uber.

One female Uber driver told me about how she had to go to court because a drunk man threatened to stab her with a knife (that he was brandishing), then he passed out and the police had to haul him out of her car. The .1% ruin it for everyone else.

Personally, I find it odd to have interactions with anyone just based of transactionality. I want to interact with people because I have relationships with them. I've always found it hard to figure out exactly how nice to be with someone you don't know. I don't think this is a maladjustment on my part, I think you probably shouldn't be overly nice to people before you establish trust with them... and that takes time.

The human driver could be nodding off because they didn’t bother sleeping last night, or maybe they just had some food with lots of garlic, or…ya, this has all happened to me before. I’ll take the Waymo over uber.

I've had one driving while reading their phone and checking stocks and looking up for about 1/2 a second of every 4 seconds.

"Yes it is that bad" - every woman I've ever talked to.

The Uber Driver who told me all about his Glock in the glove box was pretty off putting.

Also the Jeep that picked me up in August with broken air conditioning, although that was an annoyance vs “what is happening right now am I going to die”.

I’m fine to share a car. I’m less keen on dying in one.

Riding in a car is easily the most dangerous thing I do in my daily life and my subjective impression of how well uber/lyft/taxi drivers drive is not great.

My memory is that Hacker News comments were even more anti-Snowden at the time, but I could be mistaken. I would have thought people here would be very supportive of his whistle blowing, but I think a lot of people on this site unfortunately have a strong loyalty to the government organizations that were exposed.

This was the main thread about Snowden on the day his identity was revealed:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5850590

> You need to have been convicted to receive a pardon, the petition should be not to prosecute.

Hahaha / I’ve made myself sad

The critics weren't ever the brightest lights in the sky, but this was horribly naive even for that time. It is as if you took the whole lot of human literature, took a dump on it and honestly believe you would know better.

Oh! That's a cool site I didn't know about. Bookmarked.

i think a lot of people on this site work on the same types of projects snowden worked on and blew the whistle over, for the same organizations, and feel good about it. i wonder how many users here are happily employed by booz allen hamilton?

unrelated, but I recently saw an ad by booz allen that proudly said "Stopping Fentanyl" as part of their mission. Like, really? Are people really that gullible to believe that?

The line tested wonderfully with the focus groups.

The people that didn’t know the name before the ad?

Yeah.

Even if they do, they are not the people who shape policy or have any Power. When is the last time you saw someone with real wotld power show up and comment on HN? So its like worrying about what farm animals think about how the farm runs. What Snowden/Assange/Panama Papers/DOGE teaches us is that it doesnt matter what info about the farm is public, there is a pecking order. If you want to change something about how the farm works and how the farm animals are treated then you have to learn how to be a farmer. No free lunch and shortcuts just because you access info.

> Even if they do, they are not the people who shape policy or have any Power.

i am comfortable making this statement: anyone in the middle of the venn diagram of "booz allen hamilton employee" and "hacker news dot com reader" has the "Power" to work literally anywhere else that produces technology products.

Even in the case of a CRUD app, I think it's not bad to aim for a wow. Like "with this new feature, I'll no longer need to do x, y, and z repetitive tasks, great!"

Ever been to a shooting range? It's basically a bunch of random people with loaded guns.

That's not as random as letting me choose them! They had to be allowed onto the range, show ID, afford the gun, probably do a background check to get the gun unless they used a loophole (which usually requires some social capital).

I'm proposing the true proposal of many guns rights advocates: anyone might have a gun.

So let me choose the 50 and you give them guns! Why not?

Can you give up citizenship of the old country? Not being willing to give up your old citizenship could be one example of "not integrating enough".

Does that also apply to people living under oppressive governments? Anonymity can be a useful tool for sharing information that those in power don't want released, for example whistle blowing.

The only "system for payoff" I've seen with software patents is patent trolls. Are there cases of software inventors being rewarded for their software more fairly because they had a patent?

I think every every company I've worked at that had R&D had some kind of reward system for patents. Yes, most of the software patents were nonsense but those who have their names on it still did get paid.

Guessing those rewards are in the hundreds of dollars, probably a fraction of the engineer salary that went into the technical work.

In addition, software is also copyrightable, which makes much more sense than patents for protecting unauthorized use. IMO, patents for software should be mostly eliminated, and even copyright terms should be much shorter.

5 years full copyright, 5 years noncommercial unrestricted fair use with mandatory attribution, then straight to public domain. Berne Convention be damned, and multigenerational copyrights can go straight to hell as well.

Software patents are stupid, and even more so with AI soon to be able to take arbitrary compiled code and produce readable, well composed source in a target language with documentation and optimizations.

Studios and platforms and funds and giant corporations that "own" terabytes of IP are a cancer.

We're going to have to fix copyright. Until then, pirate everything.

A person born in a war torn country who is killed at a young age doesn't get much opportunity for good or bad choices. That's what I think of regarding bad luck.

A school's budget is tied directly to attendance. Less students = less budget.