
Uber's Board to Discuss Leave of Absence for Travis Kalanick - ghughes
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/06/11/technology/uber-holder-report.html
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dang
An article about a conversation that hasn't happened yet doesn't pass the
"significant new information" test that we use to distinguish which instances
of long-running stories count as dupes:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20significant%20new%20...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20significant%20new%20information&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment).
When such submissions make HN's front page, all that happens is that the same
discussion from the last N cycles gets repeated, since there's nothing new of
significance to talk about. Of course, when something new does happen, the
same discussion will mostly repeat then too—but at least there will be _some_
mutation to keep things from getting too generic.

For those who are curious, this test originated after the Snowden deluge of
2013
([https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20significant%20new%20...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20significant%20new%20information%20snowden&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment))
and has turned out to work pretty well.

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falsedan
What's the long-running article that this is a dupe of?

~~~
dang
Not article; story. Uber.

Edit: Oops, forgot that this was a dupe in the strict sense (thanks detaro).
My point was that a second test ("significant new information") applies during
deluges.

~~~
falsedan
The story is 'Uber'? I don't understand: were their a lot of submissions of
this article? Was it marked as a dupe because we have a lot of submissions
about Uber (on different topics)?

~~~
dang
This article was a straight-up dupe of another submission of the same article.

Even if it hadn't been, though, the 'significant new information' test—i.e.
the lack thereof—would have made it a dupe. Otherwise we end up with a front-
page of Uber Uber Uber the same way we had Snowden Snowden Snowden, with the
discussions always the same.

~~~
falsedan
> _a straight-up dupe of another submission of the same article_

At work, when we have two or more tickets like this, we close one as a
Duplicate and link them together with a 'duplicated by/duplicate of'
relationship, so that people who end up on the ticket we're not going to work
on can find the active one. Do you think this sort of system would work for
dupes on HN?

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ktamura
>Mr. Kalanick is also dealing with the death of his mother, Bonnie Kalanick,
last month, in a boating accident that also left his father seriously injured.
The board meeting on Sunday is being held in Los Angeles because in the weeks
since his mother’s death, Mr. Kalanick has been spending time with family
there, where he grew up.

Completely independent of what's going on at Uber, I sympathize with Kalanick
and his family. It's very hard to balance family tragedies with
entrepreneurship.

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chollida1
What specifically would a "leave of absence" accomplish?

Presumably this means he's coming back,

Given two things that as of today still seem very likely:

1) that he is coming back

2) he still owns a controlling interest wrt voting shares of the company

What is this really going to accomplish?

Does anyone think and serious decision that Travis disagrees with are gong to
be made while he's gone? He's ll just reverse it when he returns so whats the
point?

The only thing I can think of is that this allows a scape goat to come in,
introduce some potentially unpopular rules at the company, clean house again
if required and then let Travis come back as the good guy who didn't have to
make the hard and unpopular decisions?

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nxc18
Damage control and placating the media. Having scandal after scandal while
doing literally nothing is a really bad look. The board here gets the best of
both worlds, publicly appearing to do something while also still doing
basically nothing.

~~~
65827
I think you might be a tad overly cynical, this is basically unheard of
nowadays and a pretty major move by the board.

~~~
meowface
It is very unusual, but is it really accomplishing much? If he still
effectively controls the company and will return from his leave, then what
message is this supposed to send?

A pay cut or something would make a lot more sense, if they don't want to fire
him outright.

