
Susan Fowler fears she's now the target of a smear campaign - dsr12
https://twitter.com/susanthesquark/status/835193441814392833
======
pravula
Who didn't see this coming? This is a company whose SVP threatened to do
exactly this, publicly, to a journalist.

[http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/18/7240215/uber-exec-
casuall...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/18/7240215/uber-exec-casually-
threatens-sarah-lacy-with-smear-campaign)

~~~
a3n
In that incident, if "it's wrong" wasn't enough to dissuade them not to do
that, then "because if it ever looks like we do this in the future it will be
totally believable" _should_ be enough. But I suppose some people will always
want the marshmallow immediately.

And I suppose, today, Uber better be hoping none of its ex, current or future
ex-employees ever get assaulted, baseball bat or not. For PR or legal defense,
if not for actual human empathy.

------
Preemo
Is anyone else getting tired of Uber as a whole? There's nothing amazing about
the company itself, they've hardly been innovative beyond the idea of ride-
sharing. Can't wait for Uber to crumble from the top down starting with their
over-zealous, dark-triad CEO.

~~~
pktgen
Not to mention their business model appears unsustainable to begin with:

Part 1: [http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/can-uber-ever-
deliver...](http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/can-uber-ever-deliver-part-
one-understanding-ubers-bleak-operating-economics.html)

Part 2: [http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/12/can-uber-ever-
deliver...](http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/12/can-uber-ever-deliver-part-
two-understanding-ubers-uncompetitive-costs.html)

Part 3: [http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/12/can-uber-ever-
deliver...](http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/12/can-uber-ever-deliver-part-
three-understanding-false-claims-about-ubers-innovation-and-competitive-
advantages.html)

Part 4: [http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/12/can-uber-ever-
deliver...](http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/12/can-uber-ever-deliver-part-
four-understanding-that-unregulated-monopoly-was-always-ubers-central-
objective.html)

Part 5: [http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/12/can-uber-ever-
deliver...](http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/12/can-uber-ever-deliver-part-
five-addressing-reader-comments-and-questions.html)

Part 6: [http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/01/can-uber-ever-
deliver...](http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/01/can-uber-ever-deliver-part-
six-bleak-pl-performance-while-stephen-levitt-makes-indefensible-claims.html)

Part 7: [http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/01/can-uber-ever-
deliver...](http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/01/can-uber-ever-deliver-part-
seven-ubers-narrative-vox-stratechery-critiques-naked-capitalisms-uber-series-
defending-uber-requires-ignoring.html)

~~~
projectorlochsa
Business model is fine it's just that the problem that arises from the wanted
business model is hard. Given their bad reputation, especially now, they just
don't have quality engineers to solve the problem.

Ride sharing is computationally NP-hard (assuming vehicle capacity larger than
2), the whole fleet management itself is NP-hard and depends highly on the
realtime routing capabilities and prediction.

To make a combinatorial optimization algorithm capable of incorporating ride-
sharing constraints and realtime data is a serious feat which maybe they
jumped in too early to solve (given that no current research published tries
anything similar). For really groundbreaking work to happen one needs quality
engineers and researchers, and realistically, who would want to work in a
company that is openly criticized for having terrible work culture?

The only way they can lower the prices and then find the sweetspot prices
after monopoly is by having superior machine learning and combinatorial
optimization solution.

~~~
xenity7
I don't think this problem is as hard as you think it is in practical terms. N
is going to be relatively small given basic constraints (the number of drivers
and requests that could feasibly be matched is geographically limited). The
search space for a request is limited to a few hundred drivers at most,
competing with what is likely an even smaller pool of requests, making even
extremely inefficient brute force approaches feasible.

~~~
projectorlochsa
Yeah, problem is so simple that they have job listings for AI research
engineers that should have a little bit of experience in TensorFlow, Theano,
Caffe or Torch (obviously some lovely deep learning on who knows what). About
a year ago they were searching for PhDs and asked for experience with
combinatorial algorithms, especially travelling salesman and vehicle routing
problems.

~~~
debatem1
It's worth pointing out that Uber had their service working more than a year
ago, so while the folks you mention might help take Uber to the N+1th order of
optimization they are clearly not necessary to reach the Nth.

I suspect this is what the GP is getting at: reaching the levels of
optimization on this problem which are required to launch the service is
comparatively easy. Going from there to optimality is extremely hard, but may
not be necessary from a business or end user point of view.

~~~
projectorlochsa
N that the GP is talking about is number of vehicles and number of requests.

Yes, service can obviously work with subpar algorithms but to really succeed
at pricing it as cheaply as possible it requires practically an ability to
successfully predict the whole day and then optimizing on the NP-hard problem
of that whole day. Maybe sampling a million day variants while routing to make
a single decision (which driver should pickup the next request).

Of course brute force greedy algorithms work but they can be, on a hundred
vehicle scale, 30% away from the optimum cost.

I've been downvoted to oblivion so I cannot longer keep participating in this
discussion (HN will shadowban me).

------
purple-again
I'm confused, where is the evidence of a smear campaign? She was a big news
story that's spawned a bunch of other stories in the past few days. It's
expected there would be a bunch of journalists and bloggers sniffing around
looking to do a story about her.

I'm not a fan of Uber either, but just based on that tweet it seems a little
disengenuos to start another round of hammering the company.

~~~
pain_perdu
I have personally witnessed (and have evidence to support) Uber being
extremely heavy-handed in response to valid allegations about them. My
experience was they absolutely have people standing-by to research and goto
great lengths to undermine negative truths that arise about the company.

~~~
debatem1
Can you provide your evidence? Who are the people that they have standing by?

I wonder if it would be possible to convince those people to support a better
cause. There's a dire need for some good investigative journalism right about
now.

~~~
pain_perdu
I actually described the issue in question on HN in the past which promptly
led to Uber threatening the employee who leaked the details to me. He was so
scared that he asked me to reach out to YC and have the original post deleted.

I wouldn't hesitate to share the evidence with a journalist with a publication
backing them though as that would be a more appropriate venue.

~~~
debatem1
Have you reached out to anyone?
[https://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2016/news-
tips/](https://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2016/news-tips/) would be my first
place to go. It even specifically calls out "Here is proof that this company
is conducting itself unethically" as an example, and asks for evidence
corroborating the story. So if you have it, that would seem to be the place.

Having said that, I was more wondering if the people doing the threatening
could be turned to better use. They surely aren't in it for the warm fuzzies,
and if they're good at digging perhaps they could be convinced to do it for
the good guys.

------
pinewurst
Uber denies this (not that I'm defending their history):
[http://www.recode.net/2017/2/24/14728660/uber-says-its-
not-b...](http://www.recode.net/2017/2/24/14728660/uber-says-its-not-behind-
the-phone-calls-to-investigate-susan-fowlers-personal-life)

~~~
TorKlingberg
It might not be Uber. It could be regular internet misogynists.

~~~
sn9
Or anyone with a financial interest in Uber doing well.

------
beckler
Uber has done this before.

Even though it was under different circumstances...

[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/26/nyregion/investigation-
of...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/26/nyregion/investigation-of-
conservationist-conducted-on-ubers-behalf-crossed-the-line-judge-rules.html)

------
enahs-sf
Uber has been the subject of a fair amount of bad press in the past few weeks.
I wonder what it would take for a Zenefits-style meltdown to occur there.

------
opinionsarelike
looks like Uber's day of strong arming everything are over. good riddance. i
always knew it was a cesspool of ego

