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Oh my god! What a coincidence this is. Yesterday at around 3am I woke up in the middle if the night and I had the worst pain in my lower back.

I have never had any problems with my back in my entire life so this came as a shocker. My job is as a web developer so I spend 90% of my time awake seated and working.

Here's what happened:

Once I woke up, I tried standing up and I could barely walk because of the pain. Talk about being god damn mortified. I immediately called my girlfriend to let her know she should probably check on me in the morning.

In a state of panic, I also called a doctor friend of mine at around 4:30am. I explained my situation to him and he told me to conduct a simple test and answer some questions so he could assess what it could be: he asked me to put my chin on my chest which I could and that was good. He also asked whether there was numbness or tingliness which I didn't have so he was more at ease. However, because he couldn't explain what it was he suggested I should go to the hospital. It wasn't safe to get out at that time so I decided to take some ibuprofen which luckily I had, and wait it out till the sun was up. I managed to get some sleep by 5:50am and by the time I woke up at 9am. The pain had somehow reduced and I could walk again.

My friend later on prescribed some myospaz and suggested it might have been a muscular issue. I'm feeling much better now. I still can't bend or lift heavy things but I can at least I can do some basic stuff like go to the bathroom without feeling excruciating pain when I change body posture e.g. moving from standing to sitting position and vice-versa.

I'm working from home now. Seated on my couch in the living room because, you know, code must be shipped and I absolutely love what I do. My back is rested on the couch so I'm pretty comfortable and the pain has been gradually decreasing.

LESSONS LEARNED

1. What didn't help:

Reading about back pains on the internet. If you want to absolutely heighten your anxiety when panicking about your health, read about it on the internet. I had begun to imagine the worst.

2. My girlfriend has been so great helping me out with cooking and cleaning since I've been pretty much useless at any laborious tasks. I should probably marry her NOW. She's been amazing.

3. Ergonomics

I've been trying to figure out what I might have done to trigger this and the only thing that comes to mind is that lately I had been changing my posture to a more upright position i.e. straight back instead of leaning back on the chair and letting my back ease up by resting it on the back of the chair. I'm insatiably trying to learn all I can about this topic. (any resources are welcome)


Avafind Pro when native search doesn't work. It will scan even the system files(and hidden folders) which are typically ignored by default unless you're deliberate about enabling their inclusion.


The Big 3 in china will now also have control over the world's 4th largest telecom provider whose market cap is $23B.


Is anyone just taking the time to simply ask, WTF is going on?

At the emotional frequency everyone is operating on, do you really think you'll win? No one will win because everyone will lose. Let me explain why.

I think it's time everyone admitted their biases and that their biases if not TAMED will only serve to antagonize their political opponents.

Before I go on, here are my biases...

I'm a black libertarian(with a strong affinity for classical liberalism) and a supporter of Trump's presidency so words like 'uncle tom' have been thrown at me. I wasn't always a libertarian. Initially a liberal, I didn't pay much attention to politics but when I begun to think about the role that politics has in my life (at zero option), I realized that I was naturally inclined towards conservatism i.e. fiscal responsibility & frugality, tighter immigration control, less government intervention, anti-eminent-domain, pro-personal freedom and liberty, anti-common-core, and then some. I'm huge fan of Peter Thiel and Hans-Hermann Hoppe - I read them a lot. I no longer feel the need to watch CNN because their ability to hide their skew towards liberalism is all but gone

You should note that there's no where that I mentioned violence as a chosen means to get my voice heard. I don't support it but I fear that's where the world is headed in order to resolve this political conflict that's in the ether right now.

What we have today is a left that is too far gone - who mostly don't realize it - and a right that's intentionally too far gone also.

Just as much as there is a far-right, you best believe that Trump is right and there is a far-left (it is telling that today on the web, you'll find two clones of Wikipedia all skewed towards either leftism or rightism because neither trust Wikipedia - see Conservapedia & RationalWiki).

As much as Trump has been touted by some as a symptom (I agree), I think that Obama's presidency was also a symptom. Putting his(Obama) race aside, we had an American president who once said that [sic] between capitalists and communists or socialists, and especially in the Americas, that’s been a big debate...You should just decide what works.

This shows that the world had once again reached a point where systems like communism which were disproven - when America won the cold war, the soviet collapsed, the Berlin wall came down and Fukuyama wrote the words 'End of History' - could now be viewed in a relativistic manner. As though it didn't matter what the world had gone through historically. This was one of those fatal flaws because, if you forget history, you're undoubtedly bound to repeat it.

I also subscribe to some Burkean views which espouse that, change in a society should be introduced gradually. Gradual change while all the while testing to see if there's truth in your claims. This is not what we're used to in the tech scene; we prefer disruption but disruption comes at a cost. You cannot have a Bernie without a Trump. You cannot have an Alt-Right without an Antifa.

We must all tone down our views. We must all tame our desires for instant political gratification. Revolutionary change comes at a painful cost. Let's all embrace gradual change. If we don't, right or left, the Daily Stormer will win whether you like it or not because there will be a race war as per their slogan. When this happens, it will all turn into rubble and only a few will be left to pick up the pieces.

The questions we should be asking is what can I cede (politically) in exchange for you ceding something of equal magnitude until some balance is restored. We aren't headed in the right direction otherwise.


Totally agree. If we focus on our differences we'll end up divided.


> It's perfectly legal for a business to discriminate against such views.

Well-intentioned question: where do you draw the line? Where does it start or end? Businesses that have used this same logic to discriminate against LGBT patrons based on the owners' religious beliefs have had a very difficult time selling this same spiel.

Edit: Scrolling down, I can see this same question asked multiple times. My assessment is that, it's a very difficult thing to do and we must admit our biases even as we make our voices heard.


I tried it. It's still not fixed. This is incredibly dangerous.

I think that for all 'non-essential' sites it might be prudent to use a throwaway password each time. I think it might be an all too common practice on many a site.


I try and use separate passwords on every site, essential or not. That way if something like this happens it isn't really much of a big deal.

After all, who can ever know that even a large site like Facebook or Twitter or Google or Hacker News is storing your password securely? You usually can't, so you may as well be cautious and not reuse passwords for any service.


It might be the right time for the people at Uber to self-select based on their values.


It might be time for people to realize that the lived experience of the vast majority of Uber employees does not match the ridiculous charicature that the media portrays. (I am not saying there wasn't harassment or bullying, that Susan's stories aren't true, or that the board and upper management seems like a circus right now.) Source, meyself and my co workers at Uber.

Btw, I am an Uber employee, AMA.


It's interesting to me how many people who say the environment is "not toxic" are men in the tech organization who've been there a long time.

I've helped 2 women find new work, moving from the chaos of Uber. Both saying variants of "the shit I took there was only offset by the stock's possible valur and the waymo stuff calls that into question."

Is the divide between men and women's experience there that intensely different, I wonder?


We (I work at Uber) dealt with insane growth in a toxic fashion and are now paying down the debt of letting toxicity rule us for the last three years. I'm still of the opinion that we are doing that, even if it's only to enable the shareholders to make their money. And we're doing that through efforts that, anywhere else, would be noteworthy and exciting. Everyone I work with has various classes of stories like these, but by and large the non-minority men have not been so negatively affected as those who don't have that going for them. I've been through the ringer myself, but I've been in a spot where I can come out ahead despite having been in the same reporting structure as Susan Rigetti.

A lot of us are still here in hope that the folks like Saad, Gandahar and Kalanick who have left are replaced with people with an ounce of emotional intelligence like Frances Frey. Folks who are in a position and mindset to force the structure of the company to grow. Seeing Kalanick apologists like Saad leave is one of the best signs we might finally be ready to do that. It's going to be a long slow slog of 'losing' people like them until we're in a place where we're not actively villains, but I still think the company could do it or I'd be gone.


I appreciate your comment and your decision not to obfuscate your identity. Thank you very much.


I'm not related to Uber in anyway, but being a man with a longer tenure in a company shouldn't be a reason to discount someone's opinion (or possibly in your comment's case, hinting that they were the reason for toxicity).


My post doesn't dismiss anyone's opinion. Heck, it explicitly asks for comment on why this might be so. Nor was I hinting that any one person is the cause. I do not think it is the work of any one person, even Travis.

But it's striking what a very reliable classifier the union of 'man?' and 'yearsAtUber >>> (> 4)' is in figuring out who's vocally unhappy about Travis leaving. Perhaps I am simply suffering from availability bias and therefore don't know about all the satisfied and successful women at Uber speaking up that their experience is positive.


Thanks AMA #1:

Did Kalanick really set up and encourage a bro Culture? Did he respect fellow employees as humans or was just running behind business success?


Uber employee and can answer this:

Travis had a deep empathy for the challenges of building successful products, and would offer tremendous grace and thoughtful advice to his team solving problems in the trenches. When projects went sideways, and we presented numbers that were less than stellar, Travis was both empathetic and optimistic while offering actionable guidance and a path forward.

"Bro culture" is a loaded term and the wrong one to describe the environment Travis cultivated. He had tremendous focus on the problems at hand and pushed his team to operate with a sense of urgency to solve them. If anything I think he cared too much about each individual problem, which propelled his teams forward but sometimes left him too deep in the details of his business rather than focusing on the big picture.


Sounds like the most diplomatic way to describe a "do it yesterday" micromanager, or, at the very least, a nondelegating CEO (often seen in family businesses).


This... doesn't answer the question?


Former Uber employee here.

> Did Kalanick really set up and encourage a bro Culture?

No, not at all. He's a grown man and unbelievably serious about Uber.

> Did he respect fellow employees as humans

Yes. Always.

> or was just running behind business success?

I don't know what this means, but Travis Kalanick is absolutely the main reason that Uber has grown faster than almost any other company in history.


> It might be time for people to realize that the lived experience of the vast majority of Uber employees...

That's just awfully close to that "9 out of 10 people enjoy..." joke.


Bitcoin mixers would serve you well in this instance. Just buy BTC normally and clean via a mixer.


And how do you know that that the Bitcoin mixer you decided to use is not actually operated by the FBI and that they are actually keeping a private log tying bitcoins in with bitcoins out?


Monero.

This whole argument is stuck in 2012. Lean not on your own understanding and look at the technology thats out there.


Had similar questions yesterday and some hackers responded here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15016338


That doesn't seem to address hostile mixers? Running dark-net bazaars, bitcoin mixers and "hacker"(cracker) forums seems like trivial intel basics. Just like running "anonymous" [ed:remailers,[1]] and tor nodes.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixmaster_anonymous_remailer


I actually think it would suffice to payout at random times with an insanely high number of bitcoin addresses (all autogenerated via a script) for high number of users (the more the better). It would be virtually impossible to know who got how much BTC out (may be in, but not out).

As for the hostile mixers, I'm afraid I can't offer any solution other than to rely on reputation. That said, it is rather telling that bitmixer.io is closing [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14843373]. It may not be safe to run a mixer; the feds may come after you.


> Are you serious? This is almost too goofy to merit a response.

Unfortunately, I suspect the poster is dead serious. This is why I don't recommend trying to appease socialists. It is never enough and they'll never be happy until we're all 'equal'.

The first time I came across this phenomenon was while listening to Thomas Piketty on YouTube and he went on and on about how the philanthropic approach Gates and people like him (the wealthy) were taking to solve the world's problems was flawed. I couldn't believe it! Piketty disapproved of Gates' donations and his philanthropy on the basis that one cannot donate to a charity that one still controls. To him that was ridiculous despite the fact that Gates' foundation has done a remarkable job thus far; more than Piketty - with all his socialist nonsense - will ever do in a million lifetimes.

The irony is that, the first time I heard of Piketty was via Gates' reading list on his website.

The mistake that some wealthy people are making is that they assume that they can appease socialists. You can't. They'll always want more or everything if you let them!


> it's easy to live to 100 years old, just give up all the things that make you want to live until 100

Oh-so cool.

This makes me mull about the role that moderation plays in a person's overall happiness and success in life.


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