The biggest red flag is: "I don't care anymore, I hope they sue me", and saying they're about to contact reporters.

It's designed to boost credibility (this is gonna be proven legit, any day now! skeptics will look dumb!), but then why hasn't he gone to them already? Texting a Signal number takes a second. Why would he take additional legal and financial risk for fake internet points on a minor subreddit known for its fanfic?

Raising awareness is not a bad call. I would not know about this, if it would surface in a random US paper

Even if it appeared on Guardian or NYT I'd not have heard of it unless it trended on HN lol

It's the biggest clue that it's typical reddit brained fanfic.

What about the claims though ? I dont see the point of getting hung up on just this and discrediting the rest of the story. Tbf this proves nothing without more confirmations however it might be possible to design client side A/B tests to catch this type of behaviour. Might be something NYT or some group with a well resourced investigative arm could pull off.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of fiction on Reddit these days, especially on subs like r/confession.

I treat these posts, especially ones that have indicators like these, as “fiction until proven otherwise”.

This has been a longstanding issue, particularly in the era of AI-generated content.

When I choose priority delivery in Uber, I can see the driver go to the store, pick up my order and drive directly to my place. I also see the driver usually have 1-2 stops on the way if I don't select that. If there's enough gap between myself and the restaurant, priority is absolutely a time save.

If this is Uber then it's not legitimate.

Or the app shows you a few fake deliveries... If this story is real then there's no reason you can believe what the app shows you.

It would have to do very accurate parallel construction of GPS signal to lie about the driver's location yet correctly predict the arrival time, which cannot be faked.

If you ask Uber drivers, they explain it to you that they are not even aware of your priority order.

All it does is that it puts you first in queue (assuming two people don’t pay priority in the batch). So it’s a gamble on your end.

But that makes sense. Why should the driver be aware of who is marked Priority? It might also open up the app company to liability (oh the app told me it's a "Priority", so I drove faster and crashed). The driver simply goes where the app tells them to go.

In my experience on Uber Eats, Priority definitely works.

It shows the guy going to the restaurant, the same guy that eventually shows up at my door. It shows it on the way to a couple of deliveries and takes as long as extra deliveries should roughly take. It shows the immediate previous delivery when it's almost delivered, and the guy spends about as long as i'd expect at that place.

Not saying that it's not deceptive in some way, but it's more than just a surface-level difference.

I don't think this is Uber, I think it's DoorDash?

I thought so too but one of the comments he comments about the ride sharing part of the company.

Ah! Good catch!

I know the OP. He's actually a compulsive liar. We had to fire him from our team at Big Food Delivery because he'd keep saying he was done with his tickets but then he'd be blocked on someone, and when the code showed up it would be crap and very verbose. Finally, one day someone said "Dude, can you at least review your own code?" and he flipped out and said he was suffering from trauma and needed time off, and that our company policy allowed Claude Code. It does, but you can't just post the output like that.

Then he went online and posted this and told us that we were screwed. Internally we're following the process to get him fired, but because he's technically hired out of Italy we can't do it without 3 months notice.

Anyway, I made that whole thing up but don't let that one small phrase discredit the rest of the claims.

Oh man you had me right til the end

I’m just upset he didn’t plummet sixteen feet through the announcer’s table

I definitely did consider it, but for the fact that we'd start endless debates about whether HN is becoming Reddit and so on. Though now that I think about it, that is a worthwhile honeypot to capture such a person in.

I don't think you have to claim you made that thing up. I don't care about the language, the hyperbole of the post just the claims. The claim that you know the OP of an anonymous reddit account is where I'd stop reading.

Don't let that one claim distract you from the others. They might still be true.

Could be fanfic, but fees are 100% misleading.

Meh, I wouldn't read too much into it. They might be a backend dev but that doesn't make them perfectly rational under stress. Being in a whistle blower situation makes smart people do dumb things.

To me it's coherent BUT I'll still wait from a source I trust, e.g. 404 Media, to actually do journalism. I'm not saying it's fanfic or not, I'm saying "Noted, might read about it later in few days in a proper format with verified claims." nothing more.

I mean, it’s not even remotely hard to believe. There are plenty of extremely similar examples, such as:

- grocery delivery algorithmic price fixing: https://youtu.be/osxr7xSxsGo

- dollar general lying about prices: https://youtu.be/uE5THiD-kTk

But yeah, it’d be good to get this backed up even better. Delivery companies are already on thin ice

This is what I would do if my internal moral compass was exhausted to the bone and I felt like public disclosure mattered. Fortunately, public disclosure regarding my prior employment is already regularly made and ignored, so I didn’t have any compulsion to.

Libraries are a haven of safety for leaking material once only. Burnout does not imply incompetent opsec. Neither does drunk; after all, it would horrify non-tech folks to realize how often impaired / intoxicated workers are using root privileges to fix an incident.

When you are burn out your brain doesn't brain too well, reminds me of Luigi, that 3D printed his gun among other smart moves but made many silly mistakes that got him caught (like carrying the silencer, the magazine, and other incriminating evidence)

I am 95% convinced he was caught because we live in a surveillance panopticon.

The McDonald's kiosks could very easily be sharing data with other private companies (e.g. Palantir) who the government contracts with. There are so many other companies jumping in on sharing data like this, why would a company like McDonald's care about selling out customer privacy in exchange for a better bottom line for investors?

>I am 95% convinced he was caught because we live in a surveillance panopticon.

I'm sure this is unpopular opinion but I'm glad we can catch murderers quickly which technology. The flip side is worse.

Note: This has nothing to do with the reasons for murdering which I'm not going to debate.

> I'm glad we can catch murderers quickly which technology.

According to whom? Homicide clearance rates in the US have been getting worse for decades [1][2]. The same is true in the UK, another surveillance state, where only 10% of violent offenses get solved [3].

This promise of a crime-free utopia has been nothing but a deceptive manipulation of the public and the scary part is that it keeps working.

[1] https://www.murderdata.org/p/reported-homicide-clearance-rat...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2023/04/29/1172775448/people-murder-unso...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jan/13/most-violent...

He got caught because someone recognized his uniquely bushy eyebrows from the wanted photos. This is all documented, no need for advanced theorizing.

> This is all documented, no need for advanced theorizing.

Something being documented doesn't make it true:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

The woman who reported his location said that.

2 weeks notice and maybe even being backend developer is a lie. He's trying to midlead them

It would be a good curve ball if he is that smart.

It's also possible he lied about his end date to throw suspicion off. Or he may be still working for the company and used someone else's resignation to pin the blame on them.

Maybe “he” is a “she” - quite right what you say, there’s no reason to believe their details.

I would say what they describe about their employer is probably true. I’ve had similar experience of companies making every last buck off their “human assets” but thats how profit works: you take money off others in exchange for promised benefits.

That’s what I would have done. Planting a few lies to protect your anonymity can’t hurt. Maybe they quit months ago, or maybe they didn’t even put their notice yet.

Or maybe he's going to stick around to watch the fireworks. Milk the company for a few more months before it goes into regulation.

Sigh ... you would you specify when you put in your two weeks after going through all the trouble with the burner tech?

It's just another run of the mill reddit rage bait fanfic. Nothing makes sense plus the weird responses by the user. Inb4 no shallow dismissals

> The algorithm is a gigantic neural network, and as such essentially a black box, incomprehensible to the human mind.

Yeah right

If it was me, and I was trying to hide my identity, I'd add those sorts of details to muddy the waters.

Also, the NDA part. I've never heard of SWEs getting "NDAs". Technically everything you do while employed is supposed to be confidential. It doesn't require a special NDA.

I've signed NDAs at a few companies. Implied confidentiality has more limitations and gray areas than an NDA and requires trials when businesses tend to prefer arbitrators (those supposedly neutral parties that know their future business depends on "making the right decision" which is why companies win nearly 95% of arbitrations).