dowjones

Let's not forget that both inflation and unemployment were in double digits, Iran was holding Americans hostage, and gasoline rationing was barely in the rear view mirror

something is missing, this isn't close to 100%

You think Travis Kalanick should go to jail? Really? For what?

>> The program does the mind-numbing job of interpreting commercial-loan agreements

A computer program that interprets written language -- natural-language processing -- is reliant on highly-advanced, complex algorithms and AI to do the interpreting. This is much deeper than mindless "automation" and requires absolute trust in the accuracy of the underlying algo (or, hiring back some of those humans).

You're changing the subject. You imply Travis isn't a good CEO because his company is losing money, whereas Steve Jobs was "was a phenomenally effective CEO." At the age of 40, he most certainly was not.

In the early 1990's, JP Morgan developed software tools it packaged and sold as "RiskMetrics." It standardized the way most banks measured and reported their portfolio risk. For example, it was now easy to determine how likely a portfolio would lose, say, 5% of its value. This underlying concept, called Value at Risk, was baked into the RiskMetrics tool and quickly became the default methodology for measuring risk among traders but also regulators, bank management, and external portfolio managers and investors.

The problem was VaR had never really been tested in a real-world meltdown situation. Its models all assumed even under duress, markets acted rationally and traders' behavior was uncoordinated and uncorrelated. In 1998, the spectacular failure of Long-Term Capital Management, was enabled by its reliance on VaR (among other things, like bad trades and enormous leverage). In a crisis, markets were NOT acting rationally, and neither were traders, causing losses much larger than anticipated by VaR. Unfortunately, people tend to repeat mistakes, so in 2007-8, once again, banks all over the world that relied on VaR calculations to tell them their risk portfolio was small and manageable, soon found out that it wasn't.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/magazine/04risk-t.html

tl;dr: JP Morgan would be among the last companies I would trust with a software innovation reliant on new, breakthrough algorithms.

When Steve Jobs was 40, which Travis Kalanick is now, he had been kicked out of the first company he founded (Apple), and his second company (NeXT) was failing miserably. Pretty much everything that Steve is remembered fondly for -- his success at Apple and Pixar -- came after 1995.

And HN and other tech sites are somehow exempt from this phenomenon? With billions of dollars at stake at Uber and its various competitors, is it impossible to think, for example, that Susan Fowler had professional authoring help, or was offered compensation to publish her recent blog post? Or that paid/professional/fake commenters downvoted, attacked, and drowned out any voice who simply requested documentation, or cautioned that judgment should be reserved until both sides of the story were made public?