Live data from Hacker News

The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

danielcompton.net

531–540 of 542 posts

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#531
post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No sympathy for people who lost their home and possessions over a $75 fee? Well, yes, sympathy from me as in "sucks to be them". But they were adults and made a voluntary decision to forego paying for fire protection. They made a bet and they lost. As for cancer, when I was in high school some 40 years ago, I knew a US Army Major (i.e. Gung-ho military) who smoked. Even then, smoking was starting to be frowned upon.…

I respect your different point of view on this matter. But if I may act as the devil's advocate: what if it was your brother (or father) that said that to you? Would you not volunteer help to them if they said those things and are now suffering from cancer? Personally, I don't think we should reward people for making bad decisions; you are implicitly punishing the people who made the good ones, which are often hard.…

Would you not volunteer help to them if they said those things and are now suffering from cancer?

Yes of course families help each other no matter the previous bad choices.

On a societal level we try to help people with cancer even if they don't have health insurance. That's what Medicaid is. Unfortunately that only helps save them from death; destitution probably feels almost as bad and we don't have an easy solution to that.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#532
post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as far as it goes for "world domination" I've read before that Uber's plan is to make everyone's (self-driving car) a money making machine for Uber and the car owner. You go to work at 9am and while at work 9.01am to 4.59pm your car drives around making you both money. The same applies for when you return home 6.01pm to 8am the next day. No drivers, only Auto-bots ;) and paying customers! (makes me wonder how much In…

I can only imagine how filthy your car would be when it gets back to you at 5pm. I don't want to imagine what it'd be like at 8am after giving lifts to people coming home after a night out

It wouldn't be too hard for them to throw in a cleaning mechanism in there somehow.

If you find the car filthy, I'm sure a customer would too, so it's in their interest to fix it and I'm sure it's even easy to automate the cleaning process :-)

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#533
Just a thought… Isn't it one of those things where Google has access to so much data, they could acquire (illegally) some of it from their servers, and then use parallel construction for finding other evidence ?

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#535
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pick up flowers here, then get my son from Judo practice, and practice his French with him in the car This would basically turn them into a private driver service and finding qualified staff would be a pain for anyone wanting a french tutor for the drive. Ignoring that as an off the wall example though they'll still hit a pretty hard wall with trust. Even if the fear is unfounded trying to get a huge number of peop…

> finding qualified staff would be a pain for anyone wanting a french tutor for the drive Why? Just filter on the "Speaks French" tag.

The supply would still be extremely limited outside a few markets where French is a primary or main secondary language. Also unless you're paying extra for the French speakers the chances the small pool will be already booked with normal jobs is pretty high.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cruise was bought for a billion dollars. Argo got a billion dollar investment.

Argo isn't really an independent startup, Ford was behind it all along.

Do you have a source for that I could read?

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#537
post #2

TL;DR: The "Bombshell" is Alphabet/Waymo's lawsuit against Lewandowski and Uber for stealing trade secrets, and an interpretation that Lewandowski formed Otto basically as a cover to get a big payday from Uber in exchange for the secrets.

Bloggism at its worst. A blog post with an agenda making huge leaps of faith without bothering to keep a semblance of impartiality to try to show that Uber somehow conspired to steal technology. Without bothering to hear the other side. "From Waymo’s filings, it seems that they have Levandowski dead to rights on stealing their LiDAR designs." This is one of the dumbest quotes in the post. Of course the lawyer's job i…

Author here.

> "He hasn't even heard the other side of the story and he's already coming up with conclusions"

I tried pretty hard throughout the entire article to make it clear both that I was speculating, and that Uber will contest these claims in court.

In the 'dead to rights' quote you referenced, my first three words were "From Waymo's filings". I am aware that Uber hasn't had a chance to respond, if I was to expand that sentence it would be something like: "If everything in Waymo's case is accurate, then they have a very comprehensive case to make against Levandowski stealing their LiDAR designs, based on forensic evidence as well as testimony and eyewitness accounts.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#538
post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> finding qualified staff would be a pain for anyone wanting a french tutor for the drive Why? Just filter on the "Speaks French" tag.

The supply would still be extremely limited outside a few markets where French is a primary or main secondary language. Also unless you're paying extra for the French speakers the chances the small pool will be already booked with normal jobs is pretty high.

I'm not saying Uber should become a service for French tutors. I'm saying every Uber driver has a unique value-add and in a large market there will be plenty of customers for those additional skills.

Are you trying to argue that there is zero use for a person with a car who speaks French in a city like San Francisco? I really don't understand what you're trying to convince me.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what I've heard from insiders.

As someone who voted "against" Uber/Lyft, I can promise you their PACs misleading and blatantly false propaganda regarding the city ordinance directly caused them to lose my vote. That and people love getting 4 fliers per day in their mailbox. Good riddance.

Cool, but your vote has little to do with the political reality that pushed the initiative to politicians putting it up to vote.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what I've heard from insiders.

Well then share what you heard.

Politicians were captured by the taxi industry and exploited the liberal environment of Austin to achieve an effective ban on larger sharing services. What more is there to know?
Post reply on HN