Stop The JerkTech • Hacker News Board

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#111

Post by mturmon » Fri, Jul 04, 2014, 5:44 AM UTC

RodericDay wrote: post #64

NhanH wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be clear: I agree with your point on focusing on creating value. And after I read your comment, I agree that none of the startups in the articles are truly creating that much value. However, is it that simple to qualify when you're creating value? If I had read the article before HN's comments, I'd have thought the startup is cool (admittedly trivial and silly, but we have a lot of those nowadays), rather tha…

"in the true spirit of capitalism. Yes, while it would shift the value to rich people, it also free up the rich people's time, so they (rich people) can create more value." this is embarrassing.

"Stones were made to be hewn and to construct castles; therefore my lord has a magnificent castle; for the greatest baron in the province ought to be the best lodged."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candide

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#112

Post by eevilspock » Fri, Jul 04, 2014, 5:51 AM UTC

jamesisaac wrote: post #97

eevilspock wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Because nearly every internet business gets it's revenue from advertising, a lot of good people jump through hoops to convince themselves that they have not made a deal with the devil. The downvotes[1] come fast when I point out this moral and cognitive dissonance, usually without any counter argument since t…

As someone who worked in an advertising-industry startup for 2 years before questioning what I was doing, I agree with everything you've said (in your linked post too), and sorry to see you're getting downvoted. The project I subsequently started operates on a very simple $5/mo pausable subscription with a 30-day free trial. I'm _much_ happier with this model than anything I've ever worked on which is ad-based - it f…

Thank you! I most certainly will get in touch. I want to both evangelize the problem and spur solutions (I have a few). I'm very serious about this, in much the same way as people are serious about open source, privacy and net neutrality. I am so glad you are too :)

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#113

Post by vdaniuk » Fri, Jul 04, 2014, 5:54 AM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #109

eevilspock wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Count all of the web content you've consumed and all the web services you've used in the past year. Now count all the ones you've paid for. Also, those paid-for services you mention are of such high quality (to you, not advertisers) because you pay for them. You are the customer not the product, as they say.

You're right, and it's depressing that you're being downvoted. Then again, HN can be a very hostile place if you bring an unpopular perspective to a discussion, even if that perspective is presented with clarity of thought and reason.

Unpopular? Really? "Advertising is bad" is one of the most supported memes on HN.

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#114

Post by gfodor » Fri, Jul 04, 2014, 6:05 AM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #107

icambron wrote: post #84

I dislike all of these companies, but I'd have put it all differently: The first one, Reservation Hop, is simply indefensible because it relies on fraud. It's deceiving restaurants into thinking the person asking for a reservation is a real person. Not only does it involve lying, but it's fundamentally different from scalping a ticket because if no one "buys" the reservation, the restaurant gets nothing and was perha…

>>The parking ones are a bit different, in that they're taking advantage of inefficiently priced parking. The reason parking is priced the way it is is because it is a public good. The only thing "efficient" pricing would do is give wealthy people a massive advantage over the consumption of that good. You might like to live in a world where only rich people can afford public parking - I don't. That's exactly why the…

Even for public goods, there should be some way of fairly allocating them. The randomness of driving around looking for parking is not a good way in 2014. It would be nice if some subset of spots used an automated system where people paid with their time, where drivers could sit in a queue to be notified when a spot frees up, and the spot becomes reserved for a short period until they park in it. (You snooze, you lose.)

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#115

Post by gfodor » Fri, Jul 04, 2014, 6:13 AM UTC

jw_ wrote: post #92

codezero wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly right, from the creator of ReservationHop: "To be honest, I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking through these questions." http://brianmayer.com/2014/07/how-i-became-the-most-hated-pe...

This guy seems intensely clueless. "If somebody is willing to pay for it, is it really unethical?" There we go - if there's a paying market for something, it's totally ethical. Off I go to found assasins.io - murder for hire disrupted.

This seems taken out of context. I don't think he was making a blanket statement, he was asking if people are willing to pay for this particular service, is it unethical? Ie, is it reasonable to say that if people are willing to pay for restaurant reservations, specifically, does that say anything about the ethics of it. Not to say that it is a good point, but I don't think it's some moral statement that paying for something makes it de facto ethical in general.

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#116

Post by fudgekludge » Fri, Jul 04, 2014, 6:13 AM UTC

randallsquared wrote: post #52

People keep using the phrases "the rich" and "the wealthy" in connection with this parking app (I heard this same phrasing on the NPR story about it last night), as though having a smartphone in the US and using it for parking is a sign of wealth. Firstly, a Virgin Mobile (no contract) Android phone is $30. Gas is well over $3 a gallon near SF. If you can afford to drive a car (even assuming it was given to you and y…

Just wanted to chime in to say that in SF if you have a parking permit you can park in some spaces for up to a week until street cleaning. When I had a car I would have gladly paid someone $15 to get a spot on my street on a Thursday knowing I could leave it there until Wednesday. Spots open up all the time but are filled quickly. I'm not defending the app, but there's definitely a (small?) market for something like that here.

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#117

Post by gfodor » Fri, Jul 04, 2014, 6:19 AM UTC

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the reservation thing, while being a bit sketchy in that the guy uses a fake name, doesn't seem as abhorrent as people seem to be making it out to be. If the guy was printing money hand over fist like an evil villain that'd be one thing, but it sounds like a weekend hack. An experiment. You know, the type of thing we encourage here so as to learn something. He cancels the reservation if nobody buys it. He's focusing on restaurants where demand outstrips supply (by definition.) My guess is the net effect of this experiment is probably increased revenue for the restaurants involved. It would be interesting if he presented numbers.

It's an interesting experiment. Should it be literally turned into a business, as-is? No, because it requires a) lying on the phone and b) leaves the possibility open that restaurants are going to leave money on the table, so beyond being unethical you probably don't want to make enemies of the people who are providing the service your customers are paying for. It's not viable, and it's both dumb and unethical to form a serious venture around as-is. But let's admit it, he's found something interesting that perhaps with some tweaks could be turned into something disruptive. In the startups I've worked stuff we ran small stuff like this all the time: things that we'd never try to scale since we were breaking the rules a bit, but we were trying to learn something and knew the way we were executing on it "in the small" did not cause any real harm.

But if we are going to just hang people out to dry immediately for releasing small experiments to test gaps in the market or test boundaries, then we've lost what it means to be a hacker. I don't like the idea that my entire reputation can be ruined if I launch a weekend hack that ends up on valleywag and starts a hate train fueled by wider hatred around the tech industry. Part of the reason startups work is because you can bend the rules a bit while you are small and under the radar while you look around at the edges for the opportunity for a real business you can stand behind. But with Twitter and the tech press even single individuals no longer seem to be able to stay off the radar if their experiment will drive clicks from angry readers and re-enforce their stereotypes about the tech scene.

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#118

Post by silencio » Fri, Jul 04, 2014, 6:24 AM UTC

icambron wrote: post #106

silencio wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> inefficiently priced parking This is not really relevant in the context of San Francisco. The city has been running a pilot program since 2010 to change meter pricing based on demand. Interested startups could have worked within this program and with SFMTA to help. All Monkey Parking et al. have been doing is screwing with this program which has been actively adjusting prices and rolling out to more areas. http://s…

I'll admit it's been a few years since I parked in SF. But I guess I don't understand how that program could be working but still give these guys a market. If the meters are setting the prices at market-clearing levels, then it would be prohibitively expensive to hold onto a spot you didn't need, and there'd be an equally priced spot available nearby anyway. I don't know if it's that the pricing doesn't work that wel…

Honestly, I don't think there is any street parking price that would scare them away, especially since the only limitation is the space constraint and not the contents of car driver wallets. There will always be someone that's willing to pay for a slightly better spot, and even if SF sets meters to $15-20/hr some areas are still going to stay congested. All I can really hope is that the program can expand and adjust prices so it's just a little bit less congested while not being outrageously priced, so people are a little bit less tempted to break the law. [1]

The gross thing about some of these startups was that they were looking for people to hire to squat on parking spaces. Not just the one-off space, but literally, your job was squatting until someone paid for the space. It's unbelievable. I hate parking here but not enough to screw around with other people looking for a parking space or to pay for a service like that. I would not shed a single tear if cops started using the apps in question to write the people selling spaces $300 tickets for breaking local laws.

Really not sure why all these "disruptors" can't just channel their energy into improving public transit and working on better (but slower and still imperfect) approaches to the parking problem just like sfpark. "Let's find you an available space and let's make it frictionless for you to pay for parking" if not just "let's fix the problems you have with taking Muni" is better in the long term than "let's create an app to auction off _public_ parking spaces".

I'm not even going to approach reservationhop because I also own a restaurant. I could write a wall of text about that....

edited in: [1] So I addressed this in other comments, but the sfpark program also involved installing per-spot sensors in over 8k meters in the city (along with credit card-supporting meters and remote pay). There was an official app (and third party dev access!) that showed you which _exact spaces_ were available near you. Imagine the ability to just discover that there's a space open 2 blocks away at half the price of the area you were searching in. Now that's the kind of technology I could get behind that would have a chance of destroying Monkey Parking and the likes on its own. I'm hoping SFMTA brings that back soon.

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#119

Post by jl6 » Fri, Jul 04, 2014, 6:30 AM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #107

icambron wrote: post #84

I dislike all of these companies, but I'd have put it all differently: The first one, Reservation Hop, is simply indefensible because it relies on fraud. It's deceiving restaurants into thinking the person asking for a reservation is a real person. Not only does it involve lying, but it's fundamentally different from scalping a ticket because if no one "buys" the reservation, the restaurant gets nothing and was perha…

>>The parking ones are a bit different, in that they're taking advantage of inefficiently priced parking. The reason parking is priced the way it is is because it is a public good. The only thing "efficient" pricing would do is give wealthy people a massive advantage over the consumption of that good. You might like to live in a world where only rich people can afford public parking - I don't. That's exactly why the…

I think the point re rich-vs-poor is that efficient pricing should be decoupled from wealth redistribution initiatives. An inefficient allocation of resources only has the side-effect of kind-of sort-of assisting the poor. The real solution is to efficiently allocate resources, and then separately take action to correct economic injustice.

Re: Stop The JerkTech

#120

Post by silencio » Fri, Jul 04, 2014, 6:31 AM UTC

gfodor wrote: post #114

enraged_camel wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>The parking ones are a bit different, in that they're taking advantage of inefficiently priced parking. The reason parking is priced the way it is is because it is a public good. The only thing "efficient" pricing would do is give wealthy people a massive advantage over the consumption of that good. You might like to live in a world where only rich people can afford public parking - I don't. That's exactly why the…

Even for public goods, there should be some way of fairly allocating them. The randomness of driving around looking for parking is not a good way in 2014. It would be nice if some subset of spots used an automated system where people paid with their time , where drivers could sit in a queue to be notified when a spot frees up, and the spot becomes reserved for a short period until they park in it. (You snooze, you lo…

SF had a pilot program to (among other things) install per-spot sensors in around 8k metered spaces in congested areas. There was a companion iOS/Android app that could direct you to the nearest sensor-enabled available street parking spot. I used it a couple times, it was great.

Sadly it doesn't work right now because the program ended, but while it existed, realtime data was even accessible to third party developers. The potential was huge.

http://sfpark.org/how-it-works/the-sensors/

If someone wants to disrupt something, it should be by helping the SFMTA to bring sensors back along with upgrading the rest of the city's meters to the smart, credit card accepting, remote pay enabled, pricing-based-on-demand system that only some of the meters use.