191–200 of 332 posts
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My first experience with Uber made me so annoyed I e-mailed them to demand they delete my account, although I eventually tried it again.
Uber charges you for "wait time" after you request a car...which is insane. Not that Lyft is much better, but I've never seen that kind of nonsense with them.
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A shame that uber and the whole gig economy is so shit, circumventing basic employment rights and both minimum and living wages. I mean I like the basic idea and I agree that the taxi business needed the disruption, but it's opened the gates to people working well below a living wage because there's nothing else. That is, there's plenty of people that are willing to work below minimum wage because it's the only thing…
Taxi drivers were already considered contractors and working for shitty wages. Uber just followed the existing model. In fact, it was worse, as drivers had to pay to work , by renting the cars with medallions, rather than being able to use their own. https://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/09/nyregion/driving-a-taxi-d... The change for taxi drivers has only started to come after Uber was already making it big, e.g.: "For wha…
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In a completely free market, corporations are free to distort economic and labour policy so that poor unemployed people are desperate to get any job they can, regardless of how poorly it pays. This is why minimum wage and other laws exist. See also: race to the bottom.
> This is why minimum wage and other laws exist. This is not a settled question in economics. The idea that minimum wage laws help the poor is at the very least debatable.
Shazam is the closest thing we have to witchcraft. I'm sure plenty of HNers will chime in with "well acktually..." type comments about how they could write it in their basement in a weekend, but to do what it does, as quickly as it does, on the ridiculously enormous library of music that it does is really something special.
After I learned how it roughly works, it seems no longer like witchcraft, but it is still impressive. The remaining thing I don't understand now is how the heck they managed to negotiate the license for all the songs they have in the database. A friend of mine had a major website for lyrics, and he got some legal trouble from the record companies. When he tried to buy a license to display the lyrics, after some back…
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A shame that uber and the whole gig economy is so shit, circumventing basic employment rights and both minimum and living wages. I mean I like the basic idea and I agree that the taxi business needed the disruption, but it's opened the gates to people working well below a living wage because there's nothing else. That is, there's plenty of people that are willing to work below minimum wage because it's the only thing…
Taxi drivers were already considered contractors and working for shitty wages. Uber just followed the existing model. In fact, it was worse, as drivers had to pay to work , by renting the cars with medallions, rather than being able to use their own. https://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/09/nyregion/driving-a-taxi-d... The change for taxi drivers has only started to come after Uber was already making it big, e.g.: "For wha…
My uncle was a taxi driver around the same time (maybe a little earlier?) and was paid a livable wage plus benefits.
>"There are so many drivers available that it's an owner's market," said Edward G. Rogoff, a professor of management at Baruch College who studies the taxi industry. "Drivers are competing for these low-prestige, low-pay jobs, which pushes their incomes down further."
You also missed the main part of the article. Simple stated there were too many taxi drivers. Now I don't know about you but if I were to have that many people willing to work for me its either the pay is good or working conditions.
This sucks because like the article mentions, it becomes an owner's market. On top of this it's also NYC. No taxi driver is gonna be able to afford many of the places they get fares from.
>"In '87, '88, you could make $100 a day, maybe more," said Sam Khan, a 37-year-old driver from Pakistan. But now, he said with a grimace, "maybe $60, $65."
Shazam is the one app that has been around since about the birth of the iPhone that honestly still blows my mind in it's capabilities. The fact it can so quickly figure out any song in so many environments is incredible. Call me simple, but I use it almost daily, and it is accurate close to 98% of the time. I absolutely love Shazam's iOS app, and they have done a great job keeping up with UI/UX treads for it over the…
I frequent mostly heavy metal pubs and for the last 5 years neither shazam nor sound hound has detected a single song for anyone near me. Complete crap. We've been using the ancient technique of asking the DJ on the way to the bar.
I like Shazam, but I love Soundhound. I've found it way more accurate and I also found their other audio tools through it. Such a cool company. Congrats to Shazam though!
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A shame that uber and the whole gig economy is so shit, circumventing basic employment rights and both minimum and living wages. I mean I like the basic idea and I agree that the taxi business needed the disruption, but it's opened the gates to people working well below a living wage because there's nothing else. That is, there's plenty of people that are willing to work below minimum wage because it's the only thing…
I don't understand this logic generally and in this case it makes even less sense. 10 years ago, Uber literally didn't exist. How, in any way, is Uber forcefully underpaying it's employees/contractors? People flocked to drive for Uber; where is the oppression here? This is the same "Walmart doesn't pay its workers and destroys local businesses argument". People work there, and people shop there. Walmart didn't make a…
Ubers model works because they externalize a lot of operating costs to ignorant (under-informed) "contractors", and obscuring the economic realities from customers.
So I think it's fair to hate the player.
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For what it's worth, I think it's neat that you shared that the knowledge necessary to build a Shazam-like thing is something an undergraduate might do as a homework assignment. I had thought it would be a lot more complicated. :)
If you're interested, you can search Berkeley EE16A and if you're lucky you'll find the homework assignment (Berkeley's class materials are always open to public). It was like a Jupyter notebook and the "song" was I think random 5 seconds of Universal Declarations of Human Rights, or something like that. I'm writing this in case it helps your search, I'm at work so I don't have time to search it myself. I took this c…