571–580 of 689 posts
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> I worry the most about Scooters and AV as those are arguably core to urban mobility Scooters are a fad that was never needed. Bikes or mopeds like Revel are 10 times more useful. I don't think scooters replace anything of note, since you can pretty much walk the same distance. They're only fun for tourists and left in the sidewalk for everyone else to stumble over.
I disagree wholeheartedly. Electric scooters are fun and useful, especially for commuting in the morning from a drop off location like a train station. The real question is whether or not it can be profitable, which I highly doubt. I would rather just get my own if I needed it.
I think the rental bikes which have a fixed docking station are a better design.
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"I had to make this decision because our very future as an essential service for the cities of the world — our being there for millions of people and businesses who rely on us — demands it." This is only one sentence in an otherwise fairly measured email, but it nevertheless annoyed me given the context. Uber is not an "essential service". They made this decision so that they can stay in business to make money for th…
Uber all but destroyed the existing taxi infrastructure in several major cities. So yeah, in many places they're now pretty essential. That said, the barrier to entry for an Uber-like service is quite low, so if Uber vanished from the face of the Earth it wouldn't take more than about a month to re-create it.
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Sure, but the idea of "mankind" is gendered / male-centric in the first place. We just defaulted to male because we always default to male. Training yourself to default to non-gendered language like person-kind and to think about whether a term originates from problematic aspects of gender dynamics is a relatively easy first step towards breaking down some of the insidious aspects of sexism that are imbedded in langu…
> Sure, but the idea of "mankind" is gendered / male-centric in the first place. We just defaulted to male because we always default to male. That is not actually true. The Old English word for a male human being is wer, as in werewolf; it is cognate to the Latin vir (also meaning a male human being, and the source of modern English words like virile & virtue). That word is no longer in common use in modern English,…
This is why I come to read HN =) - interesting content like this, or esoteric/cool facts, or awesomely deep tech discussions.
Out of curiosity - do you have a background in this kind of thing (linguistics), or its just an interest topic for you?
(As a side-note, this whole SJW crusade does irk me somewhat, but hey, I guess it resulted in gems like this).
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what did those jobs produce?
I always feel thankful that I don't have to deal with taxi drivers when I travel.
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My annoyance is that it has absolutely no relevance and adds nothing to the discussion regarding the story/post. It's just noise, which begets noise (my response) and so on. Let's talk about tech.
Sounds like a snowflake problem to me. If left alone, there would have been nothing distracting about that short and explicitly non-accusatory comment, but you were triggered and chose to build a crusade around how you don't want to see certain kinds of comments on HN. You seem to have trouble handling the fact that some people have different opinions than you, about what comments are worth making. Very snowflake pro…
Was it worth it? Did you feel good about yourself, to distract everyone like this?
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San Francisco / Seattle / Boston / New York --- Austin / Salt Lake / Los Angeles / Portland / Atlanta --- Ann Arbor / Chicago / Minneapolis / Miami
Props for posting an ordering :O This seems to be ranked on eng availability, but in terms of actual city tiers it's more like T1: SF / NY / LA / Miami / Chicago / Atlanta T2: Seattle / Boston / Austin / SLC / Portland T3: Minneapolis / Ann Arbor
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> Determining which organizational complexity is essential and which is accidental is likely the quintessential hard problem of business. Three questions. (1) "What would the impact on our business be if we built the best possible, state of the art feature here?" (2) "What would the impact on our business be if we half-assed a solution in a quarter of the time?" (3) "What would the impact on our business be if we utt…
Those questions assume an existing framework where "the feature", "state of the art", "half-assed", and "failed" are all well-defined. But my experience is that the framing itself is most of where the challenge lies. You end up with team A who wants to add the feature, team B who thinks it's an anti-feature, team C who thinks the entire application where feature lives should be scrapped, PM D who says users can alrea…
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All the gig economy apps do is ensure the poor stay poor. When you are working 10-12 hours a day to make ends meet and shoulder the all costs of the depreciating fix assets there is very little opportunity dig yourself out of that hole. Uber and similar companies are destroying the very small businesses (or squashing their margins into nothing) which traditionally are the environment that the poor can become entrepre…
You have no idea what you're talking about. I presume you live in the US. You definitely have no sense at how much an average brazilian/argentinian/russian/indian guy can improve their financial life by driving for a ride sharing app. I know of engineers and lawyers down here that are making 2, 3 times more money than they used to make working a 9to5 job. I'm tired of seeing privileged people talking about how the po…