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Comment by curmudgeon22 | Hacker News Reader

Uber only has one HQ. Sure, it’s more expensive than a taxi service in city X, but Uber HQ and engineering service a very large area.

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It doesn't require any special "engineering" to make a ride hailing app. I guarantee you could get an Uber clone out of a high school coding bootcamp weekend. It's really that simple.

"Dispatching" a message to a phone based on its location. Why would that need special software engineering? That's all open source stuff that's readily available. Certainly everything else Uber does (collecting money, ratings, etc) is all off-the-shelf stuff.

Just the whole abuse detection and handling part of it is vastly more complex than anything a coding bootcamp could handle.

But as usual the software isn't the biggest challenge. Building a driver and rider network at the same time is.

Abuse detection is more important at scale. If you have a local app servicing a single city, they're less of a target than Uber.

What abuse are you trying to detect? I can only see payment fraud, but that can be mitigated by requiring clear payment in advance (like a deposit) and/or payment methods where the fraud liability shifts to the bank (any payment card with 3D-Secure which is now the default in Europe).

Sometimes, drivers rob / assault / murder passengers and sometimes passengers rob / assault / murder drivers. Sometimes, you want to do background checks on people driving, and you want to have a way for a passenger to report something like "hey, my driver that dropped me off at my house has now been driving past my house at 2AM", and you want to make it possible to let a driver report something like "hey, my passenger threw up in my car".

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