Hacker News Reader

Devil's advocate: the wait timer should diminish even if the driver hasn't left their house, assuming that you can statistically model the time it takes from a driver getting the notification to getting in their car. Also, while there are probably better solutions, it would be a privacy violation to reveal the location of the driver's home.

Also see: "If you cut through this residential street with 4-way stop signs on every corner and make an impossible left hand turn across four lanes of moving traffic back onto the main road, you can shave 1min off your ETA."

- Sincerely, PM of driving directions in SF who takes a company shuttle into the office and doesn't own a car.

> - Sincerely, PM of driving directions in SF who takes a company shuttle into the office and doesn't own a car.

Silicon Valley PMs must drive a lot. My iPhone constantly nags me about "driving" when I'm riding the Subway reading a newspaper. Maybe when BART finally completes the ring around the bay we'll see products designed for people that use public transportation instead of driving alone.

Here's another one: driver accepts your ride, driver cancels, you get charged a $5 cancelation fee. There's no way in hell this is an accident they're unaware of, but it has happened to me several times the last few months, each time requiring both noticing and then dealing with customer support for them to send an identical copy-and-paste confirming that you were indeed charged a cancelation fee for the driver canceling and giving you your $5 back. In Uber credit. They have undoubtedly stolen tons of money like this from people not noticing or not caring enough. Fuck Uber.

I live downtown in a major city and use Uber + Ubereats a LOT. I used UE twice yesterday and if I go anywhere more than 10 blocks I uber which is a few times a week minimum.

I can't think of a single time I've had a problem like that. The only somewhat consistent thing that I encounter is GPS updating slower than the person actually is, but I'm in a pretty bad GPS/cell black hole.

You couldn't catch me ever driving my car and leaving it at the airport. That's going to cost you/ins $2k when someone chops out your catalytic converter. Don't ever leave your car in public parking anymore cat theft is so, so rampant.

https://www.denver7.com/follow-up/a-target-rich-environment-...

"The area of DIA, however, has seen theft increase by 28 percent this year compared to last year."

In the greater NYC area, it's commonplace to have the ETA immediately increase by several minutes (not uncommonly by 50%+) as soon as you're matched with an actual driver.

Based on other comments, it seems this might be a somewhat location-dependent phenomenon.

That'd be frustrating.

I'm in Denver.

I too live downtown in a major city but have never installed or used an app for rideshare, food delivery, dating or... In fact I pretty much don't use apps at all. Not a shut in, have a family, friend group, tech job etc.

Why did this all become so necessary in the past eight or so years? Aside from facilitating hyper-scheduled high-value per minute business trips, it seems like people efficiency LARPing or something.

> Not a shut in, have a family

There's a chance that what you consider a shut in might be very different from what I consider a shut in. Not to mention my friends and I aren't married or with families (and in our 30-40s). I work with a lot of people that have families of course due to my age and we live vastly different lives. I have a lot of "friends" that have families but they're more like people I'll grab a beer with once every few months. They're busy with soccer practices and what not. Not the friends I see weekly.

I'm out around town almost every other day. I took an Uber to Oppenheimer last night, 2.1 mile Uber. I think it ran me something like $11-13 before tip. Then I took an Uber about another 2 miles in a different direction from home to meet a friend for a beer. Then I ubered home about 3 miles. All of these Ubers show up within 5 minutes so I'm not spending much time waiting and can almost immediately get place to place. I could take a scooter or bus and dodge cars or spend 30 minutes getting somewhere. But even using a scooter I'm "using an app."

On Wednesday I did basically the same thing to go see Barbie except switch up locations a bit.

Not using UberEats is smart. It's a complete waste of money and I'm paying for total convenience and the fact that I haven't bought groceries in awhile. I also don't enjoy cooking in the least. Being hungry is a total inconvenience to me and if I could take a pill and be sustained I'd be out of this world happy. I don't live anywhere near a grocery store, I'm in a food desert so getting groceries requires me to spend about 40 minutes driving back and forth and all the pleasures that are driving around a big downtown, lack of parking, meter maids, general traffic.

So when I do get groceries I use Instacart/Kroger app. It costs me typically something like a $15-20 tip, lets me sit at my desk and pick out meals/recipe ingredients, etc and shows up in a couple of hours. I don't have to pull my Jeep out of a parking garage and deal with a 40 minute stressful drive to save $15-20.

I'm not sure how you completely missed the app train over the last 8 years and have literally never used an app for food delivery. That is incredibly strange to me. You've never sat at home, had a craving for some special restaurant who doesn't do delivery and .... wanted it delivered? You've never had a hangover or felt sick and wanted Pho to show up in 15 minutes?

Using a dating app is just increasing your pool of options. You can, and I have, spent days and weeks going to bars or meetups and trivias etc meeting people and you have no idea on initial interaction who is single, nor whether or not they find you attractive at all. Dating apps make that easy. If someone swiped on you they at LEAST find you somewhat attractive, theoretically. I've spent hours having conversations with someone I'm attracted to and possibly interested in while out and about to find out they're partnered up or I'm not their type. Dating apps just kind of bypass that and put the options front and center saving everyone time.

We're just wired differently.

Food delivery in particular. The added cost is quite significant once you figure in service fee + tip + restaurant mark-up (many restaurants will charge more than the menu price on UE/GH/DD to make up for the cut of the order that the service takes).

You wind up paying a significant amount for food that has been effectively steamed in an insulated bag.

I live downtown in a major city and the reason I use these apps is because the area I'm in has pushed everything else out. I live in a very tech centric area of my city and there's one grocery store in walking distance and that's whole foods so I can't get everything there. All of the restaurants are either big chains, 2-3 miles away, or overpriced business focused places. When my lease is up I'm moving to a more walkable neighborhood, but until then if I want good food and don't want to make it, my options are pay $80/plate, get in my car and drive 20 minutes to get to a restaurant 3 miles away, or pay the extra 20% to get it delivered.

I'm not arguing that this is good. Like I said I will be moving to a more sustainable location when my lease is up. But I think it's important to acknowledge and understand the failings exhibited by American cities that end up promoting the use of these apps.

Tangential question from a German: You said "when my lease is up". What does this mean? The way I know it is, if you want to move to a different apartment, you just cancel your current lease. There's a period of notice, usually something like three months, so you would choose the start of the new lease so that it slightly overlaps with the old lease for the purpose of doing the actual move. Is it different in the US?

> It's so transparent that some asshole PM in San Francisco thinks he's really clever and that lying to users will improve retention or whatever.

Couple this with the arse of a VC who's making the meta worse and you all you need is a self-proclaimed capital F Founder type to have the perfect triumvirate of modern digital malaise.