bm1362

The share economy allows people to use their invested capital (vehicle, home, etc) to generate income - the platforms like Airbnb and Uber provide high quality alternatives and came about due to a void in the market.

I have 3 personal anecdotes, you can ignore them if you'd like, but I'm a proponent of the sharing economy.

1. I'm from Austin, Texas where prior to Uber it was impossible to get a ride unless you were directly downtown. I've called cab companies and they no-showed, leaving me stranded in the middle of no where. There isn't enough density for public transit and when Uber and Lyft entered the market, it changed our lives. Prior to the existence of these companies, there was rampant drinking and driving. I went to school here, and every party was essentially binge drinking followed by a harrowing 30 minute drive where everyone on the roads at 2am is a drunk driver.

2. My sister is a teacher, single mother, and low income. She uses Uber on the weekends to make extra income and help support her child. For her, the flexibility of being able to drive whenever for a quick buck is key to closing the gap that Texas politics hasn't quite solved. I'm going to preempt the argument and say I agree that UBI may be the solution more generally to workers needing to rely on their employers.

3. My mother is retired and generates ~1000/month in income from social security payments. She did not plan for retirement, has no savings, and has moved in with my sister to help out. Her day job is managing Airbnb rentals in Austin and she rents out a room in their house for extra income (~700/mo). Her quality of life is much higher than it would be without Airbnb, and her ability to schedule, find and vet potential tenants without Airbnb would be pretty much nil.

I recognize these are not the same 'workers' whom are being pathologically disadvantaged by the rules of these platforms - I think they're the ideal users that product people pin on the whiteboard. I come from a low income background and only see positives, had Uber been around when I was in school I wouldn't have worked for $5.15 washing dishes in a rat infested kitchen, done tech support for wireless hotspots in trailer parks or been a valet on 6th street dealing with intoxicated people. I've had about ~20 low skilled, hourly jobs that essentially dominated my life at the time and I had very little mobility or earning power, having the opportunity to leverage my vehicle and time flexibly would've been enormous.

I wonder if simply having riders set the rating threshold and a maximum fare would allow drivers more power to choose the fares they want as an independent contractor. Consider that if a driver sets a minimum fare as well, has a given rating, then riders will be selecting against many competitors based on the tuple of ratings/cost.

I don't think relaxing vehicle standards or driver background checks is good for anyone - and requiring your contractors to have certain equipment sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

I understand this point as well, but imagine you got into earlier and tied up your existing capital in that $700. You wouldn't have been able to capture the next 70x.

For anyone unfamiliar with Minix, it appears to be a tiny OS:

> MINIX 3 is a free, open-source, operating system designed to be highly reliable, flexible, and secure. It is based on a tiny microkernel running in kernel mode with the rest of the operating system running as a number of isolated, protected, processes in user mode. It runs on x86 and ARM CPUs, is compatible with NetBSD, and runs thousands of NetBSD packages.[1]

Something about this [2] made me feel bad for the author, I can't imagine building software for a few decades, getting excited about a conference and then no one submitting any papers.

[1] http://www.minix3.org/

[2] > Unfortunately, the MINIXCon 2017 conference had to be cancelled due to the small number of talks submitted

It sounds like there might be a (very tiny) market for an entirely audited GPL stack. Intel made a sound, responsible decision for everyone involved except the privacy crowd.

I believe Intel did give attribution, but to MINIX itself. It really is just an ask for a 'hey, thanks' that was deserved.

What does this have to do with Docker then?

In reality most Americans cannot afford snow tires- the ones that do tend to be upper middle class skiing folk, in my experience.

It’s also possibly not worth solving. I don’t know off the top of my head but I’d assume most of the population lives in temperate cities that rarely see the kind of icy weather regularly. Your vehicle could just not drive automatically in suboptimal settings and I think that’d be totally fine.

Like others have said, the vehicle will localize using GPS, LIDAR, other image features and then attempt to continue in it’s route. If the confidence is low the system will most likely just take no action.

I did the self driving car class on Udacity and it was super effective as a primer for how these systems work in general and framework for solving these problems.

That's pretty exciting. I'm curious when we can just compile our views into some IR or byte code that can be natively run. Isn't that kinda what WASM is trying to do?

This makes the most sense to me. Constant growth to meet investor expectations.

I think SoundCloud's downfall would be it's huge investment into record label deals, it's paywalling to support said deals and then the lack of adoption for it's subscription service for access to those label's music.

Essentially, SC tried to pivot to Spotify, pissed off free users, and let it's actual paying user base stagnate for 2 years.

Then all that capital investment had no return and they're stuck in big contracts with hefty guaranteed payouts.

> "It'd be cool if you kept that data encrypted at rest and kept track of every time it's accessed. Oh, you guys have a physical form everyone fills out when they access files? Perfect." - HIPAA in practice

It literally just (1) keeps printing money for investors and (2) keep some people employed. Ambitious people will take the mantle every 15-20 years and do more of 1 and 2 until they make a mistake.

The goal of a successful company is basically serving those two sets of people, Google may enter the retail market or real estate, or McDonalds will take over Cloud Computing -- they're all just trying to get a consistent return.

Yup, having an internship opens so many doors and if you're not going to a top school you hardly get a response from Google/Amazon/Facebook etc.

I'd also bet that anyone who can build a Django photo sharing app with auth has a much better skillset than what I'd expect from a first-year intern.

Intern's at Amazon, etc, tend to be pursuing a Masters and usually have some experience. One intern project was adding Jepsen testing to a distributed database, for example.

Unrelated to the topic:

I'm super excited about this guy, looking at his background we had to have worked in the same computer science lab at Texas State. We're the underdogs in Texas and it's cool to see people that were successful in the typical ivy-league environments. Incidentally enough, I'm now getting into mobile app performance and worked at Amazon around the same time.

Related:

I find that interviews are mostly a crapshoot. I'm currently looking for a new job in SF, so I have a few experiences from this last week that stood out:

* Onsite with a ~100 person startup last week where the guy asked about my past experience ("Wow me with a past project") and then I caught him looking out the window as I explained a particularly gnarly problem we solved at Amazon. I was asked 5 coding questions (that I more-or-less solved), never spoke to a manager and then got a canned rejection.

* Onsite with a ~2000-10000 person tech company and met my would-be team, my manager and his manager. We discussed the projects I'd work on, did coding and architecture problems and I left super excited to work with them in the future. I received an offer from them within a few days, having already built a relationship with my team and management, that makes me feel much better about the opportunity.

* I'm currently going through an interview with a really great company (~60 engineers). I spent an hour talking to my maybe-future manager and we left both excited to work together. The follow up was a realistic technical project and pair programming with my future teammates- all of whom were awesome to work with. I'm still awaiting next steps, but I've really enjoyed getting to speak to my future team.

A litmus test I've found: Does the technical hiring manager talk to you before you phone screen? Do they seem engaged and ask follow up questions? If your only point of contacts prior to the onsite is a random engineer interview and a recruiter whom repeats a script, your past work is not going to be a major factor. Most likely your hobbies outside work won't be considered (I'd suspect for legal bias reasons?) unless it's a small startup that's looking for a friend-as-a-coworker fit. I experienced this at my last startup, we went from 5 engineers to 50, and the values started to shift.

So, I get that you feel like your home is threatened and changing. You feel like this is your town, your neighborhood and you liked it that way. I'm sorry that you're experiencing such psychic pain.

You are empowered to vote for representation that can protect these communities. In this case, for whatever reason, it appears not enough people in the community wielded their power to create the outcome that you think is best.

Aside: I'm from a small town that is experience crazy growth as well. In my life time, we've gone from a single stop light to 10 and have doubled in size. Our water table is unable to cope with the new amount of people -- there is a real risk that the aquifer will deplete. Another side effect, water is becoming more expensive. The response to this problem hasn't been to blame new residents, it's been political efforts to restrict new development.

As an employee, it was pretty apparent people didn't want you there. The Stranger would post inflammatory articles about tech bros and unflattering caricatures.

My girlfriend and I moved up from Texas completely unaware of the stigma. She worked in bars and restaurants, where the staff would disparage customers suspected of being tech yuppies. I even remember being a guest at a BBQ once, I told someone I worked at Amazon (timidly) and the response was "Oh, you're one of those assholes."

Coming from small town Texas and being lower income, it was a weird time for me. I was newly middle class and when I would go back home I felt weird about my income, but then being in Seattle I felt unwelcome.

I worked as a late-night valet in downtown Austin when I was in college. We would go into the bars to get water even though we were underage and eventually we got the idea to go in with our valet uniform on, take it off and order drinks.

It's probably easier to get an entry-level job with the company, or the facilities contractor, a vendor etc. The turn-around is longer though and you have to supply an id and SSN that could be bought, but you'll have more access and potentially be undetected.

I wonder if some type of 360 camera on humvees could be trained to detect incoming fire and display the direction/location to soldiers on the ground?

I'm unsure if these types of systems exist, but after watching Restrepo it seems like figuring out where the enemy is located was half the battle. In a combat situation with incoming fire, having a CV system tracking incoming rounds and combatants might be useful.

Yeah, that’s the new model. The review is on the S which is bigger.

I want to funnel my Bay Area salary into some land out in Alaska for family retreats and off periods in between work.

How is it living out there?

One could make the meta-argument that this is an attack on our trust in Facebook, a news conduit, and that the end result is people are more reliant on traditional news monopolies.

I’m certain there is a reason, we scaled up and hired an infra team that owns it so it’s out of my domain now.

I was merely a poor steward in the early days out of necessity. My era of tinkering ended once we moved to CircleCI.

There are self-hosted analytics (like Piwik) that you could self-host for sensitive data to solve this generally. I'd like to think that conversion of credit applications isn't something a marketer is trying to gamify though, that's probably wishful thinking.

Drone is a self-hosted alternative, although you still have to do some configuration:

https://github.com/drone/drone

We went from Drone -> CircleCI -> Jenkins in the last two years. Jenkins feel opaque and hard to reason about, periodically dies for no _good_ reason and the UI is atrocious.

Drone itself was fine, as a minimal feature set. I think the docs are offline now, but it's fairly straightforward.

I agree with you, the reason these new tools are useful is they’re much more intuitive than the esoteric flags that have built up over the last 30 years.

I think I wasn’t clear, but a lot of people are harping on the specific use case I glibly mentioned.

To answer you, I meant on a Docker image build step- which is where you’d want to install the tool so it’s accessible to people debugging the application during the container run context.