mojowo11

As a manager of a customer service team, everyone on my team knows exactly whether something has been "totally wiped" or not, regardless of whether it's something that would require developer intervention to recover. To have your reps not understand this and ultimately mislead the customer (or, in this case, I suppose former customer would be more accurate) is a management/training problem, and what the rep ultimately said on behalf of the company was a lie as a result.

For anyone else as ignorant about this period of history as me, the Wikipedia articles are a real trip.

Geta -- murdered by his co-emperor and brother because they didn't like each other (aged 22)

Caracalla (the brother) -- murdered at the behest of Macrinus while urinating on the side of the road (aged 29)

Macrinus -- reigned one year before being defeated by an uprising that brought 14-year-old Elagabalus to power, ultimately beheaded

Elagabalus -- married and divorced five times during his four-year reign, including to the widow of a man he had executed and possibly also to a man; was assassinated by his own Praetorian Guards, beheaded, and his body was dragged around Rome (aged ~18)

Severus Alexander -- replaced cousin Elagabalus, did alright for quite a while (13 year reign!), but ultimately pissed off his military by trying to not fight the Germans, and was assassinated by his own generals, along with his mother

Maximinus -- made emperor by the Praetorian Guard, which caused the Senate to revolt; marched on Rome to put down the revolt, and was opposed by a series of emperors (numbered below) nominated by the Senate; ultimately murdered by his own military after failing to easily take Rome

(1/2) Gordian I/Gordian II -- father and son, rose to power while in Africa at the behest of the Senate; Gordian II was quickly defeated in battle by a supporter of Maximinus, after which Gordian I killed himself (reigned 21 days)

(3/4) Pupienus/Balbinus -- co-emperors after the death of the Gordians. Pupienus went out to fight Maximinus on the field, and returned to Rome successful. Balbinus stayed in Rome and fucked everything up. The two did not get along or trust each other, and ultimately both were murdered by the Praetorian Guard (reigned 3 months)

(5) Gordian III - Made Emperor at the age of 13 and sorta held it together for a remarkably long time, but ultimately died in Mesopotamia either at the hands of military enemies or his own army (aged 19)

I'm only stopping because I need to get back to work.

When I say this, please understand that I'm saying this as a person who would've wandered for 15 minutes as well -- but yeah, you COULD just ask someone who works there where the batteries are.

SF to St. Louis here. I miss a lot of things about SF (weather, certain kinds of food, urban density) but I definitely would not move back. It's a very silly place in a lot of ways.

Yelp remains very helpful to me in many ways. Looking up the restaurants in an area, filtering by various things (are they open? do they take reservations? what's the noise level?), making reservations, etc.

I know Yelp has a shady underbelly, but pretending that it doesn't have anything to offer is just being intellectually dishonest.

As with most anything, it probably just depends on the person. Probably most 20-year-olds are not ready to helm a company. Some exceptional few probably are.

We'll never know whether your unstated genius creative idea for how to monetize Twitter would have worked. Tis a shame.

Not to be confrontational here (or argue with your primary point), but I'm pretty sure you didn't read the whole post. It says in the post that he's been going attending regular counseling already.

Not to be pedantic, but it's called "G Suite" nowadays.

Good streamers (shoutout to Grubby) will actually read the question they're answering out loud before they answer it. Means I don't have to wade through the insane chat myself, but I still get to experience both sides of the Q&A when he picks out something funny or interesting to respond to.

St. Louis here. The startup scene here are also trying to copy the Silicon Valley model, instead of trying to be something unique and different. It is frustrating.

And that's only the living people, we got lots of dead human bodies lying around, too!

Currently at 504 hours on Civ V and I don't really even think I'm very good at it. It really eats my brain anytime I play it.

Meal replacement shakes have been around for, what, 2+ decades now? Saying that Soylent has come along and now somehow enables depressed people strikes me as insanity.

Depressed people misuse all kinds of perfectly valid products and services. Being mad at Soylent, or pizza delivery, or the internet, or beds, or any other thing that depressed people might end up leaning on in an unhealthy way seems pretty silly to me.

This comment is kinda silly. Like, the problem here isn't Soylent, it's that you were depressed. And the problem with your friend using Soylent to watch her weight isn't Soylent, it's that she ate more of other crap when she drank Soylent as a meal replacement.

I drink Soylent occasionally -- once every two or three weeks, maybe. Normally I use it if I know I'm going to eat a huge dinner, or if I ate a giant lunch and don't need to consume many more calories in the evening. It works great for me.

Yes, if you misuse Soylent, it will not be a good thing for you. That goes for, like, everything.

It's basically because this reads like a real-life plot arc from "Silicon Valley," a parody of Silicon Valley. This company makes a $400-$700 machine that basically squeezes a Capri Sun pouch of fruit juice into a cup for you, and the company has raised $120M in venture capital, even though you could just squeeze their "proprietary juice pouches" with your hands (or, like, buy normal juice and pour it).

Probably there's more to what the machine does, etc., but the story has legs because it's so absurd-sounding and reads like an indictment of how out of touch Silicon Valley actually is with what qualifies as a good idea.

Startup person (at a "Zebra") in St. Louis here. We've got a neat little scene downtown, and a convention center right in the middle of it all. Definitely have some programs that would love to get this kind of thing into town (Arch Grants, etc.).

Probably not gonna happen, but it sure is tone deaf as shit to have this convention in SF.

It's not because he's a billionaire, it's because he's the CEO of Uber talking to an Uber driver about Uber. Even if the guy isn't making particularly solid points or is being accusatory, it shouldn't be that hard to hold it together, be conciliatory, and avoid saying something nasty. This should be child's play for a CEO discussing/defending their company.

(That said, on the whole, I agree that it's being blown pretty out of proportion.)

I work at a company that considers itself a startup -- we're seven years old and completely bootstrapped. I've had many people tell me that we're not a "startup," we're just a "normal company." Usually this comes down to people saying that unless our priority is maximizing growth in the short term, we're not a startup. (We are obviously still focused on growth, just not at the expense of our stability, our product, or our company culture.)

"Startup" is a nebulous term with no firm definition, so these kinds of arguments are bound to happen. Some people still say Facebook is a "startup" because it has the fast-paced environment with the normal superficial cultural trappings of a tech startup (food perks, no dress code, casual interpersonal culture, etc. etc.).

Ultimately it's probably just a dumb semantic argument that's best avoided.

Riding in an Uber Pool has always been perfectly pleasant for me. Quiet and awkward in some cases, but not unpleasant. Some basic restrictions about not cramming people into the vehicle like it's a clown car should alleviate most concerns about unpleasantness, I'd think.

Teenagers right now have a different attitude about how their camera interacts with the world, by virtue of having been raised in a perpetually-filmable world. For a teenager, everyone they know has had a camera with them pretty much as long as they can remember. They've already got a camera pointed at them all the time. It only takes a few seconds to start filming something with your phone.

People who are 30 are going to be weirded out by this. People who are 18 are not. They already have the assumption that anything they do in public might be filmed and shared on social media. And they want to be able to quickly film anything they're doing in public and put it on social media.

Let's take a specific example, then. Last week I ordered ~$140 worth of pizza for a party at our office. I paid with my credit card on the website of the pizza joint. Everyone owed about $12-13 in the end (yeah I know, it's an expensive local pizza chain).

Getting paid back with cash would've been a nightmare. Instead I opened Venmo, put in $150, entered the names of my colleagues who were partaking, and hit request. Venmo did the math and requested each person's portion with a push notification. They each confirmed, and I was paid back in full in a few minutes, without even needing to talk directly to most of the people involved.

There are so many situations like this. "But you could do it another more inconvenient way instead" or "you could continue to deal with recouping for hours afterward" aren't especially compelling arguments once you've had the convenience.

Yep, I bet Venmo processed $1.6 billion in transactions in the last quarter of 2014 entirely from Hacker News users.

EDIT: Oh, apparently we're going to talk about their business model now instead. Jeez, it's hard to keep up.

Venmo is not "objectively worse in every way."

Example #1A: It's absolutely insane for Square to have an app targeted toward sending money to friends, splitting bills, etc. that doesn't have a built-in calculator. It's inexcusable that if I'm paying two even shares of a $213.42 bill split between seven people, I need to either do some mental math or leave the app to use another calculator.

This is one of the most common actions I take in Venmo. Until they get their act together on that, there's just no way I'm switching. It's a classic example of thinking that simplicity is the same thing as removing features.

> This approach is simply not the most viable.

What's a better approach for in-the-moment, one-touch ordering of household necessities? I'm sure Amazon would like to hear your idea.

> How many buttons are you going to have in your household?

However many you would like. Sorta depends on what kind of products you'd like to buy in this manner. That's kinda the point.

> How are you going to protect it from kids

First of all, children are short. Put the buttons out of their reach. Second -- these are incredibly boring buttons that order boring things and provide no immediate pleasure or feedback. Kids don't crawl around on top of washing machines looking for buttons to press because washing machines are boring. Also you get a notification when you order something, so a kid smashing it is easily reversed. Common sense works fine here.

(Also, lots and lots of people don't have kids, or have kids old enough that they're not going to press a button to order laundry detergent willy-nilly, etc.)

I also found the hardest thing about the game to be figuring out the lag in timing between pressing jump and my character actually leaving the ground. Windows 7, Chrome.

"Taxes are very high." "Want to clean up areas of the city? Put a cop on every block!"

Someone elect this guy to city government, he seems to have a unbelievably solid grasp on the complexities of running a city like San Francisco.

Most of the reverence for this guy (regardless of whether you find it pseudo-intellectual or not) can probably be explained by the fact that Paul Graham is a co-founder of Y Combinator, and you're on ycombinator.com.

This whole article is written very clearly with a very specific audience in mind. "You will be come an early adopter!" Well, maybe. I guess if you work in tech and know people who work in tech, yes. But as you noted, there are plenty of people who don't.

So, just to be clear, you literally drove a Zipcar ONE TIME, you screwed up and didn't leave yourself enough time on the rental (yes, you'll have to book with the understanding that things are very likely to take longer than you think -- and yes, you will often pay for time you're not actually in the car at the end of your reservation)...and then you never did it again?

The system is designed specifically to disincentivize people from doing what you did -- to book without really having a good sense of how long something is going to take. This is to prevent people from screwing over the next person, which as you said, you felt bad about. And you should -- you fucked them.

The system is what it is, and is designed for a certain kind of use. If you're going to take a trip during a relatively in-demand time (meaning, not the middle of the night) that's going to take 3.5 hours +/- 1.5 hours, you either book for 5 hours or you probably shouldn't use Zipcar. You can risk it to try to be efficient, but then you might pay a big ole fine and screw over someone else.

If you need to be able to take highly variable length trips and not commit to a given rental length, then maybe you should buy a car. Don't blame Zipcar when you're trying its very structured system in a willy-nilly manner.

You literally had a worse experience on your first drive than I've had on any of my probably 100+, and you're condemning the entire service -- nay, the entire business model -- based on one experience. One. Surely you can see how this seems like madness.