princess3000

They have navigation systems built into the Lyft (and Uber) apps, actually, but it was more of me saying my destination and the guy saying "Should I go left or right to get started?" whereas a cabbie just knows exactly where you're headed.

That just happened in SF, actually:

http://sf.streetsblog.org/2013/05/21/sfmta-to-designate-hund...

A 12-spot trial run was successful and now an additional 300 curbside spots are going to be designated for shared cars. Not bad.

I've taken Lyft twice and both times I had to direct the driver. Which isn't a problem, really, but they are indeed amateurs in the real sense of the word compared to the Uber drivers and most cab drivers. It's kind of neat though since they're just people from the area and even though they don't know where everything is they're interesting to talk to for the most part.

If I'm reading this correctly it says you just park the car at the other end and get out? In SF I'd pay a premium not to have to park a car. Parking, in my limited experience, often takes much longer than the actual driving part.

That's true but there is a middle ground, and it's not like indie developers can't get it together and ship great code without being massive. A good recent example that gets thrown around here is the new Tomb Raider, where first month sales of ~3.5 million were underwhelming because the game cost so much to make (and/or was meant to subsidize Square-Enix's other recent failures). Compare that to something like Braid or Journey, which obviously aren't games of the same scope as Tomb Raider but they're quality, highly rated games made by a fraction of the people.

Ha, at first I just noticed that he ran exactly 3.14 and thought "well, that number sounds familiar." Then I thought that "irrational" was a strange way to describe running a longer distance than normal and just put the two together...

On his blog [1] he talks about running 3.14 constantly, so it's possible that he chooses to run pi miles on purpose regularly. Who knows.

[1] (cached) http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kUt_beW...

Also notable is that he ran exactly pi miles.

e: AND called that an "irrational improvement." That must be a joke or something...

True but the press/blogs will summarize this and a ton of people will have heard about it by the end of the day. They really want to be the only box in your living room, not just something you boot up when you want to play Halo, so they're emphasizing things other than the games at this point.

I think that's the point. They're trying to capture a market far larger than people who care about the next Halo, because those people are going to buy this anyway.

I agree, this story as written doesn't have nearly enough information but as this technology gets cheaper and more prevalent it's not difficult to imagine that this scenario, or something very similar, could occur. This exact thing or something very much like it will probably end up in court in the next few years.

Kim Dotcom is one of my favorite personalities... he's basically a real life James Bond villain, except that he's kind of the good guy. It's awesome to see him stand up to this stuff and even win against systems that want to see him fail completely.

Yeah, I'm not thrilled about the change, just hypothesizing why they would have made it from a business point of view.

I would assume that Google Now-type products work better when they have as much information as possible, and making all chats save by default all the time would be a good way to get much more information from people. Still, yes, kind of creepy.

I was kind of wondering when this would happen. For a very small investment you could mockup a slick iPhone gadget, make 10x your initial request of $100k and then take the money and run. Aside from the morality of it, I don't think there are many legal obstacles to this, especially if you made it seem like you were making a "good faith" effort up until you disappeared with the cash.

You realize that every single thing you enumerated could easily be applied to for-profit insurance companies in America, right? Just checking.

Awesome, thank you 8]

Would you mind going briefly into what "I learned to code" entailed? Did you identify the languages/technologies you needed to learn at first? How did you go about learning them, etc.? There's a ton of info about learning languages out there but a lot of it tends to be abstract, I'd be very interested in hearing how you learned within the context of actually launching a product.

When I say "joke" I just mean that the whole concept appears to be firmly tongue-in-cheek (or pizza-in-cheek, maybe). Though I haven't used the app I suspect that the tech behind it is pretty sound. I feel you on the hyperbolic marketing though, when every new app is a "revolutionary take on _____" those words begin to lose meaning. I have no connection to the app's creators or any actual knowledge about their intentions but I would assume that this is meant to be a jab at that kind of marketing.

Who said you can't make money from a joke?

You could use a tap handle for beer. Perhaps a tap handle shaped as pizza, even.

This is really overthinking it, IMO. This app isn't a shot at Yelp or an attempt to disrupt the pizza space... It's a joke. You pay a dollar, you get a pizza compass. I think it's hilarious.

The quotes on their page about "life-affirming" and "some people might say this is the most important app... ever" tell me that whoever made this app just wanted to have a bit of a laugh.

Who said anything about corporations? Hiring people to do work has been a basic part of the human experience for thousands of years. Unless you can run your entire business on your own you're going to need help, and so you give someone else money to do what you can't. Many people are fine with this, they don't necessarily have the desire to start their own ventures for whatever reason. This tends to work out because the people who do want to start their own companies are eventually going to need to hire another employee if they're at all successful.

I'll accept increasing amounts of automation and efficiency as a reason for the reduced number of open positions but the idea that this generation is somehow more lazy than any other is ludicrous.

And finally the idea of "contributing to society" is so nebulous I don't know where to begin. Is someone who makes a really good latte contributing to society? Is an investment banker contributing? Kim Kardashian? Zynga?

Sometimes the worship of the startup culture gets to be a bit much... there's nothing inherently more valuable about making your own startup than there is in working for someone else, and you also forgot to add "money" to the list of things that drive the YC crowd.

We're basically still inside of a global economic recession and no amount of drive and passion can fix that for everybody. There are certainly some edge cases who can make entrepreneurship work but when you have 25% unemployment for a certain age group you have to assume that there's something else in play beyond a lack of motivation.

This is kind of strange given that the article isn't really about investing at all. If you can cut through the Friedman word salad his point seems to be "a 401(k) world requires you to learn much more about investing in yourself."

This article is, like so many of Friedman's, basically garbage. I guess he's saying that like you need to figure out what the best 401(k) investments are, so too do you need to figure out how best to shape your skillset for the market? I can barely find a thesis in this article other than "things are changing due to technology, some of this is good and some of it is bad."

It's possible, though, that the next six months will be critical.

Ticketmaster just changed their captchas to this format as well, you enter a captcha like "Who's coming with me" while viewing an ad about their social features. Until a few months ago it was a normal, unrelated captcha.

"Have you thought about getting a job working for better people" is incredibly patronizing, akin to asking a fast food worker why they're not working at a real restaurant or someone at a huge, bulky conglomerate why they're not working for Google. The rep knows that their script isn't designed to help you, just like someone working at McDonald's knows that their burgers aren't the best in town, but they also have to pay rent at the end of the month so they're going to stick to it.

Being nice to customer service reps is the best thing you can do and is the easiest way to get them to go out of their way to help you. Chances are the caller before you was kind of a jerk, and the caller after you will probably be kind of a jerk, so if you approach the call in a nice manner and are polite and patient you'll stick out in a good way and the agent will be more inspired to assist you. It's possible or probable that they'll still be hamstrung by corporate regulations but like they say, you'll catch more flies with honey than vinegar (or however the saying goes).

Well, flowchart software isn't especially sexy, and unlike clothes or music or a game or something along those lines you're probably not going to be intrigued by the prospect of flowchart software unless you're actively looking to make a flowchart.

Pepsi's also a bad example, it's a 100-year-old behemoth of a company and it would be difficult to point to any single thing as responsible for a loss in revenue, especially a social media campaign. Pepsi also isn't especially sexy from a social media perspective, if you check their twitter it's a lot of "Hey, anyone drinking a Pepsi right now?" which to me at least isn't particularly compelling.

Social media can be extremely effective, local businesses especially can get a lot from not a ton of investment. Bars and restaurants can post specials, parties, pictures from past events, do ticket giveaways, etc. In SF at least a lot of nightlife promotion and engagement happens on Facebook, and you only really need a person or two per venue or production house to make that happen effectively.

Yes, you should be professional, the same way you'd probably be respectful at a dinner party that occurred outside of work hours. This is about as puritanical as a coffee shop that prevents you from bringing a guitar and amplifier in and playing loud riffs at 4pm. If you want to remove your mask then please, feel free to do so, but maybe find a more appropriate environment for letting loose than the Django community forums.

Also, really? The idea that asking people on Django-hosted channels to "be respectful" will lead to gun violence is pretty out there.

Fallout generally means something negative. If this is related to the PyCon incident (which it might not be, given that Django says they've been working on it for some months) then the "fallout" is simply the adoption of a formal document that says, in so many words, "don't be a jerk." The Django team has a right to do whatever they please with the spaces they host and moderate, and asking that users don't be jerks in these spaces is completely reasonable by any metric.

She's going to RPG camp and they finish the game during the camp session.

The 10k reward level seems more humorous than an actual attempt to get someone to pledge 10k. I'm doing a kickstarter soon and we have the exact same thing, a huge reward level with a somewhat comedic prize attached.