vikinghckr

Well, if you own a car just for commute, it's sitting idle for 23 hours out of 24. Whereas the Uber/Lyft driver is using it for 8-12 hours a day, and the overall ownership/maintenance cost is not linear with usage. On top of that, add UberPool, and the cost for ride hailing goes even lower. So essentially, ride hailing can be thought of as a form of public transport.

One thing not mentioned here is how it will impact customers, and who these customers are. These regulations will result in higher fares for customers and those customers overwhelmingly tend to be people who can't afford to buy and maintain a car. Affluent people already have cars and those on the fence will choose to drive more if fares go up. So the main impact would be on people in the service industry who rely on Uber/Lyft for their daily commutes.

Slightly off topic, but I feel like when people talk of STEM as a lucrative field of study, they tend to imply CS. Non-CS STEM field hardly have a shortage of qualified and talented people. In fact, there's probably a oversupply compared to job prospects in non-CS STEM fields. I see so many talented Math/Physics majors end up switching to CS and do mundane software engineering work.

I don't doubt that Nadella is humble, and so is Microsoft under him. But my point is they're not in the least bit ambitious technically. They are not trying to make any product that's the best in the world. The old Microsoft, and the current Google/Facebook/Amazon all have that ambition.

Sure. Making an effort to recruit the brightest minds means first of all paying them like your competitors are paying. Giving them similar perks. Giving them challenging things to work on. Giving them good promotion paths within the company. Making the company engineering-driven rather than middle-manager driven. Google and Facebook do all of them. Microsoft currently do none.

Also, you haven't addressed why you think even if my assertion is true how Microsoft's so called revival having nothing to do with tech isn't true.

How does that follow? If what I say is true (and it is, just talk to software engineers who work at these big companies they'll tell you the same), then it means Microsoft have done nothing under Nadella that's ambitious or challenging from a technical point of view. They have made no new products or improved existing ones that warrants calling it a revival. All they have done is better PR.

They're writing code obviously, but they are happy hiring mediocre programmers these days for their boring, mediocre products. They pay far lower than Google, Facebook and Amazon do. They make zero effort to recruit the brightest minds in the industry.

Sorry, but this so called Microsoft revival under Nadella is pure marketing, not in the least bit technical. Under Ballmer (and Gates before him), Microsoft were a super ambitious company that tried to be the best at everything it did, and they made an effort to recruit the best programmers. Under Nadella, Microsoft completely lacks any ambition, and almost all of their best programmers have left for Google, Facebook or Amazon. They are now officially the new IBM. Not in the least bit exciting or something to emulate.

After years of switching between programming fonts, I finally settled on SF Mono. Not planning to switch any time soon (and hopefully ever).

That's not necessarily a bad thing for consumers if the replacement product is just as good or better than the previous one.

There are hundreds of thousands of developers around the world who dream every day about working at Google. If you think a few dozen engineers aren't replaceable by a company like Google, you are wrong.

> a company that adds so little value to human life (at least in its current form).

Only place I hear this is on Hackernews and Reddit. It's not a coincidence these are two sites where a huge portion of users are socially awkward single males in their 20s. For pretty much every other demographic on the planet, Facebook adds incredible amount of value to people's day-to-day life. They discover their long lost friends/classmates through Facebook. They can keep in touch with each other's life events from thousands of miles away. If that's not "adding value to human life", then I don't know what is.

> 80% of Googlers in NYC will probably have lower lifetime earnings than firefighters or cops once you factor in pensions

No way. How much do you think Google entry level fresh graduate engineers earn in total compensation?

Thanks. This news is a pretty big deal then.

Ah OK, I wasn't aware. In terms of purely engineering talent, how would you rank Google's Mountain View, Seattle, NYC and London offices?

Well, problem with Orlando etc., as opposed to NYC is it would be harder to attract elite talent there. In fact, it will be hard enough to attract talent at NYC when most tech companies are still in SV.

If it's going to make NYC a major engineering hub, on a similar scale as Mountain View, then it's a huge deal. If it's going to be mainly non-technical roles, then meh.