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Medallions have nothing to do with taxis that you call up.
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Feb 9, 2016 06:12
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Flip Yr Wig posted:But it's not totally crazy to believe that Uber does add something via their platform that could survive labor regulations and overall be a positive for the customer, is it? For Uber to be profitable, it's going to have to raise prices. By a lot. This isn't even to comply with regulations, it's because they're currently being subsidized with VC money. This will make them much less attractive to people compared with regular cabs. The positives that Uber brought is basically "call a cab with an app" (note that they don't even give you an accurate map of available cabs). That's not really that novel, and certainly not something worth $51 billion. Especially if cabs adopt a similar "call with an app" feature (and most likely, someone is going to develop that app and then sell it to the cab companies).
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Feb 9, 2016 23:22
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ComradeCosmobot posted:The only thing is that Uber has a huge first-mover advantage. Hailo was one of the first companies to try to unify mobile taxi hailing worldwide, but ended up pulling out of the US because Uber was eating their lunch. Like it or not, Uber isn't going anywhere any time soon, and certainly won't as long as a company like Flywheel or Arro hasn't gotten global penetration even as Uber continues to grow. The thing is that Uber is unsustainable, and not in the "Climate Change will kill us in 50 years" sense but in the "Housing prices can only go up!" sense. Once they run out of money (and they're losing something like $400 million annually) they will die.
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Feb 10, 2016 17:26
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Freezer posted:All this Uber talk reminds me of this image a friend shared a week ago, 125 GBP uber to the airport. Driver inadvertently took the scenic route... Funny because one of Uber's main selling points is that their drivers don't do that in the first place.
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Feb 10, 2016 19:07
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Dr. VooDoo posted:I know the answer will be the founders blowing money on themselves at an amazing rate but what in the hell could Uber waste that much money on? They don't supply their drivers with anything so what are they dropping near a billion dollars on? Do car mustaches just cost that much? They subsidize the rides and give a bunch of freebies to gain market share.
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Feb 11, 2016 03:30
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go3 posted:what does any of this have to do with the OP The collapse of the tech bubble is going to have lots of people still clustering to those expensive cities because they think flyover states are Mad Max hellholes. The debate is over whether that belief is accurate.
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Feb 11, 2016 15:42
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TBBT wasn't really about Silicon Valley last i checked, it was about really rear end in a top hat academics that are still played off for laughs. Funny and dumb for academia would basically be Office Space but also the main character would lecture utter morons.
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Feb 11, 2016 19:38
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ToxicSlurpee posted:I saw that attitude with computers a lot as well; I know people with computers that are 10-15 years old because gently caress it, the thing works. It gets on the internet, it sends e-mails, it types letters, it plays solitaire, and that's all the person wants it to do. That is the future of technology, and arguably it's already started to happen with computers right now. In the future, computers will be appliances like microwaves or refrigerators - maybe they cost a reasonable amount, but they're very simple and closed off to the general consumer. When it breaks, you either hire a specialist to fix it or buy a new one. This scares people for some reason.
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Feb 13, 2016 18:16
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ToxicSlurpee posted:The specialist you hired to fix your car or refrigerator isn't going to find multiple GB of your weird fetish porn. Saving porn is another quaint hobby compared to what regular people do these days.
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Feb 14, 2016 07:16
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Discendo Vox posted:I am an idiot. Someone explain alibaba to me. Everything I read about it is unapproachably dense. Alibaba is a platform where businesses can sell products to other businesses. For example, if you need cardboard boxes and packing peanuts to ship your widgets, you can use Alibaba to find Joe's Boxes and Phil's Peanuts and get orders from them (minimum order 10,000 boxes/pounds of peanuts). They also have a consumer version called Aliexpress where you can buy individual customer items. They're usually pretty cheap too.
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Feb 18, 2016 21:50
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Arsenic Lupin posted:
If the banks were funding the tech bubble then you wouldn't have VC money. Even the greediest banks that pushed mortgages to poor people looked at the average startup's risk and said "nah, you can try elsewhere".
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Feb 21, 2016 20:36
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ohgodwhat posted:.... so why would they do that after the bubble burst and you can pick up a bunch of unemployed Americans for cheap? That's why what you said makes no sense. Because the outsourced workers are still cheaper, and (in the short term) quality isn't a meaningful metric.
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Feb 21, 2016 23:52
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Cicero posted:It's just a "revenge of the nerds" type fever dream, except now it's more like "revenge on the nerds". A certain segment of the left sees techies (particularly those in startups) as ignoble looters who immorally profit from business ventures that are stupid at best and immoral & destructive at worst. I suppose working for an advertising company would fall under the latter.
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Feb 22, 2016 08:16
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MechanicalTomPetty posted:I can't wait until 80's nostalgia passes so we can get to 90's nostalgia because that shits gonna get loving weird. We're already starting to see shades of it in some places but it's not quite omnipresent yet. We just had the X-Files.
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Feb 24, 2016 20:24
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GreyjoyBastard posted:I really love that choice, and I'm not sure if I'd prefer it to be tongue-in-cheek or, somehow, a perfectly straight-faced misunderstanding of the source material. Remember that this was a thing:  And this: 
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Feb 25, 2016 22:18
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Jumpingmanjim posted:Someone remind me why Marissa Meyer left a good job at google for this shitshow. No one's going to blame you if Yahoo goes bankrupt.
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Feb 26, 2016 00:22
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ToxicSlurpee posted:That's true of business in general and has been for centuries. Arguably that's a major reason why it functions. Easier to do business with someone you interact with a bunch.
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Feb 29, 2016 23:15
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Nonsense posted:Apple continues to use AMD GPU lol Somehow Nvidia had worse defect rates.
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Mar 4, 2016 05:56
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Munkeymon posted:Huh, so does that mean VR is going to be limited to the kinds of PC builds that are game-enthusiast levels or are drivers on Windows so much better that you can hit performance targets with worse hardware? Yep, VR is going to be incredibly niche for the foreseeable future. I doubt any laptop out now will be able to comfortably run it.
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Mar 9, 2016 22:57
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Cicero posted:For games with good modern graphics, yes. If you're willing to have simplistic graphics, sure, go hog wild. I'm guessing there'll be a lot of games/apps that have a 'toaster mode' for running on weaker computers. It sounds like the resolution is the main factor, so even Minecraft is going to require a lot higher quality hardware than a normal setup. Shifty Pony posted:A friend got to fiddle around with a dev kit and says if it drops below 60fps you are going to start to feel queezy. In addition to the raw computing power problem there's trouble in that a modern PC is actually really bad at consistent real time operations. Game engines and graphics cards experience frame-to-frame variation in framerate and micro-stuttering as a result. The readout might say 100fps but what is actually happening is 80 frames took 5ms each to render (200fps) but a random 20 frames or so took 30ms each to render (~30fps) for one of myriad reasons. Yeah also this. Quality control is always expensive, and making sure that your system actually never dips below 60fps is going to be really really hard.
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Mar 10, 2016 06:09
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Twitter is offering valued employees $50k to $200K to stay rather than accepting a job elsewhere. This is also a sinking-ship sign, because it means they're also having trouble hiring. Don't they have a lot of redundancy in their employment?
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Mar 11, 2016 00:19
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Company loyalty is one thing that's confused me. I used to suffer from that until I realized that a company would dumb your rear end to the curb for all sorts of incredibly stupid reasons. A lot of people don't like uprooting everything every few years, even though that's the prevailing trend these days.
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Mar 11, 2016 01:18
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rscott posted:If capital is mobile, labor must follow. Welcome to Neoliberalism! That really doesn't correlate at all, since labor in the US doesn't move that far. If you created tons of protectionist policies for the US you could (and probably would) still end up with a situation where people have to hop jobs regularly to get a raise.
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Mar 12, 2016 19:22
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rscott posted:It's neoliberalism as a mindset. Capital looks all over the world for the best return, that's globalism in a nutshell. Labor isn't that lucky, what with citizenship and immigration frictions and all of that junk, but moving all over the United States every 3-5 years in an effort to get the best wages in your chosen career is becoming increasingly necessary and the expected. Things that tie you down to an area, like family, friends, a mortgage, or children are a hindrance to making a living wage in our post industrial economy. Part of that is inevitable simply because it is easier than ever to move cross country, but quite a lot of it is caused by a race to the bottom between various regions and locales in the US competing to offer the most favorable tax status and least regulated labor rights to companies in an effort to attract them, which is a microcosm of the situation in the wider world. Again, not really. Companies are perfectly able and willing to offer a wide variety of jobs and pay scales. What they're not willing to do is promote existing employees to a significant degree. So you could have low or non-existent raises for years, get an offer from another company, work there for two years, and get an offer back from the first company for a lot higher than what you made earlier, despite the fact that the only change is that you're not presently working at the original company.
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Mar 12, 2016 23:25
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ToxicSlurpee posted:
This is common in any STEM field that doesn't require grad school for meaningful employment. It's why the conspiracy theories about people wanting STEM graduates to push down STEM wages always ring kind of hollow to me. Even if that was the intent, they hosed up massively in actually getting those graduates to market. asdf32 posted:Well most openings are for experience because most of the workforce has some. But companies aren't dumb. Entry people can do tedious work and if employers are lucky, deliver near senior results after a couple years for much less pay. So entry positions will open up. Except they have massive preference towards people with internships. So basically even if you studied your butt off and did well in school, you're still hosed.
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Mar 13, 2016 15:53
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asdf32 posted:Wait why is that a conspiracy. The effect of more grads entering the market should be to push down wages. The two dueling theories are (more or less) either: A) The number of STEM jobs is fairly constant (maybe a constant % of population, etc) and increasing STEM eligible workers is primarily to make those jobs pay less than now. B) The number of STEM jobs is increasing disproportionate to population/historical trends so a similar disproportionate amount of eligible workers is required to fill those spots. A) is typically believed by more left-leaning or labor friendly people, and B) is the stated reason for why we're actually pushing so many graduates (and I honestly believe that it's the main reason why businesses want them).
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Mar 13, 2016 16:47
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asdf32 posted:Every website that's broken or product that's shipped with half baked firmware or banking breach is evidence to me that there is still room for additional talent in engineering. And in case someone is tempted to say so, these things aren't just corporate corner cutting. More likely it's an issue with project management, specifically scope creep or inaccurate budgeting. In general, the easiest part is actually doing the gruntwork (whether it's coding or construction or whatever).
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Mar 13, 2016 17:07
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asdf32 posted:First, technical leadership just falls under a broader definition of engineering. I agree on the first point (though very few STEM students are learning those skills). I'm interested in your second point.
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Mar 13, 2016 17:43
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asdf32 posted:That the easy part is doing the grunt work? That's not easy. Lots of easy jobs pay well and lots of hard jobs pay poo poo. The reason why companies pay 6 figures for programmers is because other companies pay 6 figures for programmers. I don't know of a specific study that exists, but pretty much every story I've heard about failed projects derives from either 1) the scope of the work changing mid project or never being clearly determined or 2) someone wanting to save a little money upfront and do things outside of specifications. That's a (perhaps technical) management issue.
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Mar 13, 2016 17:53
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pangstrom posted:15-ish years ago I heard pretty consistently (when people were speaking frankly at least) stuff along the lines of "a great programmer is worth a LOT more than a good one". That is probably a little less true now, though I'm not super confident in that, it's just a sense that it's easier to make something slick with existing tools and libraries etc. than it used to be. I'm not a developer I just tell every recruiter and headhunter to stop showing me dev. jobs which they blithely ignore. Like I said earlier, it's probably more that people realize that "rockstar programmers" don't actually do that much on their own. It's like they hammer into us in engineering - a decent engineer with great people skills will do orders of magnitude better than an exceptional engineer with no people skills. This is because most work is team oriented.
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Mar 14, 2016 00:59
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Subjunctive posted:An exceptional engineer is very likely one with effective people skills in one form or another (even if they aren't necessarily pleasant). Under a different definition of "exceptional". In fact, you then contradict this definition in your next paragraph, by saying that some people are so awesome that they don't need to work with others.
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Mar 14, 2016 04:29
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Hughlander posted:Just because you don't need it doesn't mean you don't have it... Then how do you accurately determine that you don't need it?
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Mar 14, 2016 04:37
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Subjunctive posted:His people skills are fine (though his reputation is for being somewhat antisocial; I never really saw it), but he is also massively more capable technically than his peers. He can motivate others, negotiate with people, be a liaison to partner companies, speak publicly, all that. But he can also as an individual perform feats of technical creation that are pretty stunning. It is not unusual to find that he has advanced the state of the art when he takes on a problem. He can absolutely "do that much on [his] own", and he's pretty much the poster child for "rockstar programmer". Then you found a literal unicorn, congratulations. In general, teamwork is a skill that must be honed as much as any skill, and many technical people do not see the value in it (at least historically). They suffer, even if individually they're all rockstars. This isn't even specific to technical fields - in sports you can have lots of high talented people that still fail against less talented teams because they don't work together.
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Mar 14, 2016 04:49
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Spacewolf posted:
Uber's ADA compliance is not the best example you want to use.
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Mar 16, 2016 23:21
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Republicans posted:Speaking of, I wonder how Soylent is doing as a company. I looked them up recently and apparently they've improved their product significantly (no more chalky texture or separate bottle of oils it mix in) so I went ahead and ordered some because I always thought the concept was neat. You should try their competitor, "Ensure".
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Mar 17, 2016 04:45
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ToxicAcne posted:Sorry for the stupid question, but looking at future trends would a undergraduate in biomedical engineering be a good idea? Yes, because you'll be doing a lot of the automation (at least depending on the specialty, I'm not 100% sure on which fields there are). There's a lot about the healthcare sector that's basically going to guarantee jobs for educated professionals in the near future.
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Mar 20, 2016 07:22
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cheese posted:I can't wait to see how the power/energry sector gets "disrupted" by the sharing economy So far it seems to be giant backup batteries courtesy of Elon Musk.
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Mar 20, 2016 17:55
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ToxicAcne posted:In the gaming industry threes some big VR hype. Is it actually going to be revolutionary or is it just like motion controls? It's an additional cost on top of whatever system you buy, it's very hard to get working well (system requirements are well above what they are for the same games in 2D), and I'm not really convinced that it's all that useful outside of the FPS & Bethesda game genres. Plus it makes you look silly.
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Mar 20, 2016 21:31
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blowfish posted:Not if you're incompetent and/or plan to be acquired before loving up. Those types tend not to have physical deliverables.
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Mar 22, 2016 17:37
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Uber's disrupting the bug bounty system (by not paying for bugs). https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/4bq67q/ubers_bug_bounty_program_is_a_complete_sham/
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Mar 24, 2016 18:36
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