4 ms·

You have good writing skills. Your story, though shocking, had me gripped :) Did you ever find out why you felt sketchy and why you don't remember how you got

You have good writing skills. Your story, though shocking, had me gripped :) Did you ever find out why you felt sketchy and why you don't remember how you got home? Was that because of the injury? As far as Uber charging cancellation fee, I don't think they have a way to know if your phone died. For them, it's equivalent to the driver being unable to contact you.

ianamartin 10y ago
Thank you for the compliment. I try to write as well as I can. I did talk to the woman later to get my man purse back. She straight up ruffied me. I have no idea for what purpose. As for Uber seeing stuff, I have some posts below on the topic. I think this is not a difficult problem to solve. Actually, what it really boils down to is CAP theorem. Uber is just making the wrong choices about CAP. In this case we aren't talking about a networked system in the normal way we do with distributed database systems. We're talking about a network of people. How do you handle it when there's a partition event? Uber's default choice is fuck it. Write one part of the transaction to the database and charge the user a disconnect fee. That's not in anyway the correct way to handle a network partition. That's like if you have an application that receives a message and logs it, but can't get a response to my callback, and it just says, "Okay. My work here is done." And then makes a new entry in a table that says the failed callback owes 5 bucks. That's absolutely stupid and wrong. Network partitions are going to happen. All the damn time. And if your best mechanism for dealing with them is blame the callback . . . you have some serious thinking to do. Because that shit is broken.
- sulam 10y ago
  Ignoring the rest of your story, which is interesting and weird, I think your analogy to CAP breaks down fast. The driver cannot roll back their time spent. You called them to a spot, presumably they went there and you weren't there. They are out their time, it's gone. Any number of bad things could have happened to you, but the user agreement is that if you don't show, you pay.
  - wastedhours 10y ago
    Based on the assumption that he wasn't actually where he was supposed to be. I've had several cancellations from drivers, when being worse for wear, for not being where I'm supposed to be even when I've not moved and seen the car drive past without a phonecall. Probably don't want the hassle of a half-cut passenger, but it's a nuisance from their end. Do they get a cut of the charge?
    - sulam 10y ago
      I think they do -- and agreed it's a problem when it's their fault. That's what the call button is for after all.
  - ianamartin 10y ago
    CAP theorem doesn't address rollbacks. That's an implementation detail for the admins to work out based on the results of how a particular distributed system addresses Consistency, Availability, and Partition tolerance. User agreements are irrelevant--or at least a cheap cop out--for defining how a distributed system behaves in failure cases. In this particular case, I was where I was supposed to be, but I had an actual network partition event. My phone died. It's not really an analogy at this point. It's an actual P partition event. And Uber's default choice in that case is to assume the rider is no longer there. That's a bad practice, in reality. No one would tolerate a data store that behaves this way. It should be obvious that a network of drivers and riders and a coordinating piece of software that links the two of them up has every characteristic of a distributed network.
    - sulam 10y ago
      So, you're saying the driver should have waited patiently for you to wake up, and then the network would have become consistent? While the CAP theorem says nothing about rollbacks, application of the concepts of CAP certainly involve rollbacks, eventual consistency, or data loss. Perhaps if we are to take your analogy literally, the data loss is your money? But if you don't want that, you have to present an alternative. You are doing a poor job of convincing me that you truly believe this is a literal event. Instead of considering an abstract CS theory, let's talk about reality. Reality is that you ordered a service and then weren't Available to receive that service, so the other Party was due some of your Cash because that's the user agreement you signed. Saying this is a copout won't get you very far in the real world of law.
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 10y ago
  Please report this woman to potentially save others from her. If you think this is too much of a hassle and don’t do it, and she harms someone else, you will have blood on your hands.

ianamartin 10y ago

Thank you for the compliment. I try to write as well as I can. I did talk to the woman later to get my man purse back. She straight up ruffied me. I have no idea for what purpose. As for Uber seeing stuff, I have some posts below on the topic. I think this is not a difficult problem to solve. Actually, what it really boils down to is CAP theorem. Uber is just making the wrong choices about CAP. In this case we aren't talking about a networked system in the normal way we do with distributed database systems. We're talking about a network of people. How do you handle it when there's a partition event? Uber's default choice is fuck it. Write one part of the transaction to the database and charge the user a disconnect fee. That's not in anyway the correct way to handle a network partition. That's like if you have an application that receives a message and logs it, but can't get a response to my callback, and it just says, "Okay. My work here is done." And then makes a new entry in a table that says the failed callback owes 5 bucks. That's absolutely stupid and wrong. Network partitions are going to happen. All the damn time. And if your best mechanism for dealing with them is blame the callback . . . you have some serious thinking to do. Because that shit is broken.

sulam 10y ago
Ignoring the rest of your story, which is interesting and weird, I think your analogy to CAP breaks down fast. The driver cannot roll back their time spent. You called them to a spot, presumably they went there and you weren't there. They are out their time, it's gone. Any number of bad things could have happened to you, but the user agreement is that if you don't show, you pay.
- wastedhours 10y ago
  Based on the assumption that he wasn't actually where he was supposed to be. I've had several cancellations from drivers, when being worse for wear, for not being where I'm supposed to be even when I've not moved and seen the car drive past without a phonecall. Probably don't want the hassle of a half-cut passenger, but it's a nuisance from their end. Do they get a cut of the charge?
  - sulam 10y ago
    I think they do -- and agreed it's a problem when it's their fault. That's what the call button is for after all.
- ianamartin 10y ago
  CAP theorem doesn't address rollbacks. That's an implementation detail for the admins to work out based on the results of how a particular distributed system addresses Consistency, Availability, and Partition tolerance. User agreements are irrelevant--or at least a cheap cop out--for defining how a distributed system behaves in failure cases. In this particular case, I was where I was supposed to be, but I had an actual network partition event. My phone died. It's not really an analogy at this point. It's an actual P partition event. And Uber's default choice in that case is to assume the rider is no longer there. That's a bad practice, in reality. No one would tolerate a data store that behaves this way. It should be obvious that a network of drivers and riders and a coordinating piece of software that links the two of them up has every characteristic of a distributed network.
  - sulam 10y ago
    So, you're saying the driver should have waited patiently for you to wake up, and then the network would have become consistent? While the CAP theorem says nothing about rollbacks, application of the concepts of CAP certainly involve rollbacks, eventual consistency, or data loss. Perhaps if we are to take your analogy literally, the data loss is your money? But if you don't want that, you have to present an alternative. You are doing a poor job of convincing me that you truly believe this is a literal event. Instead of considering an abstract CS theory, let's talk about reality. Reality is that you ordered a service and then weren't Available to receive that service, so the other Party was due some of your Cash because that's the user agreement you signed. Saying this is a copout won't get you very far in the real world of law.
tqkxzugoaupvwqr 10y ago
Please report this woman to potentially save others from her. If you think this is too much of a hassle and don’t do it, and she harms someone else, you will have blood on your hands.