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This is, indeed, a very hard problem to solve. The only option I see is banning somehow by law/agreement, and taking legal actions to people who 'steal' them. B
by jaimehrubiks 8y ago
This is, indeed, a very hard problem to solve. The only option I see is banning somehow by law/agreement, and taking legal actions to people who 'steal' them. But in that case they would just stack them outside the house...
You could ban people who charge bikes to use them (it is as weird as if an uber driver couldn't use uber as a passenger).
- ec109685 8y agoThese hoarders display obviously anomalous behavior. Overtime, Bird will be able to weed out this fraud.
- solatic 8y ago> a very hard problem to solve Is it? Honest chargers who go out to the boonies to recover truly hard-to-recover scooters will pick up scooters which turn red from all over the place. Dishonest chargers who kidnap scooters will have scooters who all turned red suspiciously in one place (the charger's home). Developing an algorithm to find the dishonest players should be relatively straightforward, and after dishonest players are found, they should be banned.
- Normal_gaussian 8y agoYes, this seems largely trivial for a moderate sized company. Will it be perfect? No. Will it be effective? Yes. Will it make a great HN blog post? Absolutely
- michaelt 8y agoDishonest chargers who kidnap scooters will have scooters who all turned red suspiciously in one place (the charger's home). ...until the dishonest chargers figure out they can easily block the GPS signal with a few cents of tinfoil when they grab the scooter off the street.
- SamReidHughes 8y agoYou can catch that too.
- michaelt 8y agoHow will you robustly tell apart vandals from dishonest chargers, when the latter are incentivised to emulate the former?
- SamReidHughes 8y agoFrom the GPS signal being blocked some time before they charge the scooters.
- michaelt 8y agoYou think vandals never chuck scooters places they can't get GPS signals, like in rivers or metal dumpsters?
- SamReidHughes 8y agoYou use statistics.
- ApolloFortyNine 8y agoWell you just ban them. You might catch some innocents but that's their right. If someone has a habit of turning in a whole bunch of scooters that didn't have GPS available for X days before, ban them. A legitimate charger should have a certain percentage of scooters where the GPS was available up until charging (1-2 day turn around I'm guessing, or there's some fundamental flaw with the charging system), so I'm sure there's an algorithm that can remove a majority of the abusers with minimal casualties. You can never solve gaming the system entirely, the goal is just to make it harder than it's worth, and hopefully the abusers move to some other scheme.
- 8y ago
- CaptainZapp 8y agoThe only option I see is banning somehow by law/agreement, and taking legal actions to people who 'steal' them. There's something really funny about the libertarian mindset here: - Screw regulations! Disrupt! Use public property for private gain, but then - Let the hammer of the law crash down and the state deal with those scundrels if there are unintended consequences Theres' a smidgeon of hypocrisy here, don't you think?
- dnautics 8y agoThe libertarian mindset is pretty clear: There should be a small number of regulations, with a specific scope (e.g. protecting against physical harm and protecting property), which are clearly enumerated so that anyone, across most levels of education, can easily and reasonably determine if the regulation is fair or not.