4 ms·
> 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
by 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.
- michaelt 8y agoIf someone has a habit of turning in a whole bunch of scooters that didn't have GPS available for X days before, ban them. You've just banned your best guy, Wader Wayne, the only guy in the city who was retrieving scooters that vandals had chucked in the river. Now he's complaining on your employees' subreddit everyone said he was doing a great job and his numbers were really good, that no-one else should invest in equipment to do the same work, and that you've ruined Christmas for his family by cutting off their only source of income. The Guardian is going to interview him for their article on job insecurity in the gig economy.
- solatic 8y agoAll of these parameters are tunable. You don't have to get rid of 90% of the dishonest catchers, if even 50-70% will make a big difference. Your argument would have more merit if the majority of unrecoverable scooters were due to vandalism, but the facts bear out that the vast majority are due to hoarding.