9 ms·

How Uber Got Lost

109 points by braythwayt 7y ago

jrockway 7y ago
The infrastructure they've built their business on is crumbling. Every so often I'm running late and think to myself "I should just drive" (by which I mean take an Uber). I check the driving times in Google Maps and it's as long as waiting for the subway and walking. There are just too many people on the roads for cars to be a competitive mode of transport; people only drive when there is absolutely no other option. The product has also gotten worse. People used to be happy driving for Uber, and you didn't have to pay a fare to both the taxi company and the driver directly ("tip"). Now Uber is just like taking a taxi; the driver is miserable (and let you know it), and they don't get paid unless you pay the fare AND give them extra money. It's a pain. I pretty much never use a taxi or Uber for this reason; it just seems evil to force someone to do work they don't like for very little money. That can't be good for Uber's growth. (I love their open-source contributions, though!)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- epistasis 7y ago
  When Uber started with their black car service many years ago, the drivers seemed universally happier to work for Uber than the shady limo services that typically served as a ride broker; they knew they would get paid and they knew how much and could make a decision for themselves about what their best options were. Capitalism always works better when people have enough economic freedom to say "no, I'm worth more than that," or "I can make an investment with this money and even if it disappears I'll still be able to eat." Pretty much all economic models assume that people have enough economic independence. It falls down when people are desperate and have no choice and have to take whatever is given to them. All of a sudden the system that allocates resources to the those who use them best starts to exploit people that have no other choice, and the resources start getting wasted. Uber's recent years have all been about exploiting drivers that have few other options; they position themselves as a side job, but it's become the job of last resort that everybody is doing on the side, but dislikes the extreme pressure from every single interaction.
- cactus2093 7y ago
  Evil is a little extreme. The drivers are still doing it, so they clearly prefer giving you a ride to not. To add in some more anecdotal stories — the only times I really take a lot of Ubers and talk to the drivers are when traveling, and I’ve found the opposite. In Austin and Portland recently I talked to quite a few drivers that were happy with the job. And they all mentioned the flexible hours as a perk. One guy was retired and just liked getting out of the house and meeting people and making a bit of extra money to spend. A lot of people did it as a second job, but emphasized that if they don’t feel like it on any given day they can just stay home, which is very unlike any non-contract second job you could get. Obviously there are also some miserable drivers, like the ones picketing and wanting to be employees not contractors. But even though I’m pretty liberal on a lot of issues it’s hard for me to jump on the progressive bandwagon on this one because it seems so clear that most people, riders and drivers, are much better off than if Uber didn’t exist. I do suspect that the cost of living and housing in these cities I mentioned has something to do with it. They’re still low enough that driving for Uber can make you real money, compared to somewhere like SF where everyone who doesn’t make like $150k or more is screwed.
  - jrockway 7y ago
    > The drivers are still doing it, so they clearly prefer giving you a ride to not. I'm not sure they've thought it through all the way. They're not sick today, so they don't need health insurance. Their car is new and doesn't need any major work, so the finances of eventually having to replace their car don't matter. Basically, I fear that we're getting the low prices we get by mortgaging the future. One day, your driver is going to need surgery and 3 months off to recover. One day, your driver's car is going to need a new engine. He goes into debt and suffers, all so that we can pay $3 less for a ride across town after a night of drinking. That does not sit well with me. We need to understand the true cost of someone's time and materials and make sure we pay that for the ride. I'm not saying it's ever been good. Where Uber gets you now, it was people loaning you money to buy a medallion. Medallions are now worthless and guess who is left holding the bag? Not the regulators. Not the bank that made the loan. Just someone who wanted to work for himself now financially ruined; no way to send the kids to college, no way to afford medical care, no way to buy food or shelter in retirement. I think I'll walk.
sittingnut 7y ago
was it ever on ground? uber was always under water, financially speaking. whole uber idea consists in making money out of not being regulated in regulated markets, through exploitation of loopholes in regulations. not very sustainable.
devoply 7y ago
It seems none of this turn people into peon services at behest of capitalists are really sustainable other than for deceptive tactics to bilk more money than customers are willing to pay by for instance stealing tips in order to make them seem like they are sustainable or growth businesses.
- kuzehanka 7y ago
  > It seems none of this turn people into peon services at behest of capitalists are really sustainable Like the entire employment sector? At the core of it, all Uber/Airtasker/AirBnB etc. are doing is cutting out the middle man and replacing it with a far more efficient technology. Regulations will come, but they won't undo the existence of these platforms because they're more efficient and better for everyone except the middle man. > stealing tips in order to make them seem like they are sustainable or growth businesses Like the US restaurant industry?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
todd3834 7y ago
I feel like Uber became a gamble on self driving technology. It will be interesting to see if they can last long enough to see it happen. I could see them running out of money before that happens but I kind of hope they make it.
- paulcole 7y ago
  Everyone talks about Uber being a bet on self-driving cars but how do they “win”? Are they going to own and maintain an absolutely massive fleet of self-driving cars which they can’t afford? If they’re leasing self-driving cars from the owners, you’re right back where you started, paying people to use their cars. Or is the idea they somehow figure out self-driving technology, license it to Ford or whoever, and then shut down the whole taxi business?
  - usrusr 7y ago
    One model could be sticking to what they are doing now (payment/dispatch platform), but allowing the independent "investors" in rolling stock who also personally drive their investments to get slowly replaced by independent fleet operators who can be any scale, because the cars drive themselves. But that certainly does not explain why Uber would try their hands at developing self-driving tech themselves (or why the company should be excessively valuable)
    - ghaff 7y ago
      If you posit rentable (by mile/hour/day) autonomous vehicles available for purchase on the market, why wouldn't Hertz, Avis, National, etc. be the obvious owners and operators? They'd need to distribute their parking for these vehicles more than it is today. (Although Avis does own Zipcar.) But that seems like a pretty tractable problem.
- dumbfoundded 7y ago
  Uber really has no advantage to self-driving. A customer network doesn't mean much if you cannot finance actually building the cars. They also don't any training data to give them a tech advantage. It'd make way more sense for an existing car company to build the features into the car and let the owner rent out the car when they don't need it. (Telsa, GM/Cruise). Another option is to simply build the best technology and use ungodly piles of money to finance building the cars. Only Google or Apple could really do this.
inflatableDodo 7y ago
I don't think they really knew where they were located in the first place, then headed for somewhere that they were not equipped to get to. They've always been lost.
_hardwaregeek 7y ago
I feel deeply uncomfortable taking Ubers, especially in Seattle. The drivers are inevitably working class folk, just trying to scrape by. They inevitably mention the increasing rent and cost of living. They inevitably ask what I do and I have to respond that I'm one of the asshole carpetbagging tech people who come in and raise the cost of living, raise the rent. Services like Uber are placing the class barrier front and center. They're making the differences between the have and the have nots bitterly visible. Which...I guess is a good thing? If you're into the whole class consciousness stuff. I'm not so sure myself. Perhaps that's because I'd be a bourgeoisie, not a proletarian.
- kazinator 7y ago
  > I have to respond that ... Says who?
  - _hardwaregeek 7y ago
    Well, politeness dictates. I suppose I could lie. Or just refuse to answer.
    - fieryskiff1 7y ago
      You could, I don't know... actually not support the system and avoid Uber? (Gasp!)
    - dymk 7y ago
      You're overthinking this; when I say what Big Evil Tech Company I work at, 9/10 times they say "Oh that's neat I bet working there is really fun", and the remaining 1/10 time is "Oh what do you think about Cambridge Analytica"
      - _hardwaregeek 7y ago
        There’s a slight difference in the sort of abstract evil that Cambridge Analytica poses and the very tangible changes that Amazon and Microsoft are bringing to Seattle. Your average person isn’t going to understand data collection and its role in political manipulation but they will understand rent increases and gentrification.
YeahSureWhyNot 7y ago
uber is making money from almost all of the rides and they keep around 35% to themselves. uber has 22000 people (not including drivers) working for it while facebook has 37000. all of Facebook's apps and underlying tech have been tremendously evolving and developing for years which can't be said about uber's app or their tech in general. uber will become profitable when they shed at least half of their employees at which point they will become just like Groupon or Zynga.
- adjkant 7y ago
  > uber is making money from almost all of the rides and they keep around 35% to themselves Is this documented anywhere?
  - YeahSureWhyNot 7y ago
    yes ask any uber driver will show you a screenshot of Uber's cut. on short rides its actually pretty close to 50% in US
    - malandrew 7y ago
      It's called "take rate" and it was reported in the S-1 and is reported in quarterly earnings for both companies. While some rides it might be 50%, it is far from 50% for either.
dumbfoundded 7y ago
I think NYT misses the point. The problem with Uber isn't some cultural issue, it's that they're in an extremely tough and competitive business. It's really a race to the bottom. The logic I kept hearing repeated is ride-sharing is a winner take all market. Like once you have a network of drivers setup giving people the lowest times for rides, you can force other competitors out and raise prices. Time has proven how wrong this thinking was. It's almost impossible to stop competitors in ride-sharing because the cost of switching for customers is low, there are no legal or capital ex competitive barriers, and you can be picked apart city by city. Even drivers are incentivized to download as many of these apps as possible. The whole situation seems awfully similar to Living Social and Groupon.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  The cultural problem is with the investors that are willing to spend $100B to win a cut-throat $10M/year profit market.
  - bobbiechen 7y ago
    Perhaps this is an example of a "dollar auction": A dollar bill is auctioned with these two rules: 1. (As in any auction) the dollar bill goes to the highest bidder, who pays whatever the high bid was. Each new bid has to be higher than the current high bid, and the game ends when there is no new bid within a specified time limit. 2. (Unlike at Sotheby’s!) the second-highest bidder also has to pay the amount of his last bid – and gets nothing in return. [...] This peculiar game leads to a bad case of buyer’s remorse. The highest bidder pays far more than a dollar for a dollar, and the second-highest bidder pays far more than a dollar for nothing. http://www.heretical.com/pound/dollar.html http://www.heretical.com/pound/dollar.html
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - mycall 7y ago
    or they don't have a good place to park their money, looking for the NBT.
dinsjg3434 7y ago
Uber hires young inexperienced hackers to lead the organization. Making profit is different from hacking stuff
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
kerng 7y ago
I always wonder how HN does de-deduplication. Sometimes it works automatically, sometimes it doesn't. This was already submitted yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20778994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20778994
- grzm 7y ago
  The earlier submission likely didn't attract enough attention for the later submission to be rolled in.
  - braythwayt 7y ago
    I suspect this is the issue. When you submit shortly after another submission, it gets turned into an upvote. Or of the other submission makes it to the front post, it gets all the attention, and nobody will vote for a duplicate or want to discuss the matter again. What it takes for this to happen is a second submission some time after the first, when the first didn’t attract attention. This gives the article a “second chance,” and HN is actually interested in good articles getting second chances.
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  I think if the URL is identical, a second submission within 8 hours serves as an upvote. (That submission was about 10 hours earlier.) Or if it got substantial traction, then the window is larger. If the URL is not identical for any reason, it has to be manually addressed.
Causality1 7y ago
How they "got lost"? Uber has never been profitable. Ever. They sold their investors on the idea that if you hemorrhage money to create growth profit will spontaneously appear like mana from heaven. Recent events are just people realizing, after ten damn years, that just maybe never ever making any money is a bad thing. 100% market share of nothing is still nothing and it's time to pay the piper.
cryptica 7y ago
Uber didn't get lost. It simply was never the kind of company that could acquire a monopoly big enough and fast enough to justify a multi-billion dollar valuation. I'm starting to think that many of the most successful tech companies of the past decade are not real monopolies but succeeded purely because the centralization of capital made it difficult for alternative projects to compete for a limited period of time. Even projects with strong network effects are unlikely to last forever. The reason why all these dominant companies won't last forever is simply because every new generation of ambitious workers needs a way to legally take ownership of the capital which was accumulated by the previous generation. People who inherit free capital from their parents or relatives will never be as smart, hard working, determined or as capable as those who've had to struggle all their lives; especially now with an internet where essentially all knowledge is in the public domain. As monopolies get bigger and stronger, smart and ambitious people will adapt to the environment in extreme ways and find legal ways to subvert them. When you see extremely high valuations which assume that the company will have a monopoly in 20 years, it's a red flag because in 20 years' time, political and economic control will have already been passed on to the next generation; a generation which will have no skin in the game and 0 interest in seeing that company succeed.
- H8crilA 7y ago
  Billionaire half life is around 20 years. From 1995 till 2015 around 50% of billionaires dropped out of the league: https://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/21/most-billionaires-lost-a-comma-over-20-years.html https://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/21/most-billionaires-lost-a-com... Big money doesn't equate smart money.
  - kshacker 7y ago
    This is quite a mis-representation. The total number of billionaires in 1995 = 289. Of them, 66 died. 24 of them diluted their holdings to family. This is 31% of them. Of the remaining, 126 are still billionaires. That is 43% of them. I rounded it down, but if you add them together, you see only 25% dropped out. Still a big number, but maybe some of them were spiky nasdaq 5000 of the 90s : very temporary wealth due to some reason. It seems like the odds are 80% or higher of retaining your billion dollar wealth over 2 decades. But now that the dollar is cheap (by 1995 standards) and the billionaires aplenty, maybe we should look at 5 or 10-billionaires for our next study. [ Edited to add: Actually you do not even need to downsize 25% to 20%. Take a 1% erosion per year and you get there anyways. So basically the odds of someone losing billionaire status were about 1% per year. Quite a low chance of failure. And quite a high chance of death in comparison.]
hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
Curious: How would Uber engineers be able to detect Lyft notifications by just the accelerometer and gyroscope? I can't even think of how that would work.
- nsuser3 7y ago
  Maybe by detecting the notification vibration?
  - hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
    But how would they know it's from Lyft?
    - rgovostes 7y ago
      The article says, "But detecting sounds in a driver’s car without permission was clearly invasive." But it also explicitly says it would use the accelerometer and gyroscope. Perhaps these are sensitive enough to pick up vibrations from the speaker. Different apps have unique vibration patterns, as well. A text message on my iPhone is two buzzes, but a NYTimes news alert is one. Perhaps if you detected a single buzz, and then picked up motion because I'm double-clicking the home button, you could presume that I'm switching apps to respond to the notification. Most drivers would have sound on and not purely use vibrations, because the phone is not in their pocket.
buboard 7y ago
I hope a lot of the lost money goes to the drivers. This is trickle down economics through another path.
buboard 7y ago
The "network effect" lock in is real when your service is free to use. Put a price tag and suddenly it becomes much harder to keep people from leaving. The "growth at all cost" strategy is profitable for facebook & G, for other things, the market will decide what profit margin they can have (if at all)
manbearpiggy 7y ago
The taxicab industry is a saturated market that is heavily regulated. Uber's only USP was that it could bypass regulation (and in some cases, tax). Uber should serve as a warning imo - speculation drove the valuation so high on what is a very fragile business model. Are we seeing a tech bubble?

109 points by braythwayt 7y ago

The infrastructure they've built their business on is crumbling. Every so often I'm running late and think to myself "I should just drive" (by which I mean take an Uber). I check the driving times in Google Maps and it's as long as waiting for the subway and walking. There are just too many people on the roads for cars to be a competitive mode of transport; people only drive when there is absolutely no other option. The product has also gotten worse. People used to be happy driving for Uber, and you didn't have to pay a fare to both the taxi company and the driver directly ("tip"). Now Uber is just like taking a taxi; the driver is miserable (and let you know it), and they don't get paid unless you pay the fare AND give them extra money. It's a pain. I pretty much never use a taxi or Uber for this reason; it just seems evil to force someone to do work they don't like for very little money. That can't be good for Uber's growth. (I love their open-source contributions, though!)

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
epistasis 7y ago
When Uber started with their black car service many years ago, the drivers seemed universally happier to work for Uber than the shady limo services that typically served as a ride broker; they knew they would get paid and they knew how much and could make a decision for themselves about what their best options were. Capitalism always works better when people have enough economic freedom to say "no, I'm worth more than that," or "I can make an investment with this money and even if it disappears I'll still be able to eat." Pretty much all economic models assume that people have enough economic independence. It falls down when people are desperate and have no choice and have to take whatever is given to them. All of a sudden the system that allocates resources to the those who use them best starts to exploit people that have no other choice, and the resources start getting wasted. Uber's recent years have all been about exploiting drivers that have few other options; they position themselves as a side job, but it's become the job of last resort that everybody is doing on the side, but dislikes the extreme pressure from every single interaction.
cactus2093 7y ago
Evil is a little extreme. The drivers are still doing it, so they clearly prefer giving you a ride to not. To add in some more anecdotal stories — the only times I really take a lot of Ubers and talk to the drivers are when traveling, and I’ve found the opposite. In Austin and Portland recently I talked to quite a few drivers that were happy with the job. And they all mentioned the flexible hours as a perk. One guy was retired and just liked getting out of the house and meeting people and making a bit of extra money to spend. A lot of people did it as a second job, but emphasized that if they don’t feel like it on any given day they can just stay home, which is very unlike any non-contract second job you could get. Obviously there are also some miserable drivers, like the ones picketing and wanting to be employees not contractors. But even though I’m pretty liberal on a lot of issues it’s hard for me to jump on the progressive bandwagon on this one because it seems so clear that most people, riders and drivers, are much better off than if Uber didn’t exist. I do suspect that the cost of living and housing in these cities I mentioned has something to do with it. They’re still low enough that driving for Uber can make you real money, compared to somewhere like SF where everyone who doesn’t make like $150k or more is screwed.
- jrockway 7y ago
  > The drivers are still doing it, so they clearly prefer giving you a ride to not. I'm not sure they've thought it through all the way. They're not sick today, so they don't need health insurance. Their car is new and doesn't need any major work, so the finances of eventually having to replace their car don't matter. Basically, I fear that we're getting the low prices we get by mortgaging the future. One day, your driver is going to need surgery and 3 months off to recover. One day, your driver's car is going to need a new engine. He goes into debt and suffers, all so that we can pay $3 less for a ride across town after a night of drinking. That does not sit well with me. We need to understand the true cost of someone's time and materials and make sure we pay that for the ride. I'm not saying it's ever been good. Where Uber gets you now, it was people loaning you money to buy a medallion. Medallions are now worthless and guess who is left holding the bag? Not the regulators. Not the bank that made the loan. Just someone who wanted to work for himself now financially ruined; no way to send the kids to college, no way to afford medical care, no way to buy food or shelter in retirement. I think I'll walk.

sittingnut 7y ago

was it ever on ground? uber was always under water, financially speaking. whole uber idea consists in making money out of not being regulated in regulated markets, through exploitation of loopholes in regulations. not very sustainable.

devoply 7y ago

It seems none of this turn people into peon services at behest of capitalists are really sustainable other than for deceptive tactics to bilk more money than customers are willing to pay by for instance stealing tips in order to make them seem like they are sustainable or growth businesses.

kuzehanka 7y ago
> It seems none of this turn people into peon services at behest of capitalists are really sustainable Like the entire employment sector? At the core of it, all Uber/Airtasker/AirBnB etc. are doing is cutting out the middle man and replacing it with a far more efficient technology. Regulations will come, but they won't undo the existence of these platforms because they're more efficient and better for everyone except the middle man. > stealing tips in order to make them seem like they are sustainable or growth businesses Like the US restaurant industry?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

todd3834 7y ago

I feel like Uber became a gamble on self driving technology. It will be interesting to see if they can last long enough to see it happen. I could see them running out of money before that happens but I kind of hope they make it.

paulcole 7y ago
Everyone talks about Uber being a bet on self-driving cars but how do they “win”? Are they going to own and maintain an absolutely massive fleet of self-driving cars which they can’t afford? If they’re leasing self-driving cars from the owners, you’re right back where you started, paying people to use their cars. Or is the idea they somehow figure out self-driving technology, license it to Ford or whoever, and then shut down the whole taxi business?
- usrusr 7y ago
  One model could be sticking to what they are doing now (payment/dispatch platform), but allowing the independent "investors" in rolling stock who also personally drive their investments to get slowly replaced by independent fleet operators who can be any scale, because the cars drive themselves. But that certainly does not explain why Uber would try their hands at developing self-driving tech themselves (or why the company should be excessively valuable)
  - ghaff 7y ago
    If you posit rentable (by mile/hour/day) autonomous vehicles available for purchase on the market, why wouldn't Hertz, Avis, National, etc. be the obvious owners and operators? They'd need to distribute their parking for these vehicles more than it is today. (Although Avis does own Zipcar.) But that seems like a pretty tractable problem.
dumbfoundded 7y ago
Uber really has no advantage to self-driving. A customer network doesn't mean much if you cannot finance actually building the cars. They also don't any training data to give them a tech advantage. It'd make way more sense for an existing car company to build the features into the car and let the owner rent out the car when they don't need it. (Telsa, GM/Cruise). Another option is to simply build the best technology and use ungodly piles of money to finance building the cars. Only Google or Apple could really do this.

inflatableDodo 7y ago

I don't think they really knew where they were located in the first place, then headed for somewhere that they were not equipped to get to. They've always been lost.

_hardwaregeek 7y ago

I feel deeply uncomfortable taking Ubers, especially in Seattle. The drivers are inevitably working class folk, just trying to scrape by. They inevitably mention the increasing rent and cost of living. They inevitably ask what I do and I have to respond that I'm one of the asshole carpetbagging tech people who come in and raise the cost of living, raise the rent. Services like Uber are placing the class barrier front and center. They're making the differences between the have and the have nots bitterly visible. Which...I guess is a good thing? If you're into the whole class consciousness stuff. I'm not so sure myself. Perhaps that's because I'd be a bourgeoisie, not a proletarian.

kazinator 7y ago
> I have to respond that ... Says who?
- _hardwaregeek 7y ago
  Well, politeness dictates. I suppose I could lie. Or just refuse to answer.
  - fieryskiff1 7y ago
    You could, I don't know... actually not support the system and avoid Uber? (Gasp!)
  - dymk 7y ago
    You're overthinking this; when I say what Big Evil Tech Company I work at, 9/10 times they say "Oh that's neat I bet working there is really fun", and the remaining 1/10 time is "Oh what do you think about Cambridge Analytica"
    - _hardwaregeek 7y ago
      There’s a slight difference in the sort of abstract evil that Cambridge Analytica poses and the very tangible changes that Amazon and Microsoft are bringing to Seattle. Your average person isn’t going to understand data collection and its role in political manipulation but they will understand rent increases and gentrification.

YeahSureWhyNot 7y ago

uber is making money from almost all of the rides and they keep around 35% to themselves. uber has 22000 people (not including drivers) working for it while facebook has 37000. all of Facebook's apps and underlying tech have been tremendously evolving and developing for years which can't be said about uber's app or their tech in general. uber will become profitable when they shed at least half of their employees at which point they will become just like Groupon or Zynga.

adjkant 7y ago
> uber is making money from almost all of the rides and they keep around 35% to themselves Is this documented anywhere?
- YeahSureWhyNot 7y ago
  yes ask any uber driver will show you a screenshot of Uber's cut. on short rides its actually pretty close to 50% in US
  - malandrew 7y ago
    It's called "take rate" and it was reported in the S-1 and is reported in quarterly earnings for both companies. While some rides it might be 50%, it is far from 50% for either.

dumbfoundded 7y ago

I think NYT misses the point. The problem with Uber isn't some cultural issue, it's that they're in an extremely tough and competitive business. It's really a race to the bottom. The logic I kept hearing repeated is ride-sharing is a winner take all market. Like once you have a network of drivers setup giving people the lowest times for rides, you can force other competitors out and raise prices. Time has proven how wrong this thinking was. It's almost impossible to stop competitors in ride-sharing because the cost of switching for customers is low, there are no legal or capital ex competitive barriers, and you can be picked apart city by city. Even drivers are incentivized to download as many of these apps as possible. The whole situation seems awfully similar to Living Social and Groupon.

whatshisface 7y ago
The cultural problem is with the investors that are willing to spend $100B to win a cut-throat $10M/year profit market.
- bobbiechen 7y ago
  Perhaps this is an example of a "dollar auction": A dollar bill is auctioned with these two rules: 1. (As in any auction) the dollar bill goes to the highest bidder, who pays whatever the high bid was. Each new bid has to be higher than the current high bid, and the game ends when there is no new bid within a specified time limit. 2. (Unlike at Sotheby’s!) the second-highest bidder also has to pay the amount of his last bid – and gets nothing in return. [...] This peculiar game leads to a bad case of buyer’s remorse. The highest bidder pays far more than a dollar for a dollar, and the second-highest bidder pays far more than a dollar for nothing. http://www.heretical.com/pound/dollar.html http://www.heretical.com/pound/dollar.html
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- mycall 7y ago
  or they don't have a good place to park their money, looking for the NBT.

dinsjg3434 7y ago

Uber hires young inexperienced hackers to lead the organization. Making profit is different from hacking stuff

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

kerng 7y ago

I always wonder how HN does de-deduplication. Sometimes it works automatically, sometimes it doesn't. This was already submitted yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20778994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20778994

grzm 7y ago
The earlier submission likely didn't attract enough attention for the later submission to be rolled in.
- braythwayt 7y ago
  I suspect this is the issue. When you submit shortly after another submission, it gets turned into an upvote. Or of the other submission makes it to the front post, it gets all the attention, and nobody will vote for a duplicate or want to discuss the matter again. What it takes for this to happen is a second submission some time after the first, when the first didn’t attract attention. This gives the article a “second chance,” and HN is actually interested in good articles getting second chances.
DoreenMichele 7y ago
I think if the URL is identical, a second submission within 8 hours serves as an upvote. (That submission was about 10 hours earlier.) Or if it got substantial traction, then the window is larger. If the URL is not identical for any reason, it has to be manually addressed.

Causality1 7y ago

How they "got lost"? Uber has never been profitable. Ever. They sold their investors on the idea that if you hemorrhage money to create growth profit will spontaneously appear like mana from heaven. Recent events are just people realizing, after ten damn years, that just maybe never ever making any money is a bad thing. 100% market share of nothing is still nothing and it's time to pay the piper.

cryptica 7y ago

Uber didn't get lost. It simply was never the kind of company that could acquire a monopoly big enough and fast enough to justify a multi-billion dollar valuation. I'm starting to think that many of the most successful tech companies of the past decade are not real monopolies but succeeded purely because the centralization of capital made it difficult for alternative projects to compete for a limited period of time. Even projects with strong network effects are unlikely to last forever. The reason why all these dominant companies won't last forever is simply because every new generation of ambitious workers needs a way to legally take ownership of the capital which was accumulated by the previous generation. People who inherit free capital from their parents or relatives will never be as smart, hard working, determined or as capable as those who've had to struggle all their lives; especially now with an internet where essentially all knowledge is in the public domain. As monopolies get bigger and stronger, smart and ambitious people will adapt to the environment in extreme ways and find legal ways to subvert them. When you see extremely high valuations which assume that the company will have a monopoly in 20 years, it's a red flag because in 20 years' time, political and economic control will have already been passed on to the next generation; a generation which will have no skin in the game and 0 interest in seeing that company succeed.

H8crilA 7y ago
Billionaire half life is around 20 years. From 1995 till 2015 around 50% of billionaires dropped out of the league: https://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/21/most-billionaires-lost-a-comma-over-20-years.html https://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/21/most-billionaires-lost-a-com... Big money doesn't equate smart money.
- kshacker 7y ago
  This is quite a mis-representation. The total number of billionaires in 1995 = 289. Of them, 66 died. 24 of them diluted their holdings to family. This is 31% of them. Of the remaining, 126 are still billionaires. That is 43% of them. I rounded it down, but if you add them together, you see only 25% dropped out. Still a big number, but maybe some of them were spiky nasdaq 5000 of the 90s : very temporary wealth due to some reason. It seems like the odds are 80% or higher of retaining your billion dollar wealth over 2 decades. But now that the dollar is cheap (by 1995 standards) and the billionaires aplenty, maybe we should look at 5 or 10-billionaires for our next study. [ Edited to add: Actually you do not even need to downsize 25% to 20%. Take a 1% erosion per year and you get there anyways. So basically the odds of someone losing billionaire status were about 1% per year. Quite a low chance of failure. And quite a high chance of death in comparison.]

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago

Curious: How would Uber engineers be able to detect Lyft notifications by just the accelerometer and gyroscope? I can't even think of how that would work.

nsuser3 7y ago
Maybe by detecting the notification vibration?
- hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
  But how would they know it's from Lyft?
  - rgovostes 7y ago
    The article says, "But detecting sounds in a driver’s car without permission was clearly invasive." But it also explicitly says it would use the accelerometer and gyroscope. Perhaps these are sensitive enough to pick up vibrations from the speaker. Different apps have unique vibration patterns, as well. A text message on my iPhone is two buzzes, but a NYTimes news alert is one. Perhaps if you detected a single buzz, and then picked up motion because I'm double-clicking the home button, you could presume that I'm switching apps to respond to the notification. Most drivers would have sound on and not purely use vibrations, because the phone is not in their pocket.

buboard 7y ago

I hope a lot of the lost money goes to the drivers. This is trickle down economics through another path.

buboard 7y ago

The "network effect" lock in is real when your service is free to use. Put a price tag and suddenly it becomes much harder to keep people from leaving. The "growth at all cost" strategy is profitable for facebook & G, for other things, the market will decide what profit margin they can have (if at all)

manbearpiggy 7y ago

The taxicab industry is a saturated market that is heavily regulated. Uber's only USP was that it could bypass regulation (and in some cases, tax). Uber should serve as a warning imo - speculation drove the valuation so high on what is a very fragile business model. Are we seeing a tech bubble?