balloot

I am increasingly convinced that Haskell only exists so that people who know it can pat themselves on the back for being wonderful.

Good to hear - building a project on Ember now and it (Ember) is an absolute joy to work with. Keep it going!

A blog post is neither "verbal" nor a "contract", no matter how many times the word "will" is used.

Napkin ways to completely blow this up:

1) Write a script to answer requests without ever intending to pick up.

2) Get out of the car, don't transfer the other half.

3) Sign up as a driver, and wait until you find an attractive/rich fare. Lock doors and do what you will.

Deregulation is not the answer for everything. Uber/Lyft works precisely because they are very well regulated to stop the cases I outline above, and more.

"you require each user to use a valid credit card"

Who is "you"? Someone, somewhere would be creating a system that verifies unique identities, aggregates ratings, etc. Even if the logic is peer-to-peer, the system requires an extremely robust engineering infrastructure to keep it going, and the people that build that thing take on all the issues Uber is dealing with, but without real control over the system.

Or to put it differently, it's not a coincidence that all big peer-to-peer systems are anchored in weird spots around the world. In any major country the government will hunt down the keepers of the system and hold them accountable for the content.

So, to answer your question directly, you're missing a whole lot.

Crown mechanisms worked well for a completely different purpose. They are the easiest way to set and wind a watch that is not on your wrist. Totally different use case than controlling the watch's screen while you're wearing it!

My issue with the watch is the crown control. It just feels lazy to me to take a control mechanism made 100+ years ago for winding mechanical watches off your wrist, and repurpose it for digital control of a watch on your wrist.

Is it possible that the best possible UX solution for winding a mechanical watch and controlling a digital OS is exactly the same? Perhaps. But that seems improbable to me. It's hard to know until the thing is out in the wild, but I would expect a lot of people fiddling awkwardly with the top half of that tiny little dial as the bottom of the dial digs into their wrist. Doesn't seem terribly fun.

Or to look at it differently, both of Apple's other consumer hits (iPod, iPhone) introduced a navigation interface that was completely novel and way better than anything else on the market (iPhone => finger navigated multi-touch screen, iPod => rotary dial). A crown on a watch is definitely not novel, and I'm thoroughly skeptical it will be way better than its competition.

That being said, it's unlikely that this thing bombs. But as a test of innovation post-Steve, I'm just not seeing it. And over time, the luster of Apple will fade if there's no innovation.

Not quite. I would define common sense as "a reasonable fallback solution given that the current situation is unfamiliar." This is something AI systems have a LOT of difficulty with, the self-driving car being no exception.

You can't compile a list of edge cases for this kind of thing, because it is impossible to know the comprehensive list of all the situations the car won't handle correctly.

In the end, you need a learning technology that can properly adapt to any possible situation and give a decent response. Maybe it can be done, but we certainly aren't there yet and I'm skeptical as to the the tractability of the last bit of the problem.

I'm with you here. You could essentially build from scratch a traffic setup for autonomous vehicles, instead of retrofitting the autonomous vehicles to a current driving system. And by flying you get to avoid lots of complications that will prove very difficult to work around. No pedestrians, snow, signage, construction, etc etc.

You just described the problem nicely. The "magic" that turns 3 lane roads into 2 lanes etc, is a situational awareness that is really, really difficult to impart on a learning system. The big problem is that probabilistic models don't have a notion of "common sense" solution to an odd situation. They need to have seen the situation, or something very similar to it, enough to make a reasonable calculation of what to do.

I've been saying this for years, as I took Thrun's class when he was at Stanford. Google's dirty little secret is that self driving cars are still mostly smoke and mirrors. Given relatively controlled conditions and a trained driver who can play backup when needed, they work. But if you put them in complicated situations - snow, a busy city environment, abnormal signage - watch out.

The problem is that the driving model is probabilistic. When you solve a problem probabilistically, getting from 90% covered to 99% to 99.9% covered to 99.99% covered involves exponential leaps in difficulty. So even if the car covers 99.9% of driving conditions (and it currently doesn't), there's still a tremendous amount of work to be done to get it to 99.9999% correct, or whatever the threshold is for it to be deemed "safe" for fully autonomous use.

I personally am bearish on the technology, as getting the inconvenient final situational cases correct will be extremely challenging. I would love to be proven wrong, but at Stanford I came to the opinion that the probabilistic approach would get us to really cool demos, but never a fully autonomous vehicle. That being said, the people working on this are a whole lot smarter than I, and I would love to be proven wrong.

When an engineer uses the word "trivial," what you should hear is "There are some complications that I'd rather ignore, so let's just hand-wave the answer".

Sad. Project Euler is pretty much useless without the problem checking feature. Anyone know a good alternative?

Yes, she could exert influence. Just like every other SO of every other hiring manager in the world. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

I hire people, and I talk to my wife all the time about work matters. And if, knowing everything she knows about my team, she told me that I should be looking at cutting someone loose, I would take that advice very seriously. Every good executive has trusted advisors, and for people in serious relationships the partner is very commonly one of those advisors.

The only problem here is the wife's alleged direct meddling with work matters, not that she had a strong influence on her husband's work decisions. For founders, life is totally enmeshed with work and it would actually be weird if his wife DIDN'T have strong opinions on the company he built while she supported him at home.