But will people continue to use Uber when the price goes up to market levels. Anecdotally, when Uber entered the market where I live they offered steep discounts and everybody I knew started to use them. Today they cost basically the same as most taxis and I don't know anybody who still primarily uses Uber.
>It's introducing people to the service and acquiring market. Better prices come later.
You say this as if 75% of the reason people take Uber isn't price, and that one day Uber will simply be able to jack up all their prices and make money. Demand doesn't work that way.
A common case is for typeahead completion. You have a requst to the sever in flight to get typeaheads but the user has entered more characters and triggered another request. Now you would like to ignore the old one. Since async calls are not guaranteed to arrive in the same order they were sent, it would be nice to cancel the old one instead of maintaining logic to ignore it.
Shallow dismissals are a scourge on HN, and you made it worse with the snark of "I can't believe" and "this guy". In fact, with a single drive-by swipe you dismissed not only the article and someone's current project, but the entire person and an entire business sector to boot. That's a lot of dismissing—it reminds me of the fairy tale, "Seven in one blow." And it's harmful here, so please don't post like this.
If you have a case to make, you're welcome to make it substantively. If you can't do that or don't have time, please don't post at all. That way you at least won't degrade the thread.
Totally disagree. Lots of companies in lending are sleazy but Affirm seems the opposite. They mark-up at the start so you know what you are getting into. As far as I can see, Affirm does not want you to carry a balance and get trapped into the compounding interest nightmare. To be fair, I have not used the service, but this is what I gather from scoping out the company and product usage.
Care to explain yourself? Are you confusing Levchin with Thiel? Granted they co-founded Paypal, but if you see Levchin's public talks (at SXSW, YC School etc), you'll see he's a very honest individual.
Affirm itself was formed because Max felt it wrong that Big Banks makes a majority of Profits on hidden, sleezy, fine-print fees. He says this so himself at the SXSW Talk (search in youtube).
Affirm touts itself as being honest and upfront about each and every charge or fee for their service.You can see it on their website.
There are only so many areas where having capital and calculating the same numbers that everyone else has differently can reap great profits. I think lending is one such area.
Affirm was initially supposed to be an alternative credit rating system based on social signals, and I believe credit ratings are highly regulated, so they pivoted to money lending, which is not as nice of a business. Levchin seems pretty desperate to be a successful serial entrepreneur and compares himself to other ex-Paypal people who have gone on to do big things[1]. This is despite having made a ton of money via investing in Yelp. He did manage to exit Slide to Google, but I don't know how successful of an acquisition that is considered within Google. There was that Sarah Lacy book called "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good" in which he was pretty prominently profiled, so successful serial entrepreneurship must be a prestige thing for him. I agree with you that retail money lending seems a bit desperate and unseemly, and definitely not on the same level as SpaceX or LinkedIn. It feels a bit like Square getting into payday loans to gin up revenue.
I think you nailed it about his drive for successful serial entrepreneurship. Slide was sold for an ok price but was shut off. I don't know how Levchin fared at Google but I assume he probably didn't like working for someone else. I think he chose an area where it was almost guaranteed they would make a lot of money / perceived success. Affirm is definitely that, they will make a lot of money, but it is not far off from payday loans and rent-to-own furniture, no matter how good the PR is.
Google already has the capability to remove results, so they do not need to be "enabled" by EU law. I'm not really sure how you imagine this works, but the "right to be forgotten" refers to various legal frameworks in the EU for forcing companies to delete data that pertains to an individual.
It doesn't actually. There are no laws that create or define the right to be forgotten. It was a "right" created out of nothing by a new court interpretation of a very vaguely worded part of the ECHR. Before the court invented this right nobody was even talking about it.
I don't think they're happy about it. They've funded a lot of anti-DMCA stuff under "chilling effect" branding. The DMCA is a horrible law, so I don't think we should use it to justify similar takedown behavior under other laws.
