Maybe they should actually find people who know how to drive first. I'm getting sick of these ridershares and their terrible drivers. I'm strictly speaking in San Francisco. It's ridiculous how many times they randomly stop in the middle of the street to pick someone up causing traffic jams or even stopping at a stop sign to drop or pick someone up. Plus all the illegal U-turns and crossing double yellow lines when they're not supposed to. I don't recall having this issue with cabs. It's almost unbearable to drive in the city now.
My experience is the exact opposite. Cabbies in the city act like they could do whatever they want on the road, whereas Lyft and Uber drivers are way more cautious.
Same here - tons of cabs just hog the road like it's their priviledge to park there.
I don't see lyft drivers doing this.... but then how do you know lyft drivers are even hogging the road? Even if they have the purple mustache then it's in the front. Uber?
5/5, sorry... I don't have a great explanation why. I think it has something to do with personal interaction. If it was over Ebay or something I wouldn't worry about giving low rating, but when I meet someone face to face and they are nice, then it's hard to rate low.
It's funny - because I've done the same thing. I've had drivers that hit the brakes way too hard, and were kind of annoyingly chatty - that I just didn't have the heart to downgrade, even though I realized that I probably hadn't had a great experience, and, they weren't the safest of drivers. But I just couldn't bring myself to give a black mark to someone who had tried so hard to be friendly.
Out of the four Lyft rides I've done so far all of the drivers were nice and didn't violate any laws. That said, none of them knew the streets very well and even with GPS I had to direct two or three of them. I've even heard of some drivers claiming it's good way to get to know a city. It should be the other way around, you know then city and then drive for Lyft.
We should look at the bigger picture though, past our subjective preferences.
Lyft/Uber should be exciting from a business perspective to the HN community because it represents a business model that has been uniquely enabled by changes in the landscape. Ten years ago, this business wouldn't work, but the rise of the smartphone, and then GPS implicitly enabled this entire new segment. People, for better or worse, no longer need to be trained taxi drivers to drive people around the city because of smartphone GPS.
The more interesting conversation is about how this trend could have been anticipated.
I think mmxiii is saying that the phone+GPS combo has enabled people to become cab drivers, not to summon them. Previously, you'd either have to either be very familiar with geography, or purchase a GPS unit - probably not very expensive, but still an investment for a very part-time job.
Flycleaners seems like the worst, though. They must put their drivers on unrealistic schedules that force them to drive like maniacs. They run red lights and swing around corners and high speeds and idle in bike lanes in packs.
I'll echo that for DC. If you don't know how to get from the watergate to union station via the most efficient route, or you have no business driving a cab.
This is the second time I've seen you complain about this trip. I lived near the Watergate hotel for several years and can tell you there is no automatic guaranteed efficient route to union station. The entirety of downtown dc and all of the monuments lie directly between those two endpoints. DC traffic can snarl up pretty quickly between the tourists and random motorcades and regular old downtown traffic. I'd cut them some slack.
I take the trip every day so I have a lot of data points. There is an efficient route to Union station from the Watergate that's almost never backed up: take Rock Creek Parkway, to Independence Ave, to I-395, exit 10 to D Street. You can be forgiven for taking Constitution, but if you take K or H, you're guaranteed to be stuck in traffic.
People who don't take this route, I imagine, either don't know Rock Creek Parkway opens to southbound traffic at 6:30 pm (I travel at 6:35), or don't know that while 395 is a mess on the VA side, it's usually clear sailing for the short stretch from Independence to D street. This isn't obscure. Rock Creek Parkway and 395 are the only freeways running across D.C. Anyone who is a professional driver should be intimately familiar with the traffic patterns on these two roads. At the very least, you shouldn't need me to give you turn-by-turns after telling you to take this route across the city.
I'd say 75% at least ask if I want to take Rock Creek Parkway (though yesterday, one got lost and took me to Virginia...) These are old guys who hang around the Kennedy Center/Watergate all day. I'd say it's flipped for ride-sharing services, where the driver almost always relies on the GPS (I take it Uber's GPS isn't very good--Waze suggests the correct route).
I've noticed this on multiple occasions: Uber has pretty terrible built-in GPS. It almost always has my drivers taking the larger/busier roads even though they are less direct and more congested than side streets. It's like when Google Maps gives you the three possible routes, Uber often picks the equivalent of that weird third route that makes no sense.
yeah, if we had known about all those ideas, we wouldn't have bothered with pplrep. There was another similar idea called "honestly" or something. Our YC application, it wasn't even serious and they asked us to make a video last minute yesterday cause we never bothered with a video. I made one in my dark apartment on the spot. Honestly, if pplrep was actually working out and we had impressive user growth, we'd never apply to YC because $11,000 or what have you for 7% is not something I'd be interested in.
@crazytony, if your startup is already working out, influential people will come to you.
Also, where did I explicitly state that YC was only about money? I don't even think you can say I implicitly meant that or assume it was the gist of what I said.
How do you intend to solve it? If few people are on your site, nobody treats reputation on it as a real reputation. If nobody treats it as a real reputation, nobody will come.
There are dumb ideas, and it can be useful to point out their weaknesses in a constructive manner. However, using the word retarded to describe something in a negative way is both childish and derogatory.
Here's an eloquent description of why what you said is inappropriate. When saying retarded, “What we mean is that he is as stupid as someone who is mentally handicapped, and we mean that in the most derogatory sense. The implication is that the only characteristic of mentally handicapped individuals is their stupidity."
Don't take his use of the word "retarded" so literally. People might take offense to the word but understand that he doesn't mean it as an actual slight toward people with real mental disabilities.
Have you considered that you weren’t chosen because of your attitude instead of your project. Your comment here (as well as your name...) betrays a certain... outlook on the world.
It's not just about the ideas, it's also about the team, the people at YC have said as much in their press releases of the past. I would look inward before looking at your project.
This post was on the home page then randomly dropped to the bottom of the second. Considering the amount of upvotes and the time it was posted this post should have still been on the home page.
Stupid personal drama about some random person who has the most tenuous connection to this community (as far as I can tell he's never posted nn or engaged with HN at all) isn't interesting or noteworthy. That's probably how it's dropped off so quickly.
You can try out http://hackdesign.org/ or read Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty[1]. There are plenty of other sources out there, but these are a good start.
Probably the increase in revenue from having people signup is more than (or is expected to be more than) the loss from people opting out. They look like they're doing well so I'll assume it is working out for them.
Unfortunately, Helvetica Neue also renders poorly on Windows web browsers. It's a problem that I have been seeing a lot lately, especially with the popularity of Twitter Bootstrap. I understand that being a Windows user with Helvetica/Helvetica Neue installed is not very common, but when a website has an unreadable font I immediately leave it.
