~10 minutes avg ride time in SF. You also need to take into account the extra 4-5 avg minutes it takes for a driver to pick up the person. So I would assume a driver in SF can make 4 rides an hour.
Counterpoint since I only see anti-FB replies below: I absolutely love seeing OAuth login. I don't have to create yet another password, or worry about whether your site has reasonable password security. Even when I choose to create a login instead, just seeing it gives me some confidence that you're competent enough to set it up, and probably gave some thought to the security trade-offs surrounding login in general.
Have you tried using a password manager? There's no need to worry about a site having reasonable password security when every site has its own unique 15-20 character password that you don't need to know.
[With the acknowledgement that this is a tangent from the article]: I don't have hard data on hand, but in my experience, the kind of innumeracy you point to is shockingly widespread. Many people I've talked to do not know the difference between the debt and the deficit. Some people were shocked at the election results because they conflated 85% chance of winning with 85% of the votes.
Of all the math classes I've taken, Dimensional Analysis remains the one I'd most like to see forced on every highschooler. Units matter. Unlike quantities cannot be trivially compared.
Fortunately, you don't really have to solve that problem. It would be sufficient to assess claims of actual fact about the actual world. I think the first step in writing the classifier would be to write something like
Your statement is that of an atheist. You don't seem to realize that many of the followers of these religions believe their assertions to be factual in every way. When I got off the subway today, at the Port Authority, in New York City, there were 2 women, holding up signs about Jesus. One of the signs literally said "Historical fact: Jesus rose from the dead".
In general, I favor freedom of determination; if your randomly selected person wants to spend their BI on drugs or alcohol, fine. But the persistently homeless are not at all a representative sample population. There are a number of intersecting problems, especially mental health and addiction, that place them among the least credible cases for self-determination. We can argue about where the cutoff is, but there will always be people out at the end of the bell curve that need more active intervention.
And that's without even getting into the problem of perverse incentives involved in giving money to people for asking for it.
There's a wide range of moral gray area there. Imagine, e.g., a US contractor who builds converters that make dumb bombs into smart bombs. The US is going to bomb people anyway; better that they hit fewer non-targets along the way.
> The US is going to bomb people anyway; better that they hit fewer non-targets along the way.
This has been used as a talking point pro smart bombs for some time now - and yet we have still bombings of weddings with a civilian hit rate of nearly 100%.
Killing is is still killing, no matter how smart the weapon is.
I think you should check out how bombing was conducted before the introduction of the smart bomb. We used to intentionally and systematically destroy entire civilian populations.
I'll let the people bombing you know that you are unhappy they have bombs and refuse to make your own to deter them from bombing you because you don't support the use of bombs.
Would you like your message to include the sound of the bomb explosion that killed your brother or should we leave that out?
The point people are trying to get you to understand is that there are hundreds (if not thousands) of years of human history that has shown that when two groups of people disagree and cannot come to an agreement: they war.
Even when they reach an agreement, it's possible that one group will backstab the other group. Or perhaps they interpreted a given part of an agreement in different ways and are now arguing over which is the proper interpretation (a naive understanding of the Shia-Sunni relations)?
So Group A decides they are correct and will force Group B to agree by force. They approach Group B with their army armed with bows and swords. Group B has to submit to Group A, die, or fight back. To fight back they need a better trained army with superior bows and superior swords.
Group A is fearful that Group B now has a superior army with superior weaponry. So Group A invents guns. The sword-armed troops of Group B no longer stand a fighting chance against Group A. Fearing they will have to submit to Group A or die - Group B invents explosives... and so on and so on.
Now we have nuclear weapons that devastate miles of land and kill anyone caught in the blast. Fearing that a war between Group A and Group B would kill both sides and a Group C might enforce their ways, Group A and Group B have decided against using such powerful weapons against each other.
Now imagine you have 250 groups.
248 don't believe in using bombs.
Which 2 groups are in power? Hint: it's not one of the 248 "peaceful" groups.
> If I attend a conference I have the right to stay anonymous.
Sadly, legally you have no such right. You are in a public space, and anyone can take your picture freely and do pretty much what they want with it. Our society doesn't even have coherent social norms about reasonable rights to privacy in public spaces, much less law.
I agree that it would be reasonable to expect some level of anonymity, though. Hopefully some day it will be.
This is baseless FUD; any serious objections he might have are only hinted at: "things I can't talk about". If everyone switched to Chrome, at worst Chrome would get complacent, as IE did, and at best, it would continue to be a great browser.
> This is baseless FUD; any serious objections he might have are only hinted at: "things I can't talk about"
The author is Robert O'Callahan, who is a Distinguished Engineer at Mozilla and a 15-year veteran of browser development. He's not just some random blogger spouting off.
Being a distinguished engineer at Mozilla doesn't necessarily make one far more qualified to understand the vast array of potential implications of Google gaining monopoly power in a variety of web sectors.
No, but it might. I'm sure the author has spent vastly more time looking at web standards and trends than I have and as such, his opinion should carry more weight than your average person.
You've simply pulled out a variation on the old "correlation does not imply causation" retort.
No, I pulled a more wordy version of "that's an appeal to authority fallacy". And I believe my point still stands. The author is speaking of issues that are several orders of magnitude of complexity above "writing amazing web software at Mozilla" and also impacted by a variety of fields that are very different than software engineering. Thus he is only marginally more informed than your average HN user.
It also gives him an ulterior motive. I am happy to hear what he has to say, but "just trust me" is not convincing.
To be clear, I am not accusing him of dishonesty, but I don't trust him to be impartial. People have a tendency to overvalue the thing they are working on.
It might be a little fud. But its also a little true. Google is becoming everything online. They even want to be your internet service provider some day. All that control in all aspects of the internet could be abused quite easily.
IE only got complacent because hundreds of millions of users switched to Firefox over the years, and then the same thing with Chrome. It took them almost a decade and 50% of market share to start caring about their browser again.
