skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think $2000 and under devices belong in the rental space, in most situations.

That's the real issue at hand here. Scooters are light enough that someone can just buy one and carry it around with them all day. At $5+ a ride, it isn't long before people would rather just buy one of their own.

Bikes are at least large enough to be a hassle to carry around.

-----------

Consider computers (and no, not cloud computers. Like normal office computers). There was a time when timesharing computers was popular, when computers were $100,000.

Similarly, back in high school, one local entrepreneur gave a talk to my school. He explained that 3d printers, while their costs were going down, were still too expensive to own. He predicted 10 years before 3d printers were popular for home labs (and it turns out he was right). In those 10 years, he made money by renting out university-level / research 3d Printers (no one wanted to buy $100,000+ printers anymore, everyone saw the writing on the wall and would rather rent), so the rental company did well, albeit only temporarily. (Overall, the talk was about "risk taking". In this case, the calculated risk that he'd make money before the business opportunity closed as 3d printers became cheaper)

----------

But these Bird scooters look like they're around $500? If you're using the thing like 2 or 3 times a day, it won't take long at $5 / ride before it makes more sense to just buy one for yourself.
Normally I despise defending VCs, but:

First, I think a lot of people fundamentally misunderstand the mandate of VCs. The firms themselves receive funding from limited partners, who are often very large pools like the California State Pension or Yale University. Those pools are almost all deployed into very low-risk asset classes, like bonds. A very small amount, say like 2-3% is invested in the PE/VC asset class, thereby diversifying and giving that fund some upside plays in their overall portfolio.

Now, because the VCs were given the mandate by their LPs to find home runs and not a bunch of singles and doubles, this changes the logic by which they make their decisions. You may have heard of the pejorative "lifestyle business" in this context, but it's the reason why a lot of small businesses or low-upside startups don't get funded: they just don't have enough TAM to justify a potential home-run outcome.

Second, if we look back to when Bird and Lime blew up, it was still very, very early for these businesses and their breakout trajectory probably didn't look all that dissimilar from other home runs. (Lots of analogues here: how did Clubhouse look in it's early metrics? Probably a lot like Facebook. HQ Trivia probably looked a lot like Zynga's first breakout game.) It's only in hindsight where you're able to look back and see that adoption wasn't what they thought and cities were more adverse to it and so on, but it doesn't mean the investment logic at the time was flawed -- it just means that it didn't work out. Again, any VC will tell you that they'd rather invest 100 times in something with a 1% chance of being Uber than invest in 100 mom-and-pop shops.

I'm sure many people will say "I guess, but it was obvious that they weren't going to make it!", to which I say, yeah, maybe. But it was probably obvious that Uber wasn't going to become Uber until they did; you only need to have in a portfolio to make it because you become A16Z or USV. And if the metrics from the first year look like Uber and the default gameplan is investment-driven, loss-heavy aggressive growth, then it doesn't seem like such a bad bet.
Judges are biased, especially in political cases. Look at the joke of trial in Alex Jone's trial right now to see this. He's literally not allowed to plead his innocence to the jury. De facto ruling based on accusation of not turning over all the evidence.

Biased judges like this, love circular reasoning, to find justifications. Hence why Wikipedia is useful. Keep in mind wikipedia change the definition of a recession recently, than when challanged changed the definition of definition. Just last week.
If they're going to make that many bikes, why not just give them away? Why have them be "shared" and made to be returned to a pile?

It would at least eradicate theft. Most people would have the same model. You could get a handout instead of having it stolen, and if it was stolen, then that person could get the handout. And the only people claiming them would be the ones using them.
> Employees joined these companies and were granted equity at multi billion dollar valuations and investors invested in these companies at multi billion dollar valuations

Hubris and a lack of pragmatism has a cost. Of course the equity is worthless! If you do small things that don’t scale and poop aren’t profitable, and then scale and still aren’t profitable, there’s nowhere else to go.

These investments of time and fiat never seem to ask, “walk me through the milestones you’ll accomplish to corner the market.” Same with Uber (from their S-1): “We include all passenger vehicle miles and all public transportation miles in all countries globally in our TAM, including those we have yet to enter” eye roll

TLDR The koolaid has a bitter aftertaste.

(tangentially, Uber has spent almost $28B and still isn’t profitable)
What do you mean? Wayland obviously isn't useless without GNOME.
Thanks for the post, I have a ti82 with LCD screen issue, I will try this technique!
I wonder if these wild valuations could be kept in check if there were a way to short/buy puts on private companies. There's positive pressure on valuations from the funding, but scant negative pressure.

Scooters-as-a-service can probably be a profitable business worth millions, but you had to be really out of touch to think it could be worth billions.
LinkedIn may be less hypocritical than it first appears:

February 2022: LinkedIn sue Mantheos.

April 18, 2022: TechCrunch runs an article [0] stating that a U.S. appellate court affirms the legality of scraping publicly available data.

So IIUC, LinkedIn was consistently playing to the apparent law.

EDIT: oops, forgot the link!

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/18/web-scraping-legal-court/
Indeed has been doing some version of this since at least 2013, to my knowledge, and probably before. Google Jobs or whatever they're calling it does this exact thing as well (I mean I'm not defending the practice, simply noting that this is the norm among job posting sites)
That is wild!
Are you confident that LinkedIn itself is doing that, rather than some recruiter working for or targeting that different company?

Or a recruitment SaaS that recruiter is using?

(Recruitment seems to be numbers game for a lot of people. And I've noticed a few questionable integrations and duct-tape workflows going on around LinkedIn. I wouldn't be surprised if the phenomenon you noticed was an accident of one of those.)
Bill Russell Has Died
Sounds like quantum bogosort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogosort#Quantum_bogosort

The algorithm generates a random permutation of its input using a quantum source of entropy, checks if the list is sorted, and, if it is not, destroys the universe. Assuming that the many-worlds interpretation holds, the use of this algorithm will result in at least one surviving universe where the input was successfully sorted in O(n) time.
Thanks. The book ended up as 61,000 words - which is not that much compared to all-text books - but lots of pages of resume examples. A "normal" 200 page book could have up to double the number of words (100-120K words). Just want to add that detail, as a "normal" 200-page book in two months would be much more impressive.

I originally aimed for a ~40 page book - a PDF initially -, assumed it will have a few chapters at most. As I started writing and pulling in more advice from recruiters and hiring managers, the chapters added up.

In what is pretty usual for projects you do the first time, I under-estimated the scope, as well as the time it will take. My original budget for time was a month. Not too different from some software projects in a completely new domain :)
Thanks for the question. First of all it isn't a Pen :)

Codepen is a community first while having a pretty limited and slow editor without NPM modules, multiple files, rich console, etc.
Well a start would be educating riders on how to safely park the damned thing when their trip is done, instead of literally dumping it on a sidewalk/pathway, and collect fines for bad stewardship.

You could have motion/orientation sensors to complement the GPS to see if they are moved after the rider parks it. It's far from unsolvable its just that nobody cares or is motivated.
Giant ichthyosaur fossils reveal the last days of Triassic marine reptiles
I can’t tell if it’s because they had a good process and the tools didn’t fit or because they have a terrible process and nothing was going to work for them anyway

I see the latter much more often when I jump companies and Google’s projects have had terrible API stability so I’m not really sure Git is to blame here
A Cyberattack Illuminates the Shaky State of Student Privacy
Wow, love it! Thanks.
What are the implications on quantum gravity?
this is the best google secret ive seen in a long time
Because capitalism and accountants prevent you from giving stuff away.
I wish we would build social housing for people with some of the money our society throws in the burning dumpster of startups.

See how they do social housing in Vienna (it's nice).

https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr_edge_featd_articl...
Linkedin has always been a shitty company, so I bet they've been scraping the entire time.
Cars cost money to drive, so there is value in not making every trip a car trip even if you needed to buy a car anyways. And that's ignoring the costs of building your town exclusively around car travel. Even in places where you regularly need to use a car, there is value in balancing things so you don't have to use a car every single time you leave your house.
Nothing of value was lost, considering that opening after opening google.com you have to dismiss cookies page, and do it every time if you, as you should, use google.com in private mode.
America is hard to say because it's a bit of a conservative place and highly tuned to reject anything novel on "dangerous" grounds. But I'm curious about urban micro mobility in developing South and South East Asia.

This stuff must have failed there, but I wonder why it didn't displace a 50 cc motorbike. Storage capacity? Range? Ease of refuel?
> “The Bitcoin dream is all but dead.”

> “Bitcoin is a fraud. It’s worse than tulip bulbs. It won’t end well.”

Not sure if this is meant to be a subversive crypto-promo, or author actually considers Bitcoin successful by associating its price with legitimacy. It was meant to be a currency, and it's become an investment vehicle. That's not success.

I'd suggest applying the 20-year rule here; ignore anything after 2002 so we can get a proper historical perspective, and is less subject to opinions like ours.
An example of US VCs squandering on scooter startups is bike sharing in China?
Nice work!

Any plans to support cron monitoring / time of day monitoring? Something akin to cronitor?
The Raspberry Pi Pico has opened the door to young experimenters thanks to the MMBasic programming language from Geoff Graham. There are several excellent videos that explain the setup and operation. The Pico is actually available for $4. The software and manual (PDF) are free to download. It is super easy to get started - 5 minutes and you're writing software that can solve problems and control I/O.

PicoMite: Running BASIC on a Raspberry Pi Pico

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxmjy1nz6MM

PicoMiteVGA Raspberry Pi Pico Running BASIC on VGA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIK1ujslHHI

....
This is not even a hindsight 20/20 situation.

The math never made sense. They were too brittle to make the LTV turn profitable. Maybe people were hoping for subsidies?

Practicality-wise, they neither belonged to the sidewalk (too fast) or the road (can't deal with obstacles).
Squandered isn't harsh at all. The deployment of capital was disproportionate to the size of the profitable business that will result. It could have been better spent elsewhere... or saved.
I've got a few.

I rather like my Logitech MX Master mouse. I have 2. The unlatching of the click mechanism of the scroll wheel at high speed is my favorite thing, possibly, of any of my PC peripherals, which is odd because I didn't consider scrolling to be that big a part of my day, but I miss it when using other mice. I'm disappointed that the rubber on the scroll wheel is melting, however, but I still love it.

Back when conventional thinking said it was Wacom or bust, I gambled on a cheap Huion H610. At a fraction of the cost of the equivalent Wacom, I was skeptical, but amateur reviews looked promising. Initially it was dodgy but they persisted with driver updates and it became a perfectly decent drawing tablet with the specs an artist cares about and fine drivers (also works plug and play with Win8/10). The only downside with my unit is that it has a battery in the pen, a limitation fixed in later revisions.

Also, a good trade-level cordless drill (I went DeWalt) is also a huge improvement from cheap sub $100 units, and I'm quite fond of that too, because it feels very precise and I've spent too much time with crap tools to ever forget.
I don’t know i live downtown and it’s crazy how utilized the scooters are.
That's a pretty narrow specialty, and suspect it's not the kind of thing you easily jump to from general woodworking skills.
If you have money for a house the look into countries that incentivize investment immigration. Some of them might even consider real estate for that purpose. And once you get through the door aren’t EU open border anyways?
On my Thinkpad T60, Wayland is useless with and without GNOME. It just doesn't work, and nobody on the project gives a shit. So, instead of shelling out for a new computer when the one I have works fine, I stick with X11.

Fuck Wayland.
I’ve used those Snappy brand cutters in a handheld cordless drill. It’s workable but tricky. You need to start with light pressure and high speed until the cutters score a clean circle, then gradually increase the pressure. The workpiece absolutely needs to be clamped down with zero movement, and it helps if you can find a way to brace your upper body and the drill as you work. The trickiest part is keeping the cutter perfectly square to the work in both axes —- if you tip it too far you’re likely to shatter the cutter as the metal is very brittle.
Scooter startups have in my opinion totally missed their target market.

Sit looking at a scooter on a street in a city, and you'll see perhaps 10,000 people walk past the scooter before one person uses it.

So, in the 'go short distances' market, walking has 99.99% of the market, and the scooter industry has 0.01% market share.

In my view, that's a total failure. Scooter companies should have interviewed each person who walked past a scooter and asked themselves, why didn't that person use our product?

In many cases, it's a combination of cost, friction of setting up an app and account, and fear of something going wrong and being fined (for example, parking the scooter out of the operating zone).

Scooter companies should have solved all those issues. You should be able to use the scooter entirely for free, without an app or any registration, perhaps limited to 10 minutes or 5 mph.

Then, encourage people to pay for more time or more speed when they become accustomed to being able to get around quicker.
Trillions of dollars and the majority of our urban land have been dedicated to making driving easy and biking hard. The government built toll-free highways, and mandates builders of housing, retail, and offices to include excessive amounts of parking (parking minimums). Once all of this subsidized infrastructure is built each individual's rational choice is to drive in 30 min instead of risking death by biking or ride a bus for two hours.
This is a perfect example of path-dependent policy. Because the decision was to select for freight, other kinds of rail are "unfeasible". I'm using scare quotes to suggest that it's not really unfeasible, it's a choice.

And since trucking capacity has been maxed out in the US for quite a while (Amazon is the big mover for this situation, even before covid), you can bet this path dependence is biting us now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence
This would be nice, but it's also possible to get cheaper rent by just, y'know, letting people build housing easily. That's how the rent in Seoul and Tokyo is surprisingly reasonable, despite being megacities.

We're now at a point where rent prices are higher in Columbus Ohio than Tokyo (1). Part of this is probably average apartment sizes being smaller in Tokyo, but still, that seems insane to me.

1 - https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
Google Code was great but the reason it sunset was because GitHub ate its lunch (just like Google Code ate Sourceforge before that). It would have distracted their resources to focus on that and the billions their spending to get developers on GCP are not influenced by the presence or lack of Google Code (which you can tell because Microsoft owns GitHub and that doesn’t meaningfully impact Azure)
My DM42 broke in under 2 weeks and Swissmicros support was completely unreachable. I would strongly recommend getting a used older HP calculator instead.
I've built things with my child, mostly carpentry; ranging from doll beds to chicken pen and furniture and some other things. Whenever possible we draw out plans and have her calculate angles and distances and work up "bill of material" lists. Practical math. Pythagorean theorem is far easier to remember when you have a real use for it (how long do we cut this brace board?).
>Rural areas account for 14% of the US population. Why should they have veto power over the urban planning and transportation policy in metro areas?

They shouldn't. And neither should the urban planners have veto power of the planning and transportation policy of rural areas. Yet in my experience, these conversations never stop at "I want my urban area to be less car focused". It always seems to extend to "I can't wait until we ban cars everywhere"
> But there are bike lanes available.

"Available" is a strong word. There are many streets in NYC that lack them, and Casey Neistat's infamous video on bike lanes illustrates what happens in places where they exist.

I am already jaded to the point of having no trust in people to adhere to lights or signs when they believe it is in their interest to do otherwise. Anyone could jaywalk, drive in the bike lane, blow a red, or take a rolling stop, or make an illegal right-on-red. If you do not have infrastructure that violently enforces those rules, such as concrete bollards, or make them extremely convenient and desirable for individuals to choose to follow, such as detection loops that turn the light green as soon as it is safe to cross, those rules may as well not exist.

> Would you feel comfortable with an older member of your family taking a walk on a Sunday while trusting e bikers not to bowl them over turning around a corner on the sidewalk, going the opposite way on a one-way street, or running a red light?

If you ask me why I'd feel uncomfortable, it's because of cars, by a long shot, every time. The risk profile in both probability and magnitude is just so much worse with cars. Take space away from cars and give it back to people; it creates tons of additional space for everyone to maneuver, improves visibility, and calms the streets, all of which filters down to preventing accidents that people on bikes and scooters cause as well.
I don’t see why a project should strive for a lack of leadership

Most things in life that don’t have leadership become messy and disorganized and eventually disintegrate into an unstable hell with no real focus
I've tried a few things that I genuinely enjoyed and I wish I haven't, they were also problems I personally had.

Now I think the best question to ask before building anything online is: "can I sell this to people?" If the answer is no or maybe, then consider it a hobby.

Unfortunately sales is not solved by building things I love.
All they have to do is send a push notification and the timestamps they're after. Then I can review the content and choose to approve the request. Incredibly basic, easy stuff. I'm sure a lot of people would be cool with it.
I'm not sure who these are for, but it definitely isn't me.

According to some back-of-the-napkin math I did:

- Most items are marked up 16%

- There's a ~$5-15 service fee (that's WITH Instacart+)

- And most of the sources I saw showed that you should tip between 10-20% (which they deserve, given what I've seen of how they're paid).

While I could absolutely see using the service if I was having a party and couldn't leave to pick up some forgotten items, paying $60-80 extra on top of my $200 grocery bill is too rich for my blood.
Astounding. They do everything on an epic scale, even squandering.
I think if you offer to sell to them, they will probably give you a lowball offer.

Instead, maybe consider trying to grow it on your own, see where you can take it, and if it shows some reasonable traction, a big player would probably definitely offer to swallow you up at a good offer so that they get the better technology that's already been demonstrated to work in a production environment.

Just my $0.02 :)
As noted elsewhere, it's not either/or here. Some wrappers are worth having and add huge value: Ring vs HttpServletRequest is a classic example, Cognitect's AWS libraries -- built on the same principle -- are another.

Wrapping Java Time, on the other hand, is a bit pointless because it's already a value-based system with a "mostly functional" approach that is straightforward to use via interop.

On the other hand, if you want to write portable -- .cljc -- code that manipulates date/time values, you _do_ want a wrapper so that your code works on both the JVM (using Java Time under the hood) and in JS (using whatever is the appropriate JS lib behind the scenes).
> But these Bird scooters look like they're around $500? If you're using the thing like 2 or 3 times a day, it won't take long at $5 / ride before it makes more sense to just buy one for yourself.

Theft. I live in a city where you can expect any portable form of transportation to get stolen, from inside your house's garage at that.

Renting offloads the risk of theft to someone else.
My reading is that "squandered" doesn't refer to the potential market for scooter-sharing services itself, but to the poor strategy of pumping an insane amount of money into a new/untested category in a very short amount of time.
Intel got money so it can buy congressman. Normal citizens can’t, so their opinions don’t matter. You can see the
skyrocketing profits for companies and at the same time dropping peoples income and their living standards. That’s inherent to how American idea of democracy works, but it got particularly bad over the past two decades.
The tutorial was well-done. I added the PWA on my phone and look forward to trying the full selection.
Maybe last-mile mobility is a problem that requires public-private partnership.

Public communication does not need to bring profits, it needs to serve the citizens. If public communication limits need for parking space, limits traffic jams and polution, that's a win.

A number of cities introduced city-wide bike sharing networks that are paid, but subsidized. Sometimes it was more successful, sometimes less, but at least a few cities proved it can work. They can also work with the public transport card, removing the need for an app.

Maybe the same can be applied to scooters? With the current approach they'll disappear in a few years, as their prices are too high, but having to maintain and charge them daily adds a lot of operational costs.
It’s the convenience of not having to carry one around.