Yes, I read the article and I applied an idea I took from one of the first articles on Nate Silver's 538 'news' site [0] of using Bayesian statistics to decode news as you read it and in my opinion the data presented is very underwhelming and there isn't any firm ground they are standing on here.
Here's my 'Bayesian logic' applied to it. My 'prior believe' in the claim being made is that I don't believe Uber has broad penetration across all demographics. Yes, people who are in the tech world and under 30 know of them, but not much outside of that. I was the first one of all my friends to use Uber (I would know because I have gotten over $60 in credits for signing them up). So outside of SF, my initial personal belief is that Uber doesn't have wide usage. So either the largest demographic of DUI violators are nerds who are younger than 30 or Uber is magically being used by people who would prefer using a more expensive Uber service than driver over a cheap taxi ride.
So let's look at the evidence they provide to see if it changes my prior significantly: one city was explicitly given data about without any hint as to what time-frame they are talking about. The other cities were literally the equivalent of hearsay arguments so because I'm the judge of this court, that evidence doesn't count. When you're talking about month-over-month and even year-over-year trends, a drop of 10% is just as easily explained by a random process modeled as a poisson [1] over the entrance of Uber. I would know having dealt with lots of time series data.
One finally comment, my apologies to the author of the bar chart, but that is just terrible. It's hard to read and doesn't make much sense from looking at it first. How many bar-chart graphs are out there that look like that? It could just be me speaking aesthetically because I'm weirded out by the random floating bars in the middle, but I feel Edward Tufte would have something to say about that.
jusitizin, I know you weren't speaking to me directly, but I read the article. Hope this comment proves it :)
It actually doesn't even provide data for two cities, just one. It talks about anecdotal data that is the equivalent of hearsay: "we consistently hear from our riders in Chicago and elsewhere."
I wholly agree with this article. The exact point the author is getting at is something that I have been trying to say, but rather inarticulately (probably because I didn't actually go out and survey people and define "what is programming and what is wrong with it").
I really can't wait for programming to be more than just if statements and thinking about code as a grouping of ascii files and glueing libraries together. Things like Akka are nice steps in that direction.
I find this sentence very weirdly written from a stat viewpoint and not helpful at all to the "average" reader.
>>>>About one in 14 tech workers is black or Latino both in the Silicon Valley and nationally. Blacks and Hispanics make up 13.1 and 16.9 percent of the U.S. population, respectively, according to the most recent Census data.
Why didn't they say about 7% rather than 1 in 14?
1/14 ~=7.14..%
I accidentally scrolled into the comment section and my head imploded. Thank goodness for HN :)
People will look back upon this date with utter lament because the world of lambdas has been unleashed upon a much more dangerous and wider world of programmers.
There is also a complete lack of tests. It'd be nice if there was a library of tests for all sorting algorithms. I'm sure there is, but something more widely accepted and well known.
There already are a pair of data-driven journalists at the WSJ whose day-to-day sounds more like a data scientist than a typical journalist. They are Tom McGinty and Rob Barry.
They gave a great talk recently, which I wrote about (shameless plug below), summarizing how they investigated the Asiana airline crash in SF recently and what their day looks like. They're brilliant:
The demotivation poster (we'll ask for estimates, but then treat them as deadlines) really strikes a chord because that is one of my major 'gripes' with the agile planning process. Particularly when a manager is heavily involved in that process. It may be no coincidence that the best projects I have been on are the ones where the manager deliberately stepped out of the room or was not a part of those phases of the planning process.
Agile is part of a more disturbing trend I've noticed [0] of companies striving very hard to turn software into a literal sausage-making factory [1] and to make software engineers just another cog in the machine or a replaceable part to fatten the bottom line with a lower salary. This is provably the aim of some of the top companies given news on no-hire agreements. [10].
[0] with Java being the favored "currency" of programming languages being the other disturbing trend-- it's much easier to replace a Java programmer than any other for a reason
[1] you know what they say about how sausages are made
Thanks @acoustic, it's always nice to see bunk-busting. Just looking at the quote makes the statistic sounds hard to believe. Did the story include drop-outs like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg?
Wasn't criticizing the sale at all (edited to clarify tone), just found it interestingly related.
I use it myself, but not sure about the 5 years wager. One of the main reasons quite a few people I know use it is precisely because it wasn't Facebook. My bet is FB guts it and tries to {force, gently-push} everyone to switch to their well-designed app. But the FB app is probably too bandwidth-hungry for most WhatsApp users.
I welcome the change and think it is a good solution.
I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet, especially for the HN crowd, but it's relatively easy for any developer to write a bot to auto-register them-self. One could even use Selenium.
There is a very popular Google Developer's MeetUp and space for 200+ runs out in less than 5 minutes of unannounced meetings opening up for registration. I am 100% sure that a lot of bots can and do register for these events.
Just another thought, I have grown to completely mistrust any 'well-used' rating service and thus must say Uber and the like has a long way to go before I will trust their ratings by one iota.
I remember a friend once opened up a bakery and sent out an email to friends and family to review it on Yelp. So within a week of opening, there were 100+ 4-5 star reviews. I've stopped using Yelp since then and have found a great new review since then that I hope businesses don't discover, and so far they haven't, and so far the reviews are spot on.
The role of government (in theory) is to serve the people and it will not make any extra profit (aside from bribery, which again, leads to job loss) and in fact lose their "elected" jobs if their regulations fail to protect people.
Uber and other companies have a monetary incentive to squelch and play down bad reviews. In a pure capitalistic system, one should simply follow the money and realize that '1.0 regulation' doesn't sound so bad compared to '2.0' regulation by companies that have a vested interest in manipulating it to their means.
Interesting post, however I have two things to bring up.
1) The author works at Union Square Ventures, which has a vested interest in '2.0' regulation. A quick search shows that although it might not be directly related to Uber, it is certainly in the ride-sharing space to the tune of $30 million [0]. I am sorry, but whenever someone (not the author personally, but still...) has that much money on the table, it's hard not to take what they say with a grain of salt.
2) What exactly is meant by the "real world"? Just because the Internet is not a thing we can touch or see, that does not make it "not real" and thus things that apply to the real world equally apply to things that are on the Internet and vis a vice (which is a nice point the author does make).
In either case, I do agree that something needs to be changed and there is something obviously foul with some of the things I have read recently such as that NYC had has gone from 10,000 to ~13,500 Taxi medallions over the past 30 years, which is just bupkis. Throw that in with the fact that American-born taxi drivers are a rare thing, the average taxi driver makes less than minimum wage and the owners of the medallions make a killing imply something is wrong. Please let me know if you'd like sources for what I just said, I'm sure I read most of this on HN though.
http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/