The consensus is that U/L's aggressive political campaigning prior to the vote backfired big time. They really screwed up on messaging by not understanding their audience. Had they made it about losing 10,000 jobs, they might have won. Hell, if they had just not called people multiple times without consent, they might have won.
There are multiple efforts going on as a result of the vote. Former U/L drivers are trying to put together a rally. A non-profit group (Ride Austin) has sprung up to replace U/L. Certain council members are trying to fight the rest of the council. The state legislature is consider a bill that would pre-empt city legislation.
This isn't particularly difficult anymore. The most interesting challenges in web crawling around turning a diaspora of web content into usable data. E.g., how to get prices from 10 million product listings from 1,000 different e-retailers?
Trying to triangulate based on where players' eyes are looking rarely works. In many cases, the goalie is looking in a completely different direction than where the ball is. I guess that's why they're getting scored on.
Datafiniti - Data Engineer and Distributed Systems Engineer, Austin, TX
Data Engineer
Data engineers form the core of Datafiniti. You’ll be responsible for turning customer needs into usable data in Datafiniti. You’ll also be responsible for developing tools to help monitor and improve overall data quality. You should be familiar with data structures and basic algorithms, as well as have experience in 1-2 programming languages (Javascript a plus).
Distributed Systems Engineer
As a Distributed Systems Engineer, you’ll be responsible for developing, expanding and managing a highly-scalable architecture that handles our web crawlers, database and other applications. Familiarity with the following technologies will help in this role: Cassandra, Ruby, Erlang (or another functional language), Java, AWS, and Chef.
We're experimenting with a new way to power our Datafiniti search engine. Essentially you get paid for running a distributed web crawler through any Chrome Extension.
Datafiniti is the world's only search engine for data. We crawl and index close to 1 million websites each month to create structured, searchable data. Right now we have over 70,000,000 records on businesses, people, and products - and growing.
Build bleeding-edge technology with a team that's all good people. We're looking for experienced or junior-level sales and back-end developers. See https://www.datafiniti.net/home/careers to learn more.
At Datafiniti, you'll get to work on an absurdly ambitious problem - building the world's first search engine for data. We solve challenges that push the boundaries of what a search engine can do. Here are a few of the awesome things we work on:
- Managing thousands of cloud nodes
- Processing content from billions of URLs
- Automatically converting web page content to valuable data
We're looking to fill roles for:
- Sales Engineer: work with our clients team to implement customer projects.
- Data Engineer: improve the coverage and quality of our data.
- Ops Engineer: improve the scale and reliability our search engine infrastructure.
We're building the world's first search engine for data at Datafiniti. Work on fascinating problems that involve working with billions of data points, building intelligent agents, scaling out massive data collection, and more.
We have a small, close-knit team that enjoys working and hanging out together. Sending an email to [email protected] will go straight to me, the CEO & founder.
We're working on this problem at Datafiniti (https://www.datafiniti.net). Since we index hundreds of sources for a similar service, we can leverage some basic string comparison techniques to normalize records from different sources and fill in attributes that are missing from any one source.
Datafiniti is the world's first search engine for data. Datafiniti's search results are complete data sets taken and aggregated from the web. You can search for information on places, people, products and pretty much any data available on the web. We are converting the entire web into a single, searchable database of knowledge.
In addition to our search engine product, we assist clients with a wide variety of custom data collection projects. We're looking to hire someone that can work on our clients team as a project developer to implement and manage these projects.
We're a small, close-knit team, so you'll have the opportunity to make a big impact on the company and its future success.
There are multiple efforts going on as a result of the vote. Former U/L drivers are trying to put together a rally. A non-profit group (Ride Austin) has sprung up to replace U/L. Certain council members are trying to fight the rest of the council. The state legislature is consider a bill that would pre-empt city legislation.