Practical Deep Learning for Coders - <AUTHOR> http://course.fast.ai <comment><USER3> I've been coding for 20 years and professionally for almost 15 and I started watching the first video and found it to be pretty difficult to follow. I think you make a pretty common mistake that a lot of technical people do, which is take for granted how much "institutional" knowledge you have.

The topics touched on in the first 30 minutes of the video include: AWS, Jupityr Notebooks, Neural Networks, Tmux, and a few others. I understand that this is the reality of the situation today (very large up front cost of setting everything up) but it would be better to not even touch upon something like Tmux because it's not absolutely essential and just results in information overload. You can replace it with something like "I like using Tmux to save my terminal sessions, check out the wiki to learn more" instead of "here's this 3 minute tutorial on Tmux in the middle of how to use Jupyter notebooks". Very few people are smart enough to be concentrating on following what's going on with AWS/Jupyter notebooks and then pause that, process the Tmux stuff, and then context switch back to AWS/Jupyter.

There's a reason why the wiki/forums are so invaluable. There's definitely some really good information in the videos so if you guys had the time I really hope you edit the videos to an "abridged" versions that focus on only 1 topic instead of jumping around so much.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great point - but I would like to add that the expectation is that people put in at least 10 hours a week. So the amount of material is designed to be what you can learn in 10 hours of study, with the support of the wiki and forums.

The lessons are not designed to stand alone, or to be watched just once straight through.

The details around setting up an effective environment are a key part of the course, not a diversion. We really want to show all the pieces of the applied deep learning puzzle.

In a more standard MOOC setting this would have been many more lessons , each one much shorter - but we felt the upside of having the live experience with people asking questions was worth the compromise.

I hope you stick with it and if you do I'd be interested to here if you still feel the same way at the end. We're doing another course next year so feedback is important. On the whole most our in-person students ended up liking the approach, although most found it more intensive than they expected. (We did regular anonymous surveys. )

<comment><USER4> Awesome stuff, but please let's not pretend that tmux is an important piece of the applied deep learning puzzle that needs to have anything to do with the intensiveness of the course.

<comment><AUTHOR> I apologise if that's how my response came across. what I was trying to express is that I wish to show what I believe are best practices, and these tools are used throughout the course. I do not mean to suggest that tmux is critical, or that there are not other good options.

Personally I enjoy seeing how others setup and use their tools, and feel it is underappreciated in many courses; attempting to fill that gap is a little of my particular bias.

<comment><USER5> > Personally I enjoy seeing how others setup and use their tools, and feel it > is underappreciated in many courses

Interesting - that explains a lot, thanks. Sorry to say, but I for one _hate_ courses / tutorials where the tutor tries to force me to use his/her pet technology, totally unrelated to the topic at hand. I have always wondered what made them do it, and I guess they just want to help.

Still, if you want to be helpful, show me this favorite tech of yours and optionally point me to a separate resource for learning it, I might check it out sometime. But I didn't come here to learn tmux, I came for deep learning. My time is precious so please don't waste it. I would understand if you wanted to teach me basics of TensorFlow (and TensorBoard) or similar, but tmux, vi, emacs, bash,... are all outside the scope. IMHO of course. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is really stunning. I can't wait to commence to course. I finished a Masters from a top-50 worldwide university, and frankly, the approach to data science was mediocre at best. The NLP module notes were plagiarised from Stanford and we were quite happy with this! It gave us a break from 20 year old textbooks that set the plodding pace for the Data Mining module. And don't get me started on my deep learning dissertation. The only expert in the uni on the topic got poached by facebook halfway through the project. The universities are finding it difficult to keep up and are resorting to 'interesting' techniques to retain talent - witness the Turing Institute in the UK. They gave out titles to many professors in several universities a year or so ago... as I gather, as a precursor to pivotal data science research.

<comment><USER7> I applied for Masters in ML , in one of these univ ,

CMU, UT Austin, Georgia Tech, UCSD..

I am not in US, thought getting MS in one of these would boost chances of getting into something like google brain, or Open AI..

Is it waste of time and money in your opinion?

<comment><USER7> If someone thought ^ this was sarcastic, sorry, I was just genuinely wondering wether the exposure to top research in grad schools is worth investing

<comment><USER8> MS won't be so fruitful unless you do some research and publish (which is difficult and also many university don't support giving research work to MS student).

Its better to go for Ph.D. Remember for going into openai or google brain you need to be among top even after Ph.D.

<comment><USER9> I'll note that my MS was hugely useful and didn't result in publications directly. The mileage of your MS or PhD is dependent on many factors.

OpenAI and Google Brain, like most other more research driven deep learning institutions, are more interested in the results you can produce rather than the accreditation you hold. Publications obviously count but well used or written deep learning projects / packages would too. Many PhDs who come out having spent many years in academia still wouldn't get an offer from these places and many of the talented people I know in these places don't have a PhD either.

To the parent of this post, I'd also look into what I'd refer to as "Masters in industry" i.e. Google Brain Residency[1] and other similar opportunities. From their page, "The residency program is similar to spending a year in a Master's or Ph.D. program in deep learning. Residents are expected to read papers, work on research projects, and publish their work in top tier venues. By the end of the program, residents are expected to gain significant research experience in deep learning.". This is likely an even more direct path than most institutions would provide. Though obviously the competition is fierce, many of my friends who participated in this ended up with a paper in a top tier conference by the end of the.

[1]: [https://www.google.com/about/careers/search#!t=jo&jid=147545...](https://www.google.com/about/careers/search#!t=jo&jid=147545001&)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi all, Jeremy Howard here. I'm the instructor for this MOOC - feel free to ask any questions here.

<comment><USER10> Just FYI: The AWS console UI is currently different in a number of ways from the interface shown in the "how to set up your aws deep learning server" video, beyond what is accounted for in the overlay-text amendments to the video. (e.g. creating a user has 4 involved steps before you get to see the security credentials, including setting up a user group and access policies for that group -- I made my user have the AdministratorAccess policy...)

<comment><USER11> * I would amend the above comment to say that setting up a user group is not required (although it is not exactly clear that it is not).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thanks for announcing this, looks amazing! As somebody that's been toying around with deep learning and machine learning, I've been wondering what the steps are to move from 'cool example' to viable product. I know somebody else mentioned something general like that in another comment, but I had a concrete example.

For instance, it's extremely easy to set up an MNIST clone and achieve almost world-record performance for single character recognition with a simple CNN. But how do you expand that to a real example, for instance to do license plate OCR? Or receipt OCR? Do you have to do two models, 1 to perform localization (detecting license plates or individual items in a receipt) and then a second model which can perform OCR from the regions detected from the first model? Or are these usually done with a single model that can do it all?

I'm not sure if answering these questions is a goal of your course, or if they're perhaps naive questions to begin with.

<comment><AUTHOR> They are excellent questions and that indeed is exactly the goal of this course. I hope you try it out and let us know if you find the answers you need.

For this particular question, a model that does localization and then integrated classification is called an "attentional model". It's an area of much active research. If your images aren't too big, or the thing you're looking for isn't too small in the image, you probably won't need to worry about it.

And if you do need to worry about it, then it can be done very easily - <USER2> 7 shows two methods to do localization, and you can just do a 2nd pass on the cropped images manually. For a great step by step explanation, see the winners of the Kaggle Right Whale competition: [http://blog.kaggle.com/2016/01/29/noaa-right-whale- recogniti...](http://blog.kaggle.com/2016/01/29/noaa-right-whale-recognition- winners-interview-1st-place-deepsense-io/)

(There are more sophisticated integrated techniques, such as the one used by Google for viewing street view house numbers. But you should only consider that if you've tried the simple approaches and found they don't work.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I see a lot of criticism about tmux and other non-core items being included in the overall curriculum. I think the author is trying to portray the workflow he is currently on and exposing the full tool kit he uses. I don't think he is saying - this is "THE" approach one has to follow. I for one think that this is a perfectly legitimate way of teaching. People can leave out pieces which do not interest them or substitute them with other tool sets if they chose to.

For me the key take away here is that - some one who has been a consistent beater in the Kaggle competition for two years and the founder of a ML company is teaching a "hands-on" course which fills a gap (from tech talk to step-by- step hands on) and I think I can live with this method of teaching.

</comment><comment><USER14> Just going to through this out there, but this course is also geared for beginners and has been loads of fun to create: [https://www.kadenze.com/courses/creative-applications-of- dee...](https://www.kadenze.com/courses/creative-applications-of-deep- learning-with-tensorflow/info)

</comment><comment><USER7> How does this compare to udacity's deep learning course?

Or should I take a more theoretical course such as Andrew Ng's to get into ML?

<comment><USER15> If you're getting started I totally recommend Andrew NGs course...

<comment><AUTHOR> Strongly agree. Andrew's course is a great choice to take before this one, if you have the time. It's not a prerequisite however.

The Udacity course has a very different aim - it covers much less territory and takes much less time. If you're just wanting to get a taste of deep learning, it's a very good option, but it's not a great platform to build longer term capability on IMHO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm currently taking the Udacity Self-Programming Car Engineer nanodegree; I'm currently working on the lab right before the 2nd project lesson (I'm in the November cohort). That lab is to re-create the LeNET 5 CNN in TensorFlow (we have to re-create the layers of the convnet).

Last night I spent an hour or so getting my system (Ubuntu 14.04 LTS) set up to use CUDA and cudnn with Python 3; setting up the drivers and everything for TensorFlow under Anaconda - for my GTX-750ti.

That wasn't really straightforward, but I ultimately got it working. It probably isn't needed for the course, but it was fun to learn how to do it.

I would like to take this fast.ai course as well, but so far the Udacity one is eating all of my (free) time. Maybe I can give it a shot in the future.

<comment><USER17> I have used and recommend [nvidia-docker]([https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia- docker](https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia-docker)) for exploration (at least for those with a docker-capable kernel as the base OS).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hey, so I know that 0.90 isn't much... But is there a difference between running the programs on AWS than on my local computer with my mediocre video card? Will they take much longer to trian? I honestly don't know the difference so I'm asking

<comment><USER19> Your mediocre graphics card may or may not have CUDA support. If it doesn't, or it only supports an old version, then it's the same as not having a graphics card at all. And of course, Nvidia only.

If it supported, then the major difference is GPU memory, which limits the size of the network you can train. The newest models are faster than some 1-2 year old ones, but older hardware does the job fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> In addition to this excellent advice, I'll just add that my experience is that a 2GB CUDA compatible card is (just) enough to complete this course. Although 4GB makes life _much_ easier

<comment><USER20> Any recommendations for the cheapest (but not "penny wise, pound foolish") HW setup that meets these requirements for course completion?

<comment><USER21> This is what I have and it's been holding up great for everything I've wanted to do till now. Core i3 6100, Nvidia GTX 950 2GB, 8GB DDR4 RAM. Did not try running a neural net on the GPU, but it should do the job. The whole thing - [http://lonesword.in/hardware/2015/11/10/Assembled-a- computer...](http://lonesword.in/hardware/2015/11/10/Assembled-a- computer.html) \- including the cheap table and chair cost me around 60K indian rupees which roughly translates to 1000 USD - but that's because computer components are around 30-40% more expensive in India than in the US.

<comment><USER22> In same boat here. Early this year I put together a PC with GTX 750 TI 2GB.

What do you think of this? Will this work fine?

<comment><USER16> I just set up CUDA and cudnn for python3 and tensorflow last night on my machine - with that same card. That card should have 640 cuda cores; every little bit counts, imho. I'm not really sure what the difference will be compared to what I was doing before, but anything has to be better than the quad-core cpu I'm currently using (some older AMD thing).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Hi Jeremy, looking forward to going through these. Thanks for sharing. Very noble decision to make them free.

I am wondering, why you chose to leave Enlitic and start fast.ai?

<comment><AUTHOR> Probably too long a story for an HN comment! ;)

In short, my wife got sick and needed brain surgery while she was pregnant, and I ended up being away from Enlitic for nearly a year. It made me reassess what I really wanted to do with my time.

Now that I spend all my time coding and teaching, I'm much happier. And I think that making deep learning more accessible for all will be more impactful than working with just one company. Deep learning has been ridiculously exclusive up until now, on the whole, and very few people are researching in the areas that I think matter the most.

Finally, I think I achieved what I set out to do with Enlitic - deep learning for medicine is now recognized as having great potential and lots of folks are working on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Thanks for sharing this -- I've been doing hobby-level work with computer vision on the side for a couple years now, but always kinda hit a wall when moving beyond anything trivial. I'll give this a shot and see where it takes me!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I know just what you mean. Check out the feedback from Christopher Kelly here, who describes something very similar: [http://course.fast.ai/testimonials.html](http://course.fast.ai/testimonials.html) . Perhaps you'll find some inspiration there...

I really hope that you get past the wall! If you do find yourself getting stuck, demotivated, etc, please do come join the community on the forums, since they can really help overcome any issues you have: [http://forums.fast.ai/](http://forums.fast.ai/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> >>you need access to a computer with an Nvidia GPU, along with a python-based deep learning stack set up on it.

Is NVidia GPU a must have... can I workaround?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you can get by with an AMD GPU but it'll be a lot more work, and a lot more frustration.

It's worth spending the $0.90 per hour to use AWS, or less if you get spot instances.

You can do much of your prototyping on just a CPU, and only run on the GPU on more data once it's working well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is absolutely amazing. Thanks for the effort. How do we join the slack group for interactive help/questions?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our preference is for most questions to go through the forums. When you join the forums you'll get more information on why we think that's best for the overall community (in short, because it's easier for others to find answers when they are organized by topic), and also how to access the Slack channel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Can i use google compute engine instead of aws ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Last time I checked they didn't have GPU virtual machines. So no, probably not. If there is a way to run jupyter notebooks on GPU machines on Google, I'd certainly be interested in learning about it.

<comment><USER28> They announced they'll start offering GPU instances in early 2017:

[https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/11/announcing- GPUs...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/11/announcing-GPUs-for- Google-Cloud-Platform.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is great! Thanks for sharing!</comment>


Tell HN: The comment box can be resized - <AUTHOR>

Ok, I admit my spouse is has a point when it is pointed out that I don't pay attention. But I never thought about the little dots in the lower right corner until I noticed them yesterday.<p>Gosh that makes life easier, [in a packing tables v knee pads kind of way]. <comment><USER2> That's not a feature of the site but a feature of your browser.

</comment><comment><USER3> Even nicer: use the ItsAllText Firefox extension: click "edit" and use your favourite editor, fullscreen if you want. (There are probably equivalent solutions for other browsers.)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Knee pads reference in third block here:

[<http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/bez0int-4>]</comment>


Show HN: compress your Twitter timeline into Top 5 - <AUTHOR> http://micro.itrend.tv/

<comment><AUTHOR> 'basic' version is working, 'premium' isn't out yet - collecting feedback and feature requests. Thanks everyone.</comment>


Twitter: Hackers Accessed Private Messages for Elite Accounts - <AUTHOR> https://threatpost.com/twitter-hackers-private-messages-elite-accounts/157657/ <comment><USER2> Now the FBI is investigating. If it was the same amount of accounts for regular users, who want to bet this would already be swept under the rug?

<comment><USER3> Well sure, but doesn't that seem sensible? The consequences are greater when the accounts are those that belong to people with a lot of power.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looking at the direction that application design is moving towards right now with centralisation of user information into data storage in the cloud, this will only get worse. Just needs a small exploitable vector exposed (whether human or machine) to result in another mass data leak.

<comment><USER5> The antidote is to pretend everything you say to a computer is public record.

That's not reasonable, of course, but having it in mind changes your behavior.

<comment><USER6> This isn't feasible, not even remotely. I work from home, do I just stop doing my job? Because I cannot possibly work under such an assumption, at all. I can pretend to, but there is way enough that I must communicate that really should not become public. A lot of other people are in the same boat I guess, especially these days.

Also, not sending anything remotely personal through my phone would make it very, very hard to keep in touch with friends and family. I can't travel to see all of them all the time, and Covid makes meeting the local ones really difficult, too.

I don't think it's constructive to cast huge societal issues as individual failings, with remedies that are absurdly impractical. That only helps to perpetuate the problem.

<comment><USER7> I think you're really over-estimating how much of what you say would be bad if it were public record, to be honest.

<comment><USER8> Also the fact that if literally everything everyone said on a computer was public record it'd be so noisy and such a mess nobody would bother looking at what random average people are saying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Perhaps all this was a type of "burn it down", punk activism, and it will be released on twitter for public download. The BTC could have been their funding mechanism. Not for profit, but for the lolz in an election year?

</comment><comment><USER10> A subset of these messages could be leaked to produce very different optics. Say, only leak the wildest messages sent to certain celebrities or politicians in order to create the perception that their fanbase is purely of that kind, while holding back the more reasonable messages that may make up the majority.

<comment><USER11> Let's not forget this is almost exactly what happened during the 2016 election. Both the RNC and DNC were hacked.[1] The RNC data simply was never leaked. There are multiple reasons why that might have been the case.

[1] - [https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/10/politics/comey-republicans- ha...](https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/10/politics/comey-republicans-hacked- russia/index.html)

<comment><USER12> Isn't this quiet dishonest? IIRC a single RNC dude got hacked and his years- old personal outlook got stolen. Meanwhile the DNC had _everything_ get pwned right at the server.

<comment><USER11> You remember incorrectly. It was a server used by two of the most prominent GOP Senators not a "years-old personal outlook" from a "single RNC dude". Per the NYT[1]

>Federal investigators, speaking on background, have said that a single email server used by that contractor had been penetrated. But it was going out of service, and contained outdated material that the Russians probably found of little value. People with direct knowledge of the server's contents said it had been used by Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain.

Maybe nothing of value was on that server. The general public has no way of knowing because the data was never leaked.

And even if the emails themselves didn't provide any incriminating information, I think controversies like pizzagate have shown that even leaks of mundane data can have political repercussions.

[1] - [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/10/us/politics/russia- hack-h...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/10/us/politics/russia-hack-hearing- clapper-rogers-brennan.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> y-c-o-m-b I'm not a Twitter user so pardon my ignorance, but do people actually use Twitter DM for personal/sensitive conversations on a regular basis?

I was always under the impression that the majority of people use text, whatsapp/telegram, or facebook for those kinds of discussions.

<comment><USER13> Most people probably have no idea they should be using a particular platform for any sort of discussion:/</comment></comment>


Uber's playbook for sabotaging Lyft - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/26/6067663/this-is-ubers-playbook-for-sabotaging-lyft <comment><USER2> I've been mystified how Uber's kept up their "Underdog" mantle for as long as they have. They've raised over $1.5B in investment from some of the biggest companies, private equity firms, and VCs on earth. I think you stop being an underdog as soon as Goldman Sachs, Blackrock, TPG, KPCB, Google, and Jeff Bezos are invested in your success.

They likely have more cash-on-hand than the cumulative Taxi base they are 'disrupting', they've been caught multiple times sabotaging competitors, they've been outed for dishonest advertising, and have been repeatedly accused of hostile actions toward their drivers. They ignore sensible regulations like maximum hourly workweeks and insurance minimums (do you want your driver working 90hrs/week without liability insurance?) under the guise of fighting the taxi cartel.

It often takes a 'push' to get bad laws changed, and Uber's provided much of that push, but not all laws that restrain business are bad and not all companies that break bad laws are good.

<comment><USER3> The whole "taxi cartel" thing is stupid. It arises out of this really distressing attitude that every dispute must involve "good guys" and "bad guys." Yes, the taxi companies are trying to shut down Uber and Lyft using regulation, but they are just trying to enforce a legal monopoly granted to them by the cities in which they operate. It's a legal right they got in return to agreeing to measures like rate regulation and "common carrier"-esque regulations concerning routes.

I personally think most of the taxi regulations are stupid, especially the price controls. But they're not irrational, nor did these legal regimes arise out of nefarious lobbying on the part of taxi companies. Rate regulations, forbidding surge pricing, requiring cabs to serve the whole city, etc, arise from cities treating cabs as a part of the overall municipal transit infrastructure. The "last half mile" of transit, as it were. I don't think regulated monopolies are a good idea, but they're certainly a common solution when it comes to industries that resemble public infrastructure.

Given that the taxi companies were granted monopolies as part of a larger regulatory regime, why are they "evil" for trying to enforce that privilege in the face of companies like Uber taking the high value routes out from under them, using techniques like surge pricing they aren't allowed to use?

<comment><USER4> As you point out, most people are critiquing the state intervention for being woefully outdated and not inline with market economics (as they always seem to end up being overtime thanks to technology). No-one really thinks the Taxi companies are the "evil" ones because they were handed monopolies on a platter then got comfortable and fat with their position.

If the local administrators have the power to hand out monopolies, they should also have the responsibility to retract it when it no longer makes sense. A repeated and long-delayed failure to do so is harmful to society, whether or not it was had good intentions at the beginning doesn't absolve it of criticism now.

<comment><USER5>
      ... for being woefully outdated and not inline with market economics

Why do regulations have to be in line with market economics in the first place?

Most, if not all regulations should serve and protect the citizenship and not private interest.

That Uber so vehemently lobbies against sensible regulation, like an obligation for commercial insurance, speaks volumes.

<comment><USER6> Market economics is the aggregate of the deals that people make when they are not coerced. It's what results when both drivers and passengers are free to choose their best options. Regulation that disrupts this, by preventing drivers from offering services (through a medalion system) or prevents passengers from paying for services (by capping fares) make people worse off than they otherwise would be.

<comment><USER7> You're willfully ignoring the positive parts of the regulations, like proper insurance and licensing requirements. And even those you listed have both positive and negative sides. It might be difficult to hail a taxi, but I do know that once I do, I can expect to pay the capped fare to go wherever I want to (common-carrier regulations mean they can't refuse you a trip within some bounds). I fail to see how the alternative, which would be flat-out refusal of service or drastically increased pricing to go to unpopular places, improves anyone's life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I know this may sound hyperbolic, but I hope that others join me in finally getting around to installing the Lyft app today.

Before now I'd considered them too small to be worth bothering with, but hey, if Uber is worried then maybe I should give it a try. After this, and Uber's attempts at doing the same with GoTaxi a few months ago, I'll be very happy to take my business elsewhere.

I'd also be interested to know if the VCs that invested in Uber were aware of these tactics. It's especially sad to think of good startup investment money being used to defraud a competing company rather than invest in good customer service.

<comment><USER9> I'd love to take my business elsewhere. Particularly to Lyft however when I tried to sign up the other day to try it out I got a message that my account was banned and I had to contact support. I believe it said I had a duplicate account. I've never used Lyft.

I wonder if action they took against my account was a result of them trying to mitigate these attacks from Uber. If so the damage is much worse than just the canceled rides.

<comment><USER10> Or uber "borrowed" your account info and used it for one of their Lyft smurfs...

<comment><USER11> Is there any evidence of this? That is going beyond anything I've read, in my opinion.

<comment><USER12> The logic doesn't sound that far-fetched if you've read the linked article and find the business case plausible.

<comment><USER11> You honestly think Uber would risk their customer's credentials to shut out a competitor they are already trouncing by most accounts? I would consider the risks of using customer's credentials in such a careless and ridiculous way many magnitudes higher than the potential rewards. It's much safer to buy burner phones and assume fake identities. Sorry, it just doesn't make sense without some evidence to back up it up.

<comment><USER10> Credentials? They would just need a username, unless I'm mistaken?

> the risks of using customer's credentials in such a careless and ridiculous > way many magnitudes higher than the potential rewards

Are you sure? What are the risks of parking a username? I doubt it's illegal and I bet they could obfuscate the traffic well enough to make it very difficult to prove to a court that they were the ones doing it. The only downside seems to be a bit of slightly negative PR (i.e. the assumptions of those who jump to conclusions) when Lyft detects the widespread parking.

Meanwhile, the upside is the expected value of their most profitable customers times the probability that they will switch to Uber+Lyft or 100%Lyft.

Low risk, large upside... I don't think this is as bad a business proposition as you make it sound like.

<comment><USER13> Slightly negative PR for having the monopoly in the long term? I'd take the negative PR any day.

<comment><USER14> Jail time for fraud?

<comment><USER10> Have you seen people go to jail for parking domain names? We aren't talking about stealing credit card numbers here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Please be sure to read this article before commenting.

It is NOT about Uber ordering fake Lyft rides to keep Lyft drivers off the street, as was alleged by Lyft last month.

It is about:

1\. Uber using the Lyft service to get in touch with Lyft drivers, then trying to recruit them to be Uber drivers by presumably paying them more

2\. Lyft trying to block Uber contractors from using Lyft, so that they cannot do (1)

3\. Uber using burner phones and fake Lyft accounts to enable them to keep doing (1)

Also keep in mind the uproar here over the past year caused by Apple/Google/etc trying to increase profits by subverting the free market for tech worker salaries. Is the only difference that then it was collusion as opposed to an adversarial arms race? Or does the collective opinion depend on whether HN readers stand to benefit financially?

<comment><USER16> Yeah but they did cancel a bunch of rides and that's the upsetting part. Their reasons might have been different than originally assumed but that doesn't change the egregious nature of their tactics.

What it sounds like from the article is that the independent contractors Uber hires are canceling rides whenever they realize that the Lyft driver has already been approached. If they had a policy of never canceling rides I don't think people would be as upset.

<comment><USER17> Lyft says that Uber employees have canceled 5000 rides since last October. That's like $100k in lost revenue -- it's nothing. Definitely not some big plan by Uber to undermine Lyft.

<comment><USER18> That's a potential software developer's salary, whose contributions are certainly worth more than that - I'd call it substantial.

<comment><USER19> That's not all. Let's say that software developer would have produced $200k in value for Lyft. But that 200k could hire two more software developers! By induction, Uber has cost Lyft an infinite amount of money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can't stomach unethical, morally bankrupt anti-competitive tactics. Sabotaging a competitor's services distorts the free-market, ultimately harming consumers. If Uber aren't suitably punished by the courts, I hope at least their reputation is tarnished in the court of public opinion. Although that's not clear since "there's no such thing as bad publicity" and Uber's been getting a lot of that recently.

Either way, I'm at least glad I've never used Uber yet, and now never will.

<comment><USER21> Sabotaging a competitor is precisely how the free-market operates that's why we have regulations, because a free market isn't actually free or desirable.

<comment><USER22> I'm so tired of people who don't know what "free market" means making up their own definition and then saying it's a bad thing.

A "free market" is an economics term meaning a marketplace free from anti- competitive forces such as government subsidies, government price floors or ceilings, monopolies, cartels, oligopolies, non-compete agreements, etc.

If Google and Apple make an agreement about smartphone pricing, then we might not have a free market for cell phones. The government could then use regulations against such anti-competitive agreements to end the price fixing and restore a free market. In that scenario it was private enterprise causing a non-free market and regulation that made it a free market.

Regulations can help a free market (breaking up monopolies, preventing cartels and anti-competitive practices) or regulations can harm a free market (subsidizing production, preventing new entrants from entering the market). This notion of "free market vs regulations" is completely misunderstanding what a free market is and how the systems involved work.

<comment><USER23> I disagree with your defintion in the google-Apple example and so does Wikipedia. It's pretty clear that if the government regulates it it's not a free market anymore.

\--- A free market is a market system in which the prices for goods and services are set freely by consent between sellers and consumers, in which the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government, price-setting monopoly, or other authority. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market) \---

<comment><USER24> The wikipedia quote doesn't seem to support your point, though.

It specifically lists "price-setting monopolies" and the like (which would include price-fixing agreements between Google & Apple, right?) as interference in a free market. Prices must be set freely by consent between _sellers_ and _consumers_ , not amongst sellers in backroom deals.

If a government's only "regulation" is to stop monopolies, price-fixing, and other violations of the natural supply/demand pricing, then you have a free market.

If no one stops those things, then you do not have a free market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Uber has a culture of breaking the rules. As beneficial as that was and is in their growth, it's not surprising it mutates in less pleasant ways as they grow. The same actions that seemed benevolent before, will seem more and more malevolent as they look less and less like an underdog.

A cheesy line from Batman comes to mind, they will live long enough to see themselves become the villain. The customers will end up asking for more regulation in a few years. Maybe Uber will start issuing a limited amount of medallions in every city. But a lot of money to be made along the way.

<comment><USER26> >The customers will end up asking for more regulation in a few years

Consumers hardly ever ask for regulation.

<comment><USER27> Really? My view is the other way around. Customers ask for more regulation and businesses are against it. Some of the consumer requested laws include national laws like the Pure Food and Drug Act and Clean Water Act, state laws like various lemon laws, and local laws like rent control.

<comment><USER28> _> businesses are against it_

I think some businesses are against it (they tend to be the smaller ones), but other businesses (these tend to be the larger ones) like it because, while it imposes a burden on them, it imposes more burden on their competitors. Also, businesses can often get into a position where they basically write the regulations that they will have to abide by (i.e., regulatory capture). In that situation, regulation can be an asset for a business.

<comment><USER27> I speak of course in broad generalities, and not to each and every company or consumer. To start, all members of a business are also consumers, so there is no clear cut distinction between the two, and some consumers are philosophically against all regulations even without being in control of a business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> IMO Uber's greatest threat is someone coming along and making a similar service and licensing it to cities so that the cities could control who becomes a driver, total number of drivers, as well as integrate with traditional taxi services and take a cut of the revenue. Then all the sudden Uber et al. are competing with a entity that has the ability to legislate them out of business.

Underhanded tactics like this is just more ammunition for anyone who wants to make the argument that the industry needs to be regulated. Uber might be shooting Lyft in the foot but they're also putting holes in the floor they're standing on themselves.

<comment><USER30> [http://gocurb.com/](http://gocurb.com/) has been doing exactly that for many years.

<comment><USER31> And Hailo (?)

But why aren't they succeeding?

<comment><USER32> They are succeeding, but not to the extent of Uber/Lyft. Regulated taxi industry pricing is much higher than lyft or UberX pricing. If taxis get de- regulated and/or UberX/Lyft get regulated then Curb/Hailo/etc will be well positioned.

<comment><USER33> > Regulated taxi industry pricing is much higher than lyft or UberX pricing.

Empirically, it's a bit higher, but not much. A few data points from my recent experiences - I take a cab to work once or twice a week if I'm running late. The last 3 Ubers (UberX) I've taken were $11.02, $11.45 and $9.79. The last 3 Hailos I've taken were $12.29, $10.39 and $12.09. These are from similar times on similar workdays with similar traffic patterns. (Edit: this is in NYC and the Hailo fares include a 20% tip)

I'm thinking I'll pay the extra dollar from now on, worth it to avoid supporting these business practices. Although my biggest problem with Hailo has been availability - it's often impossible to get a Hailo near rush hour while Ubers are always available.

<comment><USER32> I suppose it depends on where you are using the services. In Los Angeles, after you factor in tip for a taxi driver, Uber and Lyft are about 40-50% cheaper. Here's Uber's analysis of the pricing in LA [http://blog.uber.com/LAuberXpricecut](http://blog.uber.com/LAuberXpricecut)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Price comparison SF:

Uber X: $3 base fare, $0.30 per minute, $1.50 per mile

Lyft: $2.25 base fare, $0.27 per minute, $1.35 per mile

Both have a $1 trust and safety fee, and Lyft has a lower minimum.

I've personally had better experiences with Lyft overall, and I've taken at least 100 rides with each service.

<comment><USER35> Anecdotally, I've had better experiences with Lyft as well. Uber's customer support has been terrible in comparison.

<comment><USER36> Agreed. I can't even sign up for their app on Android using Google account and Google Wallet. I emailed their support email a week ago and haven't heard anything back. The Wallet dialog pops up but I can't click anything. Looks like I won't be signing up with Uber anytime soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Is it just me or does "growth hacking" and having good "hustle" actually means doing sleazy things and being a dick.

I don't understand why Silicon Valley and Startups think acting like this is not only acceptable, but should be applauded.

<comment><USER38> I also don't understand why VCs pick companies that are clearly courting a huge lawsuit by providing a platform for people to ignore local laws.

<comment><USER39> Probably because they see how well AirBnB is doing in the same vein of "ignoring local laws".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> If you set aside the hyperbolic title, this actually is an exoneration of the worst things that Uber has been accused of: namely they were NOT pranking or trying to deliberately mess up Lyft.

The hangup calls were the side-effect of their extremely aggressive recruitment efforts for Lyft drivers - where it seems they'd hang up and call back later to try and get a different driver that they hadn't already pitched.

While not great, it also doesn't strike me as particularly underhanded or evil (this is a scenario where the "best" outcome for Uber is paying Lyft for a ride where they try and give the Lyft driver a phone and presumably a better paying job).

<comment><USER11> Lyft has stated they've had over 5,000 CANCELLED rides, meaning Uber is deliberately trying to mess up Lyft. If you don't think the cancelled rides count, how can you say that aggressively recruiting its drivers, and as a by product, reducing the earnings of the drivers/Lyft, is Uber not trying to mess up Lyft? I'm not saying its illegal, but its clearly Uber trying to win the market by shutting out Lyft.

<comment><USER41> 5000 cancelled rides over a year does not mess up a system that reportedly has a millions of trips per year.

<comment><USER11> I don't think the argument here is over the scale or the percent of rides that were fake. The argument here was "Is Uber trying to shut down Lyft, through a variety of tactics?". I'd have to say yes, they are trying their best to block Lyft out of the business by limiting the key resource, drivers.

<comment><USER42> > Is Uber trying to shut down Lyft, through a variety of tactics?

But not through cancelled rides, right? I don't understand how Uber trying to recruit drivers is any different from any tech company trying to recruit me.

<comment><USER43> Straight up, this is a key point. Lyft is in 64 cities. 5500 canceled rides over a year is peanuts. That's 1 cancel per city per 3 or 4 days. I can't believe this is even a story.

<comment><USER44> It's a story because it's an abusive tactic. It harms individual drivers to try to benefit a very wealthy company.

It's a story because Uber thinks they need to do it. Does that then mean that Uber thinks they can't compete on quality of product and price of product?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Its unfortunate but I am surprised here, aren't there any laws to punish this kind of systematic sabotage.

Would the VCs like Google Ventures and other VCs self-police and influence Uber from this tactics. Uber already has first entrant advantage, this is not childish, this is sinister. Some driver somewhere burned lot of gas and rubber only to be disappointed that there is no fare there.

I will not use Uber until they make mends, I know I am a small hummingbird but anything with in my means to discourage this practice.

<comment><USER46> > this is not childish, this is sinister. Some driver somewhere burned lot of > gas and rubber only to be disappointed that there is no fare there.

It could be even worse.

Imagine a Lyft driver going to a Uber initiated non-existent fare. Now imagine him or her getting into an accident and dying on the way there.

<comment><USER8> That seems like a needless exaggeration. Traveling to a non-existent fare does not result in the driver doing anything they wouldn't have been doing otherwise.

Uber's behaviour is already bad, we don't need to add hyperbole.

<comment><USER46> Actually, if it weren't for Uber's call they would not have been at the incident's location at the wrong time. Of course, it's a worse case scenario / exaggeration, but when they make thousands of calls, it's not entirely out of the realm of possibility.

<comment><USER47> So that means that if anyone dies or is seriously injured on their way to a client, the blood is on the client then? Come on now, that doesn't make any real sense.

<comment><USER46> My two previous comments were inundated with downvotes, so I gather that my original aside comment was seen by most as a stupid or irrelevant one. I accept that, but assigning responsibility for a possible accident wasn't really where I was coming from. It was more about increasing the odds of something tragic happening, for absolutely no justifiable reason.

To further elaborate on that point, I meant that driving is a fairly risky activity that we engage in. A driver is accepting that risk in order to make a living. A client is obviously not responsible if an accident happens, as the driver has accepted the risk associated with the transaction, in exchange for money.

However, for every extra minute or mile on the road, a driver has a slightly higher chance of getting into an accident. Uber has made thousands of such calls, for absolutely no good reason and with no monetary benefit for the drivers. Although not directly responsible for possible accidents, the sheer number could have conceivably contributed to increasing the odds of one such accident/injury or even death (in a worse case scenario) happening. Which makes Uber's actions even shittier in my books.

I understand that most people here don't see it that way.

Note: Of course my assumption about the odds might be entirely false, if I misunderstood the way Uber works. For example if cars are just running around town until a fare is requested, instead of being parked somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> To those who have used Lyft: do you get any choice in which drivers come to pick you up?

If not, I can see how the combination of Uber's policies can lead to a lot of cancelled rides even without Uber explicitly telling their recruiters to do so. To wit:

\- You're an Uber recruiter, and you call up a Lyft driver to pick you up from somewhere.

\- At some point, I assume you get to see the driver's profile through Lyft, at which point you flip through your messaging app and realize that he's already been pitched.

\- Since Uber discourages you from pitching to the same driver more than once, you cancel the ride.

This leads to a lot of cancelled rides coming from Uber's recruiters, while letting them keep their company line of, "We don't ask our employees to deliberately cancel rides". Because, technically, they haven't.

</comment><comment><USER49> So which is it - is poaching another company's drivers bad, or is making secret anti-poaching agreements bad?

<comment><USER35> Recruiting drivers from competitors isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's the tactics used here to attempt to kill Lyft by making it bleed cash that are unethical.

<comment><USER49> This article only describes a concerted effort to recruit drivers by hailing rides. Lyft still gets paid.

I believe that the hail / cancel tactic is unethical, but this article only describes direct recruitment.

<comment><USER50> The article references the hail/cancel.

"Earlier this month, CNN reported that Uber employees around the country ordered and then canceled 5,560 Lyft rides, according to an analysis by Lyft. (Lyft arrived at this figure by cross-referencing the phone numbers of users who tried to recruit Lyft drivers to Uber with users who had previously canceled rides.) "

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> CEO Travis Kalanick is attempting to defending Uber's practices in a Twitter conversation with DHH.

[https://twitter.com/dhh/status/504374243790831616](https://twitter.com/dhh/status/504374243790831616)

<comment><USER52> They have so many brand ambassadors there's no way they can control what they do when you wave a stack of hundreds in front of them an incentivize them to try and steal Lyft drivers. Perhaps they didn't tell the recruiters to cancel those Lyft rides but they should have laid out some ground rules if they wanted to keep their hands clean.

<comment><USER53> And walmart has a lot of cashiers they can't control either. Turns out they're both liable for the actions of these agents acting on their behalf. Why make excuses?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> DHH had a really great comment on this worth sharing with HN:

"Take the higher ground, man. Let the runner-ups do the runner-up shit. You're sitting on a throne but acting the peasant."

[https://twitter.com/dhh/status/504374011711594496](https://twitter.com/dhh/status/504374011711594496)

</comment><comment><USER55> So Google, Facebook, and Apple are bad because they come to secret agreements to not poach each other's employees and now Uber and Lyft are bad because they'll do everything in their power to poach each other's employees?

Make up your minds.

This sort of poaching is good for the drivers, and this sort of ruthless competition is a good indication of a market that is good for riders.

<comment><USER56> Imagine if google and facebook were calling up random numbers at each others' headquarters in order to recruit. If the recruiter ended up guessing a number of an engineer that they've already reached, they would hang up. If they hadn't spoken to them they would give them a pitch on switching companies.

This would be an accurate analogy, and I think if either google or facebook were doing this we (the tech community) would complain about it.

<comment><USER57> Except there are other, easier ways to contact google or facebook employees. Why would anyone do what you suggest instead of using linkedin or github? There's no such alternative for contacting lyft drivers in this case, so you're analogy is not very accurate. Also, lyft drivers aren't employees of lyft, which strains to your analogy more.

<comment><USER56> It's by no means a perfect analogy, but it's the closest thing I could come up with to compare to the anti-competitive practices of google/facebook/microsoft, which is what the OP was trying to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I think we need regulation in order to eliminate cutthroat behavior in the transportation industry. Oh wait...

<comment><USER59> it's not really that necessary... Lyft could figure out a way to immunize itself against these sorts of real-world attacks, and by and large they have using a comibination of analytics and creating a more reasonable cancellation policy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> As an aside, I'm starting to think that some types of non-disclosure agreements should be as unenforceable as non-competes in California.

"After Uber became aware that The Verge was asking questions, Target CW sent out multiple emails warning contractors that talking to the press violated a non-disclosure agreement they signed when they joined."

My problem isn't using these agreements to protect trade secrets, or when they are simply a contract between a company and an employee or contractor (you agree to treat certain types of things as "our property" rather than going off and selling them to a competitor).

My problem with non-disclosure is when they are used to hush up embarrassing details or otherwise keep the public in the dark about shady business practices.

</comment><comment><USER61> Just dropped Uber. Guess now I have to sign up for Lyft. These tactics seem very similar to the Hoffa era, really had high hopes for a sharing economy but things are escalating quickly to become similar to Hoffa era tactics. Minus the whole fighting for the middle class spirit.

</comment><comment><USER62> Evil company. Once they destroy the competition, they will use these tactics to squeeze out customers.

As an end-user, we must avoid Uber. We can't let them win.

<comment><USER63> Exactly my thoughts. Once they squeeze out all the competition, then its time for the drivers and riders to get squeezed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Wow, burner phones and CC numbers?

Start off as a darling outdoing the establishment and taking all their business. After you've made it, the very next day, start acting just like the establishment you disrupted.

</comment><comment><USER65> I decided to try Lyft Line yesterday and it matched me with somebody else in the neighborhood. Just as the driver pulled up to the second (shared) fare, the ride was cancelled and my driver was stuck driving me alone and accepting the half fare.

While I can't confirm whether the cancelled fare was Uber initiated, it did occur to me that both Lyft and the driver were getting screwed by the cancellation. If it happens enough times, I can definitely understand why my driver would jump ship and drive for Uber instead.

<comment><USER66> Lyft pays the driver the full amount that the driver would have received in a normal ride even when there is only one person who uses a Lyft Line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> It's a dog-eat-dog out there and if they weren't the market leader we would somehow all come around to agreeing this is the ultimate "growth hack" or appreciating Uber's "hustle". But by being top dog and having sterling investors like Google Ventures backing them, we hold them to a higher standard (much like their "polished clientele").

Since most of the risk to these services comes from the regulation side, I wouldn't be surprised that someone's greasing the wheels in Sacramento or Washington. There's enough money at stake here for those involved to do whatever is necessary. When I heard a few days ago that a lawmaker who voted in favor of rideshare restrictions was caught drunk driving the night after the vote, my first thought was that maybe it was a set up. Hire some people to buy this guy a few drinks, encourage him to get on the road, call the police to report a driver driving dangerously. Would you be surprised? I wouldn't.

Anyways, regarding the product - I use Lyft a lot more than Uber since I know a few folks there but most of my friends use both and Sidecar interchangeably. Every time I catch a Lyft, I tend to talk to the driver to figure out how much they're making, what are the pain points, and what can these services do better and there seems to be an opportunity to differentiate. Here were some ideas I had:

\- Drivers tell me they can't find a place to relieve themselves since parking is hard to come by around SF. I think they would appreciate some designated "refuel" stations where they can pull up, park, pee, get coffee/red bull, and maybe vacuum or clean their cars up.

\- I would love to be able to pick a fuel efficient car and see Lyft do a green mustache to indicate I'm making a choice for a hybrid. Maybe hybrids can get bonus payments since they can stay on the road longer per tank.

\- Several friends have complained recently about how random the route-finding applications were that these drivers used. Some used Apple Maps, the built-in nav on the apps, or Google Maps but it wasn't always consistent and some of the routes were TERRIBLE. Seems like an opportunity for either Lyft or Uber to build better path-finding in their largest markets via maybe highly localized traffic information or by paying off the city for access to bus/taxi lanes.

<comment><USER67> With regards to your third point, I just took an uber yesterday and the driver was using an uber-supplied navigation tool. maybe part of the existing app used for drivers? on my end, the app asked for a destination address and it was synced with the driver. the route was what i would expect.

the driver did complain however that they were forced to pay $10 for this ability and had no way to opt out.

this was in sf

<comment><USER68> Yes, it uses the driver's app. At least the rider's app was updated a little over a week ago (August 18) to allow this. Presumably the driver's app was updated around the same time to integrate with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> It's amazingly sad that instead of competing through innovation, marketing, or price adjustments...that capital would get devoted to competitor sabotage of QOS (almost like a real life DDOS attack). What a terrible usage of capital and resources!

</comment><comment><USER70> An article well worth reading: it contains an actual smoking gun, not just speculation and he says/she says.

Hint to all entrepreneurs and managers out there: if your job includes building an online form so that your team can generate any number of fake credit cards numbers as well as throw-away cell phone numbers, maybe you should take that ethics 101 class again.

</comment><comment><USER71> This seems like cutthroat tactics, but not illegal as far as I can tell. Anyone know if this is by the book?

<comment><USER72> Which book, the lawbook or the ethics book?

<comment><USER73> I thought on HN we call working around outdated or laws we don't agree with "disruption"?

<comment><USER74> In fact, disrupt and sabotage are synonyms.

<comment><USER75> No major thesaurus lists sabotage as a synonym for disrupt. A couple have disrupt for sabotage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> This is bad taste. Makes me think twice about using Uber

</comment><comment><USER77> I would hope that uber has bigger fish to fry by subverting the taxi industry, but strategically I can see why they are as scared of Lyft as they seem to be. Still seems distasteful to sabotage a fellow startup.

<comment><USER78> > _Still seems distasteful to sabotage a fellow startup._

I don't see why Lyft being "a fellow startup" should affect any of Uber's business tactics.

Startups don't have any intrinsic motivation to play nice with each other.

<comment><USER8> I think it's just the idea of "punching up" vs. "punching down". When a scrappy startup takes on a larger competitor they need to pull out all the stops to combat the advantages of their competitor being an established company.

At this point Uber essentially _is_ the #1 established company of car services, so them resorting to dirty tactics to fight Lyft leaves a very sour taste in the mouth.

<comment><USER79> Any established player that doesn't defend its position will be quickly unseated. I'm not saying this is an appropriate way to defend itself, but it's certainly one way.

<comment><USER8> Sure. But left unchecked it results in Microsoft's "extend, embrace, extinguish" 1990s.

<comment><USER80> Maybe, but I kind of feel like the difference between making your competitor's employees a better offer and deliberately exploiting a monopoly to destroy any technology you don't control is more than just a matter of scale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> Interesting thread. One thing I think is missing from this discussion is how significantly even the nature of transportation has changed in the era of mobile phone tech. Some context: I live in Seattle, grew up in Minneapolis, went to school in New York, and my aunt and uncle lived/live in Manhattan and have for the last 25 years. I recently got them to experiment with Uber in New York. They rarely take taxis, so it was just sort of a novelty. They hated the experience but only because they believe there has been a significant loss of "institutional knowledge" about cities (for lack of a better term, I guess). What I mean by that is this driver had no clue where to go. I think this is sort of a danger with rideshare (not that I'm arguing against it...I'm not) wherein the drivers rely overtly on the technology to guide them. Someone visiting the city can't get in a cab (uber) and say "Hey, I'm looking for x, y, and z tonight...where can I find that?" My Uncle was telling me that, as bad and dangerous as it was years ago, cab drivers were basically the resident experts of a city. They were so plugged-in to everything that they had almost a 6th sense about them. That's been my experience with Uber in Seattle. I cannot rely on the driver to get around the city at all. My experience with Lyft has been so much better that in some cases I'd rather walk the mile back to my place than catch an uber. All of this might just be the learning curve uber has built for themselves as a direct result of the rate at which they've been expanding. But it's something both companies should address. If uber/lyft really are going to dominate urban transportation (and even inter-urban transpo....uber vegas anyone?) then they need to do more than just take me from point A to point B. They actually have to know where they're going.

</comment><comment><USER82> Now imagine if Uber had a monopoly? I'll be taking Lyft from now on. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER83> Traditional taxi drivers need to be less grubby -- Uber was able to take advantage of that. How important a factor that is would depend on the country or city. But in some countries, it may be a way of filtering for drivers that speak English. For example, for Tokyo, Uber lists a flat rate of 40,000 yen, roughly 400 USD (!), for a ride from Narita Airport to any of the 23 wards of Tokyo. Pretty steep, given that a very nice bus, hotel shuttle, or express train is less than a tenth of that cost. Of course, the "last mile" is a consideration. For taxis, though, there are already established taxi services; [http://www.narita-airport.jp/en/access/bus/#taxi](http://www.narita- airport.jp/en/access/bus/#taxi) shows that fixed fares range from 16,000 - 26,500 yen.

<comment><USER84> I never understood the disdain for Uber's pricing. Who cares if they charge considerably higher than other services? No one is forcing you to take their service.

Do you get upset when people buy an M-Class Mercedes? Would I ever buy one? No. Do I think it's extravagant? Yes. Do I care how other people spend their money? No

<comment><USER83> I actually wouldn't mind if certain conspicuous, extravagant (and conspicuously wealthy) celebrities opted for an Uber taxi. Nope, wouldn't mind it one bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> The indignation over this makes no sense. Sure it's aggressive, but Uber has to be in order to maintain their market position and keep growing.

As developers, we get recruited all the time, even while employed. The horror! This is a _good_ problem for drivers to have. No one is forcing them to switch (or even stopping them from driving for multiple services concurrently). They will drive for a company as long as the offer is good.

These are competitors offering an essentially identical service, and apparently fighting over an important resource -- drivers -- so the moral outrage is absurd. This is the free market in action.

I'll say it: from everything I've seen over the years of Uber, I like their playbook. Call it whatever you want -- underhanded, blatant, political, amoral, spotlight-stealing, $linkbait_adjective. Most importantly, it is damn effective.

<comment><USER86> Did you miss the part where they cancel the rides?

<comment><USER85> And? Any service is susceptible to being gamed/abused. As developers we should understand this intuitively. Lyft is clearly working on technical ways to mitigate this if they don't want Uber hailing their drivers. As to the ethical quandary of wasting the driver's time and gas, the solution is simple: charge a cancellation fee.

<comment><USER87> all right, let's legalize DDoS !

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> I've been exclusively an Uber customer. Reading this, I'm installing Lyft and giving them a shot.

</comment><comment><USER89> The problem I see with the, "we're just recruiting drivers! fair game!" is that it's not.

When an Uber Rep goes into Lyft Driver's car, the Rep is technically a "customer" and the Driver can't exactly hang up on the Rep, ignore the Rep, nor drive away from the Rep. They are essentially forced to listen to a spiel about Uber that they may or may not want to hear. Yes the Driver is getting "paid" for the time spent but the Driver no longer has control over being recruited.

Recruiters sending me emails? Kinda annoying and takes a bit to click "delete" if I don't care for it. But at least I can choose not to read the email. When one of these Uber Reps gets into the car, the Lyft Driver has no choice.

</comment><comment><USER90> Even if you ignore the ethical side of this issue, the risk that these practices create for Uber should have prevented them from developing SLOG. They had to know that this story would come out.

SLOG is now Uber's reputation. And Lyft becomes an even more lovable underdog.

</comment><comment><USER91> From the comments here, it seems a lot of you missed the bit at the end about Lyft aggressively recruiting Uber drivers. My impression is that Uber is less subtle about it, and perhaps less ethical / more aggressive, but still, competition is competition. If Lyft were such an underdog, then Uber wouldn't be so afraid of them. From a consumer perspective, I hope that competition cools off a bit -- the price drops are great, but if they keep escalating, neither company will be particularly friendly. It would also be terrible if one company were edged out completely, ending the price wars.

That said, I always take Lyft -- simply because Uber doesn't work for my phone.

</comment><comment><USER92> I find this somewhat funny in a way because I've ran into several drivers that were "double agents" driving both for Uber and Lyft. It makes a lot of sense actually driving for both to make up for dead times.

<comment><USER93> What would they do about the Lyft mustache? Would they just not use it, or would they have to take it on and off based on which service was used?

<comment><USER92> They had both the mustache and the uber logo. He said he never had anyone complain or refuse to ride because of that.

I had never thought of that before then.

<comment><USER93> I wouldn't expect a passenger to care, but it seems like something the ride sharing services themselves could use to prevent "double agents." I wonder if Lyft/Uber could take legal action against drivers who are displaying their trademark while driving for a competitor's service?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> Two different tactics are being conflated here: Canceling rides on purpose and scheduling rides in order to recruit drivers. The former shouldn't be done, but the latter sounds fine since everyone is getting paid.

</comment><comment><USER95> Is it fair for George Clooney to hit on your girlfriend? Yeah, let the best man win! But it's still kind of a dick move.

Regardless of whether you agree w/ tactics, the attitude and behavior leaves a bad taste.

</comment><comment><USER96> Why is there a 300 comment discussion on a _taxi company_ on Hacker News? How is this different from a fast-growing yoghurt company or an IT consultancy? Why do we care so much?

Because they have an app? Seriously?

<comment><USER97> It's because they are ostentatiously making a lot of money while blatantly flaunting the law. This attracts attention, as much as Al Capone once did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> I know people at both Uber and Lyft and will say that Lyft has just as many assholes as Uber. Given both companies have great people, this article is about Uber being the unlikable of both of them and there are reasons to not like either company...if you take some things personally. That aside, cab fares that used to cost $120 now cost $35, so the customer is winning here. If anyone has a right to complain then it's the drivers that are getting the cancelled rides.

</comment><comment><USER99> This is ridiculous. The competition is great for us as consumers. To be honest, when I first moved to the city I used Uber exclusively. The sort of "executive" brand really appealed to me. As of late, with the news of Uber's shady tactics, I've been using Lyft more and more. Lyft Line, which was released prior to Uber's attempt at the same feature, has been a lot of fun and a really great way to meet random people in SF.

</comment><comment><USER100> I wonder sometimes if certain markets -- like taxi services, used car dealerships, domain registrars, etc. -- have inherent and non-obvious structural characteristics that bias the market toward "slimy" behavior.

To some extent Uber and Lyft are being driven by customer dissatisfaction with the expensive price-fixed "cab mafia," but in reading about these companies it seems like the sliminess has just shifted to other domains.

</comment><comment><USER101> As someone above spoke to it seems like these claims are now facing public outcry because Uber is beginning to lose it's underdog moniker...I imagine myself saying "now would I be concerned this was an ethically egregious action if that had been trying to 'sabotage' cab companies?" The answer to which being...eh I'd probably say "GO new/little guy!...f __* those guys. "

</comment><comment><USER102> It's very sad that Uber engages in these completely sleazy practices. I've never used either Lyft or Uber but Uber strikes me as a company that would be best to avoid.

Any company that engages in underhanded attacks at their competition rather than in the marketplace by offering a better service and possibly lower prices is not going to be nice to their customers in the longer run either.

</comment><comment><USER103> I am not surprised by this. I am sure Lyft is just among a list of threats to Uber and we are only seeing a small part of that strategy.

Its ethically not good but I think it would be wrong to say that we penalized many other companies that make similar plays or resort to tactics that are just as ruthless. It doesn't seem illegal just mean and aggressive.

Honestly, it kinda seems like something they would do.

</comment><comment><USER104> BS Clickbait headline.

Here's the gist: Uber and Lyft each try to recruit from each other. Canceling rides does not seem to be about disrupting their service. Disruption may happen as a side effect to their recruiting efforts, but that's not the point. And if you ask Uber, they tell you Lyft is doing this all right back to them.

Sure, it's an unsavory practice. But sabotage? C'mon....

</comment><comment><USER83> I thought I was going to coin a new word -- uberize. But then I thought to look it up. Lo and behold, there is an entry from 2007: [http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=uberize](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=uberize). The meaning of the word? To destroy or defeat in a quick and effortless manner.

</comment><comment> apa-sl Uber just started here in Poland (currently only in Warsaw, our capital city). I was quite surprised that event Polish startup oriented blogs and news outlets were rather sceptical about Uber and were preffering already available local services (iTaxi, Taxi5, German MyTaxi). Usually it is quite opposite when some global startup is staring on Polish market.

</comment><comment><USER105> Interview with Travis kalanick last week, check out 4:40 where he is asked about the Lyft accusations: [http://www.bloomberg.com/video/uber-s-kalanick- hires-former-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/video/uber-s-kalanick-hires-former- obama-adviser-plouffe-4mUpf2MuTZuwXnMWtu2NBA.html)

</comment><comment><USER106> This is a denial of service attack. It is "cheating" and playing dirty.

As a matter of principle, I will never use Uber.

</comment><comment><USER107> I am fine with this, the only thing I don't understand is why they cancel the rides. They should just give them a full fare to a destination where the driver is likely to get a new passenger.

From the driver's perspective, it seems like this is a fare, and a job offer. What is so wrong about this?

</comment><comment><USER108> So now it's just like Venmo, except Venmo uses your checking account vs. your debit card which is really just a difference of security IMO.

Also, losing as much as a quarter per transaction doesn't scale. At this point, Square seems like they really need an exit and it needs to be big.

</comment><comment><USER109> Heard plenty of stories about Travis Kalanick well before Uber took off the way it has. To that end I'm not surprised by any of these shady (and most likely illegal) tactics. Not sure if Google Ventures really knew what they were getting themselves into.

<comment><USER110> This is some nasty innuendo and I find it distasteful. If you want to throw a punch at someone, square up.

<comment><USER111> Oh come on.... the on-line rags are awash with stories of Travis Kalanick's abrasive character and less than honourable approach to doing business. It's hardly a secret.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER112> Thanks Uber for proving you're as sleazy as the taxi drivers you're trying to replace.

</comment><comment><USER113> Naw, Silicon Valley doesn't have a sexism problem, a greed problem, a fake do- gooder problem, a black-hat, dirty marketing problem (Uber is just the latest in the ongoing, playbook pattern), a drug problem, or a hooker problem. Not at all, Bra.

</comment><comment><USER53> Is anyone really surprised that people in the taxi industry are acting in a shady fashion? I kind of wonder how many _deals_ Uber and Lyft have made with local crime syndicates just to operate in certain cities. It would be par for the course.

</comment><comment><USER114> I love Uber but someone high up needs to instigate a culture shift - this is just not ok.

<comment><USER115> Except their CEO is a sleazeball - all this behavior comes straight from the top.

</comment></comment><comment><USER116> I'll just leave this here: [http://mashable.com/2014/08/12/uber-lyft-dirty- tactics/](http://mashable.com/2014/08/12/uber-lyft-dirty-tactics/)

Uber might be slimy, but Lyft is no better.

<comment><USER117> According to Uber, that is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER118> > Uber and Lyft are competing to become the first app you think of when you > need a taxi, and the service with the most drivers likely stands the best > chance of winning.

Aren't there other differentiating factors? Quality of service, etc.?

</comment><comment><USER119> Assuming true, this is exactly what made everyone hate Microsoft back in the day. Google "knifing the baby" or "cut off the air supply," the top hits of both are ways Microsoft tried to deal with Netscape.

</comment><comment><USER13> Uber, as any market-driven that respects itself, tries to create a monopoly. Given the companies that backed the 1.5B investment, I see where the pressure to quickly eliminate competitors from the market comes from.

</comment><comment><USER120> Those tactics sounds like something cab companies will do to competitors in the 20's. Call me old fashion but this piece of the "sharing economy" sounds like a little for many, a lot for a few.

</comment><comment><USER121> Quoth Uber:

"Operation SLOG (Supplying Long-term Operations Growth)"

Backronym if ever there was one..

</comment><comment><USER122> I'm need to make a trip from San Diego Airport late at night in about a month and was hoping to use Lyft. Sadly their app is unsupported as I have an iPhone 3GS running iOS 6.

</comment><comment><USER123> I'm always amazed at how low our businesses will stoop in a specious claim of free market and competition. Our business are monopolistic, corrupt and corrupting, and like Über is revealing itself....grotesquely, rapaciously, and insatiably greedy. Our companies cannot simply compete, they have to corrupt and sabotage and cheat and steal. It's pathetic, but unfortunately our society rewards it because at some point Über will morph from it's current state of cheating and stealing to corrupt our government and legislature and implement regulatory capture that locks into place their ill gotten, undeserved gains and advantages.

It's disgusting.

</comment><comment><USER17> Uh... which of Uber's actions here are unethical?

Aggressively poaching drivers from Lyft seems all right to me. That's just healthy competition.

And this stuff about wasting Lyft's money by booking and canceling rides -- it's a bunch of nonsense. By Lyft's own estimate, Uber employees booked and canceled 5000 rides since last October. That's like $100k/yr in lost revenue. It's nothing. Certainly not a systematic attempt to undermine Lyft.

Am I missing something here?

Disclaimer: of the two services I only use Lyft. I've had bad experiences with Uber's customer service.

<comment><USER124> When they hit the same driver twice, they're supposed to cancel the trip aren't they?

But when a trip is canceled it hurts the driver who uses gas to drive in their direction and causes them to miss out on other available rides, reduces the amount of available cars on the street for legitimate users, and more negative effects im sure you can imagine.

This still sounds ethical to you?

<comment><USER17> No, booking a ride with the intention to cancel is definitely wrong. My point is that Uber employees aren't doing that frequently enough to affect Lyft at all, so this can't be a plan on Uber's part.

It sounds like some Uber employees are just being assholes for no reason. That's unfortunate, but it's no reason to malign Uber itself. Every company has some assholes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER125> This is in poor taste, but it's not illegal or unethical. If Uber was trying to hire Lyft drivers via LinkedIn, it'd be totally cool right?

<comment><USER126> Agreed that the end goal isn't unethical or illegal, but the way they're doing it has some unethical effects, i.e. every time they find out that they've been assigned a guy they already sent a recruitment pitch to, they cancel a ride, meaning somebody wasted gas and time to go to a non-existent fare.

I don't see anything wrong with trying to lure your competitor's employees away, but fucking up their business as a knock-on effect isn't okay.

<comment><USER125> Yeah, I see your point - that's definitely not cool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER127> Uber paying a 3-figure for getting new drivers? Not a sabotage for me, but a big bet on user acquisition with a referral system.

</comment><comment><USER128> What's to stop all the taxi companies in all of Uber's markets from engaging in the same behavior?

Seems like this could get fun, fast.

</comment><comment><USER129> Uber must feel really vulnerable if they think there's a need to be this aggressive about undermining the competition.

</comment><comment><USER83> I can see Uber, Lyft, and traditional taxi drivers reading Sun Tze's The Art of War. Well, maybe Uber and Lyft.

</comment><comment><USER130> And this is why I exclusively use Lyft these days. Uber can bite my shiny metal ass.

</comment><comment><USER131> Sadly my city has Uber but not Lyft, or I'd switch.

</comment><comment><USER132> for me this is a reason not to ride on Uber

</comment><comment><USER133> No honor among thieves.

</comment><comment><USER134> What a great PR move for Uber!

</comment><comment><USER135> If you use Uber, you're an asshole.

By this point, it's an excellent job interview question. "What do you think of Uber?" Anyone says they love Uber is a no-hire.</comment>


The Third Reich's Electric Submarine Fail - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/war-is-boring/aba074f47363

<comment><USER2> _"irrational faith in technology to prevail in operationally or strategically complex and desperate situations."_

Technology does win wars, but it isn't magic. If Hitler had followed Karl Doernitz' recommendations and had 300 submarines on hand before going to war, Britain would have fallen to commerce losses to submarines. It was a series of top level decisions to defer the development of revolutionary weapons on the part of the Germans combined with a concerted pursuit of advanced technology by the allies, like RADAR aboard anti submarine airplanes, that decided the war.

If it weren't for such decisions, the V2 and Type 21 would have appeared sooner.

<comment><USER3> Yup. Like the decision to send the engineers and technicians working on jet engines to join the infantry in late 1940, because they'd be needed for the war against the Soviet Union and jet engines wouldn't be required in the short term anyway(!) -- a costly mistake which set them until the surviving skilled technicians could be hastily recalled. Or Hitler's demand for a jet bomber which forced Messerschmitt to hang bomb racks on the Me-262, delaying their first operational jet fighter for 18-24 months.

And some of the stuff they _did_ pursue was absolutely barking. Like the Landkreuzer P. 1000 Ratte:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landkreuzer_P._1000_Ratte](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landkreuzer_P._1000_Ratte)

TL:DR; the popular belief in the Nazi regime's inherent technological brilliance is a little misplaced.

<comment><USER4> I take some deal of comfort knowing that an evil and criminal regime was also stupid and irrational. It is kind of like that bank robber that hands in the note to the clerk and the note is a his bank receipt with his address on the bank.

It is good that they sent rocket scientists to die in the infantry. Good that they spent resources building that stupid tank. Good that they didn't take too much interest in the nuclear bomb.

<comment><USER2> _I take some deal of comfort knowing that an evil and criminal regime was also stupid and irrational._

Apparently, the Nazi regime was into teutonic myth based occult woo, but I have no idea if that's more a modern distortion than an accurate portrayal.

I wonder if society in the US is any more rational. We gave up on Thorium so we could build bombs faster. The authorities sell us wars with the exact ease and facility that Herman Goering spoke about. Supposedly, GM started building cars larger in the post-war decades just so engineering managers could feel more prestigious. (Prestige came with volume of one's subsystem, apparently.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Calling Type XXI failure is kind of (mo)ironic. Soviet submarines and to some extend western submarines are practically build on top of it. It is like saying jet-engines are failure :-)

<comment><USER6> I agree, and almost pointed this out myself. But the article isn't really calling the XXI itself a failure, but instead the whole strategy to design, build, and rely on the Type XXI to prosecute a commerce interdiction war that Germany couldn't actually win even with the Type XXI in service. The title would have been better as "The Failure of the Type XXI Strategy" I think.

<comment><USER7> Yes, this. The same can be said for the V2. Technologically, it was _wildly_ successful, and today most Russian rockets and many American rockets can be considered its direct descendants. However there's no question that it hastened the end of the war for the Germans.

I've often wondered what the world would look like if Germany had had the same militaristic and expansionist policies, yet hadn't devoted so many of its resources towards genocide and wonder weapons. It may be that Hitler's obsession with these things actually spared the world from a far more effective Nazi Germany, and thus an even longer and bloodier war.

<comment><USER8> It's one of the problems with the idea of using a time machine to kill Hitler. The problem is the Nazi party and Germany might actually end up with a more sane, capable and effective leader and end up winning the war.

<comment><USER9> Perhaps the previous, competent, dictator was replaced by Hitler.

<comment><USER10> [http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2920](http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2920)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Spend too much time keeping your weapons in development and you may find that by the time they are ready your strategy for implementing them is no longer relevant or, worse, that you have already lost the war.

A good analogy for the importance of getting to market with what works, not what is perfect.

<comment><USER12> > _A good analogy for the importance of getting to market with what works, not > what is perfect._

I would argue they were already "at market" with what works - older subs, bullets, torpedoes and tanks, and while doing that, they were trying to innovate something better. They obviously weren't aiming for perfect, because they did get it finished - it would never have been done if the goal was "perfect".

Had they not tried to innovate something better, we'd be criticizing them now saying "this is a good analogy for the importance of continual improvement of your product that's in the market"

<comment><USER11> A fair counter-point, I acknowledge that there is a fine line between investing too much and too little in R&D (but I suppose we all knew that).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Reminds me of PG saying startups are largely about boring grunt work techies often don't want to do, like going out and interviewing clients about what their problems actually are, etc.. Germany made technological marvels, but lost because they distracted from basic, boring things like logistics.

</comment><comment><USER14> The article is not very good.

At the time (1943) the war was already lost for Germany(not for Japan). The US had entered the world fresh after watching people in Europe kill themselves for more than 2 years, and US industry was just too powerful for a country that was already weakened by two years of war.

US at the time was the biggest saver in the world, and one of the leaders in industry production, while not in weaponry, change to weapon manufacturing is easy when you have industry.

You can compare it with China today, while the US products were not as good as the Germans, they learned fast and they could simply outproduce them. For every good quality German tank, they could manufacture 10 not as good but who cares, American tanks, same with planes.

Another important thing is that after two years of war and more planes on the air that today, supplies became scarce, specially for Germans, so they had to get by with less quality components out of necessity.

Again, this is very normal in any war, at the start uniforms, and vehicles are new, morale is high, not so after years of seeing your country, your family, your friends destroyed.

<comment><USER15> History is littered with examples of superior forces failing to achieve victory due to mismanagement or deception. Anyone who's tried to seriously play competitive games will say the same thing: it's not over until it's literally impossible to win.

You're correct that the Germans had a supply problem. But that might not have been as decisive as Hitler's decision to sacrifice the entirety of the 6th Army at Stalingrad for mere prestige, for example.

It was a stroke of luck that Hitler was so stupid as to not listen to his commanders and make so many blunders. Some have called Hitler our best ally in the war, since his mismanagement was responsible for so many strategic mistakes.

If a different type of person had been in charge in 1943, there is a sizable chance the war could've been won. The production problems were hard, but not decisive to the point of making victory vanishingly unlikely.

<comment><USER16> > It was a stroke of luck that Hitler was so stupid as to not listen to his > commanders and make so many blunders. Some have called Hitler our best ally > in the war, since his mismanagement was responsible for so many strategic > mistakes.

The British agreed with this: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Foxley](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Foxley)

"The plan was submitted in November 1944, but was never carried out because controversy remained over whether it was actually a good idea to kill Hitler: he was by then considered to be such a poor strategist that it was believed whoever replaced him would probably do a better job of fighting the allies."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> History does repeat itself, all this means is that US hight tech weapons and hardware will be useless against cheap Chinese missiles dime a dozen.

</comment><comment><USER12> I disagree with the reasoning.

The article makes it clear these subs were very advanced, and after the expected teething problems expected with any new design, they worked well. Of course they were expensive (time and resources) because they were new and advanced. They were vastly superior to other subs at the time. Had the war continued for another few years, I think it's safe to say these subs would have been extremely successful in their missions. You can't go into a project like "design the future of submarines" under the limitation that your side might lose the war any day.

Obviously when undertaking any task it's important to have a balance of "do what we've always done" and "innovate to find better ways". They would be equally criticized if they didn't try to advance anything and just kept building old tanks and bullets. The headline would be "The Third Reich's Failure to Innovate"

Did they aim for too much innovation with these subs? Maybe, but you can't blame the sub for that.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure the analogy is so bad, to be honest.

The USN submarine force was extremely successful in the Pacific... eventually. But they went to war with pre-war submarine designs, and used a strategy of pumping out the same old submarine types, with only minor improvements as the war went on. It wasn't until the end of WWII and the start of the Cold War that the US started to integrate features from the Type XXI and really try to push the state of the art of submarine technology.

But the point is that the _Gato_ and _Balao_ -class submarines were good enough for what the USN was doing, the important thing was actually getting the boats out to the theater of war. An advanced upgrade project would have risked the ability to do that at the very time such risk was unaccepted.

That was Germany's problem as explained in the article: Even with the assuredly-better Type XXI submarine, Germany would still need many other things to go right to prosecute an interdiction war. It would have needed command and control improvements to account for the submarines being submerged more often (especially if they wanted to use the effective "wolf pack" tactics), better maritime reconnaissance to find convoys in the first place, etc.

Its sonar would have been useful, but the flipside to that is that Allied sonar and ASDIC would _also_ have been useful (defeating ASDIC was one of the reasons German U-boats operated on the surface in the first place). In short, the Type XXI really did counter a lot of the Allied advancements in antisubmarine warfare, but it still would not have been enough. Those resources could have been profitably employed elsewhere, perhaps in other new weapons development projects.

On the other hand, aviation represented an area where new development was instrumental (and cost-effective) throughout the war. The German jet fighters would have been very dangerous if they could have worked them into their Luftflottes sooner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This post cites a much better article by Marcus Jones on the boat and the context in which the boat was developed: [http://www.usnwc.edu/getattachment/dd165021-2812-40ba-847f-d...](http://www.usnwc.edu/getattachment/dd165021-2812-40ba-847f-d5b4c3e4ac4e/Innovation- for-Its-Own-Sake--The-Type-XXI-U-boat.aspx)

Jones's article is better in the sense that it is more reasoned and without single-paragraph overstatements like "But everything about the Type XXI was a mistake." It also, unfortunately, takes more effort to parse.

Jones's article also has different take: "...this paper argues that the U-boat Type XXI was nonetheless not nearly so unrealistic a solution as [Tooze's] account suggests...", and also suggests that while the Type XXI was an evolutionary solution, it's accelerated development was revolutionary.

</comment><comment><USER19> There seems to be some inaccuracy involved regarding the engine: At least following to the (quite extensive) German Wikipedia article, the Walter propulsion[1] never reached production state and the design was altered in order to fit a conventional Diesel-electric engine. For this the boats became even longer and bigger and the inner hull design was changed from an ideally circular cross-section to the unique 8-form, which introduced some other problems.

Anyway, it was a significant fail by the Nazi industrial system. From 118 boats produced, not a single one met the standards and all of these had to be reworked. (Most of these were only used for training missions, none of them saw combat action.)

[1] The Walter engine would have used in deed a hydrogen peroxide fueling system, and was the system that was deemed unworkable. The note at the end of the article has this right.

</comment><comment><USER20> Aside from the broader war strategy questions, this appears to be a good example of the second-system effect.

</comment><comment><USER21> "This mentality amounted to a "disease" in German war ... Germany built radical weapons that would fail to turn the tide against an inevitable defeat brought about by larger economic, political and technological disadvantages."

Luckily, dictatorial "leader"-based regimes aren't compatible with the freedom required for creative geniuses... but, have they stumbled upon some kind of primitive nuclear weapon and strapped one on top of a V2... instead of a "disease" this "radical weapons" thing would have been the "winning bet" ?

<joking>This seems written by Captain Hindsight</joking>

edit:syntax

</comment><comment><USER22> Reminds me of the uboat in Cryptonomicon, the V-1,000,000.

<comment><USER23> Speaking of Cryptonomicon, haven't many historians concluded that the ULTRA program (Anglo-American breaking of Germany's Enigma cyphers) was also a significant factor in the decline in U-boat effectiveness?

This is not addressed or even mentioned in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've been through the one in Bremerhaven. You can walk through it. It costs about €6 if memory serves me rightly:

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_submarine_Wilhelm_Baue...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_submarine_Wilhelm_Bauer)

</comment><comment><USER25> The author mentions "Type XII" U-boats several times...this should actually be Type VII.</comment>


A glimpse inside a Facebook server farm - <AUTHOR> http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,2036928,00.html

<comment><USER2> Looks like any other data center, except all of the machines belong to FB. I bet is it nice and chilly in there. Though, I would like to know the specs of those boxes.

<comment><USER3> Looks a bit cleaner than other data centers to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> sexy</comment>


To secure a safer future for AI, we need the benefit of a female perspective - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/23/to-secure-safer-future-for-ai-we-need-benefit-of-female-perspective <comment><USER2> >Barry replied smugly that it could do cool stuff like inflating or deflating the tyres while going along at 70mph. She looked at him, open-mouthed, and then asked why in the name of God anyone would want to do that. "Er…," he replied, stumped.

It's a bit sad the author couldn't take ten seconds to find out why central tire inflation systems exist and what they do. They allow vehicles to adjust tire pressure for optimum performance on different surfaces, including preventing damage to delicate surfaces like farmland. They also prevent a puncture or slow leak from disabling or stranding a vehicle. Rather than performing a quick Google search, the author just assumed "LOL men r so dumb you guys"</comment>