Well, I think the research is more ad-hoc than being it's own field at this point.
I just scan papers that come up in the Reddit group[1]. I've seen:
"Chains of Reasoning over Entities, Relations, and Text using Recurrent Neural Networks" by Rajarshi Das, Arvind Neelakantan, David Belanger, Andrew McCallum
"Rationalizing Neural Predictions" by Tao Lei, Regina Barzilay and Tommi Jaakkola
"'Why Should I Trust You?' Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier by Marco Tulio Ribeiro, Sameer Singh, Carlos Guestrin
You might be able to chase down the works of these various authors to find more.
I'm a great fan of Slack. Large portion of revenue for an b2b app like Slack will come from big corporations and businesses with more than 200 employees.
Microsoft/Google are heavily invested on large enterprises. These big giants can pull off a product like Slack and sell to all the big clients. Microsoft already sells communicator to large corps. They can switch that to Microsoft-Slack version and bundle it with their office products taking the large (90% revenue) out of Slack pocket.
Slack has to go really big to hit enterprises hard or they will be just serving small medium businesses which will have churn burn and less LTV.
I have a great respect for Marc Andreessen who have invested in great tech companies at early stage and they are part of my daily life. I have learnt a lot by reading his essays and his bullet points in twitter about startups and building companies.
I'm not able to understand why he has to make this comment. He sits in Facebook board and recently TRAI had declined Facebook's Free Basics which violates Net Neutrality. Does this have anything to do with his comment?
India has been growing great in recent years and it's headed for enormous growth in next few decades. India has the largest youth population in the whole world and it can transform itself into a great super-power if it's run by great politicians and put India back in track.
- The British East India Company was the original Free Basics. We all know how that ended.
The news i have heard from various googlers is, `GOOG acquired Firebase because a project started using Firebase as backend and grew very fast and they didn't want to migrate and just acquired FireBase`.
This is really interesting. I believe this might be attribute to all the Uber promotions in Asia. I have heard from all my friends in India/China that Uber rides are actually free for around 10-15 rides. Also, they are giving tons of money to Drivers to promote Uber in India.
An average Uber driver in Bangalore earns 110000 INR per month where as
an entry level software engineer in GOOG/AMZN in India earns 80000 INR/month.
I was shocked that one of my friends who drove Uber in Bangalore told me that he made 180000 INR two months back.
It would be interesting to know Uber's customer acquistion cost and driver acquisition cost.
I'm still surprised that Uber is entering such competitive markets. I mean, in much of the western world, they're using a mobile app to side step cab hailing laws and break long standing taxi oligopolies. Does anyone know what market flaws they're solving in India and Asia?
I don't like how uber flaunts the law in so many places, but their competitive advantage doesn't come from non-compliance.
The service is plainly better. The cars are better, the drivers are rated, payment is easier, hailing is easier, knowing where your cab is and how long it will be and how much is will cost before you start your ride ... is better.
I live in the Twin Cities ... not a place where cabs are dense enough to just hail one walking down the street (unless it's in a prime drinking/sporting hour & location).
Uber, Lyft, and the city of Minneapolis worked together to make uber-like services legal while giving concessions to the local traditional taxi drivers without compromising appropriate regulations. Everyone behaved reasonably which is sadly extremely rare everywhere else.
The running theory is that unreasonable people either leave Minnesota or are found only after the snow thaws (please don't take this too seriously :) )
There is a difference between trying to behave reasonably outside the law starting up while trying fix regulations fairly and in good faith when you get enough attention ... and ostentatious defiance, which is how many would describe Uber's behavior in many circumstances.
There is no behaving 'reasonably' outside the law. It's clear that if they had not won over the consumers, the people who the law is supposed to help, Uber would not exist.
1. Time/Convenience: India does not have a system like America where you can hail cabs, they are only booked via an agency. These bookings need to be made some hours in advance. A pre-Uber thing (which I'm sure is still common in non-metropolotian parts of india) was to book an appropriately sized cab a day before we have a flight or train to catch. With Uber, request an Uber XL and you're done.
2. Price: As expected, these agencies work out to be pretty expensive. Uber is almost 50% cheaper.
I personally use Uber when I'm with people or have luggage with me. Otherwise India does have a very good metro train and also has autorickshaws (aka tuk tuk) but the former is not point to point and the latter seats 3 people at best (and an Uber sometimes works out to be cheaper than a autorickshaw)
I think that currently only a small part of India uses Uber significantly, but those who do have nothing but praise (anecdotal). Uber has better quality and better drivers for a better price. That said, the market seems large enough to warrant competitors like Ola and Meru.
* I'm yet to have an Uber driver clearly on methamphetamine, but a notable number of taximeter drivers
* No quibbling over the price or trying to overcharge from Uber
* Uber cars always have seatbelts, it's rare to find them in the back seat of taximeters
* Even if the Uber driver doesn't know the place you're going to, they've got a map, and directions, and they'll use them
* No worrying about if you've got sufficient loose change; you can be sure the taximeter driver will have a real shortage currently if you have only big notes
You are overestimating the competitiveness of these markets. In many(perhaps most) parts of India, these operate as unions/ price cartels. The tuk-tuks in particularly ignore meter pricing, in most parts of India, and may resort to violence/harassment to protect themselves from competition. Also most taxis/tuk tuks are independent and do not belong to any company. As such, I imagine they don't enjoy the benefits of economies of scale, efficiencies, and technology that Uber can afford. The quality of service is very poor, which makes Uber something of a Godsend. All these are points on which Uber can and is currently exploiting to gain a foothold, although they face strong challenges.
The same is true in New Zealand, where the only real requirements to be a taxi are around having a passenger endorsement to your license and police background checks.
> Does anyone know what market flaws they're solving in India and Asia?
Well the only market flaw they appear to be solving here is that they aren't hoarding more of the money in the market...
In NZ the advantage is convenience and cost - you can get a ride far faster, payment is automatic, and the rates are lower, especially for shorter trips, than the incumbent taxi companies.
Some of the local competitors have some of that (e.g. Zoomy), but they charge extra fees for paying though the app which makes them expensive, and also means you need to go through more of a process when the ride is finished.
Regular (black and yellow) taxis and rickshaws exist in Mumbai and very few other Indian cities including Delhi. However only in Mumbai do they ply according to a meter. The rest of the cities, they just charge whatever they feel like. Also most cab drivers will refuse to take passengers depending on destination on a regular basis. Maybe 50% of the time. Other radio cab services like Meru (the oldest radio cab service), need at least a half hour for booking. You also need to provide your destination. Also paying cash is a real pain, because most cab drivers will just claim to not have change and try to pocket it.
Uber is a breath of fresh air here. It doesn't force a destination, you can instantly know whether cars are available or not, generally arrives in 10 minutes or so, and there is no cash payment needed.
Where price is concerned, they've now managed to figure out the right pricing, so that an Uber ride costs only marginally more than a regular cab ride. e.g. Home to work takes around Rs 200 for a regular cab. Uber costs anywhere from Rs 220 (Uber X), to 350 (Uber Black).
When I went to Delhi, I had to haggle with the tuk tuk driver. In some cities in China, there seemed to be the impression that some taxies were not trustworthy and some people only ride from particular taxi companies. Uber was not in China or India when I last visited, but they do solve the trust problem and I would take them when I visit again.
This is a often understated advantage which Uber brings - the ability to land anywhere in the world and, modulo internet connection, get a safe ride within minutes where you know you won't be overcharged or longhauled.
In China the taxi oligopolies are very strong and the taxis are notorious for poor service. In Beijing, they come with their doors locked and roll the windows down to ask you where you want to go, to see if they feel like going in that direction.
There are no free rides here in India (at least Mumbai). You get a promo of up to Rs 600 (USD 10) to start with. And that's it. I very much doubt the claims about drivers earning Rs 100,000+. I am going to ask my Uber drivers to and from work about how much they make.
This is a requirement of our brokerage partner. We are working as fast as possible to open it up the service in other countries. What country are you from / in?
This is Radhakrishnan working as Software engineer at Zenefits, San Francisco USA. We are building a kickass engineering team in SF to work on hard and totally new kind of technical problems. We are disrupting the whole Heath Insurance industry which is taking off in US now by providing free software.
We have penetrated only 0.6% of the market. This is without considering international growth and upselling to big companies.
We are looking for engineers who can take a concept from inception to market. The process is extremely autonomous, with little to no, management. You are the PM, tester & developer, building full-stack, who coordinates with our in-house designers. Our revenue model is one of the best in the world and we have seen the hyper growth like no other company in the world.
Zenefits was founded ~2 years ago with the mission of re-defining the HR software space and giving it away for free. We have seen the hyper-growth like no one has ever seen in the industry. David Sacks (one of the paypal mafia and founder of Yammer) who saw the hyper-growth joined us as COO 3 months back. Even with this hyper-growth, We have penetrated only 0.1% of the market and so our journey is 0.1% finished.
Who are we?
We are a group of 50 kick ass software engineers which includes Engineers from Facebook, Google and founders of various startups, solving problems which no one has ever dare to look into. We are looking to more than triple our engineers this year and we're looking for highly passionate engineers who can own the product from Day 1 and ship it to the world. We rapidly iterate and roll out new code every day.
We offer highly competitive salary and meaningful equity which is going to be worth a lot.
Aren't most Linux servers already 64 bit? And we aren't even close to 2020.
I'm sure some software will need to be re-written between now and 2038, but I don't think it will be quite as bad as Y2K just because that was only a 15 year gap (Sometimes less), whereas this is over 24 years.
I just think a lot of software will be naturally replaced between now and then. And while there will be a slight mad scramble to fix stuff at the last minute, I don't think it is Y2K-2.
People who think that 64-bit servers are immune are part of the problem. Even if you've got a 64-bit server, you've still got file formats with 32 bit timestamps embedded. For that reason, time_t remains a 32 bit integer, which means that functions like UNIX_TIME on MySQL will stop working. And then there is the mess of embedded software that most decidedly is NOT 64-bit and will be in machines that are still in operation.
Just as many as all of the 8-bit systems in use today. There is no need, in the vast majority of cases, for wide data busses in embedded applications. 16-bit is going to die out, though, like the 4-bit and bitslice processors.
I set the clock to one minute before time_t overflow on an iMac once. Recovering from that and just getting the machine to boot afterwards was no joke.
I'm not a XNU hacker, but it looks like they haven't. Their time_t typedef seems to be a __darwin_time_t [1], which in turn looks like to be 32-bit signed long [2].
As far as I know, the only major operating system that has dealt with Y2038 is OpenBSD [3].
I did tech support when the 99->00 switch happened, got paid 3x overtime. I got one call, and it was actually legitimate, but was a third party piece of software so after that we left and went to a party :)
I doubt this will be a real problem in 2038, then again the prevalence of computing devices is much larger now and will continue to grow by 2038, but so will technical aptitude, so hopefully they'll cancel out and this will still not be a problem.
Same, but 4x overtime here :) I was just on the PC team though so I left at 7pm after finishing the last few BIOS updates; the AS400 and HP-UX teams got the pleasure of staying past midnight.
