Miami probably has some of the worst, most lawless drivers in the country — it's like a free-for-all out there. Makes me wonder if Waymo picked Miami as a kind of stress test for their self-driving tech. If they can handle the chaos there, they can probably handle just about anything.
Miami seems to share enough similarity in warm weather to SF to be a similar enough use case to expand while providing slightly different driving conditions to be able to dip ones toes in to the driving habits of a different city.
Absolutely agreed. Not even just because of the weather imo, but because of the actual driving experience here itself.
I’ve lived and been driving for nearly 15 years in various large cities (SF, ATL, Seattle, Portland, LA, etc.), both cars and motorcycles, and NYC (where i currently live) is the only place in the US I absolutely refuse to ever drive (or ride) in.
Not just because it isn’t as necessary here due to public transit usefulness (which is also true), but also because driving here feels like entering a warzone. Narrow roads and parking, drivers being extremely on the edge and leaving a few cm distance max between each car in traffic, constant honking, having to make very dangerous maneuvers on the daily just to get somewhere, and just the cutthroatness of the whole thing here.
I genuinely believe that NYC will end up being the final frontier for Waymo, after all the other places in the US (aside from those with extreme snow conditions).
Miami sucks because half the people on the roads here don't actually know how to drive.
They are immigrants that come from countries whose roads are effectively lawless, or come from countries that have a severely underdeveloped automobile infrastructure, or come from countries where all that's needed to get a driver's license is to pay someone.
NYC is unique in that you have no choice but to do extremely dangerous things to actually operate in traffic at all in most scenarios.
Streets, alleys, etc. are blocked or are narrowed by vehicles and a myriad of other possible obstructions, all of which could be concealing pedestrians.
Yeah, bad drivers are easy for self-driving to deal with. You just drive defensively and avoid the objects. It’s the snow and other sensor obstructions that make things difficult.
Big +1. Here using the turn signal is iffy because some drivers see that as a sign to speed up to try to overtake. I’ve had a few close calls where I check my mirrors, everything is safe for a lane change, turn on the blinker, and the guy in the left lane floors it from 5 car lengths back to cut me off. Sigh.
The Waymo driver is very passive and defensive so I imagine it will be quite slow compared to an Uber who is willing to fight to make turns etc.
The game is that you start to pull out for a right turn, and then brake unexpectedly and get the person behind you to tap your bumper, while they are looking for oncoming traffic to the left. Then you take your car to a "friendly" repair shop that overcharges for a new bumper (or claims to replace it) and split the payout.
There's nothing illegal about braking suddenly, the collision is always the fault of the person behind you legally, so there's no personal risk.
When I've been in Waymo, they've never drove so fast that they don't have time to brake if the car in front of them does. And they can multitask - while looking for oncoming traffic to the left they can still watch the car in front of them
Hi dulse, can you please make a public announcement with much more clarity. We received one of your alert emails but it was very cryptic with very little information and no mention this was happening across the network. Our fraud team spent two hours in a panic until we found this thread via Twitter.
I can’t think of anything CB put out during his tenure that was interesting at all. IIRC, he was a driving the push for Coinbase NFT which flopped massively.
Not sure the exact timeline for these, but what about staking and yields, integration of Coinbase Pro with the main site, and a more robust Tax Center? Those all seemed pretty useful to me. Pretty sure all those were within the last couple of years.
Counterpoint. After cobbling together a bunch of Coinbase products, we successfully use Coinbase to receive and send payments for our online marketplace in much the same way you would use a PayPal type service. The user experience is great and technologically there is no match. We literally could not do what we do with any other service. If Coinbase focused on payments they could dethrone the kings of the international payment space in no time.
Your point is still valid. They have all this technology "sitting around" and they seem to be avoiding focus on the obvious growth areas in favor of trading. See below yao420's point.
It is a market distortion. It favors the industry that is getting government support, taking away valuable resources from other industries that would do better in a free market.
Practically, HN is pro-engineering, so we likely approve of such moves. Similar subsidies in other industries might not be viewed as favourably.
Personally, I am not against it, because as someone who has many of his peers playing a zero-sum game in mathematical finance, I've seen some of the downsides the top talent being allocated where the free market desires them most.
It's not just a pro- versus anti-engineering issue. A lot of engineering fields are rigorous and difficult while not being very highly paid.[1] Part of the reason is the market distortion you point out: both on the demand side (e.g. aerospace is a heavily regulated industry with few opportunities to build "unicorns"), and on the supply side (e.g. the government invested heavily in churning out aerospace degrees during the Cold War).
[1] I made more money out of school in software, with no relevant degree, than I would have in aerospace, with a B.S. in the field.
The Econ 101 answer is that we'll have some number of people going into STEM fields would be more productive to the economy (and probably personally better off) as lawyers or cops or bakers or whatever. More realistically, it's likely to cause average salaries for engineers to decline somewhat as supply catches up to demand.
Not just the tech industry too. There are plenty of areas of STEM which are totally saturated with smart effective highly educated people and the result is low wages and poor employment outcomes. Just look at chemistry or biology.
I worry more about quality going down than either of those. Companies will amass huge armies of truly awful engineers and it will become a profession of attrition.
Not to mention that we will motivate foreign students to study mostly only STEM and thus deprive ourselves of the diversity of thought and the artistic and critical labor output of foreign workers in non-STEM domains.
Makes me think of Arcade Fire: "One day they will see it's long gone."
The tech industry isn't zero-sum though, even from just a purely selfish "can I get a job" POV. More talent in the pool will arguably make the industry bigger, rather than diluting the value of that talent. There's just so much room to grow.
But fewer complaints of H1-B wage slavery (note: I'm exaggerating somewhat), which also suppresses salaries. Hard to say which is more significant an effect.
It's government trying to pick winners, which rarely works out that well. I think government should stick to basics like infrastructure, education and making sure everyone has decent health care; that kind of thing that companies are less suited for.
