eiopa's comments

eiopa | 2 years ago | on: Ending Junk Fees, the Most Annoying Thing in American Commerce

Why does that mean that the final price must the opaque during the moment of purchasing decision, though?

If the goal is keeping people informed, one can show various breakdowns, piecharts or any other creative infographic at the canvas of the bill.

eiopa | 2 years ago | on: Ending Junk Fees, the Most Annoying Thing in American Commerce

In San Francisco restaurants, I’ve seen this tactic applied liberally. Maybe AirBnb and DoorDash are rubbing off on them:)

A common one sees the restaurant charge you separately for the employee health benefits, cynically marketing it to consumers as “healthy SF” and “SF health mandate”.

What’s sort of fun is that like cryptocurrencies, you can always materialize new ones out of thin air. One popular establishment demands that you pay a separate “carbon offset fee”.

eiopa | 5 years ago | on: Basecamp’s founders are trying to start an email rebellion

OMG, "The Screener" is something I've always wanted. There's a lot to love about this.

Something I am nervous about is using a @hey.com email. Similarly to domain, it's a world-visible and sticky, but unlike domains, it isn't portable, the only options are: pay Basecamp forever, or lose access. gulp

eiopa | 5 years ago | on: State of Loom

This reminds me a lot of python’s gevent.

I often wish the language had adopted it instead of the C#-like await async, since it’s just more straightforward.

eiopa | 5 years ago | on: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

Although they are particularly picky at the moment, which makes sense given the situation.

Anecdotally, I couldn't get an interview, even though I had an offer from them in the past.

eiopa | 6 years ago | on: Airbnb Plans to Verify Every Listing

The 24/7 support sounds promising. This has been their Achilles heel for many years.

Anecdotally, I once checked into an Airbnb with a leaky roof. After spending a good 20 minutes trying to get to a human (a small eternity when you’re in an unfortunate situation), Airbnb asked that I spend hours negotiating with my non-responsive host on a solution, which is obviously nonsensical given the situation.

Being able to instantly talk to someone and feel like I am being taken care of would have made all the difference in the world. Instead, I churned from their platform.

eiopa | 7 years ago | on: Airbnb to Acquire HotelTonight

My personal experience with Airbnb is that they simply don't know how to do support. Even basic issues take multiple days to resolve, and usually involve many phone calls.

HotelTonight has been awesome there. You can get a representative on live chat and resolve most issues while you're still en-route from the airport.

On one hand, I am hopeful Airbnb will be able to learn from HotelTonight, but in reality, it seems most acquisitions end up with the acquired company diffusing into nothingness :(

eiopa | 7 years ago | on: Lyft Follows Uber Into Bike-Sharing Lane, Buying Owner of CitiBike

I'm based in SF, and I've taken over 200 rides with Ford GoBike (operated by the same company).

It is awful.

The bikes: big, heavy and ugly. Due to their sheer weight, peddling up the gentlest of hills will make you question your life choices, and consider other, much faster options, like walking, or just gently slithering around the pavement.

Additionally, Motivate's chosen method of bike cleaning - a dude hosing them down - tends to leave the bikes drenched with ice cold water. I suppose the feeling of freeze gnawing at your body does act as a replacement for caffeine for some, but I find it very unwelcoming.

The stations: Sparse, not well maintained, and honestly, an eyesore. They're this giant, lumbering object that takes away precious public resources, and is only available for Motivate's usage. You also constantly have to plan around them -- is there one next to where I want to go? Is it almost full?

E-Bike deployment: what a joke. They are rarely available, and even you've spotted one of these precious unicorns, you'll often by greeted by a beaming red dot, indicating that the bike is unwell, likely due to the battery giving up in the middle of day.

Other than that, the app spams you with ads, many of which are strangely enough for buying an e-bike. I thought this company is about bike sharing??

eiopa | 9 years ago | on: Netflix Replacing Star Ratings With Thumbs Ups and Thumbs Down

I understand people who want more expressiveness in their reviewing, but the reality is that the 5-star system just leaves too much ambiguity.

It's like how in Uber/Lyft, most people just default to 1/5 star ratings. In that case, the average rating a driver has to maintain gets skewed to a a pretty high number, like 4.5, and people who think "oh, this was a pretty good ride! 4 stars!" end up unintentionally boning the driver.

eiopa | 9 years ago | on: Fork: Fast and Friendly Git Client for Mac

Reminds me of gitx (a good thing!) :)

Is there a way to only view commits that belong in the current branch (like git log)? The commits from the other branches are distracting when you're trying to read the history of a particular branch.

eiopa | 10 years ago | on: Challenges of Deployment to ECS

Our own experience with ECS has been similarly negative. While this was 6 months ago, I am not aware of significant improvement.

In general, the whole thing feels rushed and duct taped together. Networking model (inherited from Docker) doesn't play nice with ELB.

- The built-in AWS tools for monitoring are not container aware.

- We've had multiple occurrences of the ECS daemon dying.

- Very little visibility into the progress of deploys. The API/console will report something as "running", when it in fact was still loading up.

If you watch their videos, they promise integration with Marathon, but if you look at the code, it's in "proof of concept" stage.

At this stage, GCE is significantly ahead of AWS. Out of the box, you get a top notch container story, logging and monitoring.

eiopa | 10 years ago | on: Visual Studio Code 1.0

VSCode is so good.

I do wish it had a global symbol search, similar to Sublime's (cmd+shift+r). It's indispensable for code navigation.

eiopa | 10 years ago | on: Amazon Provides DIY Echo Plans for Raspberry Pi

tl;dr:

It's literally a tutorial on configuring Alexa Voice Services + their sample code on Debian.

The way you interact with it is by clicking on a button in a Java app. No trigger phrase like Echo.

eiopa | 10 years ago | on: How to Pass a Programming Interview

What makes implementing qsort/bsearch/etc "the basics"? It seems rather arbitrary, and it mostly measures how well you are able to recite from CS books.

eiopa | 10 years ago | on: How to Pass a Programming Interview

It's always been strange to me that tech interviews tend to check for basic CS, rather than deep engineering.

When was the last time you had to implement bsearch() in a real project?

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