Uber POP has been against the law for one year now, this was bound to happen. Even if what the Taxis did is insanely wrong and should be condemned, Uber POP is illegal according to the french law and even trendy tech startups have to obey the law.
It's now up to all the actors to find a way to make this work.
Uber's service is illegal in most places, including the US. However they grew and became popular fast enough that it put pressure on local governments to change the laws, rather than put pressure on them to ban Uber. It's basically their business model.
Apparently this didn't work as well in France as it did in the US.
Uber has evolved from simple ridesharing into a real livery. That part of Uber is not illegal in most places. UberPop is the reincarnation of the original Uber. That is illegal almost everywhere. The taxis aren't protesting Uber. They don't like them but as long as they follow the law they'll have to live with it. What they are up in arms over is UberPop.
Anywhere in the world you take money you are now engaged in commerce. And you have to follow the rules on commerce. Even the kid that delivers your pizza has to have auto insurance that covers delivery.
Why aren't French entrepreneurs rioting in the streets to protest against protectionist laws that primarily serve to shield incumbents from competition?
France doesn't have as many start-up guys and girls as you probably think and besides that they probably do not feel that uberpop is entirely without blame in how this all played out.
From what "aikah" posted below, it sounds like shielding consists of requiring proper driver training, equivalent of commercial insurance on the vehicle, and license (which probably involves some mandatory maintenance, as commercially utilized vehicles tend to have higher mileage and higher level of abuse than personal vehicles).
Compliance with all the requirements, however, removes the economic advantage.
That's not really what the article says. The point they're making is that if you expect to receive a lot and then you don't then you think your email account isn't working correctly.
“I haven’t gotten an email in seven minutes, making me immediately suspicious my email is broken.”
That's actually a complaint that the user is getting too much email (or possibly the right amount); it's just phrased in a way that makes it look like it's the opposite.
That's maybe the most interesting finding. Receive too much e-mail? Business as usual. Not so many? The world is coming to an end. If this is not a sign of withdrawal, I don't know what is :D
"Look at what I've done. Here are my projects" is definitely not the Y-intercept "Look I went to <fancy school>" is the Y-intercept. With projects and experiences you can start to plot someone's work according to it's own Y-intercept and guess the slope. The hard part is assessing someone's slope when all you have is it's Y-intercept ( freshly out of school ).
Concerning asking tricky question, you can do it the Google way ( How many frogs does it take to build a space elevator ) but even they decided to stop these kind of questions or take a lot of time and find something your candidate can work on, even if the technology is known to him, seeing how fast he can appropriate himself the codebase is really a good way to judge your future new recruit potential
"Look at what I've done" is neither the y-intercept nor the slope in this increasingly stretched metaphor. It's a definite integral (area under the curve).
You could try to "guess the slope" if the slope were static, but it's not. Aptitude and track record are, in my experience, not correlated. I can get specific about this if you want, but I don't want to be tiresome about this subject (you can find similar comments in my history).
A short preemptive summary is: the last 10 amazing hires we made would not have been distinguishable from their online portfolios.
They appear to be the only software company on Earth to do work sample tests. It's working out really well for them. The process is extremely well laid out here.
matasano.com/careers
We'll get on the phone and talk to you about the company and what our work looks like. At the end of this call you should have a good idea of what we do, how our hiring process works, and answers to questions about Matasano. Most importantly, you'll have a contact at Matasano to talk with and bounce questions off of through the duration of our process.
We do 1-3 technical phone screens. You'll talk to a senior Matasano team member who will ask you about your technical background and talk you through scenarios and concepts from our day-to-day work. If you've been doing app security for 5 years, you'll be talking about your past projects; if you're a developer, you'll be talking about code.
We do a web app challenge. Most software written within the last several years is web code. Everyone on our team needs to be able to deliver a solid web pen test. When you're ready, you'll be given an instance of a vulnerable web application and an hour or so to break it. We timebox challenges to avoid taking too much of your time. You're doing this on your own schedule, in your own comfortable setting.
We do a custom protocol challenge. Every Matasano team member routinely runs into exotic network protocols. We'll throw something at you that you're unlikely to have worked with before and watch you reason your way through breaking it. This challenge seems to be everyone's favorite; candidates routinely tell us how they particularly enjoyed it. That's great! It's part of our day-to-day work here. Like the web challenge, it's timeboxed and you're doing it remote.
We'll have you write a fuzzer. Everyone here writes fuzzers. We'll give you a file format. In the language of your choosing, you'll write a fuzzer for it. This gives us a chance to see how you code and to see what types of things you automate testing for. Like the other challenges, this one is time limited and you can do it remote.
We've talked. We've done phone screens. We've answered questions. You've done challenges for us. At this point we both have a pretty good idea whether you'll be happy working with us. If that's the case, we'll bring you onsite for an in-person interview, which concludes our hiring process.
Didn't knew about the HTML part, which is not such a bad news, when most of the self taught programmers I knew started (real) programming it was either on a calculator or because HTML was no longer enough. Even if I don't consider HTML to be real programming, it's enough to be a first step in the rabbit hole, and we all know how deep this hole can be if you care to keep digging.
As for the outside of class hour part, as far as I know it's not 'outside class hour' literally but more reserved hours for non standard class activities ( back in my time that's were I was first taught English which was not a 'standard' class ). Besides, in primary school you only have one teacher, which means most of them will not be half decent at teaching CS, relying on volunteering teachers and/or parents seems like the good way to present CS to young children.
It's definitely not a programming language at all. But for young kids it's much more appealing to create a web page with colors and animation than a calculator in Python.
And that's the goal, not make them able to program, but show them what are the possibilities.
And, on the teacher's side, it's going to be easier to teach most of them HTML rather than a real programming language.
I totally get your point, when your passionate about something, as a student you need someone really good to teach you. And thus the issue when non passionate teachers ends up teaching something because they have to and not because they like it.
In the end I believe the point of CS lectures at such a young age is not to actually teach people programming but more let them know that this field exist, how it basically works and light the spark for some students. I've seen a lot of people when I was in engineering school going 'Ho my god I wish I had knew about CS before, would have saved me a lot of time' ( And some going the other way ). Having these kind of revelation 10 years before can only be something positive .
My main point here is that recycling a math teacher will not actually teach anything about CS, it will just add a "practical session" where you just write the same math concept with some boring language around it.
When I was a kid, for some people the advantage was that they actually got to turn on a computer and type on a keyboard for the first time in their life.
But nowdays, you don't really need to do that. Not in France at least.
I failed PC in HS. I'm the only one who took that class that is a computer professional today.
These classes only scare people away from computers.
It would be far more effective teaching "hacks" and how to find information on the Internet.
The french government wants to add non compulsory computer science in primary school ( age 6 to 10 ) where the lessons are up to the teacher.
For secondary school ( age 11 to 15 ) programming will be added to the schedules, these lectures will probably be made by math and technology teachers.
Personal opinion :
While this is a nice step forward, I really fear the teachers will lack formation resulting in poor lectures made just to follow regulations ( and squeeze some extra hours ).
What is it a step forward for? A popular opinion on HN seems to be that programming should be taught in schools because it's somehow a new basic skill everyone should have? I have to disagree and don't see it being a step forward for anything. Programming after hours, taught as a kind of extracurricular activity seems sufficient to me. There's no need to know how to program a computer. Knowing how to use a computer is the important skill. You don't need to know how to rebuild a transmission to drive a car in the same way you don't need to know how to build a web page to know how to input text into form fields and click a submit button. Those who are curious and interested will learn to build the things we use while others will find it more than enough to simply to know how to use the things the rest of us have built.
I, like anyone else here, am super passionate about programming and it thrills me to be able to make a computer do my bidding but my friends and family don't care how the computer works. That's okay. I know a carpenter. I love living in a well built home but don't really care to know how to build one. Knowing how to work a stud finder to hang a painting is enough for me.
Not to mention the common argument that "ubiquitous computing will necessitate that everyone have a high degree of technical literacy" is false. Computers are heading from becoming tools to appliances and circuits. You'll never interact with most of them directly, and when you do, it'll be through an abstracted shell or interface of some sort. The actual internals will be arcane to most, running some form of Contiki, QNX, specifically tailored variant of embedded Linux, or whatnot.
We're already seeing this happen with smartphones and tablets. They offer an ecosystem of applications and network-enabled technologies that are useful to users, but in the end, they're digital handcuffs.
The practical benefits of teaching programming will be outweighed by the sheer incompetence and farcical mess that compromises public education in general. There's no way I, personally, can trust such a system to make anything worthwhile of this.
In my opinion schools should stick to basic teaching, a high percentage of french teenagers cant even write french at the end of highschool, yet the government want pupils to learn programming ? same old french bullshit.
Instead of letting schools adapt their teaching to local conditions and parameters , someone in an office in Paris is deciding for everybody.
That's at the heart of France problems. When the french government starts trusting its citizens things will change.Today there is too much power in a few hands and a total distrust of institutions.
I fail to see how the French kids' ability to write would be hurt by their being introduced to programming. Maybe you think the solution to their not being able to write is to sacrifice all other subjects to focus on writing. Though I doubt the writing is that bad, if it's the case I'd probably axe history before programming.
In the short run, I agree to say that the formation will be very bad and could turn teenagers out of the code with bad experiences, which is a shame.
However in the long run, with IT being more and more present, and the global pool of users being more and more mature, I think that's a good thing which will open great perspectives to our teenagers.
Moreover the educational program can be adapted with the feedback of the field. We shouldn't spit in the soup, this is a good measure.
Since you just graduated, remember to factor in the learning experience, I'm not familiar with the rails ecosystem but if you are working with some really good developers, you are gonna learn so much which is IMO worth way more than equity. Especially since equity is kinda random ( remember 9 out of 10 startups fails ).
As said in another comment, ask them how they value the equity by bargain, can you raise your wage and take no equity or have more holidays.
A last thing : Try an do some maths, like if you could get +1k/year how high must the exit be for the 0.5% equity to be worth more than the wage raise.
Couldn't this problem be solved by a shift to a video game consulting industry ?
In tech companies it's quite common to have a period of 'inter contract' between two missions where you can do trainings or even self training. Is the video game market hostile to this kind of organisation or has it just not been tested yet ?
I considered that option too - consultants or freelancers or the like with less rigid contracts - however, the cost for those would be exponentially that of the young easy to hire developers; hourly rates at least twice as high, which doubles if you make them work double hours during crunch hours.
In-house developers work for a flat annual salary, and IIRC most game development companies don't pay overtime whilst demanding devs work overtime during crunch time.
But game dev extortion is a known problem, and the other problem is that people take it. Working in the video game industry is a dream for a lot of people, and they're willing to take a lot of shit for the perceived privilege to work on the things they love.
And the weirdest part? The actual development of a video game is often only a small part of the total cost package; iirc, games like the Call of Duty series cost more in marketing than the actual development.
I have no idea how close the chrome/chromium and the angular dev teams are but this is clearly a great synergy.
This is an interesting time for the browser / web framework duo, I wonder what would happen if chrome/angular become really faster but anotherBrowser/angular ends up having poor performance due to chrome specific features. Will developers turn to a more evenly supported framework to avoid performance issue or will the other browsers be forced to ensure good performance to avoid being considered as "slow" because of angular apps ?
It's now up to all the actors to find a way to make this work.